Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation

Political Violence

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Political Violence B elief, B eh av io r, an d L egi t i m at i o n

Edited by Paul Hollander

POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Copyright © Paul Hollander, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60646-3 ISBN-10: 0-230-60646-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Political violence : belief, behavior, and legitimation / edited by Paul Hollander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60646-6 1. Political violence—Soviet Union—Congresses. 2. Political violence— Congresses. I. Hollander, Paul. HN530.Z9V646 2008 303.609172⬘4—dc22

2008012363

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: November 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Robert Conquest Poet, writer, historian – A man of durable accomplishments

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Paul Hollander: Introduction Contemporary Political Violence and Its Legitimation

1

Part I Soviet Communism 1. Joshua Rubenstein: The Reception of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror 2. Norman M. Naimark: Stalin and the Question of Soviet Genocide 3. Stephen F. Cohen: The Victims Return: Gulag Survivors under Khrushchev 4. Mark Kramer: Leadership Succession and Political Violence in the USSR Following Stalin’s Death 5. John B. Dunlop: Post-Communist Political Violence: The Poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko 6. Lee Edwards: The Mass Media in the Service of Soviet Communism and in Post-Communist Russia

23 39 49 69 93 109

Part II Comparative Perspectives 7. Arthur Waldron: Managed Spontaneity in Rural Political Violence in China 8. Maria C. Werlau: Political Repression in Castro’s Cuba: Policies, Institutions and Victims 9. Mark Falcoff: Revolutions and Revolutionary Ideologies in Latin America 10. Anthony Daniels: Western Perceptions of Postcolonial Violence in Africa 11. Ibn Warraq: Apologists of Totalitarianism: From Communism to Islam 12. David Pryce-Jones: The Roots of Arab and Muslim Violence

193

Notes

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Notes on Contributors

253

Biographical Appendix: Robert Conquest

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127 143 155 165 177

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Acknowledgments

My efforts to honor Robert Conquest by editing a collection of writings inspired by his work and by organizing a conference of those who produced them have been helped by various organizations and individuals. Major credit goes to the Bradley Foundation, and especially to Dianne Sehler, Director of Academic Programs, which provided essential moral and material support and to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and its president at the time, Christopher DeMuth, that hosted the conference that took place on November 6–7, 2007 in Washington D.C. Most of the contributors presented the first draft of their chapters at the conference. I also owe a longstanding personal debt to both of these institutions: The Bradley Foundation supported my own work on several occasions in past decades while the AEI invited me a number of times over the years to expose my ideas on various subjects to interested and knowledgeable audiences. I also thank the National Association of Scholars, and its President Stephen Balch for administering the grant provided by the Bradley Foundation. The publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and Toby Wahl, its senior editor, in particular, deserve credit for readily offering a contract for this volume. Two moderators at the conference, Leon Aron and Norman Ornstein significantly contributed to the success of the proceedings. Kara Flook of AEI diligently and dependably attended to the numerous organizational and logistic tasks the conference required. I also take this opportunity to thank Stephen F. Cohen, Peter Kenez, Harvey Klehr, Mark Kramer and Norman Naimark for their thoughtful comments about the introduction that follows. Erika Pfaff, my research assistant, performed a variety of tasks essential for producing this book with dedication, intelligence, thoroughness and good judgment.

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Introduction

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C ontemporary Political Violence a nd Its Legitimation Paul Hollander

I Several motives converged in bringing about this volume. The essential point of departure was my longstanding admiration for the work of Robert Conquest and the desire to find a suitable and durable intellectual expression for these sentiments. It is safe to say that no Western author has provided more revealing and reliable information about every aspect of the Soviet system, and especially about its policies and institutions of coercion, than Robert Conquest. He did so often at times when neither Western academic audiences nor the educated public were particularly receptive to such information or interested in Soviet-Communist affairs. As Czeslaw Milosz pointed out: The achievement of Robert Conquest becomes most obvious when we view it together with the behavior of his contemporaries … For many decades of the 20th century, the great majority of them observed certain rules … To act against those rules would have been to violate powerful taboos … I have in mind … an injunction forbidding one to speak the truth about the Communist system in the Soviet Union.1

In addition to these accomplishments Robert Conquest has been an inspiration and exemplar for those of us who believe that it is possible to combine in one’s scholarly work and intellectual aspirations a measure of detachment and objectivity with moral convictions and that entertaining such convictions need not reduce one’s work to either preaching or propaganda. Accordingly, his methodology reflects common sense, an interest in facts, in what actually happened, and an old-fashioned belief not only in the possibility that such matters can be established (unlike the postmodern belief that everything is a “narrative,” a matter of interpretation and subjective perception), but also that these facts can be evaluated and interpreted. Thus his work supports the compatibility of factual truth seeking with bearing moral

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witness to historical events. Most importantly, unlike many contemporary intellectuals, Conquest believes that truth and lies can, with modest effort, be distinguished from one another. He further recognizes that lies are not merely of ethical or moral importance but also have a bearing on the capacity of political systems to endure. He has written that “the imposing structure of falsification [i.e., the Soviet system] was eaten away from inside until nothing was left but a hollow shell … If a victory of truth has been won or is in sight [he wrote in the late 1980s] … it was only possible because the system of lies exhausted itself.”2 That is to say, Conquest believed that ideas can be powerful sources of both social improvement and of dangerous delusions capable of merging into murderous fanaticism. My intention to create this volume was strengthened by the growing realization that, notwithstanding the collapse of Soviet Communism, Conquest’s work still has a great deal to say about the world we live in, especially about the new expressions of political violence and the connections between political beliefs and behavior, as several of these chapters will make clear. Furthermore, Putin’s Russia has increasingly adopted many unsavory political practices of the Soviet era, which is another reason for appreciating and remembering what Conquest taught us about the Soviet system. While Conquest was among the few who had recognized and shown that the type of violence and repression the Soviet Union pioneered was historically distinctive, the importance and relevance of his work is not limited to a better understanding of Communist systems. Another reason for continuing to reflect on what he had to say about Soviet Communism is that the longings and ideals projected upon it have not been completely erased by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evidence for this assertion may be found in many places, including the persisting sympathy among Western intellectuals for Cuban Communism and for new political systems at least partially modeled on it—such as Venezuela under Chavez and Bolivia under Morales. As in the past, we see the critics of American society sharing platforms with aspiring dictators such as Chavez and the latter bolstering his legitimacy by literally brandishing and quoting the writings of one such critic, Noam Chomsky. Within the United States a lurking nostalgia for the old, pro-Soviet Left has been with us for decades (including the insistence that the Rosenbergs were innocent of spying for the Soviet Union) and found recent expression in a celebratory conference marking the donation of the American Communist Party archives to New York University.3 Conquest’s pioneering work about the Soviet system defied much of the benevolent and misguided conventional wisdom of Western intellectuals and journalists.4 The durable character of these misperceptions was highlighted by their smooth and rapid transfer to other Communist systems in the third world, all of which shared many serious moral and institutional defects with the Soviet one. (I chronicled and detailed these misperceptions in Political Pilgrims.5) The recent critiques of globalization are also relevant here as they derive from the longstanding visceral aversion to capitalism, which used to be the foundation of the sympathy for state socialist systems such as the former Soviet Union and present-day Cuba. This durable and emotional rejection of capitalism holds it responsible for all major deformations of human character and social institutions and is at the root of the sympathy for the apparent or imaginary alternatives to it. Conquest’s reflections on this matter expressed over forty years ago remain noteworthy: “The mere fact of the abolition of ‘private’ ownership of the means of production is not uncommonly taken … as meaning ‘socialism’—a social order juster than any other

Introduction

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in existence. Time and again we see ‘progressive’ people hypnotized, as it were, by this idea.”6 It is an interesting paradox, if that is what it is, that Robert Conquest, determined explorer of the unique evils of twentieth century Communist systems, has also been a poet, and his writing career began with poetry and moved on to matters far from poetic without abandoning poetry. There is indeed something implausible about his becoming a foremost student of the horrors perpetuated by the Soviet system: he is a good-humored person with no apparent inclination to rancor, bitterness, or resentment; a person without any apparent traumatic personal experience that often predisposes one to plumbing the depth of evil and suffering; a man by no means possessed of morbid curiosity. As Jay Nordlinger observed: “For someone who has spent his life immersed in the grimness of mass murder—and the reluctance of free people to face up to it—he is astoundingly merry.”7 George Walden, the British author wrote: The great ideological struggles of the 20th century, in which Conquest played an important role, could be highly personalized and occasionally vicious. Yet somehow you don’t think of Conquest having enemies, and in speaking or writing about opponents he preserves a certain decorum … his bite is intellectual, never poisoned by malice, and his anti-heroes are chosen with discernment.8

In all such respects he has been quite unlike many other authors who have probed the dark sides of human nature and history. I shared with him not only an interest in the Soviet system and the ills and injustices it had perpetrated. We also have in common a certain fascination with the human capacity for self-deception, which was revealed and confirmed in recurring Western delusions about Soviet, Chinese, and other brands of Communism. These predispositions to misjudgment made it easier for these systems to misrepresent themselves over long periods of time. The mendaciousness of Communist systems had numerous sources and it was, in fact, one of their preeminent characteristics, and often the root cause of their rejection by those who lived under them. Conquest was interested in both the mendaciousness and murderousness of Communist states, and especially of the Soviet Union— a combination that was their hallmark and that distinguished them from other brutally repressive systems of our times (or of the past), which made fewer or less successful efforts to conceal their repressive policies, or to pretend to be humane and caring. Conquest had little doubt that the ideological foundations of the Soviet and other Communist systems shaped much of their character and played an important part in their repressive policies. The mass murders and totalitarian controls in these systems were the result of attempts to “establish the political and social order prescribed by their doctrine.” He also wrote in The Harvest of Sorrow that “the events we recount here were the result not simply of an urge to power, an insistence on suppressing all autonomous forces in the country, but also of a set of doctrines about the social and economic results achievable by terror and falsehood.” The sacrifices were exacted “in the name of hitherto untested dogma.”9 Unlike many writers on Soviet affairs who sought to diminish the influence of the Marxist theoretical foundations on Soviet policies and practices, he was well aware of the part played by these ideas and especially by the doctrine of class struggle and its offspring, the concept of the “class enemy.” The latter made it easy to treat groups and individuals either with hostile

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detachment or outright hatred and “to eliminate [from the Party] those elements insufficiently disciplined in the suppression of bourgeois-humanitarian feelings.”10 The part played by Marxism-Leninism in motivating the policy makers and executors was strengthened by their conviction that it was a scientific theory, and that it was “scientific socialism,” that inspired and guided their policies. A major accomplishment of Conquest has been to unearth and document the distinctive characteristics of political violence and repression in Communist systems based on his studies of the Soviet Union. As the first Communist state, the Soviet Union was mentor and model to others that followed; it exercised a formative influence on the development of the coercive policies and institutions of other Communist states, including those that later became its rivals and critics. Four among his many books stand out as comprehensive depictions of the SovietCommunist methodology of repression and political violence: The Great Terror (1968, 1990, 2008), Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978), The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) and The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970). His Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961)—a case study of repressive Soviet literary policies—reflected his interests in politics and literature. The distinctive features of Soviet-Communist repression that his writings brought to light may be summarized as follows: 1. The persecution and punishment (including liquidation) of huge numbers of individuals considered politically unreliable or designated as enemies of the system, not because of their actual behavior or actions, but due to their potential for such action. Opinions critical of any aspect of the system were expected to be followed by conduct inimical toward the authorities. Politically relevant attitudes, or potential attitudes, were inferred from socio-economic characteristics, kinship, social origins or ties, and sometimes from ethnicity; 2. The establishment of a vast, highly differentiated, political police force (state security) specializing in the identification, detention, and punishment of the potential and actual enemies of the system; 3. Heavy reliance on informers, widely dispersed in the population, used for reporting on suspicious attitudes or behavior; 4. Long-term forced labor, widely used on major economic projects, as the predominant punishment, leading to high rates of mortality; 5. Control over population movements both internal and international. The “internal passport” was a major device of such controls as were the elaborate border fortifications often referred to as “the iron curtain” in Europe. Equating illegal border crossing, actual or attempted, with “treason” was part of these policies; 6. Coerced confession, which played a key role in establishing guilt both on the part of those publicly tried (in didactic show trials) and those handled routinely and without publicity by the political police. The combined effect of these characteristics resulted in the vast scope and scale of repression impacting on a large portion of the population in the Soviet Union and most other Communist states (although this impact diminished over time). Robert Conquest understood that good intentions have little to do with the results of the policies such intentions inspire, that revolutionary idealism is a far from solid foundation for the creation of a humane social system, and that imperfect human

Introduction

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beings cannot, and will not, create perfect societies. As Joseph Conrad observed a century ago: in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites … The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of the revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment … Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.11

Perhaps the most enduring message of Conquest’s work has been that the political pursuit of utopian social arrangements and human perfectibility is bound to produce a rich and devastating harvest of unintended consequences such as violence, repression, and mendaciousness, as well as untold material and psychic deprivations for the surviving victims of these experiments in social engineering.

II It is important to emphasize that this volume, while honoring Robert Conquest’s work and accomplishments, also seeks to examine and probe the connections between the political violence and repression he studied in the Soviet context, and other, more recent manifestations of such phenomena in different parts of the world unrelated to Communist systems and ideologies. The infliction of violence and suffering remain deep-seated human propensities and capabilities prompted by a variety of political, ideological, or religious impulses and aspirations as well as by material interest exacerbated by scarcities. Given the endemic nature of political violence, it was far from obvious what should be included in a volume of modest size dedicated to Robert Conquest and seeking a measure of originality. I concluded that contributions should focus on types of political violence that are consequential, contemporary, and insufficiently known or understood. This consideration led to what may seem to be a serious omission, namely Nazi political-racial violence, culminating in the Holocaust, the best-known and most notorious moral outrage of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. It has not been included because vast amounts have been written about it and its inclusion would have further expanded the scope of the volume. Given the amount of research on the topic, it seemed unlikely that anybody could have added much to our understanding of the phenomenon in a relatively short piece, necessitated by the confines of a volume of this kind. Other important cases of contemporary political violence and repression not discussed here include the mass murders in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the remarkably intact system of totalitarian repression in North Korea, the extraordinary violence against civilians (with a specialty in the mutilation of limbs) that was the hallmark of the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, as well as the terror and famine in Communist Ethiopia (the latter a direct result of official policies). Likewise, massacres of impressive proportions under Idi Amin in Uganda and Sekou Toure in Guinea, among many others, were given little attention. Given the criteria of selection, much of this volume deals with the political violence produced by Communist states and with the terrorism inspired by present-day

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Islamic fundamentalism. Since the political violence and repression associated with Communist systems is far less known, and its literature a fraction of that dealing with the Holocaust, the attention here given to it seemed well founded.12 Moreover, unlike the Nazi atrocities, those of the Communist states are not entirely matters of historical interest since some of these systems, movements, and ideologies still exist. The inclusion of Islamic fundamentalism and the unique violence and terror it has of late inspired hardly needs explanation; it is a preeminent global concern and threat, and its irrational aspects provide special stimulation for the efforts to better understand it. It is always daunting to write about (or ask others to do so) complex and consequential phenomena that have been much discussed and debated by major thinkers and scholars and have been with us since the earliest days of recorded history and presumably before. Political violence is this kind of phenomenon. Although at least one respectable social scientist has recently argued that such violence has substantially diminished in the modern world,13 there is plenty of it left (as he himself agrees). Moreover, new types of violence have emerged, and the older ones are reinvigorated (whatever the proportion of victims to the general populations involved). The organization of this volume reflects the significance of some of the major, and historically unprecedented, mass murders and population losses of the past century and their attempted legitimation. They resulted from executions by shooting, from conditions conducive to high mortality in forced labor camps, and from famines that were created by official policies. Such policies, their victims, and attempted legitimation in the Soviet Union are discussed by Stephen F. Cohen, Mark Kramer, and Joshua Rubenstein. John Dunlop examines the notorious Litvinenko case and the Soviet tradition of political assassinations abroad. Lee Edwards evaluates the uses of the mass media in the Soviet Union from Lenin to Putin as an important accessory of political power and its uses in legitimating repression. The characteristics of Chinese political violence under Mao, with special reference to rural areas, is explored by Arthur Waldron. The little-known repression in Castro’s Cuba is examined and documented by Maria Werlau. David Pryce Jones offers explanations of the novel and exceptionally brutal political-religious violence inspired by Islamic fundamentalism and carried out by Islamic radicals in recent years. Ibn Warraq compares the attempted legitimation of Islamic fundamentalism with that of Communist systems. Anthony Daniels introduces the reader to the Western perceptions and apologetics of postcolonial violence in Africa, while Mark Falcoff contributes case studies of Latin American revolutions and their supporting ideologies. Several of these writings also shed light on the attitudes of intellectuals toward political violence and their selective moral judgments, ranging from indignation to benign neglect, rationalization, or fervent support—depending on the causes promoted by the violence and the identity of the victims and victimizers. The legitimation of contemporary political violence is central to its understanding; this legitimation has been an essential precondition and preeminent attribute of much of it. Whereas in earlier times, self-or group interest narrowly defined was, in most cases, sufficient, in recent times demand has grown for loftier justifications. This is not to suggest that crusades and other religious wars of the past could be explained by material interest or conflict over scarce resources, although the latter might have aggravated them in some instances.

Introduction

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Since the beginning of the past century, voluminous and elaborate ideological justifications and rationalizations became conspicuous in the initiation and infliction of political violence—preceding, accompanying, or following it. Several circumstances seem to account for this development. The first is the actual presence of ideological motivation and fervor spurring on political conflicts; the second is the emergence of political propaganda and the mass media of communications that disseminates it. Further explanation may be found in the growing numbers who participate in these conflicts either as conscripts in huge military forces or as members of large and highly specialized political police forces that carry out the repression that often culminates in violence. Arguably when large numbers of people replace the far smaller, more selectively recruited groups of the past charged with these activities, the need for motivating these multitudes increases. Members of mass conscript armies or large police forces, and the public at large, need to be persuaded that the political violence being inflicted is legitimated by some higher purpose, rather than merely by individual or group interest. The need for such political-ideological legitimation might have also increased as a replacement for the divisive religious convictions that in premodern times often motivated combatants in various conflicts. As to the substance of the political-ideological currents animating and justifying violent conflicts in more recent times, nationalism and the attempts to recast societies in some utopian mold are the most important. Nationalistic and ethnic hostilities are, of course, frequently related. The third major force, in recent years, has been the fundamentalist Islamic religious-political beliefs and objectives providing powerful motivation and legitimation for terroristic political violence that may involve self-destruction. Political violence entailed in interstate wars is not dealt with in these pages although they too are often legitimated in ways similar to that of the other kinds of political violence discussed here. A common thread running through the legitimation of the major types of political violence—war, civil war, revolution, repression, and decentralized terror—is an extended conception of collective self-defense. The Nazis felt mortally threatened by Jews and were convinced that only their complete eradication would make them secure. Communist regimes created and made much use of the mythical figure of the omnipresent and vicious enemy of many social-political incarnations: members (sometimes even descendants) of the former ruling classes (landlords; capitalists; former civil servants; police and army officers; priests and ministers; party politicians of parties no longer in existence; kulaks, i.e., more prosperous peasants; or any peasant who hired labor), as well as all those who expressed, or were thought capable of expressing, sentiments critical of the authorities and any of their policies. Communist regimes endlessly claimed to be encircled, besieged, and potentially subverted by increasingly desperate, dangerous and conspiratorial enemies at home and abroad; it was imperative to engage in “self-defense” of an exceptionally extended and aggressive nature against all those actually or potentially hostile, including those in Cambodia who wore glasses (that suggested higher education and Western influences). Pol Pot also believed that his mass murders were in part justified by the necessity of defending against the kind of threat represented by the killing of Communists in Indonesia under Suharto.14 Islamic terrorists and those providing them with justification for their actions fervently believe that their sacred religious beliefs and values are threatened or are under actual attack by the “infidels”—a category broad enough to include the office

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workers of the World Trade Center in New York, members of a wedding party in Egypt, teenagers in Israeli cafeterias, and Australian tourists in a night club in Bali. Why the compulsion in all these diverse quarters to redefine aggression as selfdefense? The latter—both at the individual and collective level—is a self-evidently acceptable motive. There are few humans, who believe in—and especially few who also act on—the principle of “turning the other cheek,” notwithstanding the encouragement of Christian, and possibly other religious teachings. Pure, unconditional pacifism, secular or religious, is equally rare. Even so, self-defense was less often invoked in the great conflicts of the past such as unprovoked conquests, colonial expansion, the forcible settlement of territorial disputes, and the desire to acquire land and other resources. In the old days the seemingly self-evident mutual hatred of neighboring groups and competition for scarce resources were sufficient for violence to erupt. Hitler might have been the last modern dictator to freely admit that he wished to conquer other nations simply to extend the Lebensraum (living space) of his nation, but even he claimed victimized status for his nation (on account of the Versailles Treaty). Victimhood, past, present, or potential, is associated with, and justifies, self-defense. And even Nazi Germany claimed, before invading Poland, that it was responding to a Polish border violation (fabricated by the German military). Self-defense can also legitimate extraordinary measures. Allegations of insidious conspiracies are among the most potent grounds for a ruthless response. From the Jewish World conspiracy to the large number of conspiracies Communist states manufactured, conspiracy, broadly and dubiously defined, has been the most widely used justification for unleashing state, or other, terror. Even the attack on the World Trade Center was claimed to be an American or Jewish-American conspiracy by numerous Arab and some European sources.

III Is the political violence and repression discussed in this volume peculiar to modernity and the contemporary ideological convictions that motivate the protagonists? Does it have uniquely disturbing qualities? Are there and can there be new variations on the timeless conviction that ends justify means? But which ends and what means? There is an ambiguous relationship between modernity and violence, both political and nonpolitical. Modernity not only entailed the development of far more efficient methods of mass killing, it also created the technology of mass communications that made it possible to learn about such violence rapidly and to disseminate images of violent behavior and its consequences. Last but not least, the mass media could also be used in the campaigns to legitimate political violence. Much of the news disseminated by the print and electronic media concerns violence. Wars, rebellions, riots, and criminal violence, as well as natural and unnatural disasters of every kind, are zealously reported. It has been argued that exposure to vivid and authentic images of death and suffering, especially on television, hastened the end of the Vietnam War as the American public became aware of and indignant about the sufferings and atrocities it entailed. Likewise, it is widely believed that showing pictures of starving children in Africa will raise levels of compassion and hasten efforts to provide relief. But it has also been proposed—more persuasively— that the routine, relentless exposure to images of violence and suffering creates

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“compassion fatigue,” that it trivializes violence and thereby erodes the capacity for moral indignation and compassion. Susan Sontag wrote: there is a mounting level of violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex … mayhem is entertaining, rather than shocking to many people in most modern cultures … Our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images.15

It is questionable that audiences in the past would in fact have recoiled from such spectacles given the historical popularity of public executions, torture, lynching, bull, dog, and cock fights, and similar spectacles. What is beyond dispute that the mass media has been catering to a broad public interest in violence, that many of its manifestations (boxing, wrestling, ice hockey, etc.) are considered normal public entertainment. On balance, it seems that these images of violence neither have a deterrent effect nor do they raise the actual levels of violence by making people more accustomed to it. Approval, toleration, or rejection of violence is determined mainly by identification with either the victim or victimizer and by acceptance or rejection of the ends being served by the violent means. While the Holocaust is widely regarded (except in Arab countries) as the most distinctive and morally reprehensible expression of political violence in our times, possibly all history, the other mass murders and atrocities here examined were also remarkable in at least two respects. In the first place, the number of their victims has been historically unprecedented (eclipsing that of the Holocaust) and in the second, they represent clear cases of idealistic beliefs leading to and culminating in the mistreatment or mass murder of tens of millions. These atrocities too prompt profound moral revulsion (insofar as they have been known) and renewed reflections about evil. Even as we discount original sin as an explanation of endemic political violence, we cannot discount human nature, or at any rate its darker potentials, and especially the capacity to dehumanize other human beings—an apparent precondition of inflicting pain and death on a large scale. To be sure, these propensities are unevenly distributed, and their transformation into actual conduct is difficult to predict as it depends on many circumstances. In any event, it is obvious that without the availability of individuals willing to engage in political violence such violence would not occur; it is also likely that there are individuals who gravitate to organizations and situations that encourage and sanction such violence because they find satisfaction in carrying it out or witnessing it. For them the ideological or theoretical justifications are of limited importance, welcome as they might be in providing legitimation for doing what they enjoy doing even in the absence of such legitimation. Two contemporary historical events, moral outrages of major proportions—the so-called Cultural Revolution in China (between 1966 and 1976) and the massacres in Rwanda (in 1994)—are especially vivid examples of these human potentialities and propensities, and their manifestation in actual behavior. In both cases the violence involved large numbers of people who did not belong to specialized police forces or were embedded in hierarchies controlling and prescribing their behavior; they were under no compulsion to participate in these atrocities. Inflicting death or suffering was not a matter of obedience to powerful authorities, and the participants

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often gave every indication of enjoying what they were doing, that is, humiliating, injuring, or killing other human beings. The victimization performed during the Cultural Revolution differed significantly from other major manifestations of political violence in the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust and the Soviet mass murders. It was decentralized, grassroots violence, with a large element of spontaneity, encouraged, but not closely supervised or organized, by the highest authorities. It was public, unlike comparable actions in the other Communist states. Inflicting public humiliation was the central feature of these events. The violence unleashed by the Cultural Revolution was comparable to a loosely coordinated, nationwide series of lynchings or pogroms, involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of participants and spectators and millions of victims. Most important for the present discussion is that the victimizers (as well as the spectators) were enthusiastic and highly motivated and took pleasure in humiliating, mistreating, and often killing people deemed to deserve such treatment: Regular humiliation in front of tens of thousands of screaming Red Guards was the fate of top level “revisionists.” These spectacles, often incited by the Central Cultural Revolution Group and addressed by its leaders, were political theater designed to rouse the youngsters to even greater fury against Mao’s supposed enemies. Documentaries … show tens of thousands of people packed into a sports stadium, shouting slogans, their clenched fists in the air, and humiliated revisionists with signs hanging around their necks … being forced down non their knees, roughed up, abused physically and verbally.16

While official incitement and hate-mongering propaganda played a part in the formation of these attitudes, there was an unmistakable responsiveness and readiness to project fierce hatred upon individuals largely unknown, who symbolized ideologically defined evils: Some hard-core Red Guards … positively reveled in the opportunity to take out “class revenge on their hapless targets” … A 22 year old student in the East Asian Languages Department of Peking University wrote … “The class enemies are extremely sinister and ruthless and I really hate the reactionaries to death! It was class hatred that made me denounce Li Jianping at the mass rally … that drove the masses to such popular fury. They beat her … to death with their clubs. It was an immensely satisfying event, to avenge the revolutionary people, to avenge the dead martyrs. Next I am going to settle scores with those bastards who shelter traitors, butchers and counter-revolutionaries.”17

These were indeed “red guard circuses” in which elaborate public humiliation seemed to be a source of great satisfaction for those inflicting and witnessing it. This was largely a Chinese specialty; other Communist states generally abstained from public humiliation and mistreatment of their designated enemies. On the other hand, public humiliation, torture (flogging, amputation), and execution (beheading, stoning) remain institutionalized and practiced in several Islamic countries. The genocide in Rwanda—the major atrocity of the last decade of the twentieth century—is another instance of mass murder that prompts reflection on the darker sides of human nature and illuminates the disposition that allows such atrocities to take place. Mass participation and a preindustrial methodology (machetes) were the distinctive features of these murders, which led to the death of 800,000 people. Equally noteworthy is that it was not a series of impersonal killings of strangers,

Introduction

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but of neighbors, often personally known;18 proximity and familiarity presented no emotional obstacles. Our Tutsi neighbors, we knew they were guilty of no misdoing, but we thought all Tutsis at fault for our constant troubles. We no longer looked at them one by one; we no longer stopped to recognize them as they had been … They had become a threat greater than all we had experienced together … That’s how we reasoned and how we killed.19

Unlike the Cultural Revolution, in Rwanda the major goal was complete physical elimination and not humiliation.20 Although enthusiastically performed, these mass murders were not spontaneous, but were preceded by planning and incitement by the authorities: “Everybody had to participate in some way, to be involved in the killings, destruction and looting … [on the other hand] no one was seriously threatened with physical harm for reluctance to use a machete on a Tutsi.”21 Whatever the exact balance between voluntary or involuntary aspects, the most notable features of the massacres were the matter-of-fact participation of so many, the total absence of empathy, and the ready acceptance of the purported necessity to eradicate the Tutsis, seen as enemies and competitors for scarce resources. In these as in other major massacres of our times, dehumanization played an important part and found expression in the frequent designation of the Tutsis as “cockroaches.” One of the participants said: “We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps. I mean a person like us, sharing similar thoughts and feelings.” They were also called snakes or dogs “because in our country we don’t like dogs.” Such sentiments were preceded by propaganda campaigns designed to nurture them: In Butare, home of the national university, professors vied with one another to publish … anti-Tutsi diatribes. In the broadcast studios of popular radio stations … the Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches.” Announcers … used humorous sketches and songs to call openly for the destruction of Tutsis.

The lack of empathy found numerous expressions. In a region where the killings were particularly widespread, we find not one comradely impulse among the teammates, not one gesture of compassion for helpless babies at the breast. No bond of friendship that survived from a church choir or an agricultural cooperative. No civil disobedience … not a single escape network, although it would have been easy to set up one.22

As to the babies, “Saving the babies, that was not practical”—one of the killers remarked. “They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away ... they were killed more quickly, because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use.” Although killers did not want for motivation and initiative, obedience to authority played some part: Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … But if you must obey orders of the authorities, if you have been properly prepared … if you see that the killing

12

Pau l H o l l a n d e r will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured. You go off to it with no more worry … Man can get used to killing if he kills on and on.23

We will never know what proportion took pleasure in the killings and for how many it was a simple routine. As one of the perpetrators said: Since I was killing often, I began to feel it did not mean anything to me. It gave me no pleasure. I knew I would not be punished, I was killing without consequences. I adapted without a problem. I left every morning easy and free, in a hurry to get going. I saw that the work and the results were good for me.

There was a division of labor that also helped (as in other cases of mass murder, notably the Holocaust): The intimidators made the plans and whipped up enthusiasm; the shopkeepers paid and provided transportation; the farmers prowled and pillaged. For the killings, though, everybody had to show up blade in hand and pitch in for a decent stretch of work … We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits.24

Also, as among the Nazi killers, group solidarity and pressures played a part: Colleagues were watching us. If they saw trembling, they sneered and called us cowards. If they saw hesitation, they … accused us of treachery … In that situation, the jeering of colleagues is awful to overcome if it gets around in the neighborhood … So you join the camp of the ones doing it. When the killings begin, you find it easier to play the machete than to be stabbed by ridicule and contempt.25

For most of the participants the killings became routinized, referred to as “work” or “job” or “activities,” part of the daily schedule, often followed by relaxed socialization by the perpetrators and their families and friends. One of the killers recalled: I gave him a machete blow at neck level, on the vulnerable vein. It came to me naturally, without thinking. Aiming was simple … he fell without shouting, without moaning. I felt nothing, just let him die … It was sweaty, hard and stimulating … I did not even count.

Another murderer observed: A number of farmers were not brisk at killing but they turned out to be conscientious … Doing it over and over: repetition smoothed out clumsiness. That is true … for any kind of handiwork.

Apparently it was not difficult to integrate these activities with normal daily routines: In the evenings, after the killings, there was time for friendship, and meeting friends brought us light hearts. We would chat about our days, we shared drinks, we ate.26

Introduction

13

The relative ease with which these killings were performed had yet another prosaic explanation: Killing was less wearisome than farming … We could shelter from the sun and chat without feeling idle. The work day did not last as long as in the fields … We fell asleep every evening safe from care, no longer worried about drought … We gorged on vitamin-rich foods.

Another interlocutor added, “Killing … was more productive than raising crops, especially for someone with a meager plot of land.”27 Calculated, thorough, and matter-of-fact looting was an important motive for the murders: People would steal anything—bowls, pieces of cloth, jugs, religious images, wedding pictures—from a anywhere, from the houses, from the schools, from the dead … in the Tutsis’ abandoned houses we knew we’d find quantities of new goods … That time [of the massacres] greatly improved our lives … The daily Primus [beer], the cow meat, the bikes, the radios, the sheet metal, the windows, everything. People said it was a lucky season and that there would not be another.

Another participant recalled: I saw colleagues linger over their catch [victims, that is] to make the agony last. But they often left before polishing someone off because they were too eager to go looting. For example they gave the first machete blow and then spotted a bike, and hop, they’d rather jump on the bike than finish the job. Same for a roof with good sheets and corrugated metal. It was greed more than wickedness. I trusted that there was time for each of those occupations … I struck just to get it done.28

A smaller number enjoyed the murders: Their killings were delicious to them. They needed intoxication … they felt frustrated when they simply struck down a Tutsi. They wanted seething excitement. They felt cheated when a Tutsi died without a word. Which is why they no longer struck at the mortal parts, wishing to savor the blows and relish the screams … There were fierce people who urged us to cause pain … We always finished our jobs properly. Except with runaways who made us sweat too much running in the swamps … Torture was supplementary activity … It was just a distraction, like a recreational break in a long work day. The orders were simply to kill … The bosses would say, “Kill, and fast, that’s all. There is no point in taking your time.”29

Sometimes the murders became public entertainment: The killers would call everyone to watch. All the women and children would gather to see the show. There were people still carrying drinks, or nurslings on their backs. The killers would cut off the victims’ limbs, they would crush their bones without killing them. They wanted them to last … Shouts would rise up from all sides. These were raucous village jamborees, quite rare and quite popular.

The witness explained that during the period of the mass murders there was no school, no ball games, and no leisure activities, hence,

14

Pau l H o l l a n d e r when there was a cutting session [i.e., torture.] in public … all the children came running … Anyone who had not heard about it was attracted by the cries. We studied all the details of blood. You could squeeze up close or hang back, depending on your curiosity.30

The Rwandan mass murders help to evaluate two approaches to understanding the contemporary campaigns of extermination, the most extreme forms of political violence. One is associated with Hannah Arendt, who proposed—relying on the case of Adolf Eichmann—that engaging in mass murder (or designing mass murder) does not require special qualifications, beliefs, motivation, or some personal pathology. Anybody under appropriate circumstances (such as organizational or group pressure, or compulsion by superior authorities) could become a mass murderer— hence her concept of “the banality of evil.” The other approach stresses individual motivation associated with strongly held beliefs. The mass participation in Rwanda and the genocide’s organized nature seem to support Arendt’s views: there was some pressure by local authorities to induce participation, and the participants were ordinary people of no apparent distinction. At the same time, these killers had strong beliefs about the alleged threat the Tutsis represented. This made it easier to kill them; many apparently relished their “work.” They accepted and internalized the officially promulgated view of the Tutsis as cockroaches; they were “willing executioners”—the term Daniel Goldhagen used to characterize the Nazis carrying out the Holocaust. Nor did the Hutu killers show any moral revulsion or experience moral conflict if these accounts are to be believed. For some, “killing was a demanding but gratifying activity.”31 It is ironic that moral outrages such as the massacre in Rwanda and recent acts of Islamic terrorism have taken place at a time of growing moral relativism (at any rate, among Western intellectuals), presenting a moral and psychological challenge and dilemma to those who disapprove of being “judgmental.” Even before the rise of such relativism, many social scientists and historians cautioned against moralizing and avoided reference to the concept of “evil.” They considered it their task to establish social and historical facts and explain them as best they could and not to pass judgment. But there has also been a countertrend since the 1960s as a growing number of social scientists and intellectuals became advocates of political causes, social changes, and improvements, taking positions that demand moral judgment. Consequently, in spite of the rise of postmodernism and the associated moral and aesthetic relativism— and the commonplace therapeutic injunction against being “judgmental”—there has been no decline of concern with social-political injustice and the resulting human suffering, even if the word “evil” is avoided. The relativism noted above has in fact been limited and selective; various evils continue to be judged and denounced without hesitation and with relish, especially racism, sexism, homophobia, and the inequalities they lead to. The concept of evil has also been avoided because of its theological associations. Discussions and specifications of good and evil traditionally belong to the religious realm, although few in the modern world would insist that religion has a monopoly on moralizing; moral judgments do not require religious foundations, although often enough it is not easy to disentangle the secular from the religious elements in such judgments.

Introduction

15

Be that as it may, contemporary Western intellectuals and social scientists tend to consider dwelling on evil as a sign of a lack of sophistication, an expression of irrational religious impulses, and simplistic Manichean thinking. Only members of the clergy or political extremists feel free and unembarrassed to use the word. In contrast, intellectual sophistication requires one to consider all attitudes or human qualities as matters of degree, a continuum, or composites of opposing entities. Even moralizers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn insisted that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in every human, although this insight did not prompt him to embrace a nonjudgmental moral stance. There are further reasons for this reticence. The concept is vague, the phenomena it refers to are often difficult to agree upon and to identify, and its explanations are difficult.32 How can one apply a single word to characterize a wide range of actions or behaviors encompassing ideologically motivated mass murder, serial murder of randomly chosen individuals, rape, child abuse, and the torture of human beings or animals? Evil resembles pornography (also hard to define satisfactorily) insofar as when confronted, we can identify it without much difficulty. The Hungarian writer George Konrad observed: “Even the most determined relativist can distinguish between a decent person and a scoundrel, especially if he is affected by the behavior of the party in question. Our sense of whether a person is good or evil works instinctively, the way we blink when something gets into our eye.”33 A literary historian suggested that “evil is always identifiable as such because two elements are never absent: one is the misappropriation and depraving of human free will; the other, the denial of the humanity of others.”34 The philosopher John Kekes suggests that evil originates in basically flawed or defective human nature and not necessarily in deliberate choice and is by no mean an anomaly: “Evil actions are rarely exceptional episodes in otherwise benign lives.”35 He further argues that such acts deserve moral condemnation even if they are not the result of deliberate choice. In his later work he describes evil as an attack on the fundamental condition of human well-being … Acts which threaten the very condition of civilized life … serious harm that causes fatal or lasting physical injury, as do … murder, torture and mutilation … Serious harm need not be physical … The evil of an action … consists in the combination of three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive harm caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for the actions.36

For the writer William Styron, “the root of all evil … is the inability to feel guilt for one’s action.”37—a key characteristic shared by politically motivated mass murderers, religious-fanatic terrorists, and ordinary criminals. In present-day Western societies the public designation of anything as evil is often equated with a primitive self-righteousness. Lionel Trilling observed half a century ago that “educated people … ‘more and more accounted for human action by the influence of environment and the necessities and habits imposed by society’— a circumstantial explanation never adequate to the reality of evil.”38 Andrew Delbanco pointed out that “the once unassailable distinction between good and evil is suspect since it is now conventional to believe that ‘the apparent assertion of moral principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.’”39 An author recently went so far as to conclude, after examining “demonic conspiracies and Satanic abuse in history” that “every single example of evil … turns out to

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be evil imagined: there is, he says, no evidence for any of it. Evil, he argues, is not something real, it is a ‘discourse’ a ‘way of representing things and shaping our experience, not some force itself.’”40 These remarks illustrate the “postmodern” mentality: everything is “socially constructed,” from sexual identity to obesity and notions of good and evil. It may also be proposed that questioning the idea of evil is moral progress of some sort, since it may entail discarding superstitious, irrational scapegoating and persecution of groups or individuals to whom the label came to be affixed on dubious grounds. It is a notable paradox that the reluctance to entertain the idea of evil coexists with a cultural climate redolent with what most of us would consider its striking manifestations and lurid depictions. Again, Andrew Delbanco wrote: “Never before have so many novels and films portrayed acts of sadism, mutilation and terror. As we lost touch with the idea of evil, we seem to need more and more vivid representations of it.” He further argued that “despite the monstrous uses to which Satan has been put … evil remains an inescapable experience for all of us, while we no longer have a symbolic language for describing it.”41 For Leszek Kolakowski, the reality of evil was never in doubt: “Evil has always been with us; it came from us … the atrocities that humans perpetuate on each other have been perpetuated in all periods of history; genocide, bloodbaths and torture have always occurred; evil—the evil in us—never ceases its work.”42

IV The single major common denominator of much of the political violence discussed here and in the volume as a whole is that it is inspired, directly or indirectly, by ideas, ideologies, beliefs, and their attempted realization. They may be political, religious, or secular-religious, each capable of providing the necessary legitimation for the acts of violence involved. Elaborate, self-conscious legitimation is always a necessity when the violent actions to be performed may create moral conflicts or qualms in those performing them, or in those ordering, encouraging, or witnessing them. It is one thing to kill in war, when combatants threaten each other’s life; it is quite another to shove defenseless civilians into gas chambers, shoot them into mass graves, or blow up children, women, and the old in restaurants or marketplaces. The latter demand unshakeable motivation and persuasive legitimation. Present-day Islamic terrorists rely on the pursuit of martyrdom, born out of the serene conviction that in afterlife generous rewards await them. These are, of course, deeply religious and irrational beliefs intertwined with more rational political objectives, sometimes with material rewards as well, benefiting the family of the “martyr.” These beliefs and the actions they prompt also require elaborate conceptions of the evil adversary, the varied incarnations of the “infidel” who must be eradicated ruthlessly and without hesitation. The historically unique mechanized mass murder of Jews by the Nazis was based on such compelling conceptions of the Jewish enemy with whom peaceful coexistence was impossible. A world cleansed of Jews was thought to usher in peace, harmony, prosperity, and social justice, at any rate for the superior Aryan races. The Communist mass murders also rested on conceptions of a better world inspired by the lofty goals derived from Marxist ideals and theories, the creation of which

Introduction

17

required the removal of those obstructing its realization. Nathan Leites, an American social scientist, aptly summarized the moral implications of this worldview: The Bolshevik must eschew free-floating empathy … Bolshevism shares the feeling expressed by a character in Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth: “It doesn’t matter if one has to pass through filth to get there as long as the goal is magnificent. It will all be washed off … afterward … Bolshevik doctrine rejects the virtue of empathy with and pity for all human beings … The awareness of distress of others would reduce one’s capacity to perform those acts which would ultimately abolish it … instead of feeling guilty about the suffering which one imposes on others … one attempts to feel self-righteous about directly and actively imposing suffering on others—for the sake of the future abolition of suffering.43

Lenin put it more succinctly: “It is altogether unforgivable to permit oneself to be frightened or unnerved by ‘field hospital’ scenes [bloody, mangled bodies.] If you are afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest.”44 Alexander Yakovlev, a high-ranking Soviet Party functionary through much of his life, came to reject both the practices and ideological foundation of the Soviet system as he came to a clearer understanding of the connections between theory and practice: Belief in the inevitability of the coming Communist world served to justify the numerous and senseless victims of the class struggle … The idea that one should not fear creating victims in the course of serving the cause of progress … is very characteristic of Marx … Moral criteria … are “revoked” by the brutality and directness of the class warfare … This special “class” morality leads to the indulgence of any actions … Its justification comes from the special vision of the historical path of development, its final goals for the full renaissance of humanity … All this grew into the conviction that everything that corresponded to the interests of the revolution and communism was moral. That is the morality with which hostages were executed … concentration camps were built and entire peoples forcibly relocated.45

The exaggerated awareness, or fantasy, of some powerful and hateful enemy is complemented and intertwined with a scapegoating impulse. Human beings derive great satisfaction from righteous indignation and hatred, which often inspire and justify violence. This impulse is universal and timeless and rests on the disposition or determination to hold others—individuals, groups, social or political entities— responsible for a wide range of grievances, frustrations, and resentments individuals experience. Human beings markedly prefer not to take responsibility for those of their actions and attitudes that have unpleasant consequences and incline to explain their hardships or misfortunes by the malice or malevolence of other humans. It is not sufficient to blame deities, fate, bad luck, impersonal social forces, or circumstances (for personal or group failure or deprivation); it is far more agreeable to hold responsible specific human beings or groups, or some personalized abstraction (Jews, infidels, capitalists, Communists, etc.). Identifying evil or evildoers yields great satisfaction, indeed a quasi-spiritual gratification, the feeling that there is an ordered and meaningful moral universe in which good and evil can be readily and sharply distinguished. Still more gratifying may be the conviction that when evil is well defined and identified, it can be crushed without regret or remorse. This attitude has legitimated the great slaughters of our times: the Holocaust, the Soviet and Chinese mass murders, and the mass murders in Rwanda.

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V There is another important source of contemporary political violence here to be considered: it is the threat to one’s sense of identity, real or imaginary. Such threats have multiplied and intensified in the wake of modernization, which has at once splintered traditional communities, ushered in new national identities, homogenized societies, undermined traditional cultures, and almost simultaneously created a backlash against these processes: the reassertion of ethnic, national, or religious identities and the demanding of “respect.” Such concern with a weakened or threatened sense of identity helps to answer the questions: “why [do] so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic or some other kind of identity? Has it always been like this, or is the present era influenced by hitherto unknown factors?”46 Preoccupation with a sense of identity, moral corruption, and the restoration of honor are thrust into sharp relief when these concerns confront the impurities (real or imaginary) of modernity. Judicial systems, too, are enlisted in defending and reasserting traditional values and in the eradication of what is seen as “moral corruption.” The latter, in Iran, includes “adultery by wife [!] and insults to the prophet Muhammad.” Thus, the Iranian Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of six members of a state militia who stoned to death and drowned victims they regarded as “morally corrupt,” including “a young couple engaged to be married who, the killers claimed, were walking together in public.” In another case in 2004, a 16-year-old girl was sentenced to death and hanged for what was said to be “chastity crimes.” All these killings, judicial and extrajudicial, were sanctioned by “Islamic teachings and Iran’s Islamic penal code.”47 Needless to say, the sense of individual identity is bound up with collective or group identity and a sense of community. Modernization notoriously undermines such communities and the associated sense of identity. Societies are in trouble when people begin to ask “who am I?” and in even greater trouble when they are unsure of the answer. In a well preserved traditional society the question does not arise, and not all modern societies are equally afflicted by these problems of identity. It is in societies that are the most ambivalent about modernity—such as Islamic countries—that identity problems are the most pronounced and in which militant, compensatory, counter-modernizing trends and responses arise, such as radical Islamic militancy. As Todd Gitlin wrote: “Islamic fundamentalism … has become the main repository of a passion for pure belonging, a passion exacerbated by the unsettlements of globalization.”48 People “frightened by change seek refuge in values and symbols of a time-honored tradition.”49 The demand that women wear traditional Islamic garb is such a compensatory response as is the rage against Western popular culture. Most of the 9/11 suicide bombers spent substantial periods of time in Western countries, and several of them acquired higher education in these countries, thereby experiencing and nurturing a consuming ambivalence and hatred toward modernity. How the threat of Westernization, or globalization, is perceived as deeply threatening and converted into violence is captured in these observations: It is easy to imagine how it [the threat to one’s identity.] can drive people to the worst kind of extremities: if they feel that “others” represent a threat to their own ethnic group or religion or nation, anything they might do to ward off that danger seems to them entirely legitimate. Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they

Introduction

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are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and dearest … The butchers often have a clear conscience.50

A recent historical study of mass murder and its genocidal manifestations came to conclusions that partially overlap with those here entertained. Ben Kiernan wrote: [The genocidal] … mindset usually comes with an expansionist territorial drive bolstered by a sense of historical loss and racial or religious resentment … Genocide and extermination betray a preoccupation with restoring purity and order … this often demands eradication of foreign contamination and return to an imagined pure origin … As in the past, racism, religious prejudices, revivalist cults of antiquity, territorial expansion, an obsession with contesting and cultivating land and the idealization of social classes such as the peasantry, are equally likely … [to be the source of these mass murders.] … Central to this book are four recurring ideological preoccupations of the perpetrators of … genocidal massacres: racism, expansionism, agrarianism and antiquity.51

These propositions were put forward largely to explain colonial massacres and those associated with the expansion of ancient empires. They have limited applicability to much of the political violence discussed in this volume, but help us to understand the Holocaust and the mass murders of Pol Pot.

VI At last something has to be said about intellectuals and contemporary political violence, in part because—as the preeminent moralizing elite of our times—they themselves often address the issue. Moreover, insofar as a great deal of modern political violence has been perpetrated in the pursuit of some utopian social-political project, certain intellectuals have not been able to avoid being implicated since it is they, in their politicized incarnations, who propose and develop such utopian designs. The Chinese Nobel prize winner Gao Xingjian wrote: “During the century that has just passed, many of the intellectual elite went mad. Following the death of God, it was as if everyone had suddenly become a savior who wanted to annihilate the obsolete world order to establish a utopia.”52 The initial involvement of intellectuals with utopian designs, and the attendant social engineering, was most evident in Communist systems. Less well known that academic intellectuals in Nazi Germany were among most the enthusiastic supporters of the regime; furthermore, spreading and elaborating racist theories and propaganda required intellectual involvement and support. Intellectuals in Communist societies did not remain supportive of these systems. More typically, their initial support gave way to withdrawal and disenchantment, except for those who became absorbed in the cultural-political apparatus of the ruling party. Arguably, intellectuals outside Communist systems, Western intellectuals in particular, retained their support and sympathy for these systems longer.53 In Rwanda, as indicated by Jean Hatzfeld, “university professors” were involved in the creation and dissemination of anti-Tutsi propaganda (see page 11). Intellectuals also played a part in the incitements to and justifications of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.54 The legitimation of Jihad requires substantial intellectual contributions and efforts, and they have not been withheld. It may be argued that all these examples represent a debasement of the intellect and that those engaged in the creation and propagation of such ideas do not deserve

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to be considered intellectuals. Of course it all depends on our understanding or definition of intellectuals.55 If we consider intellectuals those who are regularly and often professionally engaged in the creation, propagation, or criticism of ideas and institutions associated with matters moral, cultural, social, or political, then the groups referred to above will qualify as intellectuals. Aside from creating or supporting the ideals or ends that call for, or lead to, violent means for their realization, intellectuals may also be involved more directly in the legitimation of political violence as official ideologues, functionaries in propaganda and mass communications, journalists, or preachers of religion. It is, after all, mainly intellectuals who explain why ends justify means in the causes and conflicts they support. It was not my intention to insist that contemporary political violence is the exclusive outcome of utopia-seeking, perverted idealism, or of nationalistic or religious fanaticism. As noted earlier, conflict over scarce resources is another potent and timeless source of such violence, as is the determination of power holders (of varied ideological persuasions) to cling to or expand their powers and privileges. I did, however, argue that many of the most egregious and destructive forms of political violence in recent times had idealistic roots in the various conceptions of a world purified of evil, its incarnations variously defined, depending on the nature of the beliefs held. The work of Robert Conquest has provided invaluable and enduring assistance for grasping this paradox.

Part I

4 S oviet Commu nism

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Chapter 1

4

The Reception of Robert Conquest’s T H E G R E AT TE R R O R Joshua Rubenstein

The publication of The Great Terror by Robert Conquest was greeted with univer-

sal acclaim in the American and British press when it appeared in the fall of 1968. The timing of the book’s publication could not have been better. The Great Terror appeared just four years after the removal of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev from power, in the immediate aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was a time when liberal opinion was no longer vulnerable to credulous, pro-Soviet apologetics, and few, if any, were being offered. This process of disillusionment among at least some segments of left-wing intellectual circles had begun in the mid-1950s. As the late Adam Ulam remarked in 1966, “when [the Kremlin’s] façade of self-assurance began to collapse, first after [Khrushchev’s] revelations about Stalin in 1956, and then as a consequence of the split in the communist camp, many Western intellectuals began to shed their loyalty to the one-time idol, now certainly more humane than it had been under Stalin.”1 By 1968 this process had matured completely. For many in the West, 1968 is remembered as a pivotal year. We think of the disorders in Chicago and Paris, the turmoil on American campuses—most notably at Columbia University—and in the streets of Mexico City, and the trauma of the Vietnam War, which undermined the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and led to the election of Richard Nixon. But 1968 was no less momentous in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Prague Spring captured the imagination of people around the world, while the phrase “socialism with a human face”—which was first and foremost meant to serve as a defiant rebuke to the Kremlin—expressed the hopes of a new generation who had come to understand how Stalinism had undermined the appeal, if not the possibility, of humane socialism. At the same time, the Soviet human rights movement was beginning to influence Western perceptions of the post-Stalin period. Writers and activists, who came to be called dissidents, were now circulating appeals and independent-minded essays on

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a broad range of topics, including political trials and conditions in the still-existing labor camps. As activists were arrested and brought to trial, the proceedings against them provoked indignation among intellectuals in the West, including many who were famous for their liberal and left-wing views. Following the arrest and trial of the writers Yuly Daniel and Andri Sinyavsky in Moscow in 1965–1966, a case that exemplified Brezhnev’s now hard-line approach to Soviet liberals, their Moscow supporters circulated a transcript of the trial and a host of appeals, which, in turn, caught the attention of Western figures.2 No less a group of writers than Günter Grass, Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Arthur Miller, and Ignacio Silone wrote in 1967 that “no cause célèbre in modern times has had a greater impact on the intellectual world than that of the Soviet authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel.”3 In 1968 the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov was just emerging as a leading figure among the dissidents; his famous memorandum “Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” began to circulate in Moscow in the spring and was translated and published in full in the New York Times in July. But then came the shocking images of Warsaw Pact tanks invading Prague, suppressing a reform Communist movement in August. The Great Terror came out that September and caught the wave of cold reality surrounding Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia. Kremlin figures like Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov had begun their careers under Stalin, and their mention in The Great Terror, however brief, underscored how many of Stalin’s heirs felt beholden to his legacy, especially now that both Nikita Khrushchev and Alexander Dubcek were out of the way. Anatoly Marchenko’s My Testimony, a classic account of the post-Stalin labor camps, also appeared in 1968 and was soon translated into eighteen languages. When Marchenko had first reached Moscow and befriended a group of politically engaged intellectuals, his stories surprised and shocked them; they were convinced that Khrushchev’s Thaw had put an end to such horrors. They had no idea that the camp system continued to brutalize prisoners, subjecting them to hard labor in the forests and the mines and depriving them of proper health care. (Marchenko had gone partially deaf due to medical negligence.) Prisoners in the harshest camps could barely survive on a starvation diet. By 1968 it was fair to say that public opinion in the West was no longer being fed misleading accounts by gullible, naïve, or willfully ignorant journalists or “fellow traveling” tourists. In The Great Terror, Conquest was right to remind us how “credulous observers”4 like Walter Duranty had covered the Ukrainian famine in the New York Times and received a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts; how U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies had been taken in by the notorious purge trials; how the writer and educator Owen Lattimore, who accompanied Vice President Henry Wallace to the Soviet Union and China in the spring of 1944, was given a tour of the Magadan concentration camp and came away with a reassuring impression, which he soon shared with the readers of National Geographic. Lattimore explained that Magadan was part of the “domain of a remarkable concern, the Dalstroi (Far North Construction Company), which can be roughly compared to a combination of Hudson’s Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority. It constructs and operates ports, roads, and railroads, and operates gold mines and municipalities, including at Magadan, a first-class orchestra and a good light-opera company.”5 The Dalstroi, in fact, administered an enormous network of forced-labor camps, which encompassed millions

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of political prisoners. This era was now behind us, and though Conquest referred to these episodes, he felt no need to unduly dwell on them. Writing in the 1960s, Conquest faced a formidable task. He had no access to Soviet archives. And while informed opinion in the West knew that Stalin had carried out repression on a massive scale, which was only natural to compare to Hitler’s crimes, there was no access to the kind of documentation, both in print and on film, that so informed and outraged people when they reviewed the evidence at Nuremberg between 1945 and 1948, or the testimony at Eichmann’s trial in 1961. The trials at Nuremberg included the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which passed judgment on twenty-three leading figures in the German political, military, and business community. This is the trial, which featured Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess among the defendants, that is most vividly recalled. But the IMT was followed by twelve subsequent tribunals, which focused on particular categories of perpetrators, including doctors, industrialists, and the military officers who had carried out the mass shootings on German-occupied Soviet territory. Each of these trials relied on mountains of documentary evidence, making German crimes of aggression and the Holocaust the most well-documented crimes in history. Even today, more than fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, formerly closed Russian archives have not yielded as rich an array of documentary evidence about the horrors of Stalinism as the Allies were able to assemble from captured German records and those present at Nuremberg. In this regard, it is worth remembering that prosecutors at Nuremberg relied almost exclusively on incriminating material evidence produced by the Germans themselves; very few survivors were invited to testify at any of the thirteen Nuremberg trials. Two decades before the publication of The Great Terror, serious scholarly works and accounts by survivors of the Gulag began to reach Western audiences. In 1947 two Russian émigrés with scholarly credentials—David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky— published Forced Labor in Soviet Russia. This was the first comprehensive attempt to pull together all that could be documented at the time. The authors included an eleven-page, annotated bibliography, in which they listed several dozen memoirs, mostly published in Western Europe and the United States, and written by individuals who had survived years in the labor camps and then found themselves outside the Soviet Union, most often because of the dislocations of World War II. But despite this growing literature, Dallin and Nicolaevsky felt compelled to observe the stunning lack of knowledge or outrage surrounding Stalin’s crimes. As they wrote in the opening pages to Forced Labor in Soviet Russia: In the face of a resurgence of slavery in Stalin’s Russia the world remains ignorant or skeptical, and usually silent. It knows of purges and mock trials, mass persecutions and executions, but it has not as yet realized the extent and significance of the use of forced labor in the Soviet Union. It is high time to become aware of the new social system which has arisen in the East during the last seventeen years—a social system with novel and surprising features, and which is as far removed from capitalist society as it is from the Socialist pattern professed by the early builders of Soviet Russia. What has emerged is a hierarchical society of several distinct classes and a multitude of intermediate castes. The entire structure, however, rests on a new foundation: the huge class of forced laborers, a segment of mankind degraded to the level of beasts of burden. It is this class which constitutes the lower level of the social structure. Like a taproot, it conveys sap to the higher layers of the edifice. Its individual cells perish with terrible speed, and much

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The work of Dallin and Nicolaevsky made clear how much was already known in the West, at least to anyone with the desire to look for it. Within a few years, several additional books gained considerable attention. The defector Victor Kravchenko published I Chose Freedom in 1947; his portrait of life in Stalin’s kingdom was disturbing enough to provoke concerted attempts by communist party activists and their supporters to discredit it. The Paris trial connected to the case and the notorious testimony of Jean-Paul Sartre—in Conquest’s words, Sartre decided to deny the truth behind Kravchenko’s book on the grounds that “such evidence would throw the French proletariat into despair”7—has been frequently discussed in the scholarly literature. At least two other books by Gulag survivors came out in those years and deserve to be mentioned. Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber-Neumann and A World Apart by Gustav Herling were widely read and provided compelling and grim descriptions of life in the forced-labor system. Nonetheless, Herling’s book faced insurmountable difficulties, particularly in France. The Paris publishing house Plon hoped to issue a translation in 1952 and even arranged for two chapters to appear in Le Figaro Litteraire. But their intentions led nowhere. “It was quite clear,” Herling remembered, “that the unflattering portrait of Communism presented in the book—so offensive to the amour propre of the intelligentsia—was responsible for this.”8 Memoirs aside, Conquest relied on other significant sources of information that gave The Great Terror a particular edge of credibility: these were accounts from within the Soviet Union itself. This category of material could be divided into three parts. First, with the emergence of samizdat, the West began to read books by survivors like Eugeniya Ginzburg, which provided an unvarnished look at the Gulag. Ginzburg and others were not defectors, and their reputations could not be sullied by accusations that their accounts were somehow the result of Western manipulation or Cold War intrigue. We may think of Conquest’s achievement, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, as coming late in the game; he was, after all, able to glean material from a vast number of documents. But in terms of the evolution of the Soviet human rights movement and its ability to gather hard facts and share them with the West, Conquest’s book came out early. Over the next few years, many more samizdat accounts reached the West. Conquest did not read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the stories of Varlam Shalamov, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago before writing The Great Terror. Second, the Soviet press brought out vivid material of its own, which could not be dismissed in a cavalier way. Conquest, for example, drew a good deal of information about Stalin’s purge of the military from official Soviet sources. In 1961 at the XXII Party Congress, Khrushchev himself had included a vivid account of Stalin’s purge of the military. The interrogations had been so brutal that officers could not help but confess: They were “persuaded”—persuaded by quite definite techniques—that they were either German or British or some other kind of spies … Even in cases where such people were told that the accusation of espionage had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their previous testimony, because they believed it was better to stand on their false

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testimony in order to put an end as quickly as possible to the torment and to die as quickly as possible.9

Drawing on articles published in Moscow and Kiev, Conquest provided telling details about the arrest of generals and the officer corps. A Moscow publication (in 1964) described the purge of the Frunze Military Academy. In the summer of 1937 “not a day passed without the arrest of a member of the staff,” Conquest wrote. “Almost all the instructors were sent to the jails. Army Commander Vatsetis was giving a lecture. After an hour there was a short break, which ended with the announcement, ‘Comrades! The lecture will not continue. Lecturer Vatsetis has been arrested as an enemy of the people.’ The students too were rounded up in droves. All who had references from Gamarnik, for example, were taken. So were those, and there were many of them, who had been sent to the Academy from units whose commanders had been arrested.”10 And third, with official censorship easing, individual Soviet writers were given the chance to break many taboos. Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoirs, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and a host of other memoirs and historical accounts of Stalinist repression animated the Soviet press in the first half of the 1960s; a careful reader of The Great Terror will find many references to them, sometimes in footnotes and other times within Conquest’s text itself. They provide a continuous litany of charges, grounding Conquest’s narrative with the voices of Soviet citizens who were speaking with the permission and, in a certain sense, the full authority of the Soviet state. The Terror reached such broad proportions that no sector of society was spared. Beginning with the peasants and extending to the party and the army before reaching the intellectual class, which was “rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes,”11 Stalin succeeded in destroying “personal confidence between private citizens everywhere.” Ehrenburg visited Moscow in December 1937. He had been covering the Spanish civil war, and, with access to the Western press, he was in a better position than most Soviet citizens to understand what was going on. Nonetheless, Ehrenburg’s daughter and son-in-law had to inform him of how many fellow writers had disappeared and had to warn him not to raise questions about the whereabouts of friends and colleagues. Ehrenburg saw Isaac Babel in Moscow that winter and it was Babel who shared with him a vivid way of understanding how deeply the feeling of fear was seeping into every crevice of society. “Today, a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.” Ehrenburg recalled Babel’s remark in his memoirs, which managed to appear in serial form over the course of five years, between 1960 and 1965, and were published over the intermittent objections of Kremlin leaders, including Khrushchev himself. Conquest cited Ehrenburg’s memoir as the source for this remark, a vivid reminder of how much the Soviet press had once been allowed to divulge before Brezhnev and company clamped down.12 In addition, while Conquest had occasion to quote statements from Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956, his ability to cite accusations from official speeches at the XXII Party Congress in 1961 underscored how far Khrushchev had been willing to go in exposing crimes which had been camouflaged or hidden away. We know now that one of the fundamental reasons for Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964 was that he had let too much out of the bag. Conquest and his readers were among the beneficiaries.

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Conquest’s comprehensive history of Bolshevik rule provided little comfort to people who were ready to condemn the violent repressions of the Stalin period but still retained respect, if not reverence, for Vladimir Lenin, whose legacy Stalin was said to have betrayed. Even as astute a figure as Andrei Sakharov, for example, wrote in “Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” that the party needed to restore “Leninist principles of public control over places of imprisonment.”13 Conquest had little patience for such naïve and essentially uninformed romance. Neither did the reviews of The Great Terror. While it would be unfair to make a full-scale comparison of the reviews that greeted Conquest’s book—unfair because the length and therefore, the opportunity to be comprehensive was, as it is today, dependent on the space book reviews command in a given journal—it would be useful, nonetheless, to recall how the book was received, what this reception tells us about the ideological lenses employed (if any), and the state of knowledge about Soviet history that informed the reviews. A cursory survey of the major journals of opinion quickly reflects the seriousness with which the book was received. The Great Terror was assigned to distinguished scholars and journalists. William Henry Chamberlin (in the Wall Street Journal),14 Gerhart Niemeyer (in the National Review),15 Edward Crankshaw (in The Observer),16 David Joravsky (in The Nation),17 Harrison Salisbury (in the Saturday Review),18 and Alexander Gerschenkron (in the New York Review of Books)19 contributed thoughtful pieces, while no less a figure than George Kennan reviewed the volume for the New York Times Book Review.20 Scholarly journals assigned the book to leading historians and political scientists: Bertram D. Wolfe (in the Slavic Review),21 Alexander Rabinowitch (in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science),22 Alec Nove (in Soviet Studies),23 Zvi Gitelman (in Studies in Comparative Communism),24 and John Armstrong (in The Russian Review)25 to name a handful. Two paragraphs from Edward Crankshaw’s piece in the liberal British newspaper The Observer suitably represented the book’s enthusiastic reception: Mr. Conquest has written the first full and comprehensive account of this nightmare. A great deal of material has been available for a long time, but widely scattered. And until Khrushchev slightly, but with deadly effect, raised the lid of the horror-box in 1956, it was the easiest thing in the world for people unable, or not wishing, to believe in the power of evil to dismiss as grossly exaggerated the accounts of defectors and survivors from Soviet prison-camps. Khrushchev put a stop to that by proclaiming many of the crimes which until then every Russian in authority, without exception, had denied. By admitting much, he was able to conceal more; but since then there has been a remarkable accumulation of fragments of the truth emerging from speeches at party congresses, the memoirs of Soviet soldiers and writers, the courageous statements of persecuted intellectuals, to say nothing of novels and plays. To read, digest, sift and weld together the relevant material from all these sources is a labour to daunt the boldest. Mr. Conquest has done it and made it lucid and highly readable. He has not been afraid of elaborate detail where this is called for to get at the truth; he has not shirked the problem questions—e.g., the meaning of the notorious “confessions.” He takes us through the whole unimaginable process, built on a stupendous lie. He shows the police in action, from the midnight arrests, through the crowded prisons, the interrogations, the phony confessions (often elicited by threats to wives and children), through the inhuman labour camps. He analyzes the great show trials. He offers an extraordinarily perceptive account of Stalin himself which gives an added dimension to the story of his actions. The whole outrageous all but unbelievable story is here for the first time between two covers. Throughout Mr. Conquest has kept his own voice down. It is the facts that do the shouting.26

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Harrison Salisbury was no less effusive. Writing in the Saturday Review, Salisbury, who had been the first regular New York Times correspondent accredited to the Soviet Union after World War II, observed that “the story of the Russian purges has been told and retold by one wave of survivors after another, until a callous and sometimes politically disoriented world has become sated. But never has it been told so precisely, with such painful accuracy of detail, with such insight into motive and relationship as by Mr. Conquest.” Salisbury at that time was under a good deal of pressure. He had visited North Vietnam in 1966, and his reporting and opposition to American involvement in the war were drawing the wrath of the Johnson administration, even as it earned him a George Polk Award for foreign reporting. Salisbury’s views on the Vietnam War did not affect his judgment on Soviet history. Just months after reviewing The Great Terror, Salisbury published 900 Days, his acclaimed account of the siege of Leningrad. For Salisbury, Soviet society was “more cruel, more vicious, more repressive, less reasoned than any other of the twentieth century.” And like other reviewers, Salisbury did not hesitate to point out how Lenin had laid the foundation for the “terror system by his willingness to dispense with legality and ethics in dealing with his enemies. Lenin’s ruthlessness toward White Russian enemies and revolutionary opponents (the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, for example), his granting of special, enormous, and purposefully vague powers to the Cheka, the GPU, and the OGPU—all his own creatures—were the foundations on which Stalin built.” Salisbury would not even grant much credit to Stalin’s heirs for the reforms they had permitted. “There has been no essential change in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death,” he wrote in the fall of 1968. “And the men now running the Soviet state far from excoriating police power are more and more relying upon it to suppress young dissidents, to fabricate false evidence and calumniate those few brave souls who rise up in Russia to speak for virtue and principle.”27 Perhaps it was the fate of so many imprisoned dissidents in Moscow that affected his judgment and altogether soured him on the post-Stalin period. Brezhnev and his colleagues were hurrying to reverse Khrushchev’s reforms, to refreeze the Thaw; Salisbury was not alone in his evident disappointment.28 The National Review waited almost two years to cover The Great Terror. Written by Gerhart Niemeyer, a distinguished professor of political theory who taught for many years at Notre Dame and also wrote extensively for the National Review where he befriended William Buckley, the review focused on the continuities in Soviet policy before and after the Stalin period. This is a fair and telling point. It was under Lenin that the Bolsheviks suppressed other revolutionary parties and violently put down challenges to their rule by formerly close allies, most notably the sailors in Kronstadt. Several show trials were held in the decade before once-powerful Bolshevik leaders, like Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev became the most famous defendants in 1937 and 1938. And though Conquest did not emphasize how and when Soviet leaders of the 1960s first embarked on their party careers under Stalin, Niemeyer was right to point out that “the purges created the entire apparatus of power that exists today, that all of the present Soviet leaders are direct beneficiaries or, in many cases, accomplices, of Stalin’s liquidation of their own comrades.” But I would take issue with some of Niemeyer’s views on both the Stalin period and on the immediate post-Stalin years. Like many people, Niemeyer assumed that Stalin was behind the 1934 murder of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov; as Niemeyer wrote in the National Review, it “was later shown to have been ordered by Stalin himself.”29 In The Great Terror Conquest relied on compelling circumstantial evidence to hold Stalin responsible for Kirov’s assassination while making it

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abundantly clear how Stalin capitalized on the murder to begin a wide-scale purge of party leaders and thousands of others, a view that is universally accepted. But Conquest and Niemeyer could not have seen firm documentary evidence that linked Stalin directly to the crime because none has yet been found. While he was in power, Khrushchev even publicly declared that Stalin was responsible for Kirov’s death, but the commission of inquiry that he initiated was not able to find such a document. In recent years, other responsible historians have also raised serious doubts about Stalin’s role, leaving this question one of the most perplexing in Soviet history.30 Niemeyer also made questionable observations about Soviet politics in the 1950s. While there were certainly procedural grounds for criticizing the trial and execution of Lavrenti Beria (in December 1953, and not in 1954 as Niemeyer wrote) and the demotion of figures like Lazar Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov during what became known as the purge of the “Anti-Party Group” in June 1957, these episodes did not add up to the “purges, trials, the official fabrication of wide-flung networks of conspiracies” that he calls them.31 An argument could even be made that these episodes reflected what was changing for the better following Stalin’s death. Beria was the most feared among the Presidium members to survive Stalin. His arrest, secret trial, and execution may well have been an exercise in self-preservation on the part of Khrushchev and the others. But it was also an indication that Stalin’s most extreme methods were being repudiated, even if, in this instance, Khrushchev and the others dared not hold a proper trial for Beria or publicly clarify the extent of his crimes. At the same time, Beria, in the initial months after Stalin’s death, had been promoting liberal-minded policies. He had been behind the repudiation of the Doctors’ Plot in April 1953 and the release of a handful of doctors who had survived torture. He had also successfully pressed for amnesty for over a million prisoners in the Gulag; this did not include political prisoners but an enormous group of inmates who had been convicted of minor economic or property offenses in the late 1940s. Beria understood that it was too expensive to maintain the Gulag, that it was economically wasteful and unproductive and had to be scaled back. It is hard to say if these policies reinforced the suspicions of his colleagues. A few years later, when Khrushchev overcame the challenge to his authority by Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Molotov (who were mounting a conspiracy within the Presidium to remove him from power), they were simply demoted within the party ranks—effectively retired—a move that helped Khrushchev pursue his policies of de-Stalinization more broadly and deeply. On this point, Niemeyer is, in my view, being unfair to elements of the post-Stalin leadership who were desperately looking for a way to break with the past even as they remained determined to hold onto power and not allow their complicity in Stalin’s crimes to undermine either the party’s authority or their own.32 Khrushchev was trying to balance on a knife’s edge. Even as he permitted poems, stories, and novels to appear that illuminated the horror of the Stalin years, he had to insist that the party remain above criticism, that it was more to be pitied for what it had endured than mistrusted for what it had encouraged. Finally, Niemeyer objected to Conquest’s offhand observation that he did not rule out “an evolution toward democracy” within the party and within the Soviet Union. No one has ever accused Robert Conquest of being “soft on Communism,” but when Conquest wrote that the party “must either evolve or perish,” he was putting his finger on a point that Mikhail Gorbachev and his closest advisers also came

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to believe in the 1980s and that reinforced their thirst for reform with such dramatic and unforeseen results.33 The Nation carried one of the longest and most thoughtful responses. Regardless of its once regrettable history of pro-Soviet apologetics—the journal had congratulated Walter Duranty for “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world”34—there is no mistaking the straightforward acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes and recognition of Conquest’s “masterful description” of the Terror. “From many sources, chiefly the memoirs of surviving victims, he has compiled a catalogue of horrors, skillfully driving the shrinking reader along on a current of dismay and outrage. The shootings seem less cruel—perhaps for the simple reason that he has found virtually no eyewitness accounts of them—than the humiliation and torture of the accused, the starvation and freezing in the camps, and the protracted torment of the “wreckers’ families.” Like other reviewers, David Joravsky also held Lenin responsible, at least in part, for Stalin’s extreme policies. But he also believed that Conquest went too far in asserting that the “nature of the whole Purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.” It is here that Joravsky, a highly regarded historian of Soviet science who was to publish a seminal study of Trofim Lysenko in 1970, raised his principal challenge to Conquest’s volume. “What caused the enormous convulsion of Soviet terror in 1936–1938?” he asked rhetorically, and then quickly, referring to what he understood to be Conquest’s answer, he continued: “Stalin’s insatiable lust for power. That is Robert Conquest’s main explanation of the Great Terror … by which he does not mean the whole spasmodic history of extralegal jailing and shooting, only the spasm of 1936–38.” But, as Joravsky pointed out, “In 1929–33 mass terror was used to drive peasants, technicians and managers toward the impossible goals of the first Five Year Plan. If the quantity of victims and the qualitative transformation of society are indices of greatness, this convulsion of 1929–33 deserves to be singled out as the Great Terror.” But Conquest, in Joravsky’s view, was unwilling to consider an explanation for the purges of 1936–38 beyond a “wearisome elaboration of his main theme. The Great Terror was a Great Plot, executed with unfaltering mastery by that ‘political genius,’ J. V. Stalin, who virtually destroyed the party in order to change ‘despotism,’ which he had achieved by the end of the twenties, into ‘absolute autocracy,’ which he won through the Yezhov thing.”35 Joravsky bordered on scorn when he suggested that Conquest was endorsing the idea that “Stalin was omnipotent.” Anti-Communists have long cooperated with Communists in spreading this myth. Khrushchev explained the Yezhov thing simply by turning the “cult of personality” upside down, and Conquest does much the same. Not divine but satanic omnipotence is attributed to one person, and with that the search for an explanation stops. Togliatti’s famous objection, that this is un-Marxist reasoning, can be recast in the language of common sense: social phenomena must have social causes of appropriate magnitude.36 Soviet Communists ignore this truth for fear of condemning their system. AntiCommunists fear that talk of social causes will exonerate Stalin and his henchmen. Such people are confusing moral judgment with historical inquiry, which tries to explain changing patterns of mass behavior.37

Joravsky was not questioning that Stalin was the driving force behind the purge trials, collectivization, or other episodes of mass repression. But just as historians

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of Germany have long looked beyond Hitler to try to understand how a modern, civilized nation could launch an aggressive war and deliberately murder six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables,” so Joravsky was posing a similar challenge to Conquest and the historical profession. Ilya Ehrenburg had raised similar questions in Moscow. In April 1966, at a time when Leonid Brezhnev was fast undoing many of Khrushchev’s reforms, Ehrenburg spoke about his memoirs to an audience in a public library. The discussion inevitably led to the dilemma of how to understand Stalin. “Is it not true,” Ehrenburg asked rhetorically, that the historical question lies not in Stalin’s personality, but in what Togliatti spoke about: “how could Stalin come to power? How could he hold on to power for so many years?” This is what I do not understand. Millions believed in him without ever seeing him, went to their deaths with his name on their lips. How could this have happened? I see a rooster in a chalk circle or a rabbit before the jaws of a boa constrictor and I do not understand. References to lack of culture or the backwardness of our people do not convince me. Such arguments are not persuasive for me. Is it not true that we saw something analogous in another country [Nazi Germany], where such reasons did not exist? I am yearning for an answer to this fundamental question, fundamental for preventing such horrors in the future.38

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Alexander Gerschenkron was troubled by the same concerns. Gerschenkron, the Odessa-born economic historian who taught at Harvard for many years, was famous for his analyses of economic systems. He also sustained a deep interest in Russian literature and culture. The questions he raised and the challenges he posed in response to Conquest’s book continue to resonate today. From the outset, Gerschenkron expressed his admiration for Conquest’s achievement and his horror over Stalin’s. An “impressive book;” “well-written, with wellchosen pithy mottoes and many illuminating allusions to literature and history;” “an immense and splendid effort in research”—such compliments highlighted the opening paragraphs. As for Russia’s experience under Stalin, his years in power were “far and away the most horrible period in the history of the country whose annals are not distinguished by the absence of savage brutality and murderous cruelty.” Gerschenkron also focused on Conquest’s portrait of Stalin, referring to his “impressive chapter,” “The Architect of Terror.” Here again, Gerschenkron found Conquest’s portrait of the dictator compelling: “Vain and vulgar, utterly ruthless and unscrupulous, morbidly suspicious, vindictive, and cruel, but endowed with immense resources of “nerve’ and will power and great political intuition.” Still, Gerschenkron found that Conquest was stymied by the tension between holding the system that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others had created as primarily responsible for the Terror, and Stalin’s fiendish character, which took the system to its most logical extreme. Lenin and Trotsky had relied on terror, dictatorship, and party discipline to establish and sustain their authority. But it could also be said that Stalin perverted a one-party dictatorship into a vehicle for obtaining absolute power for himself, and that he then turned on the party and destroyed it as well. Conquest, in Gerschenkron’s eyes, failed to explain how Stalin sustained his control. When Conquest wrote that “in a general way, the drive for power was

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Stalin’s strongest and most obvious motivation,” Gerschenkron could not help but point out that “this happens to be what all dictatorships are about; the desire, that is, to maintain and to increase their power; and a man whose libido dominandi is weak is unlikely to become or to remain a dictator for any length of time. In a sense, therefore, the statement just quoted is trite. But it is the necessary point of departure for the consideration of something that is not trite at all, that is to say, the mechanics of the exercise of power in a modern dictatorship—the crucial problem upon which Conquest touches here and there, but fails to face squarely.” For Gerschenkron, it was not enough to describe Stalin’s crimes, as skillfully as Conquest had laid them out, and then fail to offer more than a reference to Stalin’s insatiable thirst for power combined with his paranoid and cruel character. Collectivization and the assault on the peasantry, the destruction of the old Bolsheviks, and the anti-semitic campaign after World War II—to name just three phases in Stalin’s cycles of violence—cannot all be ascribed to either paranoia or simple wanton cruelty. They each had a purpose and were meant to address, however imperfectly, some function that Stalin perceived as significant, both to reinforce his personal power and to sustain the system he was creating. Gerschenkron, like Joravsky, came away with a degree of frustration over Conquest’s book. As Gerschenkron wrote: In the concluding passage of his book Conquest quotes from a pamphlet by Rosa Luxembourg. Written in 1918, the pamphlet contained a critique of the young Bolshevik dictatorship. She argued there that the absence of general elections, of unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, of a free struggle of opinion—must cause a brutalization of public life. One may safely assume that Rosa Luxembourg never dreamed of the horrible extent to which her prediction would come true. But what matters here is that the prediction was made without any reference to the personalities involved and certainly without any inkling of Stalin’s political potentialities, a circumstance Conquest would have done well to mention. In fact, had he put that quotation from Rosa Luxembourg at the beginning rather than at the end of his book, he probably would have been led to place his unbelievably rich store of critically sifted information within a broader and more convincing interpretative framework.39

Rosa Luxembourg was a Marxist revolutionary herself, thus giving her prescient understanding of Bolshevik intentions particular bite. It should come as no surprise that George F. Kennan’s review in the New York Times Book Review was among the most thoughtful, and certainly the most emotionally charged. Kennan had served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s and was the only person, to my knowledge, who actually observed a portion of one of the three principal purge trials and then, three decades later, was to read and review The Great Terror. Kennan was asked to attend and serve as interpreter for U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies, who had been invited by the Kremlin. Kennan and his foreign service colleagues at the embassy had no respect for Davies. They found him to be “shallow and politically ambitious,” a man who knew “nothing about Russia.” For Kennan, sending Davies to Moscow “was a gesture of contempt on the president’s part for us and our efforts.” Davies’ behavior during the trial confirmed Kennan’s attitude toward the ambassador and reinforced the emotional shock he experienced in the courtroom. They attended the second of the three show trials near the end of January 1937. The principal defendants were Grigori Pyatakov, Grigori Sokolnikov, Leonid Serebraykov,

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and Karl Radek. Kennan recalled that day many years later with deep emotion and alarm. [Davies] takes me with him as his interpreter, and I, sitting next to him, whisper into his ear what I can of the proceedings. He understands nothing of what is really going on. He even thinks the accused are genuinely guilty of the preposterous charges to which they are confessing, and he sententiously pronounces this opinion, during the intermission, to the American journalists. But I do know what is going on; and the sight of these ashen, doomed men, several of them only recently prominent figures of the regime but now less than twenty-four hours away from their executions—the sight of these men standing there mumbling their preposterous confessions in the vain hope of saving themselves, or perhaps members of their families, from disaster, the sight of their twitching lips, their prison pallor, their evasive, downcast eyes—is never to leave my memory.40

In his review of The Great Terror, Kennan recalled what he had seen: To some of us who lived in the Soviet Union through at least a portion of the years of the Purges, and to those of us in particular who attended one or another of the principal show trials, there is nothing in Mr. Conquest’s account that surprises, and little that is new. There is the confirmation of a certain amount that we suspected and of the existence of which we were reasonably convinced. There is, finally, a vast amount which we would have liked to forget and which the Soviet leaders would like us to forget. Mr. Conquest’s greatest service, perhaps, is to make it difficult for us to forget it.41

In his review, Kennan was unique in another substantial way. Many reviewers and scholars of the period have found it useful and utterly natural to compare the political systems of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Kennan dismissed such an exercise out of hand. At least in the framework of this review, he was indifferent to attempts to compare the mechanisms of control, the passion for cruelty, or the heaps of corpses that one or the other produced. “Comparisons between the Nazi cruelties of 1933 to 1945 and those of the Soviet leaders during the same period,” he wrote, “whether quantitative or qualitative, are meaningless. There can be no comparison between values which cannot be statistically recorded or even imagined.” Kennan is rarely difficult to understand. He was an exceptional writer, often a master stylist. But I find this formulation awkward, and though I have read the passage many times, I still cannot fathom what he meant by a “comparison of values” when it comes to understanding Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. But then he goes on to point out one significant difference between the case of Russia and the case of Germany. In Germany, the bond of political continuity was clearly and sharply severed. The political authority that emerged subsequent to 1945 turned its back on what had occurred before, recognized its monstrosity, deplored it, repudiated the legitimacy of the authority and the ideological inspiration under which it had occurred, took judicial measures, however inadequate, to repair what could be repaired, professed a determination that such things should not be repeated. Never was there any official attempt to deny their reality, to ignore them, or to excuse them. In Russia, we are confronted with a group of men who hold themselves out as leaders of the same political party under whose authority the horrors of the Purges were perpetrated. They have never denied this political or ideological continuity that links

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them to the earlier leaders of that party. Some were even participants in the decisions from which these horrors flowed. These men have not generally admitted that the party as such might have been seriously at fault in the Purges … One comes away from the reading of this book filled with a sense of the relevance and immediacy of old questions. Can men who can neither eradicate nor deny nor explain the blood that disfigures their own hands be fit leaders of a great country and a great empire today? Is not the ability to face one’s own past a serious disqualification for the responsibility of government in the present?42

Perhaps Gorbachev and then Yeltsin did, or at least tried to, compel the former Soviet Union to face its past during their years in power. But it is a commentary on the limitation of their efforts and Stalinism’s profound effect on Russia even today that the current post-Soviet government of Vladimir Putin can revive interest and support for Stalin and get away with it. We are left with an unresolved tension. Writing in the late 1960s, the reviewers of The Great Terror—right and left—unanimously responded to the power of Conquest’s narrative, to the detailed tangle of horrors that he painstakingly wove from numerous and diverse sources. But we are still left with a question: How could all this have happened? The Bolsheviks came to power after decades of unrelenting ideological disputes and clandestine organizing. After the successful seizure of power in October 1917, they could immediately believe that the revolution confirmed the validity of their dogmatic faith. The failure of the Provisional Government to withdraw from World War I or to address the insistent need of the peasants for a just distribution of land— which were the principle demands of the Bolsheviks and contributed to the party’s broad appeal—also confirmed Lenin and Trotsky’s contempt for any political strategy that advocated or even tolerated gradual political reform. The Bolsheviks, they proclaimed, were made of stronger stuff and dismissed calls for “bourgeois liberties”—the fundamental democratic norms embodied in a system of free and competitive elections, a free press, and a vibrant, unfettered civil society. Once in power, the Bolsheviks did not hesitate to suppress dissent, especially on the part of their one-time allies in the revolutionary struggle against the tsarist autocracy—the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. Within a day of taking power, they enacted a decree establishing censorship of the press. Within two weeks, the dreaded Cheka (the secret police) was founded. And the Constituent Assembly, which had been a legitimate, longed-for vehicle to decide Russia’s political future, was forcibly dispersed by the Bolsheviks in January 1918 after one day in session; lacking a majority of deputies, the Bolsheviks were in no mood to risk losing control of the Kremlin. As Alexander Yakovlev, one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s principal advisors observed, once the Bolsheviks accepted the “embrace of coercion as an instrument of historical progress,” their uninhibited resort to violence, combined with an unshakable faith in the Utopian inevitability of socialism, led the country to disaster.43 To overcome their domestic opponents and assert control over the country, then shape society according to their ideology, they needed to intimidate the population into a coerced submission. But that still begged the question of why Stalin resorted to indiscriminate mass terror. This troubling issue continued to haunt Mikhail Gorbachev and his Politburo colleagues in the 1980s. In their closed-door discussions, they frequently found

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themselves wondering out loud about the reason for Stalin’s extreme measures. In October 1987, as the Politburo helped Gorbachev prepare for a major speech to mark the 70th adversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, asked, “What compelled Stalin to turn to terror? The speech talks of democracy. This does not convince me. I still do not understand— what compelled him?” Ryzhkov repeated. “Personal power? He already had that … need to think about this more. What reasons could there have been when, it seems things were moving forward?”44 Gorbachev, at times, felt the need to push his colleagues to confront the full truth about the terror. “Three million sentenced, the most productive portion of the population. A million shot.” Gorbachev reminded his colleagues: And this does not take dispossession of the kulaks into account and the death of people who were exiled? This is what Stalin was. How is it possible to accept this, let alone justify it? We have material at our disposal which confirms that Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev signed off on lists for the execution of hundreds of innocent people. Molotov’s signature was often the first. After the Seventeenth Party Congress one-third of the Central Committee members were destroyed. There were quotas by district—how many to arrest. Two thousand in the first category (to be shot), so many thousand in other categories. There were targets for each region. How many party members were slaughtered, how many cadres were ruined, how much of our intelligentsia was destroyed! Who can forgive this?” … “The Seventeenth Congress … There were already doubts … Stalin’s power was questioned. About 300 delegates voted against him during voting for the Central Committee. When the results of the voting were announced, they lied and removed many voting cards. But Stalin knew the real numbers. He realized that the party was afraid of him. Stalin kept to himself and found an occasion—he used the murder of Kirov—to set out on his campaign of repression. Talk of conspiracies against him is nonsense. Stalin decided to remove anyone who could encourage others to oppose him and replace him. And he involved others in his bloody business.45

Gorbachev began to sound like Conquest himself, anxious to express his indignation over Stalin’s despotic rule. At one point during a Politburo discussion in 1989, Gorbachev insisted that Lazar Kaganovich a longtime member of Stalin’s Politburo, who was still alive and nearing a hundred years old, deserved to be in prison rather than continuing to receive his pension.46 But Gorbachev’s anger alone and his access to closely held documents could hardly bring him closer to a comprehensive or coherent explanation of how it all could have taken place. Nearly four decades have passed since the initial appearance of The Great Terror. Historians of the Soviet period have been able to read not only a continuing series of memoirs by survivors of the Gulag but also the reminiscences of one-time party leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov. They have also benefited enormously from access to formerly closed archives, whose documents, like large diamonds hidden away in a deep mine, illuminate the period as vividly as the recorded memories of myriad victims, but only after they have been extracted. Some of the reviewers of The Great Terror touched on two preeminent dimensions of Stalin’s rule that Conquest, at that time, could not have adequately addressed.

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When scholars like David Joravsky and Alexander Gerschenkron raised broad questions about why and how Stalin took Lenin’s one-party dictatorship to such extremes, they were, in a sense, sharing Conquest’s frustration that without access to official documents, students of the period would not be able to describe “the whole interior mechanism, the motivations behind the system” that led to such atrocities, as Conquest observed in 2004.47 Now, as J. Arch Getty has made clear, “what used to be a paucity of sources has become an embarrassment of riches.”48 Writing from the point of view of victims, and with a relative wealth of information based on their memoirs, Conquest could not wait for access to documents by those who had ordered and administered the machinery of repression. In addition, as Gerschenkron pointed out, “In a huge volume of some 600 pages, more than one-half is devoted to the purge of Party and Army and only 90 pages to the anonymous millions who were falsely denounced, arrested, tortured, and executed, or sent to slower death in the labor camps.”49 This longtime gap in historical accounts is now being addressed by several enterprising scholars, most notably the German historian Jochen Hellbeck in his work on the Stalin-era diaries of ordinary Soviet citizens, and the British historian Orlando Figes in his remarkable book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. Conquest, I am confident, would see their work as a magnificent testament to his pioneering efforts. But this treasure trove of facts still leaves many questions unanswered. Thinking about the Holocaust, Isaac Deutscher wrote in the 1960s, “I doubt that in a thousand years people will better understand Hitler, Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka than we do today.”50 A similar bewildered sentiment can well be said about Kolyma and Vorkuta, about the massive purge of the officer corps in the midst of the European crisis and on the eve of a major war, about the frightening ritual of the show trials whose stage-managed choreography succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of a world, or at least parts of that world, too eager to believe. When Leon Trotsky first broke with Lenin and the Bolsheviks in April 1904, he explained his differences in a harsh polemical pamphlet called Our Political Tasks. Isaac Deutscher could not help but acknowledge that Trotsky had produced “the most strident bill of impeachment that any Socialist had ever drawn up against Lenin,” an essay replete “with amazing flashes of historical intuition.” For Trotsky feared where Lenin’s methods and his vision of a tightly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries would take Russia should they ever come to power. “Lenin’s methods lead to this,” Trotsky wrote. “The party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single “dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”51 George Orwell could not have agreed more. Writing in 1940, Orwell did not succumb to the allure of Stalinism. “The essential act is the rejection of democracy— that is, of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin—or at any rate someone like Stalin—is already on the way.”52

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Chapter 2

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Stalin and the Qu estion of Soviet Genocide Norman M. Naimark

In the introduction to one of his classic works The Harvest of Sorrow, on collectivization and the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, Robert Conquest wrote:

Fifty years ago, as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack, and other areas to the east—a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants—was like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbours. At the same time, (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.1

The visual juxtaposition of Belsen with the death agony of the Ukrainian countryside during the famine conjures up a comparison between the mass killing perpetrated by the Nazi regime and that perpetrated by the Soviet regime. In the Black Book of Communism, Stephane Courtois directly makes this connection: “the genocide of a ‘class’ may well be tantamount to the genocide of a ‘race’.” The death of a Ukrainian kulak child, whom the Stalinist regime purposely sacrificed in the famine, “is equal to” the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw Ghetto, who died as a result of Nazi instigated starvation.2 Here, Conquest would disagree. He believes (meaning he has “the primary feeling”) that the Holocaust is essentially “worse” than Stalin’s crimes.3 Let me say at the outset of this essay that I share Conquest’s fundamental “feeling” about the Holocaust; it was the worst case of genocide in the modern era. This comes from the apocalyptic nature of the Nazi racial utopia, the complete helplessness of the Jews in the face of the attack on their very existence as a people, the sheer extent of the killing, and the industrial nightmare of the gas chambers and ovens of the elimination camps. As Richard Evans writes, “There was no Soviet Treblinka, built to murder people on their arrival.”4 Therefore, Courtois’s comparison of the death of a child by starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto and the child caught up in the Ukrainian

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Famine is a false one when comparing the larger dimensions of the Holocaust to the Soviet mass killings. The only legitimate comparison is the fate of the child in Auschwitz or Treblinka with that of the child in famine-stricken Ukraine. The Ukrainian child had a chance to survive in the Soviet countryside; the Jewish child in the death camps was sentenced to death, even if there were exceptions.5

The Problem of Genocide The basic revulsion at the Holocaust remains with us today and shapes our understanding of a variety of important political and moral issues. Precisely because the Soviet Union was largely responsible for winning the war against the Nazis and lost twenty-seven million lives in defeating the evil that brought the world Auschwitz and Treblinka, there is considerable and understandable reticence to consider Soviet crimes in the same category as Nazi ones. But the Holocaust was neither the only case of genocide in recent history nor should it be considered so unique that it cannot be compared with other egregious episodes of mass killing, like the Armenian, Rwandan, or Cambodian genocides.6 Genocide is the “crime of crimes,” but there are “worse” historical cases of genocide and less horrendous ones.7 For example, the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica was genocide. Compared to the 200,000 deaths and two million people displaced in Darfur, which many believe to be a case of genocide, Srebrenica seems a minor footnote in the history of mass killing. But if one thinks about genocide as a deliberate, or premeditated attempt to eradicate a people, then the use of the term (and the related punishment of its perpetrators) does not seem out of line. This brings us to the question of whether Stalin’s murderous attacks on peoples, groups, classes, political opponents, and his population as a whole qualify as genocide, “the crime of crimes.” Some scholars prefer to sidestep the question by coining new terms—like “classicide,” “democide,” or “politicide”—that preserve the ethnic-, national-, and religion-based exclusivity of genocide, while making it clear that Stalin’s crimes as a whole constituted mass murder.8 Others focus on Stalin’s murderous deportations of the “punished peoples” during the war as that part of his repertoire of mass killing that can be classified as genocide.9 Still others look at the NKVD’s executions of 23,000 interned Polish army officers and government officials in 1940, the so-called “Katyn forest massacre,” as the best example for the case of genocide against the Stalinist regime.10 Much of this tiptoeing around the problem of genocide when dealing with the litany of Stalinist crimes has to do with the language of the keystone of genocide legislation: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948. Here genocide is famously defined as a variety of “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” This powerful idea of genocide took hold, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, in the international courts with respect to crimes in the former Yugoslavia (primarily of Serbs against Bosnian Muslims) and in Rwanda (Hutu against Tutsi). The growing body of scholarship in “genocide studies” has also been deeply influenced by the force of the convention and by the extraordinary impact of “Holocaust studies,” which argue that the Holocaust was a uniquely horrendous chapter in the history of mass killing and that the mass murder of ethnic groups or nations is at the core of

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genocide.11 Maybe it is time to ask why the concept of genocide should only encompass the attempted or actual eradication of national, ethnic, and religious groups but not include similar actions regarding social, political, or economic groups? What is, after all, the difference when it comes to human life? This question derives in part from the history of the Genocide Convention itself. The Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during World War II, first came up with a definition of what he then called “barbarism” in 1933, in a proposal to the League of Nations: “Whosoever, out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view of the extermination thereof, undertakes a punishable action against the life, bodily integrity, liberty, dignity or economic existence of a person belonging to such a collectivity, is liable, for the crime of barbarity.” Lemkin added: “Whosoever, either out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof, destroys its cultural or artistic works will be liable for the crime of vandalism.”12 After fleeing Poland from the Nazis in 1940 and landing in the United States, Lemkin continued his search for an international law against mass killing, extermination, and “vandalism.” He first developed his definition of genocide in the document collection, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which he published as a consultant for the War Department in 1944. He had been searching for a term for the barbarism of mass murder, expulsion, and oppression, one that would jolt the consciousness of his readers, and, clearly, he was sure that he had found it. “The practices of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders [the Nazis] is called by the author” genocide, “ a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide.)”13

We are not certain why Lemkin dropped crimes against social or political entities (versus religious, racial, or ethnic ones) from his 1944 book. In all likelihood, he did so primarily to emphasize the particular horrors of Nazi racial attacks on Jews, Poles, and other ethnic groups. No doubt, he also wanted to avoid any trouble that his government-sponsored publication might elicit from the Soviet Union, whose participation in the anti-Hitler alliance was particularly highly valued at this point in Washington. Conquest has written about the extent to which the West’s misreading of the “Grand Alliance” allowed Stalin great leeway to engage in “duplicity and repression” against the Poles, and to commit a series of acts “almost ostentatiously offensive to civilized opinion.” “What Stalin was able to get away with in connection with the Allies was quite remarkable.”14 Under these circumstances In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that Lemkin did not insist on including social or political groups in his definition of genocide. After the war, Lemkin tirelessly lobbied for his new definition of genocide in the press and at the Nuremberg trials, which began in the late fall 1946.15 He was only partially successful at Nuremberg. Genocide was mentioned several times in the course of the trials, but it was left out of the final pronouncement of the tribunal. In fact, the justices at Nuremberg were much more interested in indicting the Nazis as aggressors against other nation states than they were in condemning them for the mass murder of the Jews. Conquest also makes the point that the Nuremberg trials had a number of “disqualifying defects” as legal proceedings, not the least of which was the presence of a Soviet chief judge, General Iona Nikitchenko, who had been a “judge” at the Zinoviev “Great Purge” trial in 1937. The Soviets were also

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able to use the Nuremberg proceedings to perpetuate the myth that the Nazis were responsible for shooting the 23,000 Polish officers and government officials whom Stalin and Beria ordered executed by the NKVD in 1940.16 This falsification was never challenged by the Western judges, though the indictment against the Nazis was eventually dropped. At the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials Lemkin lobbied at the newly constituted United Nations for passage of an international convention against genocide. More important, in the end, was the determination of the Great Powers to deal with the potential mass murder of the kind perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe during the war. The first move in this direction was the passage—without debate—of the General Assembly resolution 96 (I) on December 11, 1946. The resolution condemned genocide “as a crime under international law … whether it is committed on religious, racial, political or any other ground” and charged the Economic and Social Council with drawing up a draft convention on the crime of genocide to be presented to the General Assembly.17 In July 1947, the Secretariat of the United Nations presented a draft of the convention that also sought “to prevent the destruction of racial, national, linguistic, religious or political groups of human beings.”18 Further work on the draft produced a series of additional revisions. As amended by the United States, it included the phrase “on grounds of national or racial origin or religious or political belief.” China added “or political opinion” instead of “political belief.”19 All of the early drafts of the Genocide Convention, including the initial U.N. Secretariat draft of May 1947, included political groups in their definition.20 The Soviets, the Poles, and even some non-Communist members of the committees and drafting commissions objected. “Political groups,” the Soviets insisted “were entirely out of place in a scientific definition of genocide, and their inclusion would weaken the convention and hinder the fight against genocide.” The Polish delegate argued that the United Nations should oppose the extermination of groups of people for their political beliefs, like the mass shooting and killing of (left-wing) “hostages” in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere. But genocide was about the mass murder of peoples, as had happened to the Poles, the Russians, and the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the war.21 In the end the Soviets wore down the Sixth Committee, in charge of drafting the convention. A compromise was reached for the purpose of achieving unanimous approval of the convention. “It was for that reason,” the American delegate stated, that it had agreed to the omission of political groups among the groups to be protected by the convention.”22 In the name of getting the convention passed at this point, Lemkin and a number of Jewish groups also lobbied against including “political groups” in its language.23 As a consequence, the final Genocide Convention, unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948, with Lemkin in the gallery, famously defined genocide as a variety of “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” What this brief rendition of the origins of our use of “genocide” makes clear is that the Soviet Union and its allies in the United Nations eliminated any social, economic, or political groups from the Genocide convention—and, I would add, made it very difficult for scholars to talk about genocide as a product of the Soviet system. The Soviets made the self-serving argument, both in the U.N. committees and in contemporary scholarly works on the subject, that political groups were too

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fluid and too difficult to define for them to be included in the convention.24 At the same time, in many cases of Stalinist mass killing, the Soviet state tended to create just such categories in their own rhetoric and by their own actions. In Stalinist lore, the more than thirty thousand kulaks who were shot and the two million who were deported to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia during collectivization constituted an allegedly identifiable social and political category of rich peasants, in contrast to poor and middle peasants.25 In fact, this was an invented group of opponents and alleged opponents of collectivization. In the history of genocide, writes Mark Levene, not enough attention has been paid to the ways “a perpetrator can conceive a group as an organized collectivity in spite of itself.” In some ways, this was as true of the “Jews” who were targeted for elimination by the Nazis, as it was of the “kulaks.”26 Similarly, the millions of people caught up in the machinery of the purges of 1937– 38 were defined as members of various specific—if almost completely fabricated— groups of opponents and potential opponents. Seven hundred thousand people were executed or killed in other ways between August 1937 and early November 1938, an average of 1,500 people a day.27 Conquest’s pioneering assessment of the extent of the “Great Terror,” a term he coined in the original 1968 edition of his most famous book, has been generally confirmed by more recent Soviet explorations of archival and statistical documents.28 As Conquest notes, even high school textbooks acknowledge that around forty million Soviet citizens were “repressed,” about half in the peasant terror of 1929–1933 and half from 1937 to 1953.29 Whereas in the 1920s and early 1930s, “enemies of the people” tended to be mostly imaginary social-political groups, the purges marked a transition in the policies of repression from social to national groups. After 1937 for the first time in Soviet rhetoric, the “Great Russian” nation was elevated above the others. Meanwhile, many smaller national units and subunits were eliminated as reactionary and unnecessary.30 In the second half of the 1930s, Poles, Germans, Koreans, and Iranians who lived in border regions met the bitter fate of executions, forced deportations, and scratching out new lives in special settlements and the Gulag. On the eve of the war, Ukrainians, Finns, and Estonians were cleansed from their homelands en masse and in similar fashion. During the war, the so-called “punished peoples,” Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and Balkars, among others, were deported as nations under horrific circumstances, described by the victims as genocidal, allegedly because they collaborated, or at least sympathized, with the German invaders.31 By any objective standard the mass murders of Stalin’s government perpetrated against its own people should have been included in the genocide convention. The politically motivated exclusion of these mass murders provides no reason for contemporary scholars to exclude these crimes from their definitions of genocide.

The Ukrainian Famine These considerations prompt us to return to where we began, to the “one vast Belsen,” that is, Ukraine, during the killer famine of 1932–1933. Conquest pioneered the study of the Ukrainian famine (as he did the “Great Terror”) and set the terms for the subsequent lengthy debates about Stalin’s role in it.32 Once again, his fundamental historical instincts were unerring and his finding that the famine had a “genocidal element” was absolutely on the mark.33 Given a great deal of recently published documents in both Russia and Ukraine, the best recent estimate of losses

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in the Soviet Union during the famine of 1932–1933 was between seven and eight million. Four million of this number died in Ukraine, one of the richest graingrowing areas in Europe.34 Outside of Ukraine itself, especially in Northern Kuban, another million Ukrainians probably died.35 Both economic and political factors played a part in the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 and were associated with the Bolsheviks’ determination to modernize at unprecedented speed, and at the same time break the back of the independent peasantry in the process. Stalin and his immediate confederates began in 1928 a campaign of forced industrialization that had been anticipated by many in the communist party as a way out of the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness. The state would pay for the breakneck industrial growth by collectivizing the peasantry and thus, taking control of the grain harvest. The only way to do this, the leadership insisted, was to attack the kulaks (dekulakization), which meant violently removing the supposed upper stratum of the peasantry from the countryside. This bloody and dysfunctional process, begun already in 1928–1929, disrupted grain deliveries and made the center more determined to requisition grain forcibly from the peasants. By 1931 the state collections of cereals in the largest wheat-growing regions of Ukraine and the northern Caucasus comprised 45–46 percent of the entire harvest, leaving the peasants bereft of food supplies.36 Grain shortages led the peasants to slaughter their animals. Those collective farms that still had supplies of seed grain for the following year’s harvest were forced to turn them over to the authorities. Ukrainian peasants were resolutely opposed to Moscow’s collectivization and grain requisitioning policies. Almost half of all peasant uprisings against collectivization in 1930 took place in Ukraine. The Ukrainian peasantry was “doubly suspect” by the authorities: first, as peasants, who were considered inherently counterrevolutionary and hopelessly backward, and second, as Ukrainians, whose nationalism grated on Stalin and the Kremlin leadership. Stalin’s suspicions of rural Ukraine were inflamed by the belief among the intelligentsia, that the essential characteristics of Ukrainian national culture were preserved mainly by the Ukrainian peasants. He entertained images of a fantastic plot in which the grain crisis would prompt Polish agents and Ukrainian nationalists to try to pry the republic loose from the union. “We may lose Ukraine,” he wrote to Kaganovich on August 11, 1932.37 Widespread grain shortages in Ukraine due to the excesses of requisitioning led to fierce hunger and desperation in the Ukrainian countryside, as well as in Northern Kuban, heavily inhabited by Ukrainians. On November 27, 1932, Stalin ordered a “knock-out blow” to be delivered to “some collective farmers and collective farms” that continued to resist requisitioning. On February 19, 1933, he proposed that those who didn’t work—the so-called “idlers”—deserved to starve.38 The borders between Russia and Ukraine were sealed; Stalin was angry that in search of food tens of thousands of Ukrainian kolkhozniki “fled across the entire European regions of the USSR and are demoralizing our collective farms with their complaints and whimpering.”39 Ukrainian peasants were also barred from the cities, where food was available, if not plentiful. Offers of food relief to Ukraine from outside the Soviet Union were turned down as unnecessary; the fact of widespread famine was denied. As the crisis worsened in the course of 1933, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and others in charge of dealing with requisitioning and punishing resistance tended to blame the Ukrainians for the famine (a shift from blaming the kulaks!)40 The death agony of the Ukrainian countryside was heard in the Kremlin, but neither Stalin nor anyone else in the leadership did anything about it.

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Can the Ukrainian famine be considered genocide? I believe so. There is a great deal of evidence of government connivance in the circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their survival.41 Most scholars agree there was enough grain in the Soviet Union in this period to feed everyone in Ukraine at a minimal level. But forced requisitioning removed the margin of sufficiency and sank the region into famine, cannibalism, and desperation.42 There is not a lot of evidence that Stalin himself ordered the Ukrainian terror-famine, but there is every reason to believe he knew about it, understood what was happening, and was completely indifferent to the fate of the victims. This may not be enough evidence to convict him in an international court of justice as a genocidaire, but that does not mean the event itself cannot be judged as genocide. Recent international jurisprudence connected with the trials of the Serb perpetrators of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica (July 1995) concludes that historical event itself can constitute genocide, without being able to demonstrate that specific perpetrators were guilty of the crime.43 Slobodan Milosevic died before his case was concluded, but it is also unlikely that he would have been convicted of genocide, though—like Stalin and the Ukrainian famine—he was ultimately responsible for the Srebrenica events. Paradoxically, part of the problem in labeling the Ukrainian famine as genocide derives from the generally brutal character of Kremlin policies carried out against its own people. This harsh regime had already begun in the time of Lenin, though most historians agree that Stalin’s crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union reached an unusual, even pathological level.44 If twenty million or more Soviet citizens died during Stalin’s peacetime rule, and millions of others languished in camps, prisons, and special settlements, then the Ukrainian famine becomes only a part of a larger framework of criminal, if not genocidal actions carried out by Stalin and his ruling circle. In his recent works, the eminent German historian, Jörg Baberowski suggests that this penchant for violence on the part of the leadership was a product of the Caucasian backgrounds of Stalin and many of his henchmen. He argues that extreme violence also resonated within lower echelons of the party and secret police because of the backwardness of Russia, its traditions of peasant violence, and the pronounced disjunction between the utopian project of the Bolsheviks and the primitive existence of the Soviet masses.45 In this perspective the crimes of Stalinism were also influenced by the traditions of Caucasian and Russian brutality that makes it harder to single out specific events as genocidal. A further problem in defining the Ukrainian famine as genocide was the complete indifference to human suffering that permeated the Soviet ruling circles in Stalin’s time. If Ukrainian peasants starved to death in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, did the lack of any effort whatsoever to relieve their suffering amount to genocidal intent or merely indifference? Probably not. But there are good reasons to believe that the famine itself was precipitated and intensified by the same Stalinist leadership that refused to undertake any efforts to alleviate it, and would not even allow the victims to seek sustenance elsewhere. If Stalin and his ruling circle created these circumstances because they distrusted peasants and were glad to be rid of them, then, in a strict sense, the 1948 definition of genocide does not apply. But if the victims were allowed to perish because they were Ukrainians, then the indictment of genocide under the 1948 definition makes perfect sense. The bottom line is that Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and their ilk considered the Ukrainian peasants “enemies

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of the people” who deserved to die. This being the case the Ukrainian famine can be designated as genocidal.

Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to return to the question of moral equivalence between the Nazi and Soviet crimes of mass killing prompted by Conquest’s unforgettable image of Belsen and the Ukrainian famine. Paul Hollander in his introduction to From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, a compendium of personal accounts of victims of repression in communist states, suggests that while both Stalinist and Nazi mass murders could be classified as genocide, he is reluctant to see them as morally equivalent.”46 One of the reasons, he believes, is that “Communist states did not attempt to eradicate, in a premeditated, systematic, and mechanized fashion, any particular ethnic group or class of people.” The second reason is that “Communist regimes, unlike the Nazis, did not seek to murder children.” Thirdly, the Nazi racial categories were immutable, an “inescapable death sentence” for the victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, whereas in the Communist systems many of those classified as enemies of the state managed to survive. Moreover Soviet categories of the enemy shifted and changed over time according to the political needs of the regime. Without seeking in any way to lessen the horrors of the Holocaust or of Nazi crimes against gypsies (Roma and Sinti), homosexuals, Poles, Russians, particularly Soviet prisoners of war, or others, I would suggest that the history of genocide in Stalinist Russia and the Third Reich provides more material for similarity than for difference in Hollander’s categories of comparison.47 Dekulakization and the Ukrainian Famine surely should be seen in turn as attempts by the Stalinist government to eliminate “a class of people.” The Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other “punished peoples” of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination—if not physical, then as identifiable ethnic groups. While there is no question that the Nazis intended to eliminate the Jews, it is also true that substantial numbers were able to emigrate from Germany and Austria before the attack on Poland in 1939. As has been well established, the systematic elimination of the Jews was precipitated in the main by the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis in June 1941. It is interesting that both Courtois and Hollander point to the fate of children as, in one case, indicating the commonalities and in the other the differences between the fate of victims of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. A review of the Russian publication Deti GULAGa (Children of the Gulag), which documents the Soviet regime’s treatment of the children of those designated as “enemies of the people,” should leave few illusions about the horrendous fate of the offspring of the millions of fathers and mothers who were executed or deported to the camps.48 Except for their conviction in a number of categories of criminal offenses, some blatantly political, minors were not executed by the Soviet regime. But children of the “repressed” population were highly susceptible to disease, hunger, exposure, and various forms of exploitation while in transport, in “special settlements,” and in work camps. They were often forcibly separated from their parents and then disappeared into the NKVD orphanages, which were often little better than prisons and work camps themselves. This is different from the unhesitating Nazi elimination of Jewish children in the death camps and at thousands of sites of mass murder across Eastern Europe and Russia. In this sense, Courtois is wrong and Hollander is right.49 But the agony and

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unnecessary deaths of children under the Stalinist regime should not be forgotten. The mortality rates of children are hard to quantify, since many never made it to term or died soon after birth because of the horrid conditions of their mothers’ “repression” and internment. Hence, infanticide could also be included in an indictment of the Stalinist regime. The indifference of the Stalinist leadership to the suffering of children should also be included in our assessment of Soviet crimes. Hollander also focuses on the importance of the “immutability” of Nazi racial categories, while Soviet designations of the “enemy” changed depending on the time and circumstances and thus, did not constitute the “inescapable death sentence” that Jews faced. In the case of alleged kulaks, Volga Germans or Chechens during the war, and Poles before the amnesty of July 1941, there were similar elements of immutability in their condition. Even if the Soviet regime did not pronounce death sentences on all their numbers, they were forced to live under the imminent threat of dying. At the same time, it is worth noting that thousands of Jews married to Gentiles did survive the war in Germany, and there were several thousand Jews serving in the Wehrmacht, almost until the end, just as some kulaks in the Gulag were allowed to join the Red Army to defend the homeland, though most often in special punishment battalions. Furthermore, Nazi racial designations regarding Slavs were confused and inconsistently applied. Himmler selected Polish children for “reclaiming” to the German race because they had blond hair, blue eyes, and looked German; in many cases, Nazi categories of race were thus far from systematic or consistently applied. Meanwhile, the Soviets deported every single Chechen and Ingush they could find, nearly a half million people, whether serving with distinction in the Red Army or occupying an important party post in Moscow. They could do so, because the nationality of Soviet citizens was invariably recorded in the internal passport system. In the final analysis, both totalitarian states—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia— were perpetrators of genocide, the “crime of crimes.” In spite of the fall of the Soviet Union and the attendant greater access to information, we know much more about the Nazi atrocities than we do about the Soviet ones, and about those who initiated, organized and carried them out. The crucial issue of intentionality and criminal culpability in the Soviet case can only be settled definitively with full access to Russian archives and to those responsible who still survive.

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Chapter 3

4

The Victims R etu r n: Gul ag S urv i vors under Khrushchev S t e p h e n F. C o h e n

It can’t be covered up. People will come out of prison, return to their native places, tell their relatives and friends and acquaintances what actually happened … that those who remained alive had been innocent victims of repression. —Nikita Khrushchev Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will be eyeball to eyeball: the one that put people in the camps and the one put there. —Anna Akhmatova

Most writers, if they live long enough, accumulate a personal archive of unfin-

ished projects and unpublished works. The original version of this article, written twenty-five years ago, is from my archive. A study of survivors of Stalin’s Gulag who returned to Soviet society during the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms from 1953 to 1964, it was researched under forbidding circumstances—in pre-glasnost Moscow in the still-repressive late 1970s and early 1980s, when the entire subject was officially banned. No sensible scholar would have chosen such a project in those circumstances, but, I came to think, the subject chose me. It began even earlier, in 1965, in a London park where Robert Conquest and I were discussing his new undertaking, which became The Great Terror. Bob was already an eminent man of letters. I, more than twenty years younger, had no comparable achievements, only the beginnings of a dissertation on Nikolai Bukharin, a Soviet founder falsely charged at the 1938 Moscow Trial and executed. Listening to Bob I remarked that I had learned Bukharin’s widow and son had somehow survived Stalin’s terror—she enduring more than two decades in jails, labor camps and Siberian exile—and were alive somewhere in Moscow.1 Yes, Bob replied, no doubt there were still millions of survivors all over the Soviet Union.

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The seed was planted, but it grew only later, in 1976. By then, my biography of Bukharin had been published in New York; his widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, and son, Yuri, had welcomed me into their family; and I had begun to live in Moscow for extended periods. Much of my social life there was shaped by that of the Bukharin family’, and I soon realized that many of the people I met were also survivors of Stalin’s Gulag or children and other relatives of his victims. Public knowledge of their terrible “fate,” as Russians say, had been proscribed by censorship since the period shortly after Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964, and they had little hope, if any, of ever making it widely known. For that reason, and because of my relationship with Anna Mikhailovna, the ranking old Bolshevik widow in those martyred circles, they were eager to tell me their stories and even to give me unpublished memoirs. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I found myself dwelling in a subterranean history, a kind of living archaeological find, barely known in the Soviet Union and almost not at all in the West.2 Writing that history, it seemed, had fallen to me.

Getting Information in Pre-Glasnost Russia The book I planned had two purposes. One, influenced by my biography of Bukharin, was to create a portrait of Gulag returnees, beginning with their liberation and ending with their efforts to rejoin society. The other purpose, reflecting my interest in past and possible future reforms in the Soviet Union, was to explore how the return of millions of zeks (the colloquial acronym for prisoners) after Stalin’s death in 1953 had affected policy making and the system itself under Khrushchev. Both dimensions were outside the mainstream of Western Soviet studies at that time. Still adhering to the “totalitarian model,” most studies treated the political system as something apart from both its history and society, largely unaffected by either and thus essentially immutable.3 The impact of Gulag returnees in the 1950s and 1960s suggested otherwise. Their fate was a central factor in the intensely historicized politics of the period, when controversies over the past had become an inescapable aspect of struggles over power and policy at the top. At the same time, the personal needs of so many freed prisoners and their families created both a social constituency for further de-Stalinization and a test of the system’s capacity for change. (Before it became commonplace in the field, I was trying to fuse social and political history.)4 But where would I obtain the information needed for such an empirical work? Almost no secondary literature existed on the subject; the best Western books about the terror, notably Conquest’s, focused on people’s victimization, and not on their subsequent experiences.5 And in a country of encompassing censorship, closed archives, many still intimidated victims and a hostile officialdom, there was, not surprisingly, only one fragmentary Soviet study—the brief account of a few post-Gulag lives at the end of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in the West in the 1970s.6 Therefore, I had to rely mainly on primary sources. A number of uncensored Gulag memoirs had been published abroad, but they were of limited value. Most covered the years before 1953, written by repatriated foreign prisoners whose later experiences were not typical of Soviet ones, or said little about life after the Gulag.7 There were, however, two other written sources of information, both of them Soviet and important, though still little used by Western scholars.

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One was a considerable body of writings on the “camp theme,” including fiction, published under the somewhat relaxed censorship of Khrushchev’s “Thaw.” The impression that few such texts were published at that time in the Soviet Union— such as, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—is wrong.8 Many commentaries on Stalin’s terror, including accounts by Gulag survivors, appeared in officially sanctioned publications, and not only in the Moscow-based press. Prompted by returnees, I found a wealth of information in journals published in remote Soviet regions where there had been large concentrations of camp inmates and exiles and where many had remained after their release, particularly in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Getting access to such journals was difficult but amply worth the effort.9 The other written Soviet source was entirely uncensored—the growing volume of materials circulating in typescript (samizdat) or smuggled abroad for publication (tamizdat). By the 1970s, those expressions of unofficial glasnost—histories, memoirs, contemporary political and social commentaries, documents, fiction and more—should have been essential reading for most Sovietologists, as they were for me.10 Indeed, terror-era subjects and returnee authors themselves were a major component of that literature. Most of all, though, I relied on the firsthand testimonies of Stalin’s victims with whom I was in personal contact. In the beginning, I met them through the Bukharin family, but very soon also through three other exceptional Muscovites. Two were dissident historians, with whom I developed close professional relations, and themselves sons of victims—Roy Medvedev, whose father had perished in a labor camp; and Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, who lost both parents to the terror and himself “sat” for almost thirteen years in the Gulag.11 Admired and trusted by many returnees, Roy and Anton persuaded several of them to help me. My third enabler, Tatyana (Tanya) Baeva, was a young woman at the center of Moscow’s beleaguered human-rights movement, which also included a number of survivors of Stalin’s twenty-year terror as well as grown children of victims who did not return. Indeed, Tanya’s father, Aleksandr Baev, a much-honored, internationally known biochemist and high official in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had spent seventeen years in Stalinist camps and exile, where she was born.12 My friendship with Tanya led me to another circle of people whose experiences I needed. Within two years of periodic visits to Moscow, I was in direct touch with more than twenty returnees or close relatives of other victims, whom I interviewed at various lengths.13 I was not the first person to engage them in oral history—in many instances, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev or Antonov-Ovseyenko had been there earlier for their uncensored books on the Soviet past14—but I was, I think, the first foreigner. That circumstance heightened my awareness that by abetting my project they (unlike me) might again be at considerable risk. I was very cautious, which often meant surreptitious. I realized, however, that those close encounters were selective cases, most involving elderly people linked to the original Soviet Communist elite who had lived in Moscow before and after their Gulag experience. (The great majority of Stalin’s victims, 70 percent or more, were not members of the Communist party nor of any Soviet elite.)15 To reach beyond them, I prepared a lengthy Russian-language questionnaire (anketa)—also the first on the subject—that friends, acquaintances and people unknown to me circulated more widely inside the Soviet Union and among survivors who had emigrated.16 By the early 1980s it had yielded, through various

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channels, twenty or so detailed replies. With cases culled from printed and typescript sources, I now had files on nearly sixty individuals. Considering the millions of victims, it was a small sample. But considering recent Western studies of the entire Stalin era based on far fewer diaries and other personal sources found in archives, it was substantial.17 By then, I was running out of time to pursue the project inside the Soviet Union. My Moscow double life—as an official exchange scholar working on an approved subject while increasingly engrossed in a disapproved one—had become known to Soviet authorities, as possibly had my part in sending banned memoirs and contemporary dissident materials out of the country. My sporadic “tail” became more constant, and a KGB officer bluntly warned me to stop “spending time with people who have grievances against the Soviet government.” (Whether he meant Gulag survivors or latter-day dissidents, I didn’t ask.) Inevitably perhaps, that stage of the project ended in 1982, when, for the next three years, I could no longer obtain a Soviet visa. I turned instead to the large quantity of materials I had already amassed, using some of them in my publications about past and current political struggles over reform in the Soviet system.18 I also drafted the original version of this article, both as a confidential report due on a research grant and as a summary of the book I intended to write. That intention was overwhelmed in 1985–1986 by the unfolding drama of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. The new leader’s policies came to represent the attempted Soviet reformation I had long considered possible, along with the promise of longinaccessible documents for a fuller edition of my Bukharin biography. Glasnost filled the Soviet press with new information about Stalin’s victims, which I dutifully collected, but the other projects took priority. My swollen returnee files languished in storage until the mid-1990s, when I met the young American scholar Nanci Adler. Impressed by her ongoing work on a very similar project, and by her grasp of psychological and comparative approaches I lacked, I gave her full access to my materials for her own excellent book, which appeared in 2002.19 Why, then, publish this article now? One reason is that I had always intended to do so, and where more fitting than in a book honoring Bob Conquest. Another is to counter the current impression that no such research was possible before Gorbachev’s glasnost or even the post-Soviet “archive revolution.” As a Russian historian reminds us in this regard, “Every era gives rise to its own specific type of sources.”20 Most importantly, Gulag returnees remain a remarkably little-known phenomenon, certainly compared, for example, to Holocaust survivors. Indeed, their saga, a recent historian of the Gulag observed, is “often ignored” even in histories of the Soviet Union.21 Since the Khrushchev years, returnees have appeared occasionally in Russian and Western fiction, including Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, Vassily Aksyonov’s The Burn, Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House and Martin Amis’ House of Meetings; a few memoirs about their post-Gulag lives have been published; and their testimonies have informed several Western studies of more general subjects.22 But despite large repositories of relevant manuscripts and published volumes of archive documents, Adler’s book remains the only full-scale examination of their experiences, inexplicably even in Russia.23 Though a lesser contribution, this article may still have merit as a brief overview of the political and social dimensions of the returnee phenomenon. In addition, having been researched and written in closer proximity to those events, before they

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became fully historical and when many victims (and victimizers) were still alive, its perspectives on returnees and on the society and system they encountered are somewhat different. The general contents of the article are largely as they were in 1983. I have, however, replaced the original introductory and concluding sections, made some changes in tense and style, corrected a few errors, added information to expand or illustrate various matters and in the notes provided readers with a bibliography of related publications since 1983, a number of which I read in manuscripts before they could be published. I have not, even now, divulged the names of all the people who confidentially informed the original version—partly to retain the ethos of that time and partly because of uncertain developments in Russia today, or perhaps because of promises made and habits ingrained long ago.

Liberation Returnees from the Gulag were survivors in almost the full sense of victims comparable to survivors of the Nazi extermination camps. (Even Soviet newspapers later charged Stalin with “genocide against his own people.”)24 Unlike Hilter’s camps, the Gulag’s primary purpose was forced labor; but treatment and conditions in Stalin’s camps and in the vast associated system of prisons, transport, penal colonies and “special” places of harsh exile were often murderous. Many of the twelve million or more victims swept into that system between the early 1930s and early 1950s died there or were discharged because they were already dying.25 Most of those liberated in the 1950s had been arrested in the 1940s, surviving “only” ten years or less. Survival was therefore a subject that later troubled returnees, much as it had tormented Nazi camp victims.26 Who had survived, and why? Some people endured because of strong bodies and unrelenting wills, circumstantial good fortune of less arduous work or early release into exile. Others did so by becoming informers or collaborating in different ways with camp authorities. As a rule, returnees I interviewed did not want to discuss the issue, though a few raised questions about other survivors, and I did not press it. Exactly how many political victims survived to be freed after Stalin’s death in March 1953 is uncertain. At least four to five million were still in camps, labor colonies, prisons and exile.27 To that number must be added, however, the uncounted millions of relatives of “enemies of the people”—or in another formulation of Stalinist repression, “members of families of traitors to the Motherland.” (Some renounced their accused kin or managed to hide such relationships, but many would not or could not.) The story of all those collateral victims, whose spouses, parents or siblings became the inadvertent “culprit of my fate,”28 remains largely unwritten. A great many children and other relatives, including ones I knew, had also been imprisoned or deposited under false names in NKVD-authorized orphanages across the country.29 Millions more remained nominally free but so stigmatized by their “spoiled biographies” (there were notable exceptions) that they could not live or work as they desired or obtain essential social benefits.30 They too had been “repressed,” as the Russian government acknowledged decades later; and they too wanted exoneration and full integration into Soviet society. Considering only immediate family members (other relatives were also affected), there could scarcely have been fewer than ten million survivors of some kind of political victimization by 1953, and possibly considerably more.

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Many previous releases had occurred in the Gulag’s history, but the post-Stalin liberation was entirely different—being profoundly political, fraught with questions about innocence and culpability and the source of fearful conflict in the Kremlin. A March 1953 amnesty released one million of the approximately 2.7 million camp inmates, most of them ordinary criminals.31 The freeing of political prisoners, however, unfolded slowly over the next three years, agonizingly so, for those still in the Gulag.32 The primary reason was, of course, the new leadership’s complicity in Stalin’s crimes, particularly that of Lavrenty Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Georgy Malenkov, Anastas Mikoyan and Khrushchev himself. During the three years following Stalin’s death, his successors, while fighting among themselves over power and policy, relied on bureaucratic procedures to investigate the status of political prisoners, most convicted as “counterrevolutionaries” under the infamous Article 58, and review to the mounting flood of appeals. But the victims with the best chance of early release in 1953–1954 were ones with personal connections or those known to party leaders and other Soviet influentials. Beneficiaries ranged from relatives of the leaders themselves, a few once prominent Communists Stalin had not shot and surviving Jewish doctors arrested in the tyrant’s last terror scenario to famous performers such as the actress Zoya Fyodorova, the Starostin brothers (Spartak soccer players), and jazzman Eddi Rozner. (Molotov’s wife, freed on the day of Stalin’s funeral, may have been the first.)33 Otherwise, apart from partial amnesties, the procedures were a slow, case-by-case process usually stretching over months, even years, and ending in rejection. Of 237,412 appeals formally reviewed by April 1955, barely 4 percent resulted in release.34 Spurred in part by rebellions in the camps, large crowds of petitioners assembled outside the Procurator’s building in central Moscow, and thousands of appeals were sent to the party’s headquarters and the KGB as the exodus from the Gulag grew. By the end of 1955, 195,353 people are reported to have been released, though only 88,278 from labor camps and colonies, the rest from various kinds of exile.35 It was a substantial number, but growing at a pace too slow, if continued, to save the lives of many left behind. As Lev Gumilyov wrote despairingly from camp in 1955 to his mother, the great poet Anna Akhmatova, “Most likely I’ll be rehabilitated posthumously.”36 Khrushchev’s historic assault on Stalin’s still cult-like reputation at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 was the turning point. The new leader did not tell the full truth, but by accusing the dead tyrant of “mass repressions” extending over twenty years, Khrushchev tacitly exonerated millions of falsely condemned victims. His speech was not published in the Soviet Union for thirty-three years, but nor was it really “secret.” Within a few months, it had been read officially to meetings across the country, making its general contents widely known. A policy of selective releases was no longer tenable. Mass liberation began immediately through special resolutions, accelerated reviews, including those of appeals previously rejected, and blanket amnesties.37 The most dramatic development was the establishment of ninety-seven special commissions authorized in Moscow and sent directly to many of the Gulag’s sixtyfive or so largest camps. Each commission was supposed to have three to seven members, including party and state officials and, to insure “objectivity and justice,” one already freed and exonerated veteran Communist, though the latter was often excluded. All the commissions were empowered to review cases on the spot and free prisoners, usually upon a simple denial of guilt. (Zeks called them “unloading parties.”) Some, staffed by unsympathetic officials, did not act justly, but many did.

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Within a few months, they had freed more than 100,000 prisoners, adding significantly to the ever-growing total.38 By 1959, most of Stalin’s surviving political victims had been released from camps, colonies, prisons and exile.39 In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech, the homeward trek of liberated zeks became a familiar sight on trains and in streets and shops across the Soviet Union. With nothing more than documents authorizing their release and destination, a railway ticket and a few rubles for food, many looked emaciated and aged and were still in standard Gulag garb.40 When one arrived at Communist Party headquarters embarrassed by how he was dressed, another former prisoner now working there assured him, “It’s nothing. Many people are walking around Moscow today in such clothes.”41 Not all released prisoners and exiles actually went home. Some arrested in connection with sensitive political cases were banned from Moscow and other capital cities for several years. Not all deported nationalities were permitted to return to their native homelands. For a great many others, home no longer existed, years of imprisonment having cost them their families, careers, possessions and sense of belonging. Hundreds of thousands of freed zeks and exiles—“sensible” ones, according to Solzhenitsyn42—remained in the vast regions of the diminished Gulag empire, especially Central Asia and Siberia. They stayed because of new families, salaries offered by state enterprises desperate for their now-voluntary labor, a lack of travel documents, psychological attachments to the harsh settings of their punishment or because they had nowhere else to go.43 Long after the Gulag’s barbed wire and watch towers had been bulldozed, visitors still stumbled upon terrible traces of that world—camp structures, mass graves, skulls. They also found living traces in the remote former Gulag capitals such as Magadan, Norilsk and Vorkuta—elderly survivors and a large number of their descendents.44 Most would fall on hard times again when the post-Soviet state ended essential subsidies to those regions. But millions of survivors did go home, or they tried to. They were people once as diverse as the Soviet Union itself, formerly of all classes, professions and nationalities. Over the decades, Stalin’s terror had victimized virtually every social group, high and low. In the Gulag, however, as the anti-Stalinist poet and editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky, whose own peasant parents had been deported, wrote: Fate made everyone equal Outside the limits of the law, Son of a kulak or Red commander, Son of a priest or commissar. Here classes all were equalized, All men were brothers, campmates all, Branded as traitors everyone.45

Now they went their separate ways.

The Victims Return Few generalizations are possible about the post-Gulag lives of returnees. Some were so broken physically they died soon after release—“from freedom,” it was said; others

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lived into their nineties.46 Some had been so traumatized that they remained fearful, concealed their past, refused to discuss it even with family members, shunned fellow-survivors and tried to “shed [their] prisoner’s skin”; others were “professional zeks,” wearing their Gulag experience as a badge of honor, maintaining lifelong friendships with camp comrades, talking and writing because “they could not do otherwise.” (A Communist truth-teller loudly proclaimed, “I am from Kolyma,” and a poet adopted the pen name “Vladimir Zeka.”)47 Returnees young enough to aspire to a new or renewed profession usually followed a middle course, confiding in relatives, close friends and trusted colleagues.48 The great majority of survivors slipped back into the anonymity of society, but a significant number went on to eminent Soviet careers. They included several released in order to fight in World War II—Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky; General Aleksandr Gorbatov; the father of the Soviet rocket program, Sergei Korolev; and an eventual head of the Writers Union, Vladimir Karpov—as well as post-Stalin returnees like Baev, Rozner, Andrei Starostin, actors Georgy Zhzhenov and Pyotr Veliaminov and many literary figures.49 Innumerable returnees who lived out their lives privately also achieved a relatively “kheppi end,” though possibly more did not. Some ended up hopelessly dysfunctional, destitute and homeless.50 Political generalizations are not possible either. Many victims blamed the entire Soviet system, a few becoming well-known dissident religious figures such as Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov and Father Dmitri Dudko; others blamed only Stalinism and sought restitution of their Communist Party membership as full exoneration.51 Political conflicts among survivors were not uncommon. In addition to disputes among former zeks over Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, he and the other major Gulag author, Varlam Shalamov, disagreed about fundamental issues.52 A returnee who rose high in the scientific establishment was angered by his daughter’s dissident activities because they “jeopardized what I suffered to achieve,” not unlike the reaction of Bukharin’s daughter to her half brother’s public protests.53 Years later, a war of words broke out between rival organizations of former zeks.54 And while most victims hated Stalin, after the end of the Soviet Union, Karpov and Father Dudko praised his historical role.55 Collectively, however, the millions of returnees were an important new force in Soviet life. Their common experiences, needs and demands generated widespread problems, conflicts and cultural expressions that required responses from the political-administrative system. Virtually every returnee wanted, for example, a family reunion, medical care, an apartment, a job or pension, financial compensation and a return of confiscated property. The Soviet government’s general response was an unwritten but often spoken social contract: we will meet your needs within limits and leave you in peace, but you must not make political demands or clamor about the past. (When released, many survivors had been warned not to talk about what had happened to them.) Government agencies could do little for families torn apart by years of mass repression except help returnees locate relatives, and even that was done mainly by friends and other relatives. (Still worse, the KGB continued to lie for several years about the deaths of loved ones.)56 Children who vanished into orphanages and foster homes were usually found, but some were not, and their parents were still searching for them decades later.57 And when children had been young or had not known who their parents were, reunions were frequently difficult and sometimes never fully successful.58

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Many marriages were irreparably damaged, even when both the husband and wife had been imprisoned for long periods.59 When one spouse had remained free (usually the wife), the outcomes ranged from joyous to traumatic and tragic. Sometimes the spouse blamed the victim for the stigma that accompanied imprisonment. There were countless instances of long marital faithfulness, but also of political renunciations, divorces and new marriages.60 Returnees who found no family waiting often quickly remarried, not infrequently to other victims—many affected children did the same—while some men sought new lives with much younger women.61 More women returnees, not surprisingly, remained without spouses, adding to the large number of unmarried women that had resulted from World War II. Nor did the government do much for Gulag survivors suffering from psychological “post-camp syndrome”—those who lived in constant anxiety, tormented by memories, nightmares and everyday reminders of their terrible experiences. The Soviet system lacked the will and the mental health profession did not acknowledge the condition. Quite a few former zeks sought comfort in intimate circles of other victims, who were “like a family,” some even expressing “nostalgia” for the survivalist comradeship of the Gulag. How many ever found inner peace is unknown.62 The government did, however, meet the basic material needs of most returnees, though many felt the response was not adequate. Despite existing statutes, few survivors were given financial compensation for their years of suffering or their impounded savings accounts, only a flat two months of their prearrest salary; nor, as a rule, were their personal possessions—many of them now in the hands of NKVD-KGB families—returned, though compensation was sometimes granted.63 But most returnees did eventually receive health and dental care (dentures were particularly important), living space, work, pensions and other modest benefits of the Soviet welfare system. A general pension reform of 1956, for example, expanded the definition of time in the workplace to tacitly include years of forced labor.64 Recovering those benefits of full citizenship was not automatic or easy. Having been “legally” convicted, returnees needed official exoneration, or “rehabilitation,” which amnesty and other release documents usually had not provided. Obtaining the “sacred” certificate of rehabilitation, which was supposed to delete their “dark past” or that of relatives who had perished, involved another case-by-case bureaucratic process.65 Here again it was easiest for survivors who had influential help. For elderly Communists, the most active “intervenors” (khodtai) were the few Leninist-era Bolsheviks Stalin had not arrested, notably Grigory Petrovsky, Elena Stasova and Vyacheslav Karpinsky. For cultural figures, there were notables like the writer Ilya Ehrenburg.66 Less fortunate returnees were often subjected to grudging, protracted procedures. Nonetheless, between 1954 and Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964, seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand of Stalin’s victims were rehabilitated, many posthumously.67 Millions more had to await another Soviet reform leader. Compared to the twenty years that followed, Khrushchev’s leadership favored returnees, but reactions to them below, in officialdom and society, were far from uniform. Some officials were supportive, but many were not, never conceding the innocence of victims and creating obstacles to their return, from liberation to rehabilitation. Even though laws provided for positive actions, bureaucrats frequently refused survivors the necessary documents, courts ruled against their claims, state employers rejected their applications, academic directors forbid them to travel, and local party secretaries punished editors who had “a mania for justice.” One official

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probably spoke for many when he warned a rehabilitated zek, “The mark was removed, but the stain remained.”68 Society’s reaction also varied. Returnees related many instances of welcoming kindness, not only on the part of family and friends but also strangers. The emerging liberal intelligentsia and educated young people viewed them as “something romantic” and gave them “a hero’s reception.” The justly admired Yevgeny Gnedin, for example, was the subject of a well-known publication, “The Poem’s Hero.”69 But many ordinary citizens reacted with suspicion and hostility, due mainly, it seems, to major outbreaks of theft, rape and murder resulting from the mass amnesty of criminals in 1953 and to decades of Stalinist allegations about “wreckers, traitors and assassins.” They saw no difference between released political and criminal prisoners.70 One social group had reason to be fearful. Millions of people had been implicated in some way in Stalin’s twenty-year terror—from party and state apparatchiki who implemented his orders and NKVD personnel who arrested, tortured, executed and guarded victims to countless petty informers and eager slanderers. Millions of other citizens had been implicated indirectly, inheriting the positions, apartments, possessions and even wives and children of the vanished. Two generations had built lives and careers on the terror’s consequences, which not only killed but also “corrupted the living.”71 Some Soviet citizens had, of course, resisted complicity in the terror and even tried to help its victims,72 but by 1956 a profound antagonism was unfolding between two social communities. As Anna Akhmatova, whose son was released that year, foresaw, “Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will be eyeball to eyeball: the one that put people in the camps and the one put there.” The first, she added, “are now trembling for their names, positions, apartments, dachas. The whole calculation was that no one would return.”73 Widespread conflicts were inevitable. Most returnees passively accepted the government’s assistance, but a significant number wanted more—real compensation, fuller political disclosures, official punishment of the guilty. Some took action, including lawsuits and later public campaigns identifying secret police agents and informers. Others dreamt of a Monte Cristo–like revenge, though it usually evolved into demands for legal justice.74 A few survivors concluded that “no one was guilty” because Stalin’s terror had deprived people of choice—an outlook that may explain the romance between a leading victim’s son and the late dictator’s daughter and occasional requests by camp guards that former zeks testify to their humanity. But many more returnees insisted that the difference between “victims and hangmen” was absolute and “eternal.”75 There were many such confrontations. Some were accidental encounters in public places. One returnee dropped dead upon coming face-to-face with his former tormentor, while another saw the “fear of death” in the eyes of his NKVD interrogator. Awkward meetings occurred at professional institutes and clubs, where returning victims unavoidably encountered colleagues they knew had contributed to their arrest, some now in positions of authority. They reacted variously. One spit on his betrayer; another refused to shake the hand of his; yet another pretended not to know.76 One other social ramification of the great return should be emphasized. Even in conditions of repressive censorship, experiences of that magnitude and intensity were bound to find cultural expression. The irrepressible percolation of the “camp theme” (lagarnaia tema) from the subterrane of Soviet society into unofficial and

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then sanctioned culture was an important and lasting development of Khrushchev’s Thaw. Now more widely studied than when I first observed it in Moscow, Gulag culture emerged across the spectrum from language, music and literature to paintings and sculptures. Zeks returning from the “little zone,” as they called it, to the “big zone” of society brought with them a jargon common in the Gulag but prohibited in public discourse under Stalin. Some people were offended by its coarseness and seeming romanticization of the criminal world, but I heard it spoken casually by many Muscovites, especially intellectuals and young people. (It soon became the subject of several dictionaries.)77 Gulag vernacular also spread widely through songs performed by popular bards, including two sons of victims, Bulat Okudzhava and Yuli Kim. (One musical returnee had an official impact, the saxophonist Rozner being assured by the minister of culture in 1953, “We are rehabilitating the saxophone.”)78 Visual art, on the other hand, was less portable and thus more easily prohibited, but judging by what I saw and was told, a considerable number of Gulag-related paintings, drawings and even sculptures were seen in apartments, studios and, in one instance, on the lawn of a zek who remained in Siberia.79 Such works, virtually all of them done by returnees, ranged from large oil canvases depicting arrests and life and death in the camps to small graphic drawings of the torture of naked women prisoners. The existence of such art was known in select circles by the 1970s, but its first public showings in the late 1980s were a sensation.80 Meanwhile, returnees had begun to express their experiences in prose and poetry. Most of it remained part of the underground or “catacomb” culture until the Gorbachev period, but not all of it.81 A small wave of Gulag-related writings made its way into official publications soon after Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, well before the “flood” unleashed by his public anti-Stalinist revelations in late 1961, highlighted by Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. By the mid-1960s camp literature had grown into a substantial published genre posing searing questions about the Soviet past and present—about the nation’s “dreadful and bloody wound,” as even the government newspaper acknowledged.82 None of those social developments after 1953 should be understood as occurring outside of what was still a harshly repressive political system. To have a larger impact, they required initiatives at the top. Nonetheless, the social and cultural dimensions of the victims’ return created pressure “downstairs” for a response “upstairs” (in the imagery of a former Soviet journalist) that was more radical than Khrushchev’s remarks at a closed gathering of the party elite. When that response came in the early 1960s, this “muffled rumble of subterranean strata” was both a causal and deeply divisive factor in the political struggles that followed.83

“Khrushchev’s Zeks” and the Politics of De-Stalinization Gulag returnees played a little-known but significant role in Soviet politics under Khrushchev. Unlike in several East European Communist countries and China, no survivor of political purges returned to the leadership. Stalin had long since killed everyone who might have done so. A number of returnees acquired positions in the ruling party apparatus, but mostly at lower levels, either because of age or because “the stain remained.” (Several reported being trusted but, as Arthur Miller could have written, not well-trusted.)84

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Many former zeks did, however, make their way into the nomenklatura class that administered the state bureaucratic system, some even becoming nachalniki (bosses). Among them were Marshal Rokossovsky and several generals, Korolev, Baev, Boris Suchkov, who directed the Institute of World Literature, Semen Kheiman, who held a similar position at the Institute of Economics, and Boris Burkovsky, head of the museum of the iconic revolutionary cruiser Aurora.85 I often asked acquaintances in various professions in the 1970s if their bosses included anyone who had “sat” under Stalin; almost all answered affirmatively. But the most important political role belonged to a small group of returnees who unexpectedly appeared near the center of power. All of them—notably Olga Shatunovskaya, Aleksei Snegov and Valentina Pikina—had been veteran Communist officials before spending many years in Stalin’s camps and in exile. Freed in 1953– 1954, they quickly became, due to personal connections, part of Khrushchev’s extended entourage or that of Mikoyan, his closest ally in the leadership. (Their proximity to the two leaders somewhat eroded lower-level resistance to accommodating returnees.) They were referred to as “Khrushchev’s zeks,” sometimes admiringly but also derisively.86 Khrushchev and Mikoyan clearly trusted those recently released victims more than they did the Stalinist officials who still dominated the party and state apparatuses. Shatunovskaya and Pikina soon sat on the party’s supreme judiciary body, which oversaw rehabilitation policy; Snegov and Yevsei Shirvindt, another returnee, occupied high positions in the Ministry of the Interior, which administered the Gulag; and Aleksandr Todorsky, a former army officer and zek, was made lieutenant general and deployed in the exoneration of Stalin’s military victims.87 Snegov and Shatunovskaya, whom an admirer called “one of the most remarkable women in the political history of Russia,”88 were especially influential and active. They “opened the eyes” of Khrushchev and Mikoyan to the full horrors of Stalin’s terror and helped persuade the new party leader to deliver his historic anti-Stalin speech at the 1956 congress. Together they were instrumental in freeing millions of victims, convincing the two leaders to immediately release all the “eternal exiles” and to send “unloading” commissions to the camps. As the fight over de-Stalinization unfolded in ruling circles, Khrushchev and Mikoyan “needed” Shatunovskaya and Snegov as their “eyes and ears” and also, it seems, for their souls.89 All of Stalin’s leading heirs had been responsible for thousands of deaths, but only Khrushchev and Mikoyan became repentant Stalinists. (Mikoyan may have been the most committed, though perhaps due to his lesser position.)90 Khrushchev was not the first to adopt de-Stalinizing measures—the police boss Beria set that precedent—and he manipulated them in his drive for supreme power. But that does not explain why Khrushchev made anti-Stalinism such an integral part of his reforms, which eventually affected almost every area of Soviet policymaking, or the enormous personal risks he repeatedly took by exposing monstrous official crimes and freeing the survivors. It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and other victims concluded, one influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal in 1961 to create a memorial to Stalin’s victims?91 Those crimes brought Khrushchev into recurring conflicts with powerful opponents during his ten years in office, in which his zeks continued to play roles. When he initiated the trials of Beria and several other Stalinist police officials, most in 1953–1955, surviving victims appeared as witnesses. When Khrushchev prepared his political bomb for the 1956 congress, he made sure nearly one hundred freed

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zeks would be visible in the hall. When he moved toward a 1957 showdown with leading unrepentant Stalinists—Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and Voroshilov— Shatunovskaya and Snegov produced evidence of their criminal complicity. When Khrushchev struck publicly at the tenacious Stalin cult by removing the despot’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum in 1961, another returnee, Dora Lazurinka, prompted the congressional resolution. And to undermine the myth of Stalin’s Gulag as “correctional labor,” Khrushchev then authorized publication of a former zek’s unvarnished portrayal of life in the camps, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich.92 By the 1960s returnees were contributing to de-Stalinization in another important way as well. Controversy over the past often inflames politics, but rarely so intensely as in the Soviet 1950s and 1960s (and again 1980s). The Stalin era was still “living history” for most Soviet adults, whose understanding of it had been shaped by decades of personal sacrifice and a falsified official history maintained by censorship and continued repression. According to that official version, Stalin’s rule was a succession of great national achievements, from collectivization and industrialization in the 1930s to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and its subsequent rise to superpower status. Post-Stalin elites were a product of that era, and for them it legitimized their power and privileges. As a young historian (and victim’s son) soon discovered, they were determined to “defend it, defending themselves.”93 The return of so many victims, even if mute, was irrefutable evidence of a parallel history of equally great crimes. And not all returnees were mute. As Khrushshev foresaw, they told “their relatives and friends and acquaintances what actually happened.” For young people in particular, “Their testimonies shed new light on events.”94 Most such returnees were still Soviet loyalists; they contributed to the kind of revisionist history needed for a politics of reform. But other repressed traditions were also represented. The old Menshevik Mikhail Yakubovich and S. R. Irina Kakhovskaya, for example, wanted justice for their slain comrades. Solzhenitsyn and Father Dudko spoke for older religious and Slavophile values. And Mikhail Baitalsky, a former Trotskyist, had returned to his Jewish origins. Like Holocaust survivors, many Stalinist victims wrote Gulag memoirs because “This Must Not Happen Again,” among them Suren Gazaryan, Evgenia Ginzburg, Lev Kopelev, Lev Razgon, Gnedin, and Baitalsky.95 Others became self-made historians. As an official investigator of Stalin’s crimes, Shatunovskaya collected documents and interviews researchers still use today. Snegov’s abiding theme, “Stalin Against Lenin,” took him into closed archives and on impassioned lecture tours. Todorsky and Aleksandr Milchakov, another Communist survivor, did much the same.96 Sons of victims followed their lead. Medvedev and Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote histories of Stalin’s rule. Yuri Trifonov, Leonid Petrovsky, Yuri Gastev, Pyotr Yakir and Kamil Ikramov prepared biographies of their martyred fathers.97 (In the late 1980s, Arseny Roginsky, another son of a Stalin-era victim, would be a founder of the Memorial Society.) Only a small portion of this historical truth-telling could be published in the Soviet Union under and shortly after Khrushchev. But enough became known, along with increasingly explicit literary accounts, to frighten officials throughout the system. It revealed that their power and privileges were also the product of the victimization of millions of their fellow citizens. Not surprisingly, they were “afraid of History.”98 Victimizers still in high places had the most to lose. Exposing official crimes gave Khrushchev’s other policies a moral dimension, rallied popular support for his

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leadership and spurred progressive changes. The social needs of returnees, for example, contributed to welfare and legal reforms of the period.99 But such revelations, which meant victims now “were in fashion, “also galvanized powerful opposition. (Kaganovich protested that Khrushchev wanted “to let ex-convicts judge us.”)100 Those endangered were not only Stalin’s cohorts who had signed his lists condemning thousands of people but were also a legion of lesser figures with bloodstains on their careers like Ivan Serov, the first post-Stalin KGB chief, and Mikhail Suslov, the rising party ideologist.101 Some people who had prospered under Stalin in various fields followed Khrushchev’s repentant example,102 but the great majority of the complicit fought back. Senior members of the leadership, abetted by protégés in the bureaucracies, tried to sabotage his returnee policies and neuter his 1956 speech. Failing that, they collected documents incriminating Khrushchev himself while trying to conceal or minimize their own crimes, as when Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov formed a commission to investigate episodes in which they had been deeply involved. When all that failed, they moved in 1957 to depose him, nearly succeeding.103 Their fear of a “judgment day” was well-founded.104 As conflicts over the past intensified, questions began to emerge about high-level criminal responsibility similar to those formalized at the Nuremberg Trial a decade before. The analogy was hard to ignore. The Soviet Union had been a prosecuting government at Nuremberg. (Indeed, Khrushchev’s new prosecutor general, Roman Rudenko, had been the lead Soviet prosecutor.) And with so many Gulag survivors now visible and their experiences increasingly known, the Holocaust-like dimensions of Stalin-era “repressions” were becoming clear. When Stalin’s successors tried and executed “Beria’s gang” in 1953–1955, they attempted to obscure any larger implications. The proceedings were closed, Beria was falsely convicted of treason and espionage and his misdeeds were disassociated from Stalin’s remaining heirs. Even then, however, the charge of “crimes against humanity” was made in at least one case. Reactions to Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations indicated that such issues were already just below the surface. Questions were asked at low-level party meetings (and quickly suppressed) about the entire leadership’s responsibility for what had happened.105 Nonetheless, Khrushchev soon crossed another rubicon, though again behind closed doors. At a June 1957 meeting of the Central Committee, he and his supporters staged a kind of trial of Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov.106 Quoting horrific documents unearthed by Shatunovskaya and others, they accused Molotov and Kaganovich, along with Stalin, of having been responsible for more than 1.5 million arrests in 1937 and 1938 alone and personally sanctioning 38,679 executions during that period, 3,167 on one day. Bloodthirsty orders in their handwriting were read aloud: “Beat, beat and beat again … Scoundrel, scum … only one punishment—death.” A Soviet Nuremberg seemed to be looming. When the accused defended their actions as “mistakes,” they were met with shouts, “No, crimes!” A Khrushchev supporter hurled a threat at the three senior Stalinist leaders that must have chilled many other longtime bosses in the hall: “If the people knew that their hands are dripping with innocent blood, they would greet them not with applause but stones.” The implication seemed clear, as another Central Committee member “profoundly” objected: “People who headed and led our Party for so many years turn out to be murderers who need to be put in the dock.”107 In the end, however,

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Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were only expelled from the leadership and Central Committee and banished to minor posts far from Moscow. It was a moment of high drama, but the crimes still greatly exceeded the punishment. After Stalin died, some fifty to one hundred secret police executioners and brutal interrogators were tried and sentenced, about twenty-eight to death and the rest to prison. (The exact numbers still have not been made known.) Another 2,370 are reported to have received administrative sanctions, from loss of their ranks, awards and party memberships to their positions and pensions.108 In addition, a dozen or so high-ranking security and political officials committed suicide, among them camp commandants, NKVD generals and Aleksandr Fadayev, Stalin’s longtime literary commissar who was shattered by Khrushchev’s disclosures, the sudden return of victimized writers and alcohol.109 Khrushchev’s zeks regarded those episodes of justice as first steps and implored him to try or otherwise punish many more people. He resisted “a St. Bartholomew’s Eve massacre,” as he put it, no doubt for several reasons. He too had signed death lists and had “blood on his own hands,” as his admirer Gorbachev later discovered. Also, even though Khrushchev was now the top leader, he remained challengable and without sufficient high-level support. And, as others paraphrased his explanation, “More people would have to be imprisoned than had been rehabilitated and released.”110 And yet, in October 1961, Khrushchev delivered his most ramifying assault on the Stalinist past and its many defenders. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress, he and his supporters considerably expanded the revelations and accusations made in 1956 and 1957—and now did so publicly. For the first time, daily newspaper and broadcast reports of the proceedings informed the nation of “monstrous crimes” and the need for “historical justice,” along with lurid accounts of mass arrests, torture and murder carried out under Stalin across the country. (The former zek Solzhenitsyn, whose novels about those events were not yet published, was astonished.)111 There was more. This time Khrushchev did not limit the indictment to crimes against Communist Party members, as he had done on previous occasions. The resolution removing Stalin’s body from the Mausoleum spoke simply of “mass repressions against honest Soviet people.” And for the first time, Khrushchev and his allies publicly accused Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov of “direct personal responsibility” for those “illegal” acts and demanded they be expelled from the party (as soon happened), which suggested they might then be put on trial. The specter of trials, inflated by references to “numerous documents in our possession” and Khrushchev’s call for a “comprehensive study of all such cases arising out of the abuse of power,” sent tremors of fear through the thousands who also bore “direct personal responsibility.” The congress was a victory for Khrushchev’s zeks, however temporary. Its radicalized anti-Stalinism was due in part to them. Still more, in preparation for it, Khrushchev had established the Shvernik Commission, the first “comprehensive study” of dark events of the 1930s, including the assassination of Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, which ignited the Great Terror, and the trials and executions of founders of the Soviet state. Returnees, especially Shatunovskaya, were lead investigators for the commission, which concluded that Stalin had plotted those fateful developments in order to launch a mass terror campaign. On the eve of the congress, Shatunovskaya gave Khrushchev a preliminary report based on the “numerous documents” he would cite there. When he read it, she said, he wept.112

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Khrushchev’s initiatives at the 1961 congress unleashed an unprecedented threeyear struggle between the “friends and foes” of de-Stalinization.113 Eased censorship permitted historians to begin criticizing the entire Stalin era, even his long sacrosanct collectivization of the peasantry and conduct of the war. But the flood of literary depictions of the twenty-year terror had the greatest impact. Read together, they gave a nearly unvarnished picture of what had happened to millions of people and their families. Among the works published, including ones by and about returnees, was, for example, this poem by Lev Ozerov: “The dead speak … / From concentration camps. From isolation cells … / Life, while it lasted, left its signature / On the prison floor in a trickle of blood.”114 Similarly emboldened by Khrushchev’s example, victims now determinedly pursued other people who had been personally responsible for their imprisonment. Two cases became widely known in Moscow. Writers began a campaign to expose the establishment critic Yakov Elsberg as an “informer” complicit in the arrest and death of novelists and poets. And the returnee Pavel Shabalkin brought charges against two of the party’s leading philosophers, until recently members of its Central Committee, Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin, for having contributed to his long imprisonment and for plagiarizing the work of their other victims. The three escaped real punishment, but the threat was enough to inspire “mental breakdowns” among equally guilty power holders.115 Nuremberg-like issues now began to appear, guardedly and elliptically, in the censored press. They were present just below the surface in conflicting reviews of Solzhenitsyn and other terror-related literature, but were also more open in other publications.116 In a chapter from his memoirs, to take an example that entangled even Khrushchev, Ehrenburg admitted he had “to live with clenched teeth” under Stalin because he knew his arrested friends were innocent. His confession, or “theory of a conspiracy of silence,” brought furious reactions because if the marginalized writer Ehrenburg had known the truth, so must have the many officials above him.117 Still worse, in their view, was that the early 1960s brought a spate of Soviet writings about Germany under Hitler. Some of the commentary was by inference clearly about the Soviet system under Stalin. Readers instinctively saw their own recent experiences in descriptions of the Hitler cult, the Gestapo, Nazi concentrations camps, informers and the complicity of so many German office holders. When the powerful American film Judgment at Nuremberg was shown in Moscow in 1963, reactions were even more pointed.118 Considering this emerging analogy, increasingly graphic accounts of Stalin’s terror and calls for justice, it is understandable why “fears of being made to answer for their crimes” spread throughout Soviet officialdom.119 At some point, even the younger men Khrushchev had put on his leadership council decided his initiatives were endangering too many people, perhaps the system itself. Unlike Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev and others who would rule for the next twenty years had little or no blood on their hands, but plenty on their feet. Having risen so rapidly under Stalin as their predecessors were being swept away, they had a “complex about the past.” 120 One defected from Khrushchev as early as 1957, when Dmitri Shepilov objected to putting the senior Stalinists “in the dock.” Indeed, most of Khrushchev’s new coleaders disregarded their benefactor’s initiative at the 1961 congress, remaining conspicuously silent about past crimes. Resistance to his de-Stalinization policies continued to grow after the congress, as suggested in a 1962 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko prominently published on

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Khrushchev’s instructions. Entitled “The Heirs of Stalin,” it warned of “many” high officials who still “hate this era of emptied prison camps.”121 Behind the scenes Khrushchev was now being defeated or forced to retreat. In 1962 Snegov and Shatunovskaya were driven from their positions, the Shvernik Commission report went unpublished and was soon buried, and rehabilitations all but ended. More setbacks followed. Despite Khrushchev’s support, Solzhenitsyn was denied the Lenin Prize in literature. And in 1964 a major editorial authorized by Khrushchev on “Stalin and His Heirs” was aborted, along with his proposed constitutional changes to prevent a recurrence of past abuses.122 Meanwhile, the memorial he had proposed to Stalin’s victims remained unbuilt. When the Central Committee overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964, the formal indictment did not mention the Stalin question. It focused instead on the seventyyear-old Khrushchev’s failed economic and foreign policies, ill-considered reorganizations, increasingly erratic behavior and dismissive attitude toward “collective leadership.” Nonetheless, his anti-Stalinist approaches to the past and the present were a central factor. They were, after all, the driving force behind his decade-long attempted reformation of the Soviet system, which was now being ended by a sharp conservative shift in official and popular opinion.123 There were also clearer indications of the role of Krushchev’s anti-stalinism in his ouster. Suslov delivered the detailed indictment, while Mikoyan was the only Central Committee member who tried to defend Khrushchev. (During secret discussions prior to the formal meeting, he was accused of “reviling Stalin to the point of indecency.”)124 Any doubts were soon removed when the new leaders moved to end anti-Stalinist policies relating to the past and restore some features of Stalinism, including the tyrant’s historical reputation. Certainly, people with special interests understood the meaning of Khrushchev’s ouster. While Beria’s men in prison rejoiced, Gulag returnees were informed, “The rehabilitated are no longer in fashion.”125

Epilogue Readers may want to know something about the saga of Gulag returnees and Stalin’s other victims after Khrushchev. Generally, their subsequent status in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia was determined by the changing official reputations of Stalin and Khrushchev, and those by the forces of reform and conservatism inside the political establishment. The Brezhnev years were a long era of Soviet conservatism. To defend the existing order, the new leadership needed a heroic Stalinist past, when the system’s foundations had been created. Accordingly, it ended Khrushchev’s revelations and rehabilitations (a “miserly” twenty-four exonerations were granted after 1964),126 excised him from sanctioned history (except as a “hairbrained adventurer”), and refurbished Stalin’s role by ignoring the terror and emphasizing the wartime victory. (In 1969, a flattering bust was placed on his gravesite behind the Mausoleum.) Archive documents have now revealed how much Khrushchev’s successors despised their patron’s policies—and his zeks. In 1974, ten years after being nominated for a Lenin Prize, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported from the Soviet Union. Privately discussing the decision, Brezhnev’s Politburo blamed Khrushchev for “this social riff-raff.” Suslov complained, “We still have not eliminated all the consequences that resulted from Khrushchev.” Brezhnev, who said Solzhenitsyn had been justly imprisoned under Stalin, had harbored a resentment: “He was rehabilitated by two

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people—Shatunovskaya and Snegov.” In 1984 the last leader before Gorbachev, Konstantin Chernenko, took another symbolic step, restoring the ninety-three-yearold Molotov’s party membership, even meeting with him personally. Rejoicing in private, the Politburo again complained bitterly that Khrushchev had exonerated victims “illegally” and permitted “shameful outrages in relation to Stalin.”127 During those twenty years, while terror-era police officials were given honorable positions and released from prison with good pensions, many of the “rehabilitated no longer felt rehabilitated.”128 Most of them led conformist lives and were left in peace, but many agreed with Antonov-Ovseyenko: “It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin. A duty to those who died at his hands, to those who survived that dark night, to those who will come after us.”129 In the post-Khrushchev 1960s and 1970s, some victims used their semiestablished positions to be partial truth-tellers in the censored media. Among them were the popular novelist Yuri Trifonov and playwright Mikhail Shatrov, whose fathers had been shot and mothers sent to the Gulag.130 Other survivors wrote only “for the drawer,” but many let their manuscripts, with themes of “crime and punishment,” circulate in samizdat and be published abroad. (My Moscow friends eagerly sought copies of those forbidden writings about their own experiences, as well as the Russian-language edition of Bob Conquest’s The Great Terror issued in Italy.) And some became leading representatives of public dissent, including Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and Andrei Sakharov, whose wife’s parents had also been victims.131 Considering their age and years of abuse, the majority of Gulag returnees probably did not live to witness the great turnabout under Gorbachev. His declared mission of replacing the system inherited from Stalin with a democratized one meant Gorbachev had to expose the system’s entire criminal history. By the late 1980s a tidal wave of exposés—documented articles, novels, plays, films, and television broadcasts had flooded the Soviet media. Calling for national “repentance,” the result was not the “second Nuremberg” some demanded but nonetheless a media trial of Stalinism, with the newly formed Memorial Society, inspired by Khrushchev’s unfulfilled proposal, in the forefront.132 Surviving victims and victimizers again played leading roles. While the glasnost press went looking for “hangmen on pension” and secret mass graves—a search pioneered by Milchakov’s son—Stalin’s victims were featured at evenings in memory of the “national martyrology,” none more famous than Anna Larina, whose memoirs were published in 1988.133 One such public event, in 1989, was the first to honor Khrushchev. Sitting on the dais with returnees I had interviewed in secret ten years earlier, I saw many other former zeks in the overflowing auditorium. Some of them were weeping. Most now knew the dark side of Khrushchev’s career—the blood on his hands, his failure to tell the full truth about the past, his own repressive measures after 1953. But their gratitude, expressed virtually in one voice, remained undiminished: “Khrushchev gave me back my life.”134 As with his predecessor in reform, legal justice was also an “integral component” of Gorbachev’s policies. Between 1987 and 1990 a million more individuals were officially rehabilitated, and then, by his decree, all of Stalin’s remaining victims.135 Reacting to those and related actions, Gorbachev’s enemies occasionally charged that an “ideology of former zeks” underlay his anti-Stalinism. It may have been partially true: several members of his inner leadership were relatives of Stalin’s victims, including Gorbachev himself, whose grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s.136

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In the end, however, it was of little material consequence. Despite all the attention and promises given to victims by Gorbachev’s policies, many survivors remained so destitute that one of their organizations issued an “SOS from the Gulag” pleading for private donations. Bankrupt and crumbling by 1991, Gorbachev’s government was never able to provide most of the compensation and benefits it had legislated.137 The mixed status of Soviet-era victims continued in post-Soviet Russia. Boris Yeltsin, its first president, formally exonerated all citizens who were politically repressed since October 1917, not just those under Stalin, and then included their children, making them eligible for compensation as well.138 In addition, Yeltsin declared October 30 a national day in memory of the victims and passed a law giving them and their relatives access to their case files kept in long-secret archives. (Watching elderly people study those terrible documents, as I did working there on behalf of the Bukharin family, was deeply moving.) More generally, tales of the terror era became a familiar aspect of post-Soviet popular culture, including its main medium, television. Memorial developed into a nationwide institution broadening the search for mass graves, sponsoring monuments at several Gulag sites and producing major documentary studies both of victims and victimizers. A growing number of Russian provincial cities published their own martyrologies. And in 2001 Antonov-Ovseyenko, now nearly ninety, founded the first Museum of the History of the Gulag, with the backing of Moscow’s mayor. On the negative side, however, few of the dwindling number of survivors actually received any meaningful compensation for their lost years or property. By 1993 interest in Stalin’s terror and its victims had undergone a “catastrophic fall,”139 and the national memorial proposed by Khrushchev in 1961 and endorsed by Gorbachev was still unbuilt. By the early twenty-first century, pro-Stalin attitudes had grown significantly both in official circles and popular opinion, along with the number of burnished reputations of odious NKVD bosses, outspoken Gulag deniers and attacks on “rehabilitation euphoria.” Increasingly it was said, and perhaps believed, that all Gulag zeks had been common criminals because “Stalin did not repress any honest citizens.”140 Most western observers attributed post-Soviet attitudes favorable toward Stalin to the increasingly authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who became Russia’s president in 2000. In reality, though the phenomenon grew under Putin, most of its elements began in the 1990s, under Yeltsin, from the social and economic pain that was the primary source of pro-Stalin sentiments to the rehabilitation of the KGB and the decline of democratic practices. Nor was anti-Stalinism suppressed under Putin. Access to relevant archives, though somewhat more limited, continued; revealing volumes of terror-era materials were published; the renamed KGB (FSB), carrying on a practice started under Gorbachev, met with and even honored its former victims; and powerful films based on popular anti-Stalinist novels were made for and shown on state-controlled television.141 Indeed, Putin’s own role in this regard was contradictory. On the one hand, he made highly publicized statements supporting a new textbook that gave a favorable picture of the Stalinist 1930s and Stalin himself. On the other hand, one of Putin’s first acts as president was to authorize an expanded official investigation of Stalin-era crimes; and two of his last acts, in 2007, the seventieth anniversary of the murderous peak of the Great Terror, were to personally present an award to Solzhenitsyn and to attend a major commemoration of victims at an infamous NKVD killing field and burial site, the first such appearance by a Russian leader.142

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If there was a contradiction in Putin’s behavior, it reflected the still profound division over the Stalinist past in Russia’s political elite and society. In important respects, it is like the conflict that festered beneath the surface during the twenty years between the fall of Khrushchev and the rise of Gorbachev. At that time, I argued, in the original version of this essay and elsewhere, that the heat of the Stalinist past, however remote and seemingly extinguished, was bound to make itself felt in future politics, as it eventually did in the late 1980s.143 The same seems true today, for three reasons. First, few Gulag returnees are still alive, but Russia remains a country significantly populated by their descendants, particularly grandchildren, who began to make their voices heard under Gorbachev. (Of Russians polled in 2006, 27 percent said they had relatives who had been repressed under Stalin.)144 Second, leadership for a renewed reckoning with the past may come from the generation that matured during Gorbachev’s glasnost, just as children of Khrushchev’s Thaw provided it in the late 1980s. And, third, such a reckoning remains on the nation’s agenda because there is no statute of political limitations for historical crimes as enormous as Stalin’s. If so, the saga of the victims’ return may not be over.145

Chapter 4

4

L eadership Succession and Poli ti cal Violence in the USSR Following Stalin’s Death Mark Kramer

R

obert Conquest is best known for his books on the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and the devastating famine in Soviet Ukraine, but he first made his name by analyzing leadership succession and political power in the Soviet Union. In his landmark book on Soviet high politics, Power and Policy in the USSR, Conquest explained how new political leaders emerged and consolidated their power against potential rivals.1 Because no formal arrangements for transferring power existed in the Soviet Union, changes of political leadership were carried out through furtive political struggles and cutthroat maneuvering, which occasionally produced unexpected results. The instability engendered by the lack of institutionalized processes of political succession became evident as early as January 1924 when the death of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Bolsheviks, created a political vacuum. Josif Stalin’s consolidation of power in Moscow through a series of violent moves against his rivals in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in show trials and executions of former colleagues, underscored the potential role of violence in Soviet leadership struggles. In Power and Policy in the USSR, Conquest focused not on Stalin’s rise to power but on the struggle three decades later to succeed Stalin. The post-Stalin succession maneuvering began discreetly several years before Stalin died in March 1953 and gained pace and intensity in the first few months after his death. Stalin was such a dominant figure for so many years that initially no single aspirant for power could hope to replace him. Instead, a group of high-ranking officials collectively took over in Moscow in March 1953. In public they all paid homage to the notion of “collective leadership,” but in private they assumed that this collective arrangement would prove ephemeral and that one man would eventually emerge as the country’s supreme ruler. Conquest analyzed the high-level jockeying for power during the final years of Stalin’s life and the much more intense and ruthless competition that ensued after Stalin’s death.

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In this essay I draw on recently declassified archival documents and recently published memoirs as well as on a plethora of older sources to reassess the initial phase of the post-Stalin succession struggle, which culminated in the downfall and execution of Lavrentii Beria. This initial phase, unlike all later phases of the post-Stalin succession, was carried out with violence. My reexamination of the early post-Stalin leadership struggle builds on the interpretations of this struggle in Conquest’s Power and Policy in the USSR. Even though the book was published nearly fifty years ago—long before any archival documents or memoirs (or much of anything else, other than official items published in the main Soviet newspapers) became available—Conquest’s analysis stands up remarkably well against the latest archival evidence and memoirs. Conquest acknowledged in his book that in the absence of archival materials and other solid documentation, “studies made of the USSR are bound to suffer from a great inaccessibility of knowledge of what really happened in many circumstances.” The paucity of reliable sources, he conceded, was a “severe limitation” for any assessment of high politics in the USSR. In particular, he noted that “many contradictory rumors and reports exist … about the arrest of Beria. All of them fit. And there is no particular reason to choose one rather than another.” But he expressed hope that “future events”—such as the opening of archives—would give scholars an opportunity to weigh the reliability of evidence and offer “possible confirmation” of conflicting theories about the Beria affair.2 That opportunity is now at hand. To be sure, the archival situation in many of the former Soviet republics, especially Russia, is still highly imperfect. Several of the most crucial repositories in Moscow—the Presidential Archive, the Foreign Intelligence Archive, the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service, and the Main Archive of the Ministry of Defense—have not been opened to researchers. Nonetheless, despite these obstacles, the availability of vast quantities of declassified documents and firsthand accounts, as well as contemporaneous sources, permits a thorough reconstruction of the first stage of the post-Stalin succession. In the following I will discusses the conspiracy against Beria, the reasons for his arrest, and how the plot was carried out. I will also explain why the conspirators decided to execute Beria and some of his closest associates, rather than simply keep him in prison or allow him to retire. This initial phase of the post-Stalin succession marked the last time that violence was used in power struggles in the USSR.

Stalin’s Death and the Stirrings of Change Several hours before Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the Soviet minister of internal affairs, Sergei Kruglov, sent a top-secret memorandum to the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) describing the reactions of Soviet military personnel to the news that Stalin was gravely ill. Stalin did not die until 9:50 p.m. Moscow time on the 5th, and his demise was not officially announced until the 7th, but the officers cited by Kruglov were well aware that Stalin’s death was imminent. One of the officers quoted in the memorandum, a retired army colonel, ruminated about the likely consequences of Stalin’s demise: Infighting and a struggle for power will now begin within the CPSU Central Committee. [Every] Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee will now strive to place officials closely aligned with him into top leadership posts in order to preserve autocratic power

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for himself. We will now observe a situation akin to what happened during the period of [Stalin’s] struggle against the opposition [in the 1920s].3

Little did Kruglov realize at the time how prescient the colonel’s remarks would turn out to be. The scenario he laid out corresponded almost precisely to what actually happened in the USSR over the next year. The new leaders in Moscow were mindful of the challenges they faced at home and abroad, but their main preoccupation initially was the post-Stalin succession. A few of Stalin’s closest aides hastily devised preliminary arrangements for the succession right after they learned on March 2 that Stalin had suffered a debilitating brain hemorrhage and was comatose. By March 4, after working on a series of scribbled drafts, they reached agreement on an initial compact that was formally presented to the Bureau of the CPSU Presidium (the name at that time for the highest party organ), which approved it hours before Stalin died.4 This initial pact elevated Georgii Malenkov to the head of the Soviet government, restored Vyacheslav Molotov to his erstwhile job as foreign minister (a post he had held from 1939 to 1949), placed Lavrentii Beria directly in charge of an expanded Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD, which absorbed all the other components of the Soviet state-security apparatus), and reduced the size of the Communist Party’s ruling organs, which had been enlarged and reorganized by Stalin in October 1952 to dilute their effectiveness and bolster his own power.5 Ten leading officials from Stalin’s entourage—Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, Maksim Saburov, and Mikhail Pervukhin—were appointed members of the new CPSU Presidium. Initially, no one was chosen to replace Stalin as CPSU first secretary, but Malenkov, Beria, and Khrushchev were designated to oversee Stalin’s documents and personal papers, which later proved to be crucial weapons in the power struggle.6 On the evening of March 5, with Stalin on the verge of death, Malenkov and Beria presented the new political arrangements as a fait accompli to an extraordinary joint gathering of officials who served on the highest organs of the Communist Party and Soviet government.7 The participants immediately voiced their unanimous approval. Behind the scenes, however, a fierce competition was still under way among several of Stalin’s associates, each of whom aspired to take over the dying leader’s mantle on his own, without having to share power. The notion of collective leadership, in their view, was merely a compromise that sooner or later would give way to a dominant figure.8 Khrushchev, in particular, felt great ambivalence and unease about the initial post-Stalin order, despite his role in helping to shape it. On one hand, he had retained high posts within the CPSU and was given responsibility, along with Malenkov and Beria, for Stalin’s papers. This latter function enabled Khrushchev to exploit highly incriminating documents against his rivals and to prevent them from using those materials against him. On the other hand, Khrushchev was left off the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers, a government organ that for a brief while in 1953 gained greater significance and visibility than in the past.9 Although the CPSU Presidium remained the supreme decision-making body in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers temporarily acquired an important supplementary role. Officials who held posts on both organs enjoyed greater authority and status. Malenkov had been appointed chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers on March 5, and Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich had been

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appointed first deputies. (All five were also members of the newly constituted CPSU Presidium.) The omission of Khrushchev from the Presidium of the Council of Ministers seemed to put him at a disadvantage. Over the longer run, this discrepancy proved to be of little significance (especially once Khrushchev was appointed CPSU First Secretary in September 1953), but in the initial days and weeks after Stalin’s death it did appear to make a difference, not least in the choice of speakers at Stalin’s funeral on March 9. Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov were the only ones who delivered speeches at the funeral, whereas Khrushchev’s sole function as chairman of the organizing committee was to introduce Malenkov.10 The implication was that Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov had gained an edge on Khrushchev and the others, at least for the time being. Under these circumstances, Khrushchev sensed that the only way he could attain the top post was by taking the initiative. His experience in 1951, when he had been sharply criticized by Stalin and had only narrowly avoided removal or demotion, led him to suspect that one or more of his rivals in the post-Stalin era would try to move against him if he let down his guard. Several other key figures in the new lineup were also aware that their political standing could change abruptly and that they had to be on their guard. Malenkov, for example, had nearly been arrested (or worse) in 1946 as a result of the so-called Aviators’ Affair (an alleged conspiracy in the aviation industry, which actually had been contrived by Stalin), and although Malenkov returned to Stalin’s good graces in later years he knew that neither he nor anyone else in Stalin’s entourage was invulnerable.11 Beria, too, had come under sustained attack from Stalin in 1951 and 1952 (via a large-scale purge in Mingrelia of officials with close ties to Beria) and had been forced to keep a low profile to avoid falling victim to a purge that Stalin was evidently planning to carry out on the CPSU’s top ranks.12 Molotov and Mikoyan, more than anyone else, knew how quickly their political fortunes could change. For many years, the two of them were Stalin’s closest aides, but during the final few years of his life he ostracized them and subjected them to ferocious criticism, especially at the October 1952 party congress. Had he lived longer, he might have removed and possibly executed them along with others.13 Stalin’s decision to turn against Molotov and Mikoyan with such fury underscored the potential dangers facing all the members of Stalin’s inner circle. Although both Molotov and Mikoyan regained leading posts on March 5, the close call they experienced in late 1952 and early 1953 made clear to them—and to others—that nothing could be taken for granted. The precariousness of the new political arrangements and the intensity of the power struggle in Moscow were attributable mainly to personal ambitions rather than fundamental policy differences. This is not to say that issues were unimportant or that genuine disagreements about certain policies did not exist among the potential successors, but the positions espoused by the competing officials (particularly Khrushchev) were often fluid, reflecting their determination to outmaneuver their rivals. Robert Conquest perceptively described Khrushchev as “a flexible tactician with an inflexible drive to power” who had a “tendency to change policies to suit power exigencies”—traits that were “common to most of the figures” who emerged after Stalin’s death with hopes of attaining the highest office.14 To the extent that substantive issues played a role in the power struggle, the dominant ones were all internal: that is, whether violent terror should be permanently ended, how far political liberalization should go, how to divide responsibilities between the CPSU

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and the Soviet government, whether to release political prisoners from forced-labor camps, what to do about agriculture, whether to emphasize light or heavy industry, how to handle the non-Russian nationalities, whether to rehabilitate the victims of repression, and so forth. Matters of foreign policy were not wholly irrelevant, but initially were much less salient than the internal problems. Although Soviet leaders differed in their views on domestic issues, they were broadly in agreement on the need to liberalize the political system and to put an end to mass terror and other egregious abuses of the Stalin era. Stalin had moved the Soviet Union in a highly repressive direction during the final years of his life, reversing the partial relaxation of dictatorial controls during World War II. His death opened the way for a wide range of domestic reforms and a more relaxed internal climate. The movement away from Stalinist policies started almost immediately and proceeded with remarkable celerity. Within days of his death, the CPSU Presidium and the Soviet Council of Ministers began adopting a host of far-reaching political and economic reforms. Malenkov and Beria took the lead in promoting these reforms, and Malenkov was even willing to deliver a speech at a CPSU Central Committee plenum in April 1953 denouncing the “cult of personality” that glorified Stalin “in our print and broadcast propaganda.”15 Malenkov’s draft remarks did not directly criticize Stalin (the speech claimed that “Stalin himself would have condemned such a cult of personality” if he had still been alive), but everyone at the session would have been well aware that Malenkov was attacking a personality cult that Stalin himself had fostered. As it turned out, the Central Committee plenum was not convened, but the very fact that Malenkov was ready to deliver such a forceful (if oblique) condemnation of a key feature of Stalinism barely a month after Stalin’s death was a sign of how rapidly the system was changing. Malenkov also supported Beria’s efforts to move ahead with wide-ranging reforms of the internal security organs and police, which had been consolidated under Beria at the MVD. Among other steps, the new leaders prohibited the routine use of physical torture, transferred jurisdiction of the Gulag system to the Justice Ministry, reduced the size of the internal security apparatus, streamlined the economic functions of forced-labor camps, and approved an easing of passport restrictions and of limits on domestic travel.16 On April 3, 1953, the CPSU Presidium endorsed Beria’s suggestion that an announcement be published the next day in the two main Soviet newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiya, debunking earlier allegations of a “Doctors’ Plot.” This alleged conspiracy had been fabricated by Stalin in early 1953 as part of the anti-Semitic campaign he pursued during the final few years of his life. The announcement on April 4, published in the name of the MVD, denounced the purported conspiracy as a fraud and apologized to the wrongly accused.17 The announcement was followed two days later by the publication in Pravda of a lengthy, front-page editorial blaming the fabrication of the Doctors’ Plot on Semyon Ignat’ev, who had been minister of state security (reporting directly to Stalin) until the evening of March 5, 1953. The editorial accused Ignat’ev and his deputies of “criminal adventurism,” “despicable and hateful lies,” “willful abuses of power,” “political blindness,” and “egregious violations of Soviet law.”18 Numerous other proposals for sweeping reforms were also on the agenda within weeks of Stalin’s death. In particular, Soviet leaders vowed to rectify the “mistakes and shortcomings” of Stalin’s policies in western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the three Baltic states, all of which had been annexed by the Soviet Union at the

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end of World War II.19 The central authorities indicated that forced Russification in these outlying areas would cease and indigenous cadres would be brought into the local governments (especially the state-security organs) to replace Russian officials who could not speak the local language. The rationale for such changes had less to do with concerns about fairness than with the simple expectation that, as Beria put it, local residents “will trust one another more than they trust our [Soviet] state security officials.”20 Stalin’s successors believed that a less heavy-handed policy in the newly acquired territories would be the most effective way to mitigate local support for underground resistance movements. The flurry of domestic changes in the Soviet Union during the first several weeks after Stalin’s death caused a stir in Soviet society. Elites, intellectuals, and ordinary people were suddenly witnessing events that would have been inconceivable when Stalin was still alive. The sense of hope that had existed for a brief while at the end of World War II—hope that quickly faded when the hardships and oppression of Stalinism returned in full force—gradually reemerged.21 Reports transmitted by local and regional officials to the central authorities in Moscow indicated that Soviet citizens heartily welcomed the political reforms.22 Nonetheless, the loosening of political controls after the harsh oppression of the Stalin years also posed risks. Social ferment gradually increased in the spring of 1953, and violent unrest broke out in an important if isolated segment of Soviet society— the political prisoners in the Gulag.23 On March 27, 1953, the CPSU Presidium approved an amnesty for most of the ordinary prisoners in the Gulag, spurring the release of more than 1.2 million people, or nearly 54 percent of the total number imprisoned in the Gulag.24 But the amnesty deliberately omitted political prisoners, whose sentences were longer than those of regular prisoners. As a result, the political prisoners in many forced-labor camps began to put up a collective resistance.25 In late April and early May 1953, prisoners went on strike and engaged in deadly riots at camps in Karaganda and Irkutsk oblast.26 Soon thereafter, the camp in Noril’sk experienced a wave of large-scale disturbances, culminating in a revolt that lasted several weeks and ended with significant bloodshed.27 Numerous other camps— especially those in Akhtuba, Pechora, Vologda oblast, and Arkhangel’sk oblast—were also roiled by outbreaks of unrest in the spring of 1953 that added to the casualty toll. The upheavals in the Gulag did not immediately affect Soviet society at large, but they did adumbrate the potential for turmoil as the strictures and repression of the Stalin era began to fade. Violent repression had not only kept the Communist bloc under tight control but had also been a crucial element of the Soviet domestic polity. To the extent that the new leaders in Moscow wanted to reduce their dependence on repression both at home and abroad, they risked inadvertently encouraging some groups and individuals to think that at last they had a chance to rectify their grievances through direct action. Concern about the prospect of internal unrest had considerable influence on the post-Stalin succession struggle. The joint resolution adopted by the highest party and state organs on March 5, 1953, had called for the “greatest unity of leadership” to “prevent any sort of disarray or panic” in Soviet society.28 During the first few months after Stalin’s death, the new aspirants for power managed to convey a public image of “unity” and “uninterrupted and rigorous leadership of the whole life of the country.” Behind the scenes, however, high-level maneuvering in Moscow was steadily intensifying in the late spring of 1953, auguring a decisive showdown in the post-Stalin succession struggle.

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Initial Preparations and Motives for the Plot against Beria In the first several weeks after Stalin’s death, three of the leading members of the CPSU Presidium—Malenkov, Beria, and Khrushchev—had been nearly inseparable.29 They worked closely together and were often seen strolling around the Kremlin grounds, engrossed in conversation.30 Their partnership, however, was not based on genuine friendship or loyalty.31 As early as March 14th, barely a week after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev and Beria secured Malenkov’s removal from the CPSU Secretariat on the grounds that “combining the functions of the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers with those of a CPSU CC Secretary would be undesirable.”32 This step was outlined in a resolution adopted by the CPSU Presidium and then formally approved at a plenum of the CPSU Central Committee. The resolution did not signal an immediate end to Malenkov’s status as the preeminent leader in the Soviet Union. He remained both prime minister and a full member of the CPSU Presidium, and the resolution explicitly gave him responsibility for “chairing sessions of the CPSU Presidium.” Hence, for the time being, Malenkov was still primus inter pares. Nonetheless, his sudden ouster from the CPSU Secretariat unmistakably denoted a weakening of his power and deprived him of the institutional base from which he could most effectively have consolidated a dominant position in the party hierarchy. Moreover, the plenum resolution significantly strengthened Khrushchev’s position at Malenkov’s expense by giving Khrushchev responsibility for “leadership of the CPSU CC Secretariat and for chairing sessions of the CPSU CC Secretariat,” functions that hitherto had always been performed by Malenkov whenever Stalin was absent. Although Khrushchev was willing to cooperate with Beria in dislodging Malenkov from the Secretariat and thereby undercutting any plans Malenkov may have had in the near term to emerge as a truly dominant leader, this by no means implied that Khrushchev wanted an indefinite alliance with Beria. On the contrary, Khrushchev grew increasingly wary of Beria, who he suspected was trying to play senior officials off against one another. Even though Khrushchev remained uneasy about Malenkov as well, he came to believe that Beria posed a far more immediate and daunting challenge. One of Khrushchev’s associates (who was later ousted by him) recalled that, in the first few months after Stalin’s death, the new emphasis on “collective leadership” was hardly sufficient to induce Khrushchev to forgo a confrontation with Beria: [Most of the new leaders] genuinely wanted to go back to the collective leadership of old times [that is, before Stalin’s consolidation of power] … But there were two members of the ruling core who viewed things much more practically, without any sort of romanticism or sentimentality. These were Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrentii Beria. Both of them yearned for power. They were well aware that the mechanism of individualized power had not been broken after Stalin’s death and had not been given away to some museum of ancient history. The mechanism was preserved intact, and all that was needed was to gain control of it and set it into motion … From the very start, Khrushchev clearly sensed that Malenkov, with his accommodating manner, was not the main obstacle on the road to supreme power … Khrushchev was fully convinced that in the whole ruling core of the party, Beria was his only serious adversary and the only serious obstacle to [Khrushchev’s] aspirations. And what is more, this adversary was a dangerous one.33

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By the second week of June, Khrushchev had joined forces with Malenkov to oust Beria. After discussing the matter on June 12, the two men began actively preparing to move against their rival.34 Beria, for his part, was unaware that a plot was being hatched against him. For the time being, he was mainly seeking to devise further reforms for the security organs. On June 15, he presented a secret memorandum to his colleagues on the CPSU Presidium recommending curbs on the powers of the MVD’s so-called Special Board (Osoboe Soveshchanie).35 The Special Board had operated with almost complete impunity since 1934, overseeing a vast number of arrests and executions (in which Beria himself had been fully complicit). Beria’s proposals, building on the other measures he had introduced to impose stricter limits on the security apparatus, were due to be considered by the CPSU Presidium in late June. Khrushchev and Malenkov realized from the outset that a plot to get rid of Beria would succeed only if they obtained the support or at least acquiescence of the other members of the CPSU Presidium (excepting Beria, of course). If anyone on the Presidium had opposed the idea, it would have given Beria a wedge to counter and perhaps thwart any action against him. It also might have risked a premature leak of the plot. Operating in strict secrecy, Khrushchev and Malenkov quickly gained support from Molotov, whose backing for the move proved crucial in winning over the other Presidium members, especially Kliment Voroshilov. Voroshilov initially had been averse to the idea (in part because he suspected that he himself was being set up), but he was eventually persuaded by Malenkov and Molotov to back the move, if only reluctantly. Khrushchev and Malenkov had little problem securing the approval of Nikolai Bulganin, the defense minister, whose direct involvement was needed to ensure that military commanders would endorse and actively abet the conspiracy. Nor did they have any problem in winning support from Maksim Saburov. The proposal was also readily endorsed by Lazar Kaganovich, who was informed of it after returning from a brief visit to Siberia where he had been inspecting the lumber industry.36 After discerning that a majority of the Presidium already backed the proposal, Kaganovich expressed his full support. The only problems that Khrushchev and Malenkov encountered were with Voroshilov, Mikhail Pervukhin, and Anastas Mikoyan. Pervukhin initially hesitated but then gave his consent to the plan. Mikoyan, however, posed a greater difficulty, despite his close ties to Khrushchev. Mikoyan agreed that Beria’s “negative characteristics” might justify removing him from his posts at the MVD and the CPSU Presidium, but Mikoyan insisted that it would be worth retaining Beria in a senior government role.37 Khrushchev was annoyed by Mikoyan’s “special position,” but, for the time being, it gave the plotters a sufficient basis on which to proceed. Unanimity about the basic goal of demoting Beria was assured. What Khrushchev and Malenkov refrained from disclosing is that they intended to seek not just Beria’s demotion but also his arrest. Although Molotov, Bulganin, and Saburov were informed early on that the ultimate aim was to arrest Beria, all the others were deliberately kept in the dark about that. Khrushchev and Malenkov were concerned that some of the others, especially Mikoyan and Voroshilov, would refuse to go along with the conspiracy if they knew the full details. Mikoyan had proposed from the outset that they should transfer Beria from the MVD to one of the ministries responsible for economic affairs. Khrushchev and Malenkov gave the impression that they accepted this idea and would appoint Beria minister of the oil

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industry. In reality, their plan—which they implemented at a CPSU Presidium session on June 26—was to begin the session by outlining the main charges against Beria and then, after everyone voiced support of the allegations, suddenly to order Beria’s arrest. They correctly surmised that the momentum of anti-Beria criticism at the session would enable them to proceed with the arrest as a fait accompli. Even though Khrushchev and Malenkov had to mislead some of the Presidium members about what would happen to Beria, a solid consensus in favor of removing him from the MVD and the CPSU Presidium emerged early on. The wariness that most of the Presidium members felt about Beria stemmed primarily from a growing fear that Beria would soon be able to consolidate his power and perhaps seek to liquidate his erstwhile rivals. Those concerns were based in part on Beria’s control all the files and materials of the security apparatus, which documented the complicity of top leaders (including himself) in the Stalinist repressions. These files gave Beria immense leverage in the post-Stalin maneuvering, which his rivals were determined to negate.38 In addition, Beria’s colleagues were aware that he had obtained reams of “compromising material” (kompromat) about them through a variety of sources, including secret informants, eavesdropping devices, and the diversion of private documents.39 Further information had been flowing in to Beria from the elite bodyguards who, under the MVD’s jurisdiction, were assigned to senior party and state officials. Almost all of these guards had been replaced after Stalin’s death by personnel whose chief loyalties were to Beria. The gathering of kompromat had been a routine practice under Stalin, who kept all the information at his own disposal; but in the post-Stalin era the accumulated material could have been exploited by Beria, whose ministry had traditionally taken the lead in collecting it. Whether Beria actually did intend to get rid of the other leaders in the near term is far from clear, but their concerns were by no means wholly irrational given the nature of the Soviet political system, which had always been characterized by Machiavellian intrigue and fierce rivalries. As Robert Conquest noted long ago, “Beria’s position was certainly exceptional. He was in complete control of a vast and powerful machine against whose arbitrary use for his own purposes there was no adequate guarantee.”40 Well before Stalin’s death, some members of the CPSU Presidium had experienced what they construed as Beria’s hand in sinister machinations against them. Molotov, for example, was convinced that Beria had given kompromat to Stalin in 1945 that facilitated the Soviet leader’s efforts to humiliate and discredit Molotov.41 Although Beria staunchly denied having supplied any such information, Molotov believed that Beria had provided it, and he bore a grudge against him, rightly or wrongly.42 Bulganin likewise suspected that Beria had turned over kompromat to Stalin in the late 1940s to forestall Bulganin’s possible appointment as a first deputy prime minister.43 Both Beria and Bulganin at the time were deputy prime ministers, and Bulganin soon concluded that Beria “was trying to achieve the post of first deputy himself by any means possible,” a step that, in this instance, would come at Bulganin’s expense.44 Similarly, Saburov had long believed that Beria had tried to implicate him along with other high-ranking personnel in a trumped-up scandal at the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) in early 1949. The scandal led to severe punishments against a number of senior Gosplan officials, but Saburov himself emerged unscathed and in March 1949 was appointed head of the planning agency, a post he had held several years earlier. Despite this favorable outcome, Saburov resented Beria for allegedly having sought to implicate him in the affair.45 (Saburov was temporarily removed as

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head of Gosplan in March 1953 when he was assigned a much less prestigious position as minister of machine-building, and he evidently blamed this on Beria as well.) Pervukhin, too, was convinced that Beria had betrayed him in 1950 when Stalin was about to appoint Pervukhin to the inner circle of the USSR Council of Ministers.46 The appointment was derailed when Stalin suddenly received a “derogatory assessment” of Pervukhin from an unspecified source.47 Pervukhin suspected, both then and afterward, that the anonymous detractor was Beria. Whether any of these suspicions were well-founded is unclear, but there is little doubt that by 1953 several of Beria’s colleagues believed he had tried to undercut them in the past and would likely do it again. These misgivings seemed to gain greater credence from Beria’s behavior in the spring of 1953. Even officials like Mikoyan, who did not fear that Beria was planning to seize dictatorial power, had to acknowledge that some of Beria’s actions in 1953 were unusual enough to raise questions about his motives.48 Beria was one of the three leaders (along with Malenkov and Khrushchev) who secretly devised the initial political arrangements for the post-Stalin era that had been presented as a fait accompli on the evening of March 5, when Beria nominated Malenkov to be the new prime minister and was himself given unified control over the formerly separate state security and internal affairs ministries. According to Nuriddin Mukhitdinov, a senior party official who attended the joint meeting on March 5, “several [highranking party and state] officials did not find out about their new appointments until the session.”49 From that point on, Beria was extraordinarily active and visible on the political scene, not least during Stalin’s funeral when he, Malenkov, and Molotov were the only speakers. With help from a few top aides, Beria produced a flurry of initiatives after Stalin’s death on a wide range of domestic issues.50 Although most of these reforms came within the broad purview of the MVD (including the measures discussed in the previous section regarding torture, the Gulag, and forced-labor camps), a few went well beyond it. When the proposals were adopted by the CPSU Presidium and circulated to Communist Party organizations all around the USSR, Beria often made sure that his signed memoranda and draft resolutions were attached, thus demonstrating that he was the one who had spearheaded the Presidium’s actions.51 This sort of practice was not as unusual as was later alleged by Beria’s opponents— Khrushchev and others had been doing the same thing all along—but the sheer number and importance of Beria’s signed proposals inevitably brought him a good deal of attention both inside and outside the CPSU. Much the same was true of the announcement that appeared in Soviet newspapers on April 4 debunking earlier allegations of a “Doctors’ Plot.” Shortly after Stalin’s death, Beria had set up five commissions to investigate the Doctors’ Plot and other trumped-up conspiracies. Beria’s report to the CPSU Presidium on April 3 confirming that the Doctors’ Plot had been completely falsified, was instrumental in the publication of the announcement the next day.52 Because the statement was issued in the name of the MVD and made no mention of the CPSU, it gave the impression that the MVD—and Beria personally—were leading the effort to curb Stalinist abuses. This item was followed two days later by the publication of the lengthy Pravda editorial blaming the fabrication of the Doctors’ Plot on one of Beria’s chief nemeses, Semyon Ignat’ev, and accusing him of grave transgressions of the law and of party mores.53 After making a fleeting reference to the CPSU, the editorial emphasized that the MVD and the Soviet government were taking “decisive” action to uphold “socialist legality and protect the rights of Soviet citizens.”

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Other members of the CPSU Presidium reacted with ambivalence to these two items in the Soviet press. On one hand, they unanimously adopted a resolution on April 10th “endorsing the measures being carried out by Comrade L. P. Beria to expose the criminal actions perpetrated over a number of years by the former State Security Ministry of the USSR, including the preparation of spurious cases against honest people.”54 This expression of support was not surprising. Beria’s efforts to reveal the falsity of alleged conspiracies from the late Stalin era not only benefited himself (especially with the debunking of the so-called Mingrelian Affair, which Stalin had specifically used against Beria in 1951–1952) but also helped many of his colleagues, including Malenkov (by discrediting the allegations made in 1946 about the aviation industry), Molotov (by leading to the release and rehabilitation of his wife, who had been arrested on Stalin’s orders in early 1949 in connection with his campaign against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee), and Kaganovich (by approving the posthumous rehabilitation of his brother, who had committed suicide after falling victim to a Stalinist purge). On the other hand, some of Beria’s colleagues on the CPSU Presidium worried that the Communist Party appeared to be lagging behind the MVD. They instructed the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Dmitrii Shepilov, to publish articles over the next several weeks extolling the CPSU Presidium’s efforts to rectify injustices committed by the state security apparatus.55 Beria’s desire to publish the MVD’s findings on the Doctors’ Plot so soon, and his “penchant for sensationalism” (as Kaganovich later described it), contributed to a broader skepticism within the CPSU Presidium about his motives in pushing for internal reforms. Few of Beria’s colleagues believed that he was genuinely interested in redressing the abuses and injustices of the past. Instead, his main objective, as they saw it, was to shift all the blame for those crimes onto others, including Stalin.56 Beria’s choice of topics to confront (namely, the fraudulent conspiracies and large-scale arrests during the period from late 1945 to early 1953, when he had not been officially in charge of the state security or internal affairs ministry) fueled suspicions that his motives were less benign than they appeared.57 At no point did Beria raise questions about events he organized, such as the mass repressions in Soviet Georgia in the 1930s or the wholesale deportations of national minorities in the 1940s. Nor did he acknowledge the slightest degree of personal culpability. On the contrary, his growing behind-the-scenes criticism of Stalin in the spring of 1953 heightened the impression that Beria wanted to attribute the selected abuses predominantly to Stalin, thereby absolving himself of any responsibility.58 Such an approach, in and of itself, would not have been unwelcome to Beria’s rivals. Indeed, Malenkov had been taking a similar tack with his increasingly sharp criticism of Stalin at closed gatherings, even to the point of being willing to condemn Stalin’s “personality cult.” For the others, too, this approach was beneficial, as Khrushchev indirectly acknowledged in 1956 when he adopted the same tactic in his “secret speech” at the 20th CPSU Congress. Nonetheless, what many of Beria’s colleagues feared is that he would not confine himself to just blaming Stalin and Ignat’ev for the mass terror and falsified accusations. They suspected that he would eventually try to implicate most of them, leaving himself without any serious challengers. Not all of Beria’s rivals subscribed to this view, but many did. At the very least, they were skeptical about his intentions. The growing unease about Beria was reinforced by his efforts to restructure the MVD. Because Beria had not been directly in charge of the internal security apparatus and police forces since late 1945 (after he had been designated by Stalin to

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oversee the massive Soviet nuclear bomb and ballistic missile projects), he wanted to establish tight control over the MVD in 1953 by bringing in his own people and removing those whose loyalties to him were suspect. Less than a week after Beria took office, he sent a memorandum to Malenkov and Khrushchev informing them that many state security officials (who were beholden to him) had been unjustly removed and in some cases imprisoned after 1945 and that they must be brought back to “perform valuable work for [the MVD].”59 He then began methodically replacing senior ministry personnel and promoting officials who were closely tied to him, including Sergei Goglidze, Bogdan Kobulov, Vsevolod Merkulov, Naum Eitingon, Lev Raikhman, Lev Vlodzimirskii, Amayak Kobulov, Nikolai Gorlinskii, Boris Obruchnikov, Nikolai Sazykin, and Grigorii Zabolotnyi.60 He did the same with many of the union-republic and oblast (provincial) branches of the MVD, appointing his own people (such as Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik, Solomon Mil’shtein, P. A. Shariya, and M. F. Dechko) to replace officials who had gained ascendance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.61 Patronage of this sort was of course a standard, time-tested practice in the Soviet Union, where the building of networks of loyal cadres had long been the primary means of getting ahead and of advancing one’s own agenda. Other Soviet leaders had also been engaging in patronage politics both before and after Stalin’s death. (The practice, moreover, was hardly unique to the Soviet Union.) Nevertheless, the bloody history and coercive power of the state security apparatus gave extra significance to personnel changes within the MVD. Patron-client relationships in the state security organs and the MVD’s foreign intelligence service were apt to have a much greater impact on the leadership struggle than were such relationships in other spheres. Several of Beria’s rivals, especially Malenkov and Khrushchev, had sought to place their own people in key positions at the MVD in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they were worried that Beria would soon replace all these officials, giving himself unassailable control of the ministry.62 Taken cumulatively, Beria’s various actions in the spring of 1953 did appear to be highly unusual. Whether his behavior really signaled that he would try to achieve dictatorial power in the near term is far more questionable. It is unclear whether the suspicions voiced about Beria’s intentions stemmed mainly from genuine concern about his plans or were instead motivated primarily by a desire to find a pretext for getting rid of an inconvenient and potentially dangerous rival. What does seem clear is that Beria’s positions on specific issues—domestic or foreign—had little, if anything, to do with the effort to eliminate him. Although the highest leaders were by no means always in agreement about specific matters and policies, far more of a consensus about the general direction existed than has often been suggested. All the members of the CPSU Presidium wanted to abandon or at least greatly modify the most rigid and counterproductive policies of Stalin’s final years. Naturally, disagreements arose about the best means of moving away from orthodox Stalinism and about some important issues. Nonetheless, as Robert Conquest intuitively recognized in Power and Policy in the USSR, the contending leaders’ different views (or allegedly different views) were not what drove the early power struggle.63 Instead, the purported differences were later played up as convenient post-hoc rationalizations. This was especially true in foreign policy. A temporary consensus on all major foreignpolicy issues had been forged shortly after Stalin’s death, with Molotov playing the chief role. The policies that Beria espoused abroad were very much in line with the preferences of his colleagues, including Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev.

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The same applied to key domestic issues, including policy toward nationalities and ethnic groups. Although a senior Russian archival official, Vladimir Naumov, has asserted that Beria’s proposals on the union republics of the Soviet Union “played a decisive role in [his] fate,” the evidence does not bear this out.64 It is true that Beria took a prominent role on the nationalities question in the spring of 1953 and that his choice of topics was highly selective. Rather than bringing up the mass deportations of the early and mid-1940s (which he himself had orchestrated), Beria sought to focus exclusively on problems that had emerged since 1945 in several republics, especially the republics on the USSR’s western flank, which had been annexed in whole or in part at the end of World War II. Confronted by armed resistance movements (known in Soviet parlance as “bandits”) in these regions, the Soviet internal-security forces launched brutal and often indiscriminate reprisals against the local populations, but did not manage to crush the opposition there until the early to mid-1950s.65 In three separate memoranda on the “mistakes and shortcomings” of Soviet operations in western Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania, Beria advocated a change of tactics. Although he refrained from even mentioning the violent abuses committed by the state security organs, he did insist that forced Russification should cease and that local cadres should be recruited into the government.66 These steps, he argued, would be the only way to ensure that Soviet republic governments could muster enough popular support to wipe out the “bandits.” Some analysts, including Naumov, have argued that Beria’s memoranda on the union republics posed a dire threat to leaders like Khrushchev, who had been complicit in the worst bloodshed and atrocities in western Ukraine. In Naumov’s view, a fundamental clash on this issue with Khrushchev and others lay behind the removal of Beria. The flaws in Naumov’s argument are threefold. First, the notion of promoting local cadres to leading positions in the union republics was hardly a radical departure. The highest bodies of the Soviet Communist Party had been moving in that direction since February 1952 when a meeting of the party’s Secretariat, chaired by Malenkov, agreed that the party and the Soviet government should begin to recruit local cadres for the republics’ security forces.67 As noted earlier, the rationale for this move, endorsed by all those present, was that local elements “in their republics would trust one another more than they trust our [Soviet] state security officials.”68 Beria’s memoranda on western Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania were thus in full accord with views that had been firmly accepted in Moscow for over a year. For Beria and all of his colleagues, the issue was not one of fairness, or of “being nice”; it was simply a matter of expediency in the ongoing battle against underground resistance movements. Second, Beria’s memoranda stayed well within the limits of his jurisdiction as head of the Soviet MVD and as a leading member of the CPSU Presidium. In each of the documents, he gave an overview of recent personnel changes within the particular republic’s ministry of internal affairs. These changes had been carried out at the behest of the central MVD in Moscow (with the CPSU Presidium’s authorization) to bolster the capacity of the local security forces to wipe out armed resistance groups (“bandit units”). Beria then went on to list the “shortcomings” and “abnormalities” in the work of the republic’s party and state bodies, which, as he rightly pointed out, were greatly impeding the effort to consolidate a stable structure of governance in the various republics. In laying out these issues, Beria merely offered recommendations to the CPSU Presidium for corrective steps that would be “worth taking.” His recommendations were fully in accord with the policy changes that had been underway since February 1952.

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Third, the latest evidence makes clear that Beria’s proposals on nationality questions did not spark any genuine disagreements within the CPSU Presidium before his arrest. In the outlying republics, many of the officials who had been replaced were dismayed by the changes, but in Moscow a high-level consensus on the matter prevailed. Far from protesting, Khrushchev and Malenkov spoke strongly in support of Beria’s memoranda, particularly the one about western Ukraine.69 Khrushchev’s hearty endorsement of the western Ukraine memorandum is hardly surprising. After all, one of the main consequences of that memorandum was the removal of the Ukrainian Communist Party leader Leonid Mel’nikov, whom Khrushchev had long despised, and his replacement by Oleksii Kyrychenko, who was a strong supporter of Khrushchev. Moreover, Khrushchev himself drafted memoranda about Latvia and Estonia that were nearly identical in both tone and content to Beria’s reports about Lithuania, Belorussia, and western Ukraine.70 (Khrushchev relied on material provided to him by Beria, but Khrushchev was the one who actually wrote the memoranda and promoted the same sort of policies in those two republics that were being adopted in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia.) Khrushchev’s supposed discomfiture with Beria’s views on nationality questions came purely after the fact. When these policies were actually being debated and adopted in March–June 1953, Beria, Khrushchev, and Malenkov all saw eye to eye. It is possible, of course, that the tone of Beria’s memoranda may have contributed to the general unease that most of the Presidium members felt about his larger intentions, but this is a very different matter from saying that his view of the issue was fundamentally at odds with theirs. Even before Stalin died, a high-level consensus had emerged regarding the need to pursue a more effective strategy against the “bandits” in the republics by paying greater heed to local sentiment. From a practical standpoint, this meant that local cadres should be given leading posts in the republics and that greater leeway should be permitted for local languages. Beria’s views in these respects were not at all different from those of his colleagues. Thus, all available evidence suggests that the leadership struggle in Moscow did not hinge on concrete issues so much as it did on the simple question first posed by Lenin many years earlier: kto kogo (who will win out over whom)? Minor differences in the Presidium members’ positions on specific issues did not determine the answer to that question, but those differences did provide useful justifications afterward.

Final Preparations for the Move against Beria The timetable for the anti-Beria conspiracy was delayed somewhat by the sudden outbreak of a rebellion in East Germany on June 17, 1953. As the scale of the rebellion became apparent, all the members of the CPSU Presidium were determined to act as swiftly and decisively as possible to crush it. To this end, they immediately authorized the use of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany. The only concern in Moscow was to ensure that the Soviet soldiers would act promptly and forcefully enough to restore order and keep the rebellion from spreading to other Soviet-bloc countries, including the USSR itself. To ensure that the uprising would be quelled right away, Beria sent a group of senior MVD officers to East Germany led by General Sergei Goglidze, the deputy internal affairs minister responsible for military counterintelligence, and General Petr Fedotov, the former chief of the Soviet foreign-intelligence service who since March 1953 had been in charge of the MVD’s domestic counterintelligence. The delegation was responsible

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for serving as a liaison with the East German State Security Ministry and for providing support both directly and indirectly for Soviet military operations.71 Meanwhile, in Moscow, Beria took steps to keep the turmoil from spreading to other East European countries. He contacted all the Soviet foreign intelligence station chiefs in the Eastern bloc and warned them that they would “pay with [their] heads if anything like this happens” in their assigned countries.72 Beria ordered each of them to send status reports to him every few hours and to cooperate with the local authorities in preventing mass unrest and crushing any spontaneous demonstrations held in support of the East German rebellion. The Soviet crackdown in East Germany was completed within a day, but the intervention of Soviet troops was crucial both in forestalling an escalation of the violence and in reestablishing Soviet control. The violence in East Germany caused the plot against Beria to be put on hold temporarily; but by June 20, with the immediate crisis in the German Democratic Republic safely over, the planning and preparations resumed in full force. Khrushchev and Malenkov moved toward a showdown with Beria, which occurred at the CPSU Presidium meeting on June 26. It is still not entirely clear how Khrushchev and Malenkov were able to keep Beria from discovering their plans. It seems hard to believe that an intricate conspiracy like this, with so many people involved (including some who were distinctly unenthusiastic about it) and at least one who had declined to participate, could have eluded the MVD’s pervasive eavesdropping and information-gathering network. One possibility, albeit unlikely, is that the preparations were picked up by the MVD, but that one or more senior officials in the ministry betrayed Beria and kept him from receiving the information. Another, more plausible explanation is that Beria knew that something was afoot, but did not realize that the conspirators would act so soon.73 It is even possible that at least one or two of the conspirators (perhaps Khrushchev or Malenkov) had been plotting with Beria against the others—either sincerely or as a ruse—and then decided (or planned all along) to double-cross him.74 Whatever the case may be, it is clear that even if Beria sensed that a conspiracy against him was in the works, he did not grasp the seriousness of it until it was too late. Although Beria, like nearly all of Stalin’s successors, was hardly a devout believer in “collective leadership,” he was excessively confident about his own ability to outflank his rivals. His confidence was especially great in the spring of 1953 because he had regained direct jurisdiction over the entire internal security apparatus. When Stalin was alive, control of the security organs was not enough to confer invincibility on the head of the apparatus (as two of Beria’s predecessors overseeing the secret police in the late 1930s, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Ezhov, found out to their dismay); but in the post-Stalin era, Beria clearly assumed that his grip over the newly combined ministries of state security and internal affairs would enable him to fend off all challengers. Beria’s rivals, too, were mindful of the obstacles they faced in trying to arrest him. They realized that they could not assign this task to the regular police or internal security forces, all of which reported to Beria. The only way they could circumvent the MVD was by resorting to the one organ of coercive authority that Beria did not control—the military. Malenkov as prime minister and Bulganin as defense minister had the authority to issue legitimate orders to Soviet army officers, but they also knew that, for such a delicate mission, they would have to choose carefully which officers to enlist as co-conspirators. One of the highest-ranking commanders whom they initially approached on June 25 evidently was unwilling to take part.75 Khrushchev and

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Bulganin then turned to General Kirill Moskalenko, the commander of the Moscow Air Defense Region, who promptly agreed to carry out the designated task.76 They asked Moskalenko to choose four of his most reliable deputies and to instruct them to bring arms with them on the 26th. (Normally, military officers visiting the Kremlin came unarmed.) Moskalenko selected three senior Air Defense officers— Major-General Aleksei Baksov, Colonel Ivan Zub, and Major Viktor Yuferev—and also secured the help of Major-General Pavel Batitskii, the chief of staff and first deputy commander in chief of the Soviet Air Force. Khrushchev and Malenkov enlisted five additional officers and political commissars to serve as reinforcements.77 These officers—headed by Leonid Brezhnev, the first deputy chief of the Soviet Army’s Main Political Directorate, and General Mitrofan Nedelin, the commander of Soviet Artillery Forces (and a former deputy defense minister)—were responsible for guarding the doors and providing extra troops in case the arrest proved more difficult than anticipated. Getting all these officers into the Kremlin unnoticed on June 26 was no easy task, but Bulganin was able to make use of two defense ministry limousines whose special insignia entitled them to enter the Kremlin grounds without being stopped for inspection. Bulganin arranged it so that one of the vehicles would carry Moskalenko and his aides, and the other would bring in the group led by Brezhnev and Nedelin. In both cases, the officers were to remain concealed in the cars behind darkened windows and then enter the building through a side door left open by aides to Malenkov and Khrushchev.78 Once inside, they were to move as quickly as possible upstairs into an anteroom next to the chamber in which the CPSU Presidium held its meetings. They were then supposed to await an electronic signal transmitted by Malenkov to his chief aide, Dmitrii Sukhanov, who would be stationed just outside the chamber, ready to let the officers know when they should enter. The fact that most of the officers were from the Moscow Air Defense Region and that the rest were from central military organizations gave the plotters an extra precaution. The preliminary agenda for the meeting on June 26 included an item on defense preparations and future military exercises in the Moscow Air Defense Region and Military District. Hence, in the unlikely event that these officers were spotted by Kremlin guards before the meeting, their presence could be readily explained. One final step for Khrushchev and Malenkov was to obtain the cooperation of Marshal Georgii Zhukov, the renowned World War II commander, who in 1953 was serving as a deputy defense minister. They realized that Zhukov’s participation would be especially important because it would symbolically demonstrate to Beria that the army was on the side of the conspirators. Early on the 26th, Bulganin met with Zhukov at the main defense ministry building and told him that they must leave immediately for the Kremlin to take care of an “urgent matter.”79 Upon arrival, they proceeded to the meeting hall of the CPSU Presidium, where Malenkov and Khrushchev were waiting. The two of them and Bulganin informed Zhukov that the CPSU Presidium had a special assignment for him: to oversee the arrest of Beria later that day. Zhukov was instantly receptive to the idea because of his long-standing, deep aversion to Beria. The Soviet marshal was convinced that Beria had tried to have him arrested during one of Stalin’s postwar crackdowns.80 Hence, Zhukov firmly shared the conspirators’ view that it would be desirable to remove Beria altogether. Zhukov assured Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Bulganin that he would obey the orders of the CPSU Presidium. With that, the last piece of the anti-Beria conspiracy fell into place.

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The Showdown on June 26 Until recently, almost nothing was known about the meeting of the CPSU Presidium on June 26, 1953. No information at all was available about it until the early 1970s, when portions of Khrushchev’s memoirs were published in the West. Until the end of the 1980s, Khrushchev’s recollections of the Beria affair and related events remained the only source available about the June 26 meeting; but unfortunately his account is not fully reliable.81 Although Khrushchev accurately described many aspects of the affair, he distorted or fabricated other aspects and failed to mention crucial details. In the absence of corroborating material, scholars had no way of determining which parts of Khrushchev’s account were veracious. Attempts to cross-check Khrushchev’s memoirs were impossible until the late 1980s and 1990s, when new firsthand recollections of the anti-Beria plot appeared.82 Further details about the affair were provided in the stenographic record of the July 1953 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, which was declassified in early 1991.83 (The much more reliable verbatim transcript of that plenum was not declassified until late 1995.) The transcripts of two subsequent CPSU Central Committee plenums, in January 1955 and June 1957, which were declassified in the mid-1990s, also contained some intriguing comments about the Beria affair.84 Three of Beria’s own letters from captivity, written in desperation in late June and early July 1953 to his former colleagues (who subsequently ordered that all pens and paper be taken away from him), were declassified and published in 1994.85 The letters are of great value in filling in some of the comments made to and about Beria at the June 26 meeting. Important though all these new sources were, the biggest breakthrough in reconstructing the June 26 meeting came in the late 1990s, when a key document about the meeting—Malenkov’s marked-up draft of his introductory remarks as well as his marginal notes of what others said at the meeting—was unearthed in the Russian Presidential Archive. A large collection of other declassified documents from the Presidential Archive, pertaining to the investigation and trial of Beria, are also now finally available.86 These newly released archival materials not only fill in some crucial details, but also enrich and help tie together the scattered observations in other documents (especially Beria’s letters from captivity) and in many of the firsthand accounts. Although the session on June 26 was initially slated to be a meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers, the plotters scheduled it that way simply because they wanted to distract Beria, who was supposed to give a report to the Presidium of the Council of Ministers on an unrelated matter.87 It was easy to postpone the scheduled meeting and to convene a session of the CPSU Presidium instead. All five members of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers (Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich) were also full members of the CPSU Presidium.88 Of the five members of the CPSU Presidium who were not on the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, one (Khrushchev) had regularly been attending meetings of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers in the spring of 1953, and three others (Mikoyan, Saburov, and Pervukhin) were themselves ministers and had occasionally been taking part in meetings of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers. Only one member of the CPSU Presidium, Voroshilov, had not been attending sessions of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers in the spring of 1953, but his participation in a meeting of that body would by no means have been extraordinary, particularly if he were representing the Presidium of the

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USSR Supreme Council (the legislature, which he chaired). Hence, the plotters were confident that the presence of Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Saburov, Pervukhin, and Voroshilov at the government headquarters on June 26 would not provoke suspicion among the MVD guards who vetted everyone entering the Kremlin. The plotters also rightly surmised that switching the agenda on June 26 would be facilitated by Beria’s habit of arriving for meetings at the last minute. This greatly reduced the likelihood that he would notice anything untoward beforehand. Beria, as usual, arrived at the meeting on June 26 with barely a moment to spare. As soon as he entered the chamber and sat down, the conspirators informed him that the original meeting would have to be postponed because some other ministers who were supposed to be delivering reports to the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers were unable to attend.89 Malenkov then pointed out that all the members of the CPSU Presidium happened to be present, and he proposed that they convene that body instead to discuss party-related business. Having just arrived, Beria had no inherent reason to be suspicious of the change. Hence, without further ado, a session of the CPSU Presidium began in the late morning. Only then did Beria suddenly realize that the initial schedule and agenda had been a ruse. All available evidence indicates that he had no inkling he would be confronted so soon, and that he was startled when he grasped what was happening. If he had even faintly suspected that a move was going to be made against him at the session on June 26, he certainly would have ensured that the special security troops at the Kremlin, who were under the MVD’s direct jurisdiction, would be ready to enter the room to arrest all the conspirators. It is clear that no such orders were ever given. Even after Beria was arrested some two-and-a-half hours into the meeting, the security guards outside the hall had no idea what was going on. Beria’s failure to alert his security forces before the meeting leaves no doubt that he was caught unawares. Malenkov opened the session by declaring that the agenda would focus solely on Beria’s activities. This announcement evoked a stunned protest from Beria, but he was quickly ordered to be silent.90 Malenkov then began laying out the case against Beria: The enemies wanted to place the MVD organs above the party and the Government. The task now is to ensure that the MVD organs are placed at the disposal of the party and Government, and to bring these organs under the party’s control. The enemies wanted to use the MVD organs to pursue their criminal aims. The task now is to eliminate any opportunity for such crimes to occur. The MVD organs occupy a place in the state apparatus that offers immense opportunities for the abuse of power. The task now is to prohibit any abuses of power (only such a restructuring; fixing methods; using agents; introducing party discipline).91

Turning to a litany of specific “misdeeds,” Malenkov condemned Beria’s insistence that his signed memoranda be appended to the CPSU Presidium’s resolutions when they were distributed to lower-level party and state organizations. By demanding such a conspicuous role for the MVD’s documents, Malenkov argued, Beria had created the impression that he—and the MVD as a whole—were “correcting the party and Government” and “relegating the Central Committee to a secondary plane.” Beria’s alleged attempts to upstage the CPSU Presidium and elevate the MVD (and himself) to a dominant position were, according to Malenkov, “fraught with great danger unless they are immediately corrected.”92

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Among the examples cited by Malenkov were memoranda prepared by Beria’s staff regarding Lithuania, western Ukraine, and western Belorussia. According to Malenkov, the distribution of Beria’s signed reports to party organizations in those republics was an “obvious” attempt by the MVD chief to “gain prominence” in outlying regions.93 Malenkov also alleged that Beria had been seeking to displace the collective leadership and to foment discord among Presidium members. He claimed that Beria’s behavior during recent negotiations in Moscow with Hungarian and East German leaders, especially the “peremptory” nature of his interventions, had shown that Beria wanted to place himself above the collective leadership. Malenkov also asserted that Beria had tried to bring Khrushchev and Bulganin into conflict with one another during recent discussions on East Germany. Beria’s alleged attempt to sow rifts within the CPSU Presidium, Malenkov argued, reflected a “flagrant” disregard for the norms of collective leadership. These charges were the only ones that Malenkov initially presented, and in that sense they were surprisingly weak. His warnings about Beria’s intentions vis-à-vis the MVD were vague and unsupported by specific evidence. Although Malenkov was trying to stoke the anxiety that most members of the CPSU Presidium already felt about Beria, the lack of well-grounded accusations detracted from his case. Malenkov’s complaints about the distribution of Beria’s signed memoranda were more cogent, but as previously mentioned Beria was not the only member of the Presidium who had engaged in this practice. Khrushchev and others had as well. Beria had done it more frequently than his colleagues, but if he was going to be punished for it, then others would have to be, too. In any case, it hardly seemed to be a serious enough offense to warrant severe measures. Flimsier still was Malenkov’s allegation about Beria’s behavior during the recent bilateral talks with Hungarian and East German leaders. Malenkov and Khrushchev had begun plotting to get rid of Beria well before the negotiations with Hungarian leaders even took place (on June 13–16). Hence, Beria’s demeanor at the talks could not possibly have inspired the move against him. It is also important to note that Malenkov was not finding fault with the substance of Beria’s remarks at the bilateral meetings. After all, Beria’s comments during the sessions with the East German and Hungarian leaders were little different, in terms of substance, from those expressed by the other Soviet participants.94 The tone of Beria’s criticisms may at times have been somewhat more acerbic than that of his colleagues, but the difference overall was minor at best. What Malenkov was really condemning was Beria’s alleged failure to consult with the other CPSU Presidium members about some of the points he raised.95 But this accusation, too, was disingenuous. Although Beria, as head of the MVD, did have classified information about Hungary at his disposal, there is no evidence that he was keeping any of it from his Soviet colleagues.96 All the data cited by Beria during the recent bilateral talks had already been provided to the full CPSU Presidium in cables from the Soviet embassy and in reports from the Central Committee apparatus.97 Equally misleading was Malenkov’s allegation that Beria had acted high-handedly on June 13 when he proposed that Imre Nagy be appointed prime minister in Hungary, one of the posts that the Stalinist party leader, Mátyás Rákosi, had held until then. The decision to bring back Nagy, far from being a spur-of-the-moment judgment by Beria in mid-June, had been agreed upon in Moscow in late May at Molotov’s behest and was presented as a fait accompli to Rákosi during his brief visit to the Soviet Union at the end of May. On June 3, Rákosi informed the other

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Hungarian leaders about Nagy’s imminent return.98 Beria’s mention of Nagy during the bilateral talks on June 13 therefore could not possibly have come as a surprise to anyone. On this point as on others, the notion that Beria “flagrantly” violated the principle of “collective leadership” was spurious. It is puzzling why Malenkov would not have begun the Presidium session with something stronger. His accusations were notably vague, feeble, or unfounded. After laying out these initial charges, Malenkov proposed a number of possible remedies, albeit in a circumspect way.99 Because he wanted the other Presidium members to go on record as expressing strong criticisms of Beria, he carefully refrained at this point from bringing up the possibility of Beria’s arrest. Malenkov was aware that some of his colleagues, especially Mikoyan and Voroshilov, would not yet go along with the physical removal of Beria. Hence, for the time being, he offered only what he knew would be widely accepted proposals: the dismissal of Beria as minister of internal affairs and the appointment of Sergei Kruglov as a replacement, tighter control of the MVD by the CPSU Central Committee,100 the dismissal of Beria as first deputy prime minister, the appointment of Beria as minister of the oil industry, the dismissal of Beria as head of the Special Committee on nuclear weapons, and the reorganization of the Special Committee into a ministry headed by Saburov or some other official such as Mikhail Khrunichev. For good measure, Malenkov emphasized that the CPSU Presidium should exercise much more stringent day-to-day control over the MVD, ensuring that all important matters were subject to “special decisions” by the Presidium, which would then be signed by an unspecified “CC Secretary” (as in the past) and distributed to lower-level party organizations. Malenkov also broached the possibility of having the chairman of the Council of Ministers co-sign some of the decisions, but he was cautious about raising this matter because he did not want to give the appearance of staking out a larger role for himself.101 Once Malenkov had finished his introductory remarks, he invited the other members of the CPSU Presidium to voice their own concerns.102 Their attitudes toward Beria were not uniform, but on the key issue of dismissing Beria they were unanimous. All the Presidium members spoke about Beria’s “mistakes” and “inappropriate actions,” particularly his insistence that his signed memoranda be appended to the Presidium’s resolutions and his alleged attempts to elevate the MVD over the CPSU Presidium and Central Committee. Several of the participants, especially Molotov, Bulganin, Saburov, and Pervukhin, condemned what they believed were Beria’s past efforts to undercut them and promote himself at their expense. Saburov and Pervukhin alleged that Beria had consistently used his “privileged position” during the Stalin era against his colleagues. The most vehement criticisms were voiced by Khrushchev, who mixed specific charges with personal invective and obscenities, apparently as a way of releasing the nervous tension he felt as the moment for Beria’s arrest approached. Beria later expressed bewilderment that Khrushchev had so “angrily and furiously cursed at me during the last CC Presidium meeting,” an outburst that Beria found especially puzzling because he and Khrushchev “had always been such great friends [and] I had treasured our relationship.”103 Even Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and other Presidium members who were not convinced that Beria was planning to seize power were willing at this stage to offer criticisms of Beria’s “deficient” performance at the MVD and in his dealings with the highest party organs. In their view, his numerous “shortcomings” warranted his removal from the ministry and the CPSU Presidium. At the same time, Mikoyan expressed

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full confidence that Beria “would take due account of the criticism” and would play a “very useful” role if given another senior government post. The meeting went on for a considerable while to give everyone other than Beria an opportunity to go on record as supporting Beria’s removal. After the last of them had finished, Malenkov as chair began his usual task of summing up the results. As he spoke, he pressed a button transmitting two rapid signals to Dmitrii Sukhanov, who was waiting as planned in the anteroom just outside the meeting room. Sukhanov in turn informed Zhukov and the other military officers that it was time to move in. Zhukov led the way (demonstrating to Beria that the whole Soviet army was against him), and Moskalenko and his aides surrounded Beria from three sides. Mikoyan and a few other CPSU Presidium members who had not been told the full details of the plot were clearly surprised by this abrupt turn of events and were alarmed by the conspicuous entry of so many uniformed military officers.104 Zhukov quickly reassured them that “everything is okay, comrades, please sit down,” and Malenkov added his own appeal for calm.105 Their comments had the desired effect. None of the Presidium members made any further attempt to interfere or protest. Once the uproar had subsided, Malenkov called on the CPSU Presidium to “consider the question of Beria once again.” He then declared that Beria “is so cunning and so dangerous that only the devil knows what he might do now. I therefore propose that we arrest him immediately.”106 As expected, the momentum of the criticism at the meeting, and the sudden appearance of a group of high-ranking military officers, induced all the Presidium members to vote in favor of arresting Beria, a step that at least a few of them would not have condoned if they had been informed of it in advance. With guns raised, Moskalenko and his subordinates arrested and searched Beria. Among the items they found was a piece of paper on which he had hurriedly scrawled the word “alarm” (trevoga) three times in large red letters, evidently in the hope of passing it on to some of the MVD personnel outside.107 The military officers kept Beria under tight guard as they escorted him from the meeting hall into the anteroom, closing the door quickly behind them. The Presidium members and Zhukov remained in the meeting room for another fifteen to twenty minutes, trying to reach a consensus about what to do with Beria. Malenkov’s handwritten notes show that at least one or two of the members, especially Khrushchev, wanted to dispose of Beria right away without an investigation or trial.108 Most of the others believed that some sort of trial was essential, perhaps under the auspices of the MVD’s Special Board. They hoped that the staging of a trial would impart a veneer of legality to what had been an illegal, or at least extralegal, conspiracy. Eventually, they all agreed not to proceed with a peremptory execution of Beria and to defer any final decision about his fate until the next meeting of the CPSU Presidium, on June 29. In the meantime, they adopted a general resolution that spelled out the main actions taken against Beria, including his removal from the CPSU Presidium and Central Committee, his dismissal from his posts as first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and minister of internal affairs, the nullification of all his awards and medals, and the initiation of a “case regarding the criminal activities of L. P. Beria, to be considered by the Supreme Court of the USSR.” Before adjourning, the CPSU Presidium also arranged for the preparation of two additional resolutions, one to be issued by the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers and the other by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.109 These two resolutions were essentially identical to the CPSU Presidium’s own resolution,

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but instead of dealing with Beria’s party functions, they were intended to deprive him of his seat in the legislature and to confirm his dismissal from all his other state posts. With those administrative tasks completed, Zhukov and the CPSU Presidium members departed, leaving Beria in Moskalenko’s custody.

Beria’s Demise Moskalenko and his aides planned to use the cover of dark to spirit Beria out of the Kremlin and elude the MVD guards stationed near the gate, but nightfall at that time of year in Moscow always came late. They had to wait many tense hours, until nearly midnight, for darkness to set in. Throughout this time, Beria sat nervously in the anteroom, trying somehow to come up with a way of alerting his security guards or of finding some other means of escape. But his efforts were all in vain, as the military officers kept him under constant watch and prevented him from making any effort to seek help. (They even accompanied him on several trips to the lavatory to ensure that he did not try something there.) A brief disruption occurred late in the evening when the first deputy minister of internal affairs, Army-General I. I. Maslennikov, and Stalin’s former chief bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, showed up demanding to know what had happened to Beria. A confrontation briefly loomed, but the situation was defused when Moskalenko placed an emergency phone call to Bulganin, who somehow convinced Maslennikov that everything was in order.110 In the meantime, Moskalenko had arranged for five of the Defense Ministry’s ZIS-110 limousines to bring thirty heavily armed soldiers from the Moscow Air Defense headquarters into the Kremlin with minimal disruption. The troops took up positions inside the main building when the MVD guards were changing shifts. Once these reinforcements were in place, Moskalenko and his aides hastily transferred Beria into one of the Defense Ministry cars, surrounding him with armed soldiers and sending another vehicle filled with troops along as an escort.111 Beria’s captors were under orders to shoot him on the spot if he tried to escape or if MVD units launched a rescue operation, but in the end no such measures proved necessary.112 The two vehicles brought Beria without incident to a military stockade in Lefortovo on the outskirts of Moscow, where he was kept in a holding cell. By the next day, as concern grew that MVD forces might try to free Beria, Soviet leaders gave Moskalenko command of the Moscow Military District (supplementing his earlier post as commander of the Moscow Air Defense Region) and authorized him to deploy whatever soldiers and vehicles he needed to transfer Beria to a more secure location. Some twelve armored personnel carriers, twenty T-34 main battle tanks, twenty-three self-propelled artillery systems, and forty-eight military support vehicles moved into Moscow as temporary reinforcements.113 In addition, units of the armed forces throughout the Moscow district were put on high alert.114 On the evening of June 27, Beria was brought to a reinforced underground bunker at the main staff headquarters of the Moscow Military District, where he was imprisoned under constant guard for the next five-and-a-half months. The arrest, transfer, and imprisonment of Beria were accomplished with remarkably little disruption. No blood was shed at any stage, despite the complex series of events ranging from his arrest to the bypassing of the Kremlin Guards (who were still subordinated to Beria) and the blockade imposed by army troops in various sections of Moscow to prevent incursions by MVD special operations forces (Spetsnaz). The striking success of the operation was partly attributable to meticulous planning, but

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it was also attributable to good luck. Any number of glitches could have thwarted this high-risk venture, yet at each stage the conspirators somehow managed to forestall mishaps and defuse any problems that arose. The dangers they had to overcome, and their awareness that any slip-up might literally prove fatal, could not help but color their perceptions of Beria once they had him firmly in their grip. The first public intimation that something had happened to Beria came on June 28, when his name was omitted from a list in the Soviet press of CPSU Presidium members who had attended an opera at the Bolshoi Theater the previous evening.115 On June 29, the CPSU Presidium secretly ordered the new Soviet procuratorgeneral, Roman Rudenko, to embark on a full-scale investigation of Beria to expose his “criminal anti-party and anti-state activities.”116 Rudenko had been appointed to his post earlier that day because he was known to be a reliable figure who would strictly comply with the Presidium’s wishes, rather than with legal norms and requirements. (Khrushchev and his colleagues had much less faith in Rudenko’s predecessor, G. N. Safonov.117) The investigation was meant not as a dispassionate search for evidence, but as a quest to find material that would fit a predetermined verdict. In periodic “instructions to the General Procuracy,” the members of the CPSU Presidium indicated precisely what topics they wanted Rudenko to cover, what “evidence” they wanted him to collect, what witnesses they wanted him to interview, and what verdict they wanted him to produce.118 They carefully prevented the investigation from delving into certain issues (e.g., Beria’s role in the Great Terror) that might eventually have inculpated all of them. They also ordered the destruction of all the compromising material that Beria had amassed.119 Not until July 10 was the arrest of Beria finally announced in public.120 Over the next two months, Rudenko and his staff interrogated many of Beria’s former aides and associates (often with the help of severe physical coercion), collected vast quantities of documents from numerous agencies and repositories, and drafted a preliminary bill of indictment. On September 17 the CPSU Presidium ordered Rudenko to step up the investigation and to rework the bill of indictment in order to “take account of the corrections adopted by the Presidium of the Central Committee.”121 From that point on, the investigation proceeded swiftly, and by early December a final indictment against Beria was completed under the CPSU Presidium’s supervision. One of the members of the CPSU Presidium, Mikhail Suslov, coordinated the whole process and prepared the main drafts himself, submitting them for revision and formal approval to the full Presidium. The final draft ran to hundreds of pages and was accompanied by several dozen volumes containing tens of thousands of pages of supporting documents and interrogation transcripts.122 On December 10, the CPSU Presidium issued a number of “special directives” that laid out detailed guidelines for Beria’s trial, including the verdicts to be handed down against Beria and other defendants.123 A closed trial began on December 18 before a Special Judicial Panel (Osoboe Sudebnoe Prisutstvie) chaired by Marshal Ivan Konev, one of the most highly decorated Soviet military officers. Of the seven other members of the panel, only two had any background in legal affairs.124 The trial lasted five days, culminating in a preordained sentence of death on December 23 against Beria and several of his closest aides for allegedly “betraying the Motherland, organizing an anti-Soviet conspiratorial group to seize power and restore the dominance of the bourgeoisie, and committing terrorist acts against political figures who were loyal to the Communist Party and the people.”125 Soon after the sentence was pronounced, General Batitskii shot Beria in the head at point-blank range.

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Several officers under Batitskii’s command followed suit. Shortly thereafter, Beria’s corpse was transferred secretly to the Donskoi crematorium and incinerated.126 Almost no information about the Beria affair was released for many years afterward. The only evidence available when Robert Conquest was writing Power and Policy in the USSR came from a small number of perfunctory items published in the Soviet press starting in July 1953. Conquest acknowledged in his book that the dearth of reliable information had hindered his efforts to present “even a hypothetical picture of the events of the days after Stalin’s death … [T]here are many factors at whose influence we can hardly even guess.”127 He stressed that “such indications and items of evidence as do become available must … be studied with great care.” It is a testament to the extraordinary care he himself exercised when writing the book that his account of the Beria affair is still so valuable today. Conquest’s instincts and his meticulous scrutiny of the meager evidence that was available convinced him that “the struggle for power [was] a permanent feature of Soviet politics.” On this matter, as on many others, he was absolutely right. He also was right in noting that “the intensity rather than the nature of the Soviet power struggle” was particularly “difficult to envisage.”128 Nowadays, with the huge amount of evidence that has become available from archives and memoirs, we can gain a much more detailed sense of both the intensity and the nature of the early post-Stalin succession struggle. But it is humbling to realize that nearly fifty years ago Conquest had already discerned and lucidly analyzed the essential qualities of that struggle.

Chapter 5

4

Post-Communist Political Violence: The Poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko John B. Dunlop

In 1954, in the period following the death of Stalin, Nikolai Khokhlov, a captain

in Soviet state security and a trained assassin, received an order from his superiors to travel to West Germany and kill a Russian émigré, Georgii Okolovich, who was the head of NTS, a well-known anti-Soviet organization. Khokhlov was ordered to murder Okolovich with a silenced pistol that had been made especially for him at the Lubyanka so that it would look like a pack of cigarettes. Instead of assassinating Okolovich, however, Khokhlov decided to defect and to cooperate with West German and American intelligence. At a press conference held shortly afterwards, Khokhlov detailed the history of his life and the plan for the assassination and showed the press the special pistol that he had been given. The Soviet secret services appear to have immediately passed a death sentence on a man perceived by them to be monstrous traitor. “The chase lasted for three years. That amount of time was needed to choose a propitious moment in which to liquidate [Khokhlov]. In 1957, at a conference that brought together representatives of various anti-Soviet Russian organizations in Frankfurt, Khokhlov came out of the hall and ordered a coffee. They took a long time bringing it to him. Khokhlov drank a mouthful and then hurried back into the hall.1 Though he had consumed only a small amount of the coffee, Khokhlov fell seriously ill and came close to dying. He developed Lyell Syndrome—an acute skin disease—and his hair began to fall out. Eventually, doctors in the United States were able to determine that he had been poisoned with radioactive thallium. Subsequently, Khokhlov observed that the Soviet secret services had wanted to kill him “in such a way that the assassin could get away and so that there would remain no evidence pointing to Soviet intelligence. They wanted to kill me in such a way that it would not be clear whether they had killed me at all, or whether I had died

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from mysterious causes. They wanted to kill me in such a way so that those familiar with Soviet intelligence would understand where the revenge had come from but, at the same time, so that those who were naïve or blind would be easy prey for disinformation.”2 The poison that was used on Khokhlov in 1957 was the product of more than thirty-five years of research by scientists working for the Soviet secret services. In 1921 Lenin had created “a laboratory for toxic substances that was absolutely secret and whose statute specified that its objective was to ‘combat the enemies of Soviet power.’”3 From 1937 on this secret laboratory was officially placed under the aegis of the NKVD. It was called Laboratory X, and its director was Professor Grigorii Maironovskii, whose research at the Institute of Biochemistry focused on the destruction of malignant tumors through the use of toxic gases and poisons. Maironovskii subsequently became known as “Doctor Death” and “the Soviet Dr. Mengele.” According to journalist and legal specialist Arcadi Vaksberg, the Swedish diplomat Raul Wallenburg was among the many prisoners that Maironovskii personally executed with a toxic substance on July 17, 1947. Wallenberg, as is well known, rescued large numbers of Hungarian Jews from the impending threat of Nazi extermination.4 It was Maironovskii’s successors who developed the poison that came close to killing Nikolai Khokhlov in 1957.

Ordering up an Assassination In December 1997, six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and forty years after the attempted poisoning of the “traitor” Khokhlov, a lieutenant colonel in the Russian special services, Aleksandr Litvinenko, and four of his colleagues from an elite FSB antiorganized-crime unit, URPO, were summoned to the office of their commander, General Evgenii Khokholkov. Khokholkov, who had supervised the assassination of Chechen separatist president Dzhokhar Dudaev in April of 1996, had recently been named head of this elite unit.5 The general, it turned out, was not in his office, but his assistant, Captain Aleksandr Kamyshnikov, transmitted an order to the five URPO operatives to wrap up the current case on which they were working. “This is not the type of case we should be dealing with,” Kamyshnikov told them. “We are the department of special tasks. Have you read this? He produced a copy of Special Tasks, the recently published memoir of Pavel Sudoplatov, the head of NKVD special tasks under Stalin. He had run the operation to assassinate Leon Trotskii, among other jobs. ‘This is our role model!’ [Kamyshnikov] waved the book. ‘Everyone is ordered to read it.’”6 The present-day Trotskii whom the URPO men were now ordered to assassinate was Boris Berezovskii, until recently a deputy head of the Russian Security Council and still a close advisor to President Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev. Berezovskii was known at that time as “the gray cardinal of the Kremlin.”

Litvinenko’s Biography Aleksandr Litvinenko was born in 1962 into a military family. Both his father and his grandfather (who brought him up in the North Caucasus town of Nalchik) had been military men. Litvinenko graduated from the Higher Military Command Red Banner School of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was then assigned to the Dzerzhinskii Division, a unit of the USSR KGB. His gifts as

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an investigator were recognized early on, and he was assigned to a military counterintelligence unit of the KGB. In 1988 he was officially moved from the MVD to the KGB. In 1991 he was transferred to the central apparatus of the KGB, where he worked for antiorganized-crime units. In 1994 when businessman Boris Berezovskii was nearly killed in a car-bomb incident, Litvinenko was the FSB officer assigned to investigate the case.7 In 1997 Litvinenko was transferred to URPO and promoted in rank to lieutenant colonel.8 During the first Chechen war (1994–1996), Litvinenko had frequently been sent to his hometown of Nalchik in Kabardino-Balkariya where he worked out of FSB headquarters. Demonstrating the trust invested in him by his superiors, he was the officer sent to interview Dzhokhar Dudaev’s widow, Alla, when she was apprehended in Nalchik in April 1996 on her way to Turkey.9 The sanguinary war in Chechnya appears to have served to disillusion the patriotic young officer. According to separatist leader Akhmed Zakaev, whom he befriended in London, Litvinenko slowly and painfully “came to the conclusion that the war in Chechnya was unjust and that it was conducted against the Chechen people due to their striving for independence.”10 Disillusionment prompted by the carnage in Chechnya combined in Litvinenko’s mind with a growing disappointment at the corruption eating away at Russian law enforcement and, especially, at his own supposedly incorrupt organization, the FSB. As Alex Goldfarb has recalled: “For Sasha, the war in Chechnya was at first essentially a sideshow, a distraction, which diverted the Agency’s attention and resources from what he saw as the core problem: corruption and crime among the police and the services … For nearly a year he had spent long nights at home at the kitchen table, drawing colored charts of mob connections with the top brass of the FSB and the ministry of the interior. He even wrote a memorandum about it, addressed to Yeltsin … But after meeting Berezovskii [in 1994], he never sent it.”11 According to Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko took Berezovskii up on an offer to arrange meetings with the head of Yeltsin’s bodyguards, General Aleksandr Korzhakov; the director of the FSB, General Mikhail Barsukov; and the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Ovchinnikov. “I was so naïve,” Litvinenko commented later. “I thought since they were the big bosses, they would take care of it and stop the mayhem in the services. Not in the least … The whole system was rotten to the core.”12 Once Litvinenko had been assigned to URPO in 1997, matters became even worse for him. He had poor relations with his new boss, General Khokholkov. Several years previously, before he had come to URPO, Litvinenko had been assigned to investigate a narcotics and extortion racket that some FSB officers had been running together with a criminal gang. “He alleged that he found a videotape of Khokholkov and leading mafia bosses discussing how they would divide the Russian drugs market between them. At the time Litvinenko was still working with the Moscow police and was frustrated when the case against Khokholkov was dropped…. ‘I had never felt more betrayed,’ he would say much later.”13 Like the Soviet assassin Nikolai Khokhlov in 1954, albeit for different reasons, Litvinenko and his four colleagues were loath to carry out the killing of Berezovskii. For one thing, “there was no written order to carry out the killing.”14 Following the meeting with Captain Kamyshnikov, Litvinenko and his colleagues went to see their immediate superior, Colonel Aleksandr Gusak, who was on sick leave. “Why are you so surprised,” Gusak reportedly replied when he had heard them out. “Khokholkov

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has already spoken to me about bumping off Berezovskii.”15 They subsequently went to see the then director of the FSB, General Nikolai Kovalev, with whom Litvinenko was acquainted. Kovalev “listened to what they had to say and called in the man who had given the order. Confronted by them, the man, according to Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, denied everything of course. He just denied anything of the sort had ever happened. And all those who had come to report the affair were taken off their duties and put under investigation.”16 At this point, the whistle-blowers realized that they might be in a race against time. General Khokholkov could quite easily have them arrested or even liquidated. Convinced that they could be thrown to the wolves, Litvinenko and his colleagues decided, in February 1998, to inform Berezovskii of the planned attempt on his life. Berezovskii then invited the officers to come to his office and to make a videotape detailing their allegations. “While the name of the instigator of the plot does not appear on … the video, it is clear from other contexts that the men are accusing their FSB line manager Evgenii Khokholkov and his deputy Aleksandr Kamyshnikov.”17 Having arrived at Berezovskii’s dacha, Litvinenko, Colonel Gusak, and a colleague named Andrei Ponkin informed ORT’s star anchor, Sergei Dorenko, of the nature of their grievances. “The men told the interviewer that they had been promoted in 1997 to a special unit charged with fighting ‘banditry’ whose existence was a secret even within the ranks of the FSB. Gusak said he received word that there was an order to have him killed, so they made the videotape to protect themselves … Litvinenko and another junior officer, Andei Ponkin … complained they were used a errand-boys for bosses, and ordered to terrorize the agency’s enemies.”18 Eventually, Berezovskii was able to persuade President Yeltsin to turn on URPO. The organization was disbanded, General Khokholkov was transferred, while FSB director Kovalev was fired. The shake-up occurred on July 25, 1998. Yeltsin then announced that the next director of the FSB would be Vladimir Putin, a former FSB lieutenant colonel who had been working in the Kremlin administration.

Litvinenko has a Meeting with Putin Berezovskii, who was seeking at the time to draw Putin into his political orbit, convinced Litvinenko to see the newly appointed FSB chieftain. As he had planned to do with Korzhakov, Litvinenko “wanted to impress his new boss and stayed up all night compiling a dossier of evidence to back up his allegations of what some FSB bosses had been up to—the illegal businesses, the protection rackets, the intimidation and the killings.”19 Litvinenko came to the meeting with Putin laden with evidence. To Litvinenko’s chagrin, Putin appeared unimpressed with his evidence and hostile to him personally: “I felt he was not sincere. He avoided eye contact and behaved as if he were not the [FSB] director but an actor playing a role. He looked at my chart, appeared to study it and asked a couple of random questions … ‘Shall I leave the chart?’ I asked. “No. No, thank you. You keep it. It’s your work.’ I gave him another list I had compiled and told him, ‘These officers are clean. I know for sure that you can rely on them in the war on corruption. There are honest people in the system,’ I said … He kept my files, said we would keep in touch and took my phone number … Putin never called.”20 “I know a man by his handshake,” Marina Litvinenko later recalled her husband telling her. “His was cold and spongy. I could see it in his eyes that he hated me.”21

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Putin did disband URPO at a direct order from the Kremlin, but Khokholkov was transferred to a sinecure position in the tax service and Kamyshnikov to another FSB department. On September 30, the prosecutors suddenly closed the URPO case without taking any action.22

A Press Conference that Proved Fatal for Litvinenko Berezovskii convinced Litvinenko and pressured Litvinenko’s URPO colleagues to go public with their accusations concerning an assassination plot.23 On November 17, 1998, there took place a dramatic televised press conference, organized by Berezovskii, that we can see, in retrospect, was one of the elements that eventually cost Litvinenko his life: [Litvinenko’s] accusations against the FSB and certain named officers within it were bitingly clear … “The FSB [he said] is being used by certain officials solely for their private purposes; instead of its original constitutional aim of providing security for the state and citizens, it is now being used for settling scores and carrying out private, political and criminal orders for payment. Sometimes the FSB is being used simply for the purpose of making money.” Litvinenko accused his superiors of extortion, kidnappings and murder … Then in a not very coded message to Putin [he said] “We hope and trust that the FSB will summon the courage to cleanse itself of those who … sabotage the gains of recent years and pervert the constitutional mission of the FSB, abusing their offices and issuing illegal orders to commit terrorist acts.”24

While five other FSB officers participated in the press conference in disguise, it was the undisguised Litvinenko who was the star of the show. Like the defector Nikolai Khokhlov in 1954, Litvinenko had committed an unforgivable sin and a crime against the secret services. He had disobeyed an order to kill Boris Berezovskii and then, far worse, had gone public with his complaint. As General Oleg Kalugin, another defector, commented to NBC TV’s Ann Curry: “They [the FSB] called [Litvinenko] a traitor, the one who will never be forgotten, will never be forgiven.”25 In a conversation held in December of 1998 with journalist Elena Tregubova of the newspaper Kommersant, Putin made it clear that his anger was directed against Litvinenko and his colleagues rather than against Berezovskii: “Personally I believe that with the help of this scandal those officers [Litvinenko and his colleagues] were simply ensuring themselves a labor market for the future … This history with the press conference which you mentioned testifies to the internal illness of our system.”26 As Martin Sixsmith has recalled: The Kremlin officials I spoke to were honest enough to admit that Vladimir Putin was ‘not fond’ of Litvinenko, breaking with the official line that Sasha was of so little consequence the president never gave him a thought. We know that Putin was not indifferent: Litvinenko had been important enough to gain direct access to him in 1998 with his allegations against the FSB, and Putin nursed a simmering resentment against him until his death.27

On March 25, 1999, Litvinenko was arrested by military prosecutors on a street in central Moscow. He was charged with minor infractions but held in Lefortovo

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Prison for six months. A closed trial was held in October but, because Yeltsin was still president, the judiciary was still able to show flashes of independence. The FSB failed in its efforts to have Litvinenko sentenced to eight years of imprisonment. On November 26, the judge pronounced Litvinenko not guilty. At this point, he was rearrested by the FSB while still in the courtroom. He was then charged with having beaten up a suspect and having “extorted” a can of sweet peas from a farm produce vendor. Unimpressed, a Moscow military court released Litvinenko from prison but ordered him not to leave town. His passport was taken away.28

Litvinenko Arrives in London Litvinenko decided to escape from Russia through Turkey.29 When he arrived at Heathrow Airport as a transit passenger, Litvinenko was able to convince the British authorities not to send him back to Moscow. Through a translator “Litvinenko had described to the police not only his persecution at the hands of the Russian authorities but also the extent to which the FSB—especially the unit fighting organized crime—had been corrupted by officers involved in racketeering and other crimes.”30 Litvinenko arrived at Heathrow on November 1, 2000; he was poisoned precisely six years later, on November 1, 2006. Once Litvinenko had received political asylum in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2001, “his hands were untied and he threw himself once again into the passion that drove his life. In interviews, books and articles on anti-Kremlin website, Sasha resumed his campaign against his former employers with a vengeance.”31 These writings and activities will not be discussed in this chapter—they are summarized in detail in the useful books by Sixsmith and Goldfarb cited in the footnotes—because, in my view, while presumably galling to the Putin regime and to the FSB, they did nothing to alter a decision that had already been taken: namely, to kill him as a traitor. As early as 2002 a first attempt appears to have been made to assassinate him in London.32 Another preparatory move—not just in regard to Litvinenko—had been the reopening by Putin of the laboratory of toxic substances in Moscow. According to the well-informed Akhmed Zakaev: “In 1995 Yeltsin closed this laboratory by decree and in 2002 Putin opened it.”33 As early as 2002, “the celebrated Chechen terrorist Khattab [an ethnic Saudi] was killed by means of a poisoned letter.”34

An Undeclared Campaign of Aggression against the United Kingdom During the period from late 2000, when Litvinenko defected, until his death in November 2006, relations between Russia and the United Kingdom deteriorated markedly. The chief reason for this worsening of relations was the refusal of Britain’s independent judiciary to extradite Boris Berezovskii and Akhmed Zakaev to Russia to stand trial on various charges. The British judge who ruled on these two cases, Timothy Workman, could well have been a target of assassination by the Russian secret services: “One UK source closely linked to British intelligence told how he had a conversation with a Russian intelligence officer in 2004, in which the Russian spy spoke of the killing of a British citizen carried out by Russian agents. In January 2004, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Workman was found shot on his doorstep … The Russian intelligence source told his British contact that Robert Workman was killed

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in a case of mistaken identity. The real target had been a judge called Timothy Workman who lived not far from the scene of the murder.”35 By 2006 the Putin regime was engaging in open harassment of Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Anthony Brenton. On November 11, ten days after Litvinenko had been poisoned, The Foreign Office was forced to make an official complaint to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the treatment of the ambassador, Tony Brenton. For four months [i.e., since August 2006] he has been the target of intimidation by “Nashi,” a rightwing youth movement linked to the Kremlin. The group has trailed and heckled the envoy, picketing the embassy and triggering a violent incident outside his residence in September. So serious has been the harassment that there are now fears for the ambassador’s safety.36

More than a month after Litvinenko’s poisoning, Brenton was required to assert in a public statement that he considered the Kremlin to be a participant in his persecution. “The connections of the organization ‘Nashi’ to the Kremlin are well known,” he underlined. “Their leader has met repeatedly with President Putin, and one of his advisers [Vladislav Surkov], as is well known, participated in the creation of this movement. Even if one admits that the Kremlin does not control their actions directly, such a level of influence presupposes that the Kremlin could stop them if it had the desire to do so.”37

The Assassination of Yandarbiev During the period of 2004–2006, the Russian special services became increasingly active in their operations abroad. On February 13, 2004, the former acting president of separatist Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, was assassinated by a car bomb in Qatar. Two GRU (i.e., military special forces) officers, Anatolii Belashov and Vasilii Bogachev, were taken into custody by the Qatar authorities. A third assassin, Aleksandr Fetisov, was a high-ranking diplomat at the Russian embassy there and thus enjoyed diplomatic immunity; he was expelled from the country.38 A Qatar court found the assassins guilty, but they were subsequently extradited to Russia. “The [then] minister of defense Sergei Ivanov confirmed in a televised interview, not without pride, that the murderers, extradited from Qatar by Russia, supposedly to expiate their guilt in their own country, had been given a hero’s welcome at a military airport in Moscow.”39 Investigative journalist Igor Korolkov has noted: “[Russian] officials assured the world: the arrested employees of the Russian embassy in Qatar had no relationship to the murder … But it turned out: the whole process of the mining of Yandarbiev’s vehicle was filmed on videotape.”40

The Poisonings of Roman Tsepov and Viktor Yushchenko Also in 2004 there occurred a killing in Russia that may have employed a sophisticated new poison: polonium-210. The former head of the Baltic Eskort protection agency that had guarded the Petersburg mayor’s office (including then deputy mayor Vladimir Putin), Roman Tsepov, died after he visited and drank tea at the FSB and regular police headquarters in Petersburg. Tsepov had taken the dangerous step of

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trying to involve himself in the takeover of giant oil company Yukos, claiming to represent the interests of the powerful Kremlin deputy chief of staff and leading silovik [member of “power ministries,” i.e., police, military, etc.], Igor Sechin.41 Also in 2004 a leading candidate for the post of Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, was, as is well known, poisoned with dioxin, which resulted in acute facial disfigurement. Yushchenko has intimated that he believes that the Russian secret services provided the poison that was used against him.42

Authorization to Kill “Extremist” Enemies Abroad In July of 2006, three months before Litvinenko’s poisoning, the Russian State Duma passed two amended laws, later signed into effect by Putin, that authorized the Russian president to use “formations of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and units of special purpose [i.e., FSB spetsnaz]” to kill extremists beyond the territory of the Russian Federation.43 Extremist activity was said to include “public slander in relation to a person occupying a state position of the Russian Federation.” Commenting on these new amended laws, Vladimir Bukovsky has asked pertinently: “Why would the Russian authorities rush through these laws if they had no intention of implementing them?”44 The assassination of former FSB lieutenant colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko was an intricately and, in some ways, brilliantly planned operation. The active stage of the operation lasted about a year, from late 2005 until November 1, 2006, but the advanced planning, according to a number of commentators, stretched back to 2001, the year following Litvinenko’s defection to Britain.

Portrait of an Assassin Andrei Lugovoi was born during the mid-to-late 1960s into a hereditary military family. In the 1980s he began his studies at the Moscow Command School. His apparent coconspirators in Litvinenko’s murder, Dmitrii Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, attended the same military school. After graduation, Lugovoi was assigned to the elite Kremlin Regiment, where he served for five years as a platoon and then as a company commander. In 1987 he was assigned to the Ninth Chief Directorate of the USSR KGB (the rough equivalent of the American Secret Service) and then, after the fall of Communism, he served in the Russian Federation’s equivalent of that entity, the FSO, until 1996, when he retired at the rank of major from government service. Among those high-ranking state figures he protected while in the Ninth Directorate were acting prime minister Egor Gaidar and Boris Berezovskii, while the latter was serving as deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council. After his retirement, Lugovoi headed up the security service for the television channel ORT that belonged to Berezovskii at that time.45 On June 29, 2001, Lugovoi was arrested by the FSB for attempting to free a close business ally of Berezovskii’s, Nikolai Glushkov, from a clinic where he was awaiting transfer back to Lefortovo Prison. Lugovoi was sentenced to fourteen months of imprisonment for this misdeed.46 Martin Sixsmith has observed: “The prison authorities may have seemed suspiciously complicit in the escape … [Lugovoi]

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was quietly released soon afterwards … If the aim was to infiltrate him as a double agent into the Berezovskii camp, it means Lugovoi then spent five years or more as a ‘sleeper,’ gaining the confidence of the enemy before finally carrying out his long-planned mission.”47 Of course it is not clear that, in 2001, the original plan had Lugovoi functioning as an assassin or polonium-210 serving as a poison. In the period between 2001 and 2006, Lugovoi had become a wealthy man, owning 60 percent of the charter capital of the “Ninth Wave” protection agency, with its large numbers of wealthy clients.48 The name Ninth Wave is “apparently an allusion to the former KGB Directorate as well as a maritime expression for the worst wave in a sequence.”49 Lugovoi’s office was located on the second floor of the Radisson SAS Slavyanskaya, “one of Moscow’s fanciest hotels.”50 The FSB may well have served as a “roof” for Lugovoi’s successful protection agency.

A Special Operation Begins What former GRU officer Boris Volodarskii, who now lives in Britain, has termed “a broad-scale, large, and rather well-planned operation of the Russian special services” commenced in late 2005 when “Lugovoi very unexpectedly telephoned Litvinenko for the first time. He didn’t have [Litvinenko’s] telephone number and Sasha had not been in contact with him for a long time. Lugovoi proposed that they meet in London and begin a business collaboration.”51 The two renewed their acquaintance at a lavish sixtieth birthday that Berezovskii threw for himself in January of 2006. Alex Goldfarb has recalled: “We had shared a table: Sasha, Marina [Litvinenko’s wife], Andrei Lugovoi, and I … But as Sasha told me at the hospital, that party was the beginning of a surprisingly intense interaction between them. Back in Moscow they had never been close … [Lugovoi] suggested that they work together: Sasha could be his man in London. Surely there must be British security companies interested in the Russian market … Over the year they had met two or three times. No real business had come of it, but the prospects seemed great. His last meeting with Lugovoi was on November 1, in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel.”52 By October of 2006 the conspiracy had moved into high gear. On October 16, Lugovoi met with Litvinenko at the latter’s favorite London eatery, the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly. During that meeting, he introduced Litvinenko to a business associate of his, Dmitrii Kovtun. Kovtun was a close childhood friend of Lugovoi’s and, like him, had attended the Command Military School in Moscow. Unlike Lugovoi, however, Kovtun had served as a captain in the GRU (military intelligence special forces) where he had been posted to Czechoslovakia and East Germany. While in Germany he had met and married a German woman and had obtained permanent German residency; he and the woman had subsequently divorced but remained on good terms.53

Failed Assassination or “Dress Rehearsal”? We now know that both Lugovoi and Kovtun had already been contaminated with polonium-210 on October 16, when they met with Litvinenko. “Everywhere that they went on October 16—Erinys, an international security company on Grosvenor Street, a sushi bar on Piccadilly, and the Best Western Premier Shraftesbury Hotel near Piccadilly Circus—later showed traces of polonium-210, according to British

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health officials.”54 There are various interpretations as to what Lugovoi and Kovtun were doing in London on October 16, in possession of polonium-210: “One hypothesis,” Alex Goldfarb has noted, “is that there were two attempts to put polonium into Sasha’s meal; the first one, possibly at Itsu, did not work out, so the assassins came back for a second attempt [on November 1], which succeeded. Another hypothesis is that the October 16 meeting was a dress rehearsal.”55 Oleg Gordievskii, a defector and a former USSR KGB acting chief of station in London, is one of those who believes that it was a dress rehearsal: “So [October 16th],” he maintains, “was a general rehearsal. All operatives, special services and military personnel conduct a general rehearsal for their operations. On that day the rehearsal took place. They had the poison with them because it is required to have all military substances present. They came … but they did not place the ampoule.”56 Gordievskii also pointed out that “the organizers of the assassination were efficient to the point of ruthlessness; they put operational priorities first and were prepared to sacrifice the safety of their own agents. Crucially … the operatives were not told about the danger they were running by handling polonium.”57

Why Polonium? British and Russian scientists have speculated about why polonium-210 was chosen as a poison. Dr. Nick Priest, a professor of environmental toxicology at Middlesex University and the United Kingdom’s leading authority on radioactive contaminate, has noted that the choice of alpha-emitting polonium was a sophisticated one. The choice of polonium was clever because, unlike the majority of isotopes, it does not emit any gamma energy. Gamma energy is what airport radiation scanners are programmed to test for, so polonium won’t show up on them. It’s easy to transport because it looks just like water and it can be carried in neutral solutions … Whoever planned the murder would have known that cases of polonium are so rare—there had been none in Britain—that doctors do not even test a patient for it … So there was every likelihood that the source of Litvinenko’s death might have gone undetected forever.58

As to how the killers contaminated themselves and the places they visited, Priest has pointed to the remarkable lack of precautions taken. “They must have opened the vial … They either opened it in Moscow or in London, possibly to pour two or more small doses into one vial. As soon as they did so, their hands and clothes would have become contaminated and anything they touched would have been contaminated … The radiation trail was fatal for Sasha Litvinenko, it was highly dangerous for his assassins who became contaminated, but it was a godsend for the Metropolitan Police.”59 Boris Zhuikov, head of the radioisotope laboratory of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow has reached similar conclusions: “There are different variants as to why they [the assassins] left so many traces before 1 November. Either they brought it in earlier, in October, for example, but for one or another reason they did not succeed in poisoning him. But the ampoule was opened, and they began to contaminate everywhere … The second variant is that the ampoule itself was insufficiently hermetic.”60 Where was the polonium produced? The web-site Gazeta.ru looked into the question and reported: “As the sources of Gazeta.ru in the power structures maintain,

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in Moscow the polonium was most likely kept at the Second Scientific-Research Institute (NII-2) of the Federal Security Service, located in the south of Moscow, on Academician Varga Street. From there, the sources say, it could move in a sanctioned way or on the black market to former employees of the FSB.”61 As to where the polonium was manufactured, Gazeta.ru points to the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov. “Polonium [one Russian specialist noted] is very difficult to produce and handle. There is such know-how only at Sarov, and I don’t think anyone else has it.”62

The Poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko The killers came back to London to meet with Litvinenko on November 1, at the Pine Bar of the Hotel Millennium. On this occasion, Lugovoi and Kovtun were accompanied by a third man, Vyacheslav Sokolenko, who had attended the same Military Command School as his two colleagues and who claimed to work for Lugovoi’s “Ninth Wave” security company. All three had supposedly come to London to watch a much-touted soccer game. Once again Lugovoi and Kovtun left traces of contamination in the hotels in which they stayed and in the restaurants where they ate. Since Kovtun had flown in to London by way of Hamburg, where he had visited his former wife, he also left traces of contamination in Germany.63 To protect the killers from suspicion on the off-chance that the poison could be identified, an extraordinarily elaborate and complex diversion seems to have been put in motion to cast suspicion on an Italian self-described defense consultant, Mario Scaramella, with whom Litvinenko was acquainted and who had come to London to attend a session of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The two met at the Itsu sushi bar shortly before 3:30 p.m., before the latter met with his assassins at approximately 4:30 p.m..

A Skillful Diversion As Oleg Gordievskii later underscored: On the whole [Scaramella] is guilty of nothing. He was manipulated by the not-unknown [Evgenii] Limarev. He [Limarev] began to send him warnings: a murder is being prepared, you need to travel immediately to London … Limarev is an agent of the KGB [sic] who was moved to Europe to work on the Italian scholar Paolo Guzzanti and on Mario Scaramella. And he did so … [Scaramella] is a typical naïve Italian fool … Scaramella said: “On the list that I received from Limarev are the names: Berezovskii, Politkovskaya, Akhmed Zakaev, Limarev, Litvinenko and so on.”64

Limarev, who seems to have skillfully maneuvered Scaramella into a position where he would become the British police’s chief suspect—if, that is, it could ever be proven that Litvinenko had been murdered—was born in 1965 into the family of a Soviet diplomat, who is said to have been an officer in the KGB. In 1988 Limarev graduated from the Moscow Institute for the Countries of Asia and Africa. He claims to have worked from 1988 to 1991 as a translator and teacher of foreign languages at a center of the USSR KGB’s First Chief Directorate; while there, he worked with members of the KGB special forces unit “Vympel,” which specialized in operations abroad. It has been suggested that, in fact, Limarev was himself undergoing training

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at this elite KGB special forces center. Limarev subsequently enrolled at the First Chief Directorate’s Andropov Red Banner Institute. In 1991 however, he left the institute to concentrate on a business career. “In 1993 Evgenii Limarev and his family took up permanent residence in Geneva … At the end of 1999 he moved to France where he registered as an independent consultant in the politics and security of the countries of the former USSR.”65 Like Andrei Lugovoi, Limarev had succeeded in establishing contact with Berezovskii and his entourage.66 Limarev’s adroit manipulation of Scaramella met with success. On November 21, 2006, Scaramella told Sky News: “I was in London to meet Mr. Litvinenko because I wanted to discuss with him some alarming news. The information I had received was very disturbing and contained details of plots against Russians both in Italy and Great Britain … I was with him for maybe 30–45 minutes … The information I received was in two emails.”67

Murder at the Pine Bar At about 4:30 p.m. Litvinenko, who had not yet been contaminated by polonium, arrived at the Pine Bar of the Hotel Millennium in central London. While he was later dying in the hospital he told his close friend Akhmed Zakaev what had occurred. As Zakaev subsequently related: “It happened on 1 November [2006] in the bar of the Hotel Millenium where he met with Lugovoi, Kovtun and a third man whom at that time he did not know by his first or last name. When he came to them, he went up to the table where they were drinking. They proposed that he drink liquor. I am recalling now what Sasha told me and I am reporting his words. Sasha said, ‘They knew that I don’t drink liquor.’ But several times they proposed various kinds of [alcoholic] drinks. When he declined, they extended a teacup to him: ‘Will you drink tea with us?’ To my question he responded: The tea had already been poured into the cup and it was standing on the table. Did they pour it out in his presence? Sasha answered that the tea had already been poured out. He drank it, two or three mouthfuls. And from that moment he experienced a feeling of unpleasantness.”68 Litvinenko reported the same details to his wife, Marina: “Sasha told me that during the time of his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun he drank only tea. So he drank only that tea, he didn’t even finish what was in the cup, and then he said that the tea was not tasty.”69 Andrei Lugovoi has offered a different version of what happened: “He and two other men, including one named Dmitrii Kovtun, met with Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel [on November 1] … He said Litvinenko did not eat or drink anything.”70 Following his poisoning, Litvinenko became violently ill and was soon hospitalized. After days of intense suffering, he died on November 23. The doctors and scientists analyzing his case were able to determine from a urine sample what the poison was only hours before he died. President Putin appears to have been led by his advisors to believe that the British would prove incapable of discovering the nature of the poison. At a press conference in Helsinki, Finland, Putin said “there was no official finding that Litvinenko had been murdered. ‘As far as I know, the medical certificate of the British doctors does not indicate that he died a violent death,’ Putin said. ‘It does not. Hence there is no reason for such talk at all.’”71 Shortly after this statement was made, the British authorities revealed that polonium-210 had been the poison.

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Egor Gaidar Is Also Poisoned On the day following Litvinenko’s death, former Russian acting prime minister Egor Gaidar was himself poisoned during breakfast at a conference held in Dublin. (At one point Andrei Lugovoi had headed up Gaidar’s bodyguard service.) According to an essay published by Gaidar in the Financial Times, he was fortunate not to have died.72 Ekaterina Genieva, a senior official at the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow, who ate breakfast with Gaidar in Dublin that morning, was also poisoned: “Apparently she got a much lower dose, and her symptoms were milder, but she was very ill for four months and her own doctors believe she had been poisoned by an unknown substance.”73 One theory concerning this second poisoning is that those who ordered the assassination of Litvinenko wanted to distract public attention from the “nuclear” dimension of the former FSB officer’s death by poisoning a prominent former Russian politician in a more traditional, “non-nuclear” fashion. Eventually, the health authorities determined that a large number of British citizens had been put at risk by the actions of Lugovoi and Kovtun: “To date, 733 people other than Litvinenko have been tested. Of those, 716 were considered to be at no risk of developing illnesses in relation to polonium-210. Seventeen were contaminated to above average levels but the HPA [Health Protection Agency] say that, for them, ‘an increased [health] risk in the long term is likely to be very small.’”74

The British Police Crack the Case By early January 2007, the British press was reporting that Scotland Yard had solved the case: “British detectives are certain they know who murdered … Litvinenko with radioactive poison. But they say authorities in Russia are unlikely to send his two killers here to face trial … A Scotland Yard source said a trail of polonium linked the suspects, adding, ‘We are 100 per cent sure who administered the poison, where and how.’”75 Another British newspaper, The Daily Mail, wrote that “police are to issue warrants against three suspects in the poisoning of … Litvinenko.”76 In June an announcement was made concerning the 2007 laureates of state awards on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday. Among the awardees were Soviet defector Oleg Gordievskii (“for serving the security of the United Kingdom”); Judge Timothy Workman (“for a special contribution to upholding legality and order”); and the British ambassador to Moscow, Anthony Brenton.77 In announcing these awards, the British government appeared to be sending a firm message to the Russian leadership. Also in June Prime Minister Tony Blair is reported to have raised the issue of Andrei Lugovoi’s extradition during a meeting with Vladimir Putin: “Tony Blair [was] less than three weeks from quitting No. 10 … He and Putin had barely shaken hands before Blair ordered the pool of press photographers out of the room … The Russian president began by telling Blair he was sick of the West’s recent treatment of his country … Blair gave as good as he got … [He] went on to demand that Russia extradite Andrei Lugovoi.”78 Obviously Britain had decided at this point that it wanted to charge Lugovoi—and Lugovoi alone, for reasons that are presently unknown. Again in June a Russian national who had arrived in London on June 16 was arrested by Scotland Yard on June 21 “on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.”

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His reported target was Boris Berezovskii. “The idea that a second political killing may have been attempted [in London] so soon after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has,” one press report noted, “caused considerable alarm.”79 The suspect was released to the immigration service for expulsion from Britain on June 23. In July of 2007 the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, issued the following statement: Today the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have announced that they have decided, after applying the evidential and public interest tests set out in the Code for Crown prosecutors, to prosecute Mr. Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian citizen, for the murder of Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko … They have concluded that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute Mr. Lugovoi for murder and it is in the public interest to do so. It is alleged that in London on or about 1 November 2006 Mr. Lugovoi poisoned Mr. Litvinenko by administering a lethal dose of Polonium-210, a radioactive material. Mr. Litvinenko died on 23 November 2006 of acute radiation injury. The CPS will now take immediate steps to seek the extradition of Mr. Lugovoi from Russia to the United Kingdom so that he can be charged and prosecuted for murder in this country. I agree with the CPS decision.”80

A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair commented: “There is no doubt at all as to the seriousness with which we regard this case. Murder is murder.”81 Also in July a senior British official gave a statement to the Sunday Times of London in which he conveyed the government’s view of the murder. Since it is unlikely that Litvinenko’s killers will be brought to trial in Britain, this statement serves as a useful summing up of the views of the British police, prosecutors, and intelligence community concerning his murder. “The senior British official,” the Sunday Times went on to report, “was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was ‘undeniably statesponsored terrorism on Moscow’s part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government.’” “The official,” the article noted, “had access to the latest police and intelligence findings, and he was reflecting the views of senior Home Office counter-terrorism officials, Scotland Yard detectives and others with close knowledge of the murder investigation. All confirmed last week that they believe the plot to poison Litvinenko in London last year was ordered by the Russian secret service, the FSB.”82 “British officials,” the account continued, “are saying that the police investigation implicates the FSB itself. They point to the estimated 4.5 million [British] pounds cost of the radioactive polonium-210 used to kill Litvinenko. They confirm it has been traced back to Russia—probably to the nuclear center at the closed city of Sarov.” In addition, “they also point out that last summer the Russian parliament gave Putin the right to order the FSB to carry out assassinations of ‘enemies of the Russian state.’ They are careful to refrain from claiming he actually ordered the killing. ‘Yes, the road leads to the FSB, but where the road goes once it’s inside the FSB is not something the police are really aware of,’ said one of the officials.”83 The conclusions of the British “senior official” seem, as we have seen, to be borne out by the facts of the case. As for the question of the Russian president’s responsibility for the crime, KGB defector General Oleg Kalugin has asserted: “Aleksandr Litvinenko was assassinated by the Russian security service, and President Putin bears full responsibility for this crime, whether he ordered the execution or simply let his subordinate thugs do the job.”84

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For Reasons of Commerce, Britain Turns the other Cheek By late July of 2007 the British government under its new prime minister, Gordon Brown, had apparently adopted a new approach to Russia: After a round of tit-for-tat expulsions—and the curious incident of the hit-man [reportedly sent to kill Berezovskii] … —the heat has gone out of the confrontation. If Gordon Brown and David Miliband, his foreign secretary, believed that the FSB murdered a British citizen on British soil then their response was surprisingly low down the diplomatic Richter scale. Oleg Gordievskii, the KGB defector, called it “totally pathetic” … A senior official at the Foreign Office said, “That’s that. Both sides have now acted. What’s important now is that we want to show both nations can still be friends.”85

Issues of trade and commerce appear to have been the reasons behind Britain’s adoption of a new tack toward Russia.

Summing Up Martin Sixsmith has written as follows concerning the motive behind the murder of Litvinenko: It was a demonstration of power … They [the assassins] had indeed been sent to kill “Trotsky’s [i.e., Berezovskii’s] dog,” as Russian state television so sneeringly put it, but they were killing him at Trotsky’s heel … The whole Litvinenko operation was built on intimidation, and it reeks of the testosterone-fuelled machismo I have observed so often in members or former members of the Russian special services … The Litvinenko murder … was explicitly designed to be disrespectful and insulting, to instill fear and paranoia. The perpetrators were saying, “We know this is a Western country, but we have the power and you are not safe.”86

To these useful words I would add that the murder was also clearly intended to send a message to all present and future FSB traitors: “we never forget, and we never forgive.” The commission of a “nuclear assassination” on British soil was also, it seems, viewed as appropriate payback for Tony Blair’s unwillingness to override the independent British judiciary and to send Berezovskii and Zakaev to Russia for trial.

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Chapter 6

4

The Ma ss Media in the Service of S oviet Commu nism and in Post-Commu nist Russia Lee Edwards

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nlike traditional components of national power such as economic resources and military strength, the mass media are a recent development in political history. Johann Gutenberg invented the letter press in the latter part of the fifteenth century, but there was no true “mass media” until the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century. The American press contributed significantly to the success of the American Revolution by honoring inalienable rights like life, liberty, and property while the French press quickened the demise of the French Revolution by promoting utopian notions like the perfectability of man, total democracy, and collectivism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin began applying totalitarian politics to the mass media. In the first issues of his new newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), Lenin defined a revolutionary newspaper as “an organization ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle.” He declared: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.”1 Unwilling to wait patiently for the “inevitable” triumph of Communism predicted by Karl Marx, Lenin proposed that mass movements should be promoted through the mass media and led by a centrally controlled and ideologically homogeneous party. He asserted that the ideas behind the media are more important than the media themselves. Reporters and editors should be “professional revolutionaries who will give not their spare evenings but the whole of their lives” to political organizing that will reshape all of human society. With such a cadre, Lenin said, more than a decade before the October Revolution of 1917, “I will turn Russia upside down.”2

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We encounter here the first of several paradoxes about Lenin’s theory of mass communications. He calls for a highly repressive, coercive political system that nevertheless emphasizes the importance of “persuasion” through the mass media. Did Lenin really believe that propaganda worked? Did he believe, for example, that “ideas are weapons” even when the political police do not have the weapons to enforce those ideas? Conversely, if the political police had ample power (Lenin also believed that it should have), then why bother with “ideas,” with agitation and propaganda? I believe it can be argued that as an ideologue, as a man driven, even possessed, by ideas, Lenin was a true believer in the power of ideas when they were coupled with agitation and organization. In Leninist theory all three—agitation, propaganda, and organization— must be present for political success. In a highly repressive society there is no way to tell whether or not “persuasion” has worked because it is not possible to know if the conformity displayed is due to persuasion or intimidation. At the same time it is undeniable that totalitarianism is inconceivable without the monopoly of the mass media. Legitimate knowledge and information have to be restricted and manipulated. Alternative sources must be eliminated. This is precisely what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did. The mutiny of the Russian army and the uprising of the peasants during the autumn of 1917 paralyzed but did not overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky. The final blow was struck by some three million industrial workers on whom the Bolsheviks had been concentrating their revolutionary propaganda for months. Lenin personally wrote, and had distributed to local Bolshevik Party organizations and the Petrograd and Moscow Party committees, dozens of letters, messages, and pamphlets that set forth the Bolshevik program and rebutted the arguments of the opposition. The key battleground was Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), within which the Bolsheviks distributed specialized newspapers like Worker’s Road and Soldier as well as the national party newspaper, Pravda. Every edition was emblazoned with the bold slogan: “Peace, land to the peasants, workers’ control in industry, all power to the Soviets.” In his classic study of the Russian Revolution, William Henry Chamberlin wrote: This nationwide sweep of Bolshevism did not mean that a hundred and fifty million people of various races and languages had suddenly been converted to the idea that more or less clearly animated the 300,000 organized Bolsheviki of that time … But the magic of the slogan “Peace and Land” was sufficient for the time being to carry the Soviet banner triumphantly from the factory quarters of Petrograd to the rolling steppes of Ukraina to the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok.3

Lenin used the Bolshevik-controlled media to bring down the government. Once he seized power, Lenin used the government to control the media and used the media to reinforce the authority of the government. One of his first acts was to publish a decree that any newspaper “calling for open resistance or insubordination to the Workers’ or Peasants’ Government” or “sowing sedition through demonstrably slanderous distortion of fact” would be suppressed and their editors put on trial.4 The few remaining members of the independent press were liquidated in the summer of 1918. Along with daily newspapers, Lenin also eliminated the independent monthlies, some of which had been in existence since the eighteenth century.

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In October 1921, according to historian Richard Pipes, the Cheka (the first incarnation of the Soviet political police, or state security) was given the authority to enforce preventive military censorship. “Military secrets” were undefined so that this measure extended the censor’s power to publications that did not deal with military matters. The regime’s piecemeal approach to censorship was finally consolidated in June 1922 with the establishment of the Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing, popularly known as Glavlit. Implementation of Glavlit’s decrees was given to the GPU, the successor of the Cheka. The rules guiding Glavlit’s censors were progressively tightened, Pipes wrote, “until every semblance of independent thought disappeared from public life.”5 From the moment he seized power, Lenin systematically uprooted all existing institutions, including an independent press, to clear the ground for the establishment of a totalitarian regime. In Pipes’, words, such a regime was “unknown to previous history.” It imposed the authority of an all-powerful “party” on the state, which enforced its will “by means of unbounded terror.” The unbounded exponent of the unbounded terror was Lenin’s chosen successor, Joseph Stalin, author of the theory that the closer Communism approached final victory, the more intense grew social conflicts—“a notion that justified a bloodbath of unprecedented ferocity.”6 Lenin and Stalin represented two sides of the same coin: the despotic powers that Stalin exercised were put in place by Lenin. It was Lenin, according to Richard Pipes, who introduced mass terror with hostage taking and concentration camps, who viewed law and courts as “substantiating and legitimizing” terror, and who authorized Articles 57 and 58 of the Crime Code, omnibus clauses that Stalin used “to execute and imprison millions of innocent citizens.” And it was Lenin who had the party pass a resolution outlawing “factions”, which in turn enabled Stalin to dispose of anyone who disagreed with him as a “deviationist.” From “the Party is always right,” Pipes points out, it was an easy transition to “the leader of the Party is always right.”7 Nevertheless, in the 1920s a certain amount of intellectual freedom was tolerated. Early Soviet censorship laid down what could not be published but did not tell authors what to publish. In the 1930s, Pipes says, this policy sharply changed: “Censorship became positive as authors were instructed what they should and, indeed, had to write. All negative information about the country was suppressed.”8 Integral to the Soviet totalitarianism were the mass media, which did two critical things: they repeated in numbing detail the alleged successes of the Party and its leaders in governing and problem solving, thereby justifying its tight hold on all the levers of power; and they concealed and distorted the wider world beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In so doing, the historian Jeffrey Brooks has written, the media produced by the end of the 1920s “a grandiose system of public lying” that helped to prepare the way for the Great Famine and the Great Terror of the 1930s.9 *

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As we have seen, the secret police—the Cheka, 1917–1922; the GPU and the OGPU, 1922–1934; the NKVD, 1934–1954; and the KGB, 1954–1991—were the principal agents of terror, given wide latitude to eliminate all enemies of the regime. They operated the Gulag, and they monitored public opinion and controlled public information through a vast network of agents and informants. So great was their power in Stalin’s last years, Richard Pipes has written, that in many respects they “usurped the powers that Lenin had bestowed on the Communist Party.”10

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There was much for the secret police to do. More than six million people died in the Great Famine of 1932–1933, the direct result of Moscow’s forced-collectivization program. Unlike the famine of 1921–1922, which the Soviets openly acknowledged and for which they sought international help, the regime consistently denied the famine of 1932–1933. According to Nicolas Werth in The Black Book of Communism, the few voices abroad that attempted to draw attention to the tragedy were drowned out by Soviet propaganda. The Soviet authorities were helped by statements such as that by Edouard Herriot, the French senator and leader of the Radical Party, who traveled through Ukraine in 1933. Upon his return, he declared that Ukraine was full of “admirably irrigated and cultivated fields and collective farms” resulting in “magnificent harvests.” He concluded: “I have crossed the whole of Ukraine, and I can assure you that the entire country is like a garden in full bloom.”11 Such blindness resulted from a series of Potemkin shows produced by the GPU for foreign guests like Herriot that featured kolkhozy and model children’s gardens. The truth about the Great Famine, distributed only through small-circulation pamphlets published by Ukrainian émigré organizations, was not widely understood until the publication of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow in 1986 and that of other works by researchers in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. One of the most important obstacles to an understanding of the Ukrainian Famine, Conquest writes, was the capability of Stalin and the Soviet authorities to conceal or confuse the facts. They were abetted by Westerners who wished to deceive or to be deceived. And there was the Soviets’ skillful use of language that “tended to justify or at least excuse” the facts. For example, they widely dispersed the image of the exploiting “kulak”—the rich, powerful, and unpopular landowner who was necessarily purged as an enemy of the party and the people. In fact, by 1918 the kulak had disappeared; the word was used of a farmer with two or three cows or even of a poorer farmer friendly to the former. By the time of the terror-famine in the early 1930s, even these “kulaks” were no longer to be found in the villages.12 A major element in Stalin’s operations against the peasantry was what Boris Pasternak called “the inhuman power of the lie.” Stalin knew that even if the truth was readily available and distributed, the liar should not give up. As Conquest writes, Stalin saw that flat denial on the one hand and the massive injection of falsehood into the pool of information on the other were sufficient to confuse the foreign audience and “to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.” The Famine was the first major instance of this technique of influencing world opinion, but it was followed by the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938 and the adamant denial of the existence of the forced-labor camp system—the Gulag.13 Arthur Koestler, who was in Kharkov in Ukraine in 1932–1933, writes that it gave him an unreal feeling to read the local papers full of pictures of young people smiling under banners, giant combines in the Urals, reports of awards to worker brigades, but “not one word about the local famine, epidemics, the dying out of whole villages; even the fact that there was no electricity in Kharkov was not once mentioned in the Kharkov papers. The enormous land was covered with a blanket of silence.”14 As the closest collaborator with the Soviet falsifications in the news media, Walter Duranty of the New York Times obtained all kinds of privileges as well as praise from and interviews with Stalin and “unstinted adulation from important Western circles.” In November 1932 Duranty reported from Moscow that “there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” When the famine became known in the West

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and was even reported in his own paper, Duranty chose to speak of “malnutrition,” “food shortages,” and “lowered resistance.” In August 1933 he wrote that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” While admitting there had been extra deaths in the Ukraine, he blamed them in part on “the flight of some peasants and the passive resistance of others.” In September 1933 he was the first Western correspondent to be admitted to the famine regions and obligingly wrote that use of the word “famine” was “a sheer absurdity”—instead he spoke of “plump babies” and “fat calves.” Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for “dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia.” The Nation, citing the New York Times and Walter Duranty in its annual Honor Roll, described his work as “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” The praise that went to Duranty was clearly not due to a desire to know the truth, Conquest writes, but to a desire of many to be told what they wished to hear. “Duranty’s own motives,” Conquest observes coldly, “need no explaining.”15 For Bukharin, the old Leninist, the worst result of the events of 1930–1933 was not so much the suffering of the peasantry, frightful as it was, but the “deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign and, instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration and obedience to any order from above a high virtue.”16 The dehumanization of the nomenklatura had been set in motion with inevitable results. Again, as with the Great Famine, the Great Terror of 1936–1938 was generally unknown in the West. All that was known were the spectacular public trials in Moscow in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938 when dozens of Soviet leaders— including Zinoviev and Bukharin, who had been among Lenin’s most respected colleagues—admitted to organizing terrorist centers, plotting to overthrow the government and assassinate its leaders, carrying out acts of sabotage, undermining the Soviet military, and helping foreign powers by supporting the independence of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and the Soviet Far East. As Nicolas Werth points out, the Moscow trials deflected the attention of foreign correspondents and observers from other events in the Soviet Union, especially the “massive repressions against all social categories.” For those who had already remained silent about or who chose not to investigate the Great Famine and similar repressions, the trials of 1936–1938 were simply the last act in a decade-long struggle between Stalin, the ultimate bureaucrat, and his Trotskyite rivals.17 However, for Robert Conquest and others determined to uncover the truth, the Great Terror was responsible for at least six million arrests, three million executions, and two million deaths in the camps. A major target was the intelligentsia, which had long been a center of resistance to tyranny and thought control. In March and April 1937 a poisonous press campaign in Pravda and elsewhere attacked “deviationism” in economics, history, and literature. All branches of learning and creativity, Werth wrote, were targeted. Scientists, poets, musicians—no one was exempt from arrest and execution for espionage and other crimes against the state. The authorities also sought the “complete liquidation” of the last remaining members of the clergy. In short, the Great Terror was a political operation initiated and directed by people at the highest levels of the party under the personal direction of Stalin. It achieved two of Stalin’s major objectives: the establishment of a civil and military bureaucracy

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composed of young cadres “brought up in the strict Stalinist spirit of the 1930s;” and the elimination of all “socially dangerous elements,” including ex-kulaks, excriminals, ex-tsarist civil servants, ex-members of the Menshevik Party, ex-Socialist Revolutionaries, and especially “spies,” that is, those who had had contact, no matter how tenuous, with the outside world.18 *

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In The Great Terror, Robert Conquest carefully traces how the regime used the media inside and outside the Soviet Union to achieve its goals. In September 1937, for example, Pravda featured a statement by “the English jurist Pritt” in the London News Chronicle attesting to the propriety and authenticity of the show trial. This was but one case among many.19 When questions were raised in the West about the credibility of the trials, Western intellectuals quickly came to the defense of the prosecution. In a pamphlet published by the “Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee,” the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald said of the confessions by longtime Bolsheviks, “They confessed because the State’s collection of evidence forced them to. No other explanation fits he facts.” Labour MP Neil Maclean noted in a foreword: “Practically every foreign correspondent present at the Trial—with the exception of course of the Japanese and Germany—have expressed themselves as very much impressed by the weight of the evidence presented by the Prosecution and the sincerity of the confessions of the accused.” Ever eager to reinforce the legitimacy of the trials, Pravda published a long article about how a British lawyer, Dudley Collard, had described it as judicially unexceptionable.20 The trial of Politburo members Bukharin and Rykov was preceded by such devices as a special article in Pravda entitled “The Struggle of Bukharin and Rykov against Lenin and the Party,” intended to educate the younger generation who might not remember these earlier crimes. The veteran trade-union leader Tomsky was also accused of “foul anti-Party activity,” and all three men were denounced for criminal links with the Trotskyites.21 Pravda signaled the coming assault on the military leadership in April 1937 with a pointed call to the Red Army to master politics and fight the internal as well as the external foe. “This powerful, if oblique, blow,” Conquest writes, “was understood by the already shaken High Command.” Shortly thereafter Marshal Tukhachevsky, a hero of the Revolution, was relieved as Deputy Commissar of Defense and transferred to the Volga Military District, a backwoods command. That same year Tukhachevsky went on trial for espionage and was quickly found guilty.22 In the midst of the swing to total terror, a diversion was provided by Russian airmen. In June 1937 Chkalov and his crew flew their ANT-25 airplane over the North Pole, and in July Gromov flew another to California, setting a new world distance record. The two flights sparked a great press campaign that filled the newspapers with news stories and photographs about the men and their remarkable accomplishments. But at the same time, the papers continued to issue general calls to vigilance and point out the many nefarious methods used by the enemy. The always dependable Pravda drew attention to misprints in the local press that amounted to sabotage—for example, a reference to the bedy (sorrows) rather than the pobedy (victories) of Socialism.23 From the beginning, as we have seen, the Cheka and its successors played a leading role in the use of the mass media to further the establishment and consolidation of

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totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union. In December 1937 the Soviet newspapers ran page after page celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, highlighted by pictures of Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov, then head of the NKVD. The NKVD demonstrated its eternal vigilance by announcing a purge of the bread distribution organizations. Workers’ meetings sent their warmest anniversary greetings while poems about the diligence of the secret police appeared everywhere. Pravda published a long article along with a lengthy list of awards, including the Order of Lenin to the NKVD. Among the many encomiums, Conquest writes, was a reminder of the organization’s crucial work: a number of generals and colonels had been tried before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court as spies, bourgeois nationalists, and terrorists. They had confessed, and had been executed.24 Russia had of course experienced terror, widespread terror, before. Lenin called it a vital instrument of policy. There were large-scale executions of “class enemies” during the civil war of 1918–1920. Injustices and brutalities were perpetrated throughout the country. The Cheka squads shot hostages by the hundreds, but their actions were not part of a deliberate campaign directed from the top and aimed at every segment and institution of society, including the Party itself. By the end of the twenties, the country and its people had accepted, however reluctantly, the power of the party and the consolidation of its rule. It was in cold blood and during relative calm, Conquest writes, that Stalin started a new cycle of terror. First came the party’s war on the peasants in the early 1930s, resulting in the deaths of six to seven million people through famine. When things settled down in the mid-1930s, “the Great Terror was launched cold-bloodedly at a helpless population.” The other distinguishing characteristic of the Stalin purge was “the total falsehood of all the reasons given for it and accusations made during it.” Lie after lie after lie about all of the alleged plots was repeated over and over in Pravda and in the rest of the Soviet media.25 The Terror also destroyed personal confidence between private citizens everywhere. The stage was reached, the writer Isaac Babel said, when “a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.” Only the closest of friends dared hint to each other at any disbelief in the Party line. Stalin came close to achieving his goal of destroying “the idea of truth in the Russian mind.”26 Even so, and incredibly enough, many Russians did not blame Stalin, including intellectuals like Pasternak and Meyerhold, who focused their fear and hatred on Yezhov, the NKVD head (who would also eventually be eliminated by the eversuspicious Stalin). And then there were the Western intellectuals who after meeting Stalin found qualities in him that not even his mother would recognize. In his definitive study, Political Pilgrims, Paul Hollander documents a nearly endless litany of wonder and praise about the Soviet dictator. U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davis said of Stalin: “His brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.” The German writer Emil Ludwig confessed that he had “expected to meet a Grand Duke of the old regime, stern, abrupt, and unfriendly. But instead … I found myself for the first time face to face with a dictator to whose care I would readily confide the education of my children.” Beatrice and Sidney Webb insisted that “Stalin is not a dictator … he is the duly elected representative of one of the Moscow constituencies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.” The British clergyman Hewlett Johnson concurred: “Stalin is no oriental despot. His new Constitution shows it. His readiness to relinquish power

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shows it. His refusal to add to the power he already possesses shows it. His willingness to lead his people down new and unfamiliar paths of democracy shows it.” The writer Leon Feuchtwanger believed that “the realization of the socialist democracy” was Stalin’s “ultimate goal.” The American black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois thought that Stalin “asked for neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory.” Emil Ludwig, another German writer observed: “Though [Stalin] holds enormous power he takes no pride in its possession, but it must give him a certain amount of satisfaction to feel that he triumphed over his opponents.”27 Indeed. All of these fulsome comments and many more were reprinted and recycled in Pravda and other Soviet media not simply to please the dictator but also to reinforce his image as a giant of his time who was building a new nation and a new society. In 1938 the Stalin cult reached a new level of mendacity with the publication of the Short Course, the official history of the Soviet Communist Party. Over forty million copies were distributed all over the world of what was described as “an encyclopedia of basic knowledge in the field of Marxism-Leninism.” It amounts, in Robert Conquest’s words, to “a vast and breathtaking deception,” in which all of Stalin’s opponents are represented as agents of imperialism and Stalin is credited with leading the Bolshevik underground, organizing the Revolution, crushing treason, creating a prosperous agriculture, and in general being the world’s “best Marxist.”28 It was the very unpopularity of the system, reinforced by the Great Terror, which prompted Stalin and his sycophants to rely on the media and its manipulators to bolster their legitimacy. With the advent of the Cold War in 1946, Stalin proclaimed the West and especially the United States as the leading enemy of Socialism—that is, as his enemy. The Soviet press delighted in reporting fearful suffering in the West—the machine-gunning of workers in London, children working twelve hours a day in New York sweatshops. A wide range of Western inventions were reattributed to Russians—the airplane before the Wright brothers, and the radio before Marconi, among others. Always seeking opportunities to disorient the Western public, Moscow underwrote and directed the activities of the Communist Party in France, Italy, and the United States. And it tightened its hold on the parties of the Soviet bloc, with the exception of Yugoslavia, and did not hesitate to use violence when necessary to maintain control—as in the East European show trials it had orchestrated. When the North Korean Stalinist Kim il Sung visited Moscow in March 1950 seeking support for his planned invasion of the South, Stalin held a Politburo meeting attended by Kim at which he “gave him the green light.” At the same time, at Stalin’s direction, the Soviet Union launched a massive propaganda campaign abroad in favor of “peace and progress.” According to Conquest, Stalin’s effort to influence the Western mind had its successes: “some socialists still thought of the USSR as superior because it was socialist.”29 In the spring of 1952, Conquest suggests, there may have occurred a key event in Stalin’s decision regarding the infamous Doctors’ Plot. Stalin’s doctor, V. N. Vinogradov, told his visibly declining patient that he had to take a long rest from active politics. Stalin immediately remembered how, with his collaboration, Lenin had been largely excluded from political activity because of his health. Stalin concluded that Vinogradov’s advice was calculated to effect his removal from the center of power. In November Stalin ordered the arrests of the leading Kremlin doctors, including his own personal physician, and gave instructions as to how they should be interrogated: “Beat, beat and beat again.” In January 1953 the first public announcement

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about the plot appeared in the Soviet press and pointed out that most of the conspirators “had been agents of Jewish organizations in the USA serving American intelligence.” A poisonous campaign descended on the Soviet Union as the mass media loudly beat the drums of anti-Semitism.30 Less than two months later, Stalin was dead of a stroke for which his closest colleagues calmly denied him medical treatment. At his funeral the crowds were so large and uncontrolled that many mourners were crushed to death. Among those who mourned was Andrei Sakharov, who wrote, “I am under the influence of a great man’s death. I am thinking of his humanity.” It was years, he later said, before he fully understood “the degree to which deceit, exploitation and outright fraud were inherent in the whole Stalinist system. That shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology”—and, we add, the power of the mass media.31 *

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For the next few years, Stalin remained a hero to the Soviet people, but, as Richard Pipes has written, the leadership felt it had to repudiate “the demented dictator and his murderous policies” and at the same time preserve the totalitarian system he had developed over three decades that guaranteed them power and privilege. They solved the problem by reconnecting Communism to Lenin and condemning Stalin at the XX Party Congress in 1956. In a secret speech, parts of which were leaked to the West, Nikita Khrushchev, the new first secretary, revealed some, but far from all, of the crimes that Stalin had perpetrated. To compensate for de-Stalinization and to infuse new life into the system, Khrushchev “initiated the deification of Lenin with such intensity that it would outlive the collapse of the Soviet Union” nearly forty years later.32 One-party rule remained as did the secret police and censorship, but millions were freed from the Gulag. Many victims were rehabilitated. There was more contact with the West, and although the jamming of foreign short wave broadcasts continued, it was not foolproof. Soviet leaders, among them Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, visited Western Europe and even the United States. For the latter the journey was an “endless row of collapsed stereotypes and clichés.”33 The comparative relaxation during the sixties and seventies encouraged bolder individuals to challenge the regime, producing “the phenomenon of dissidence.” There were the usual punishments plus an innovation devised by Yuri Andropov— Brezhnev’s security chief—confinement in a mental institution and “treatment” with drugs and other tortures. Richard Pipes estimates that by the late 1980s—thirty years after Khrushchev’s “liberating” speech at the XX Party Congress—the KGB had a staff of at least 480,000 of whom about one-fourth, along with tens of millions of informants, engaged in “domestic counterintelligence and surveillance.”34 And here we have another paradox of the Soviet use of the mass media: the persuasiveness of the monolithic mass media in the Soviet Union and other Communist systems was always threatened or potentially undermined by the clash between official propaganda—“all is well”—and the reality of the daily lives of ordinary citizens— “all is hell.” As long as the communist leadership exercised the necessary political will and force, this awareness did not matter much. After glasnost it mattered a great deal. Writing about Communist propaganda in Hungary and Eastern Europe, Paul Hollander says that it eventually caused “intense moral revulsion” in the people

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because it attempted to “redefine their personal experiences”—to try to deceive them without the least hesitation and without the least regard for the truth.35 By the mid-1980s, then, a crisis in all aspects of Soviet society was building that could not be stopped or explained away. The Kremlin found itself in what Lenin defined as a “revolutionary situation”: it could no longer rule as it had for nearly seventy years because the people would no longer allow themselves to be so ruled. To avoid an explosion, the Politburo appointed Gorbachev as first secretary and told him to reinvigorate the system without jeopardizing its power and authority.36 It was an impossible assignment. In true Leninist fashion, Gorbachev promulgated a new Law on the Press and Information, which institutionalized glasnost as a means of information (i.e., propaganda) and of checking the centralized, stultified bureaucracy. The main purpose of glasnost, the Soviet leader stressed, was not freedom but perestroika, the restructuring of Soviet society to make it a more productive and competitive modern socialist state. In his bestselling book, Perestroika, Gorbachev was unequivocal in explaining his objective: “We are conducting all our reforms in accordance with the socialist choice. We are looking within socialism, rather than outside it, for the answers to all questions that arise.” He reaffirmed his commitment to Communism at every opportunity, as on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. “In October 1917,” he declared, “we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving towards a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.”37 It was clear to Gorbachev that so massive a change as he envisioned could only be effected by the fundamental reeducation of 280 million Soviet citizens through the mass media. And the Kremlin had one of the most sophisticated communications networks in the world to call upon. The Soviet Union had some 8,500 newspapers in fifty-five languages with a circulation of nearly 200 million. As early as 1918 Lenin had called for a national campaign to build radio stations, predicting that one day “all Russia will hear a newspaper read in Moscow.”38 Four years later, the most powerful radio transmitter in the world, broadcasting with nearly 12,000 watts of power, was built in Moscow. A vigorous policy of “radiofication” was pursued for several decades. By Gorbachev’s time there were about 544 radio sets per 1,000 people, compared with 570 radios per 1,000 people in East Germany. But the medium that the government came to favor above all others was television, an instrument that could disseminate instant uniform propaganda to everyone. In 1940 there were only 400 television sets in the Soviet Union. A decade later, in the waning years of the Stalin era, there were still only 10,000 sets. But in 1960, as Moscow began to understand that television was much more than a capitalist toy, the number jumped to 4.8 million. Between 1965 and 1970 the number of television sets doubled, and by 1976 Soviet industry was producing seven million sets annually. With the full backing of the government, a communications revolution occurred. In 1960 only 5 percent of the Soviet population could watch television; by 1986 a quarter of a century later, an estimated 93 percent of the population were viewers, comparing favorably with the 98 percent of Americans who watched television.39 Throughout its history, as we have seen, the Soviet regime strived to build a nationwide system of mass communication for the purpose of indoctrinating the population, but it was not able, until television, to reach potentially everyone. Newspapers tended to be read by elites while radio, particularly before FM, was at the mercy of the harsh weather and mountainous Russian terrain that stretched across eleven

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time zones. But television could leapfrog the inhospitable terrain and reach people at a relatively low cost. For the first time in Soviet history, the government could present the same message to all the people at the same time. It seemed that Lenin’s prediction would be fulfilled. But the Soviets badly miscalculated human nature. They believed they could create a new man, and woman, with the proper behavioral mix of education, information, rewards, and penalties, including the Gulag. Having achieved partial success with such media as newspapers, magazines, and radio, they turned to television as the best means yet of transforming the Soviet people. Their optimism was based on a belief in the “hypodermic model” of communications theory, which maintains that an audience receives all new information instantly and unadulterated from the mass media just as the human body receives medicine or a drug from the injection of a hypodermic needle. The Soviets were not concerned that Western scientists had long since discarded the theory, having found that an audience “could not be viewed as an inert element in the communication process.”40 Moscow was only slightly disturbed that a 1970s survey of a medium-sized industrial city in the Russian Republic showed that many citizens, after decades of unrelenting propaganda, did not comprehend basic Marxist items such as “imperialism” and “colonialism.”41 Despite the contradictory evidence about the impact of television, Soviet leaders proceeded with the “televisionization” of the USSR, confident that as master propagandists they could make the medium work to their advantage. They proclaimed the mastery of science and technology over the human spirit. But the unintended consequences of television included pictures of a feeble, tottering Brezhnev—an apt illustration of the stagnation of Soviet society under his rule that was unlikely to raise the spirit of Soviet citizens. At first it seemed to Gorbachev and his colleagues that the medium of television could be “a powerful force for integration” that would forge a national consciousness and a national culture.42 But glasnost brought to the surface ethnic and nationalist aspirations that had long been suppressed by Moscow. In Azerbaijan protestors sought an Armenian-language channel; in Moldavia journalists tried to convert all television broadcasting into Moldavian. Because of television, the Soviet Union was shrinking and dividing at the same time. Because of the mass media, the collective began to give way to the individual for the first time in Soviet history. At the center of the growing chaos and uncertainty stood an increasingly beset Gorbachev trying to implement his grand design to alter the mind of a nation. One commentator said that the Soviet leader tried to use the mass media the way that Mao Zedong had used the Red Guards: to destroy the power of the bureaucracy. But as Alexis de Tocqueville commented, “Experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses the first steps toward reform.”43 In the middle to late 1980s, the Soviet Union was a very bad government attempting very radical reform. *

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There are several reasons why the August 1991 coup attempted by the Gang of Eight against Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin failed: the absence of public support; the coup plotters’ failure to jail Yeltsin and other key opponents; their unwillingness to use military force against the opposition; and significant disagreement

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within the Red Army and the KGB about the legality of the coup. But a major cause was undoubtedly the coup plotters’ blunder in failing to control the means of mass communications, internal and external. They did not understand that in the electronic age, political power flows not only through the barrel of a gun but also through the lens of a television camera. In contrast, Boris Yeltsin, Mayor Gavril Popov of Moscow, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak of Leningrad, and other members of the resistance adroitly used the mass media to stall and ultimately defeat the so-called Committee for the State of Emergency. The reformers relied upon liberal democratic mediapolitik, disseminating their message of democracy and constitutional government through television, radio, telephones, and fax machines (in these dim distant days there was no internet). Yeltsin in particular understood how important the media were. In an act of real courage and unforgettable political imagery, he stood on top of a tank in front of the Russian parliament and exhorted his fellow countrymen to stand firm for freedom and against the “anticonstitutional” coup. CNN and other Western media immediately transmitted a picture of Yeltsin, the freedom fighter, around the world and into the meeting rooms of Western leaders. Seventy-four years earlier in the same city, Lenin had climbed onto a similar vehicle to announce the coming of Communism. Yeltsin proclaimed that it was ending. It is instructive to compare the attempted coup of the Soviet hardliners in August 1991 and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. The Chinese Communists were better Leninists than their colleagues in Moscow. Deng Xiaoping did not hesitate to use massive force to retain power, sending in the army to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese students in and around Tiananmen Square, while in the Soviet Union the Gang of Eight failed to employ even moderate force—only three young Muscovites died during the attempted coup—to control the people and the mass media. The Chinese Communist leadership also undertook a comprehensive propaganda campaign to turn the massacre into an act of self-defense. Employing Stalin’s big-lie technique, the Deng government portrayed the soldiers at Tiananmen Square as heroes who saved the country from a counterrevolutionary plot. In the face of extreme provocation, the Chinese news media declared, Chinese soldiers exhibited extraordinary restraint. In fact, declared one official at a news conference, “troops did not kill or harm a single person when we cleared the square.” Beijing television presented extensive film of civilian crowds stoning and burning military vehicles; the tapes and soundtracks had been carefully edited to eliminate any evidence that soldiers had fired on demonstrators. Surrounded by party leaders and uniformed officers, Deng told a national television audience that the army and police had put down an attempt to “overthrow the Communist Party and the socialist system, subvert the People’s Republic of China, and establish a bourgeois republic.”44 The Chinese government’s Leninist attitude toward the media was confirmed in December 1989, six months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the secretary general of the party declared that “news reporting must serve socialism and serve the people” (i.e., the Communist Party). He added that what he called the “counterrevolutionary turmoil and rebellion” of the preceding May and June illustrated that chaos was the inevitably result “if the tools of public opinion are not tightly controlled in the hands of true Marxists.”45 For all his faults, and he had many, Boris Yeltsin never tried to control or censor the mass media when he was president of Russia. In the winter of 1994–1995, for

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example, Moscow’s television screens were filled with images never before seen in the Russian capital, not even during the Afghanistan War: wounded soldiers interviewed in field hospitals, bloody corpses pulled from a downed helicopter, Russian officers refusing to advance, women cursing Yeltsin for trying to stamp out their independence. From their living rooms, Muscovites watched the inept Russian offensive against separatists in Chechnya and increasingly expressed their opposition to an unpopular war. Yeltsin did not try to impose media censorship even though the TV pictures of the Chechen conflict seriously damaged his reputation at home and abroad. However, the Yeltsin government did not hesitate to manipulate the media in the 1996 presidential election. The country’s leading journalists and media executives did not object because “the stakes [were] too high for them to remain neutral.” They cited the threat of a Communist comeback and the potential crackdown on the media to justify their open partisanship in favor of Yeltsin.46 All three major TV stations backed Yeltsin’s reelection: ORT, in which the government was a majority stockholder; RTR, wholly owned by the government; and the independent NTV. It is estimated that as many as 1,000 journalists in Moscow were “on the take,” including fifty elite reporters who received $3,000 to $5,000 a month for writing articles favorable to Yeltsin and other government candidates. The balance seemed to tilt farther toward the state media in February 1999 with the formation of a new Russian Ministry for Press, Broadcast, and News Media. The Yeltsin government insisted that far from imposing a new censorship, the ministry intended to make relations between the state and independent media as “transparent” as possible. But the new head of the ministry commented that “the media currently have more opportunities to influence the state than vice versa. Therefore, protection of the state from the ‘free media’ is a more vital problem today.”47 *

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Such protection was not a problem in Vladimir Putin’s Russia—the media have very few opportunities today to influence the state. At his inauguration in May 2000, President Putin (a former KGB colonel personally selected by Yeltsin to be his successor) vowed to “preserve and develop democracy.” But his guest list included Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former KGB director who had orchestrated the attempted 1991 coup that Yeltsin defeated. After he became president, Putin was asked what he liked about being in the Kremlin. “Nobody controls me here,” he answered. “I control everybody.”48 Putin took the next logical step toward controlling everybody by closing down NTV, Russia’s only independent national television network, after months of denying his government had any such plans. The message to the rest of the media, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, the Washington Post’s former Moscow correspondents, was clear: “Putin did not like criticism and would not tolerate powerful television channels in anything but loyal hands.” Unlike television, the press at this time remained relatively free in Moscow with a wide political spectrum of publications that often criticized the government. The Kremlin was not overly concerned, knowing that most Russians depended upon television for their news. “The president has a very clear idea,” a senior Putin aide said, “let them print whatever they want, nobody reads it.”49 While the intelligentsia was outraged at the fate of NTV, the vast majority of the public were not.

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All three major national television networks were now firmly under government control, as they had been in the Soviet Union. Each Friday the Kremlin hosted a meeting with the top television directors and handed out a list of the week’s expected news topics and approaches for the networks. “It was so direct and unsophisticated,” said one regular participant, “like propaganda.” All the networks were given similar marching orders in the 2003 parliamentary election: constantly build up the image of United Russia, Putin’s party, and “destroy the Communists,” the only serious political opposition.50 United Russia finished with 37 percent of the party-list vote and, after persuading pro-Kremlin independents to join the party, could legitimately claim it controlled more than two-thirds of the Duma. Election observers decried “unequal campaign opportunities” and “clear bias” in the media toward United Russia. For example, said one monitor, 56 percent of all coverage on a major channel was about Putin or United Russia. A political consultant who worked for United Russia belatedly expressed some concern about the awesome concentration of power: “They’ve got all the instruments at their disposal now, and it is very dangerous.”51 But “how dangerous?” we are obliged to ask. In the March 2004 presidential election, Vladimir Putin received more than 71 percent of the vote while the Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov finished a distant second with 14 percent. In his first inaugural address four years earlier, the then unknown Putin had pledged to “preserve and develop democracy.” In his second inaugural Putin said that “transformation in the country” would continue but did not say what kind of transformation and never once mentioned the word “democracy.”52 Which leads us to ask: Is democracy possible for Russia? After the 2004 election Richard Pipes wrote in Foreign Affairs of “Russians’ flight from freedom” and argued that Putin’s authoritarian policies were a reflection of the public’s rejection of Western-style democracy. The president, Pipes said, was “popular precisely because he has re-installed Russia’s traditional model of government: an autocratic state in which citizens are relieved of responsibility for politics and in which imaginary foreign enemies are invoked to forge an artificial unity.”53 A Putin protégé newly installed as governor of St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, confirmed Pipes’s analysis. Asked about the idea of establishing a parliamentary democracy in Russia and doing away with the presidency, she said, “The Russian mentality needs a baron, a tsar, a president … In one word, a boss.”54 And what kind of “boss” was Vladimir Putin? Baker and Glasser point out that Putin disavowed any aspirations to restore Soviet-style dictatorship. But Putin did not hesitate to follow a hard-line policy in Chechnya where Russian soldiers show up in homes in the middle of the night to arrest women who they say might become suicide bombers. Beyond Chechnya, according to Baker and Glasser, neighboring republics in 2005 experienced “political assassinations, coordinated guerrilla attacks, and bombings.”55 In July 2007 Anne Applebaum, the prize-winning author of Gulag, referred to Putin’s “penchant for breaking weapons treaties”—he has threatened to withdraw from the historic 1987 Gorbachev-Reagan treaty eliminating medium-range missiles— “threatening small neighbors”—like Georgia—“disposing of his enemies and spouting Cold War rhetoric.” Putin has sharply attacked the proposed deployment of American anti-missile sites in the Czech Republic and Poland that, Washington has emphasized, would be part of a global ballistic missile defense. And Putin has said that Russia does not view Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, although he

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knows from his KGB days that the Soviet Union provided essential aid and instruction to both terrorist groups during the Cold War. The brutal murder of the fearless journalist Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006, and Putin’s reaction to her death gives us, perhaps, a telling clue as to what kind of “boss” Putin was. Following three days of silence, Putin promised to track down her murderer but suggested that Politkovskaya may have been killed by Putin critics to make him look bad. And then he said of the intrepid journalist who had challenged him long after others had given up, “She had minimal influence on political life in Russia.”56 Certainly, in keeping with Lenin’s rule that a newspaper must be a propagandist, an agitator, and an organizer, the Putin government has done everything it can to ensure that the mass media exerts only the right influence. Television programs and movies idealizing the KGB have proliferated. Russian regulators effectively cut off news broadcasts from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America. The Kremlin has launched its own 24-hour English-language television network, beaming puff reports about Putin’s Russia to 100 countries around the world. The few remaining independent newspapers have either been bought by the government or by businessmen friendly to Putin. The Internet is deliberately circumscribed and controlled. While one in every three Russian households now has a computer at home, only one in ten has a computer printer, meaning few Russians can print out articles off the Internet.57 At his annual marathon news conference at the beginning of 2006, Putin dismissed foreign critics of the rollback of democracy in Russia. “They deserve a very brief response,” he said: “to hell with you.”58 Despite his years as a KGB colonel in East Germany, infamous for the Stalinist tactics of its secret police, Putin is no latter-day Stalin or Andropov. But neither is he a liberal democrat, although he has praised President Franklin D. Roosevelt for being willing to seek a third term as president. This may be a hint that he is considering the same option despite the Russian constitution’s limiting the president to two terms. Putin is a man of the mass media who understands its critical role in modern politics. He demonstrated this in his October 2007 visit to Butovo outside Moscow where some 20,000 priests, artists, and other “enemies of the people” were executed in 1937–1938. Standing alongside the Russian patriarch, Putin looked out over the mass graves and murmured, “Why?” So what kind of Russia was Putin trying to build? “What we have [in Russia] is post-Communism, not democracy,” said Pavel Voshchanov, a former Yeltsin spokesman. Unlike in America, Vochchanov stated, “our leaders don’t depend on public opinion when making policy.”59 In elections, the issue of who controls the airwaves becomes critical as the great majority of Russians look to television for their news and information. The calculation of politicians like Putin is simple, said the historian Alexander Yakolev, a former member of the Politburo, “to ‘take’ the Kremlin you must ‘take’ television.”60 In the end, what Russia becomes depends not on what kind of leader, democratic or authoritarian, sits in the Kremlin, but on what kind of institutions surround that leader. Russia, with its long history of a central authority, needs a true multiparty legislature, an independent judiciary, and a free press to guarantee freedom and democracy and to prevent authoritarian rule.

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Part II

4 Comparative Perspectives

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Chapter 7

4

Managed Spontaneity in Rural Poli tical Violence in China A r t h u r Wa l d r o n

Millions perished under Communism in China, but the way they perished was in

many cases rather different from corresponding events in other Communist states.1 In the Soviet Union and in regimes closely allied with it, death, as a rule, was administered by the state, proceeding through arrests, show trials, shootings, the camps of the Gulag, and so forth. In China most of those methods were also used, but differences emerged and became more pronounced as the regime evolved. In China, unlike the Soviet Union, violence—including lethal violence—often appeared to be spontaneous. This violence was usually perceived, both in China and in the West, as an expression of the release of class grievances, especially in the countryside. Indeed, the apparent authenticity of revolutionary violence in China came to be seen as distinguishing it from the state-imposed violence of the USSR, particularly in the wake of the “Secret Speech” of Khrushchev delivered in 1956, which left no doubt about the character of this state-imposed violence under Stalin. Its unique features notwithstanding, techniques of repression in China benefitted from earlier Soviet mentoring. By the time it took full control in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party already possessed substantial experience and expertise in administering violence. The Soviet training of Chinese specialists began as early as in the 1920s when the Kuomintang began cooperation with Moscow. Mao Zedong carried out extensive Soviet-style purges in areas under party control in Jiangxi during the 1920s. His important helper and collaborator, Kang Sheng, trained in the Soviet Union whence he returned in 1937 and undertook to reorganize and modernize the organs of repression. To be sure, appearance and reality diverged regarding the nature of violence in China. It was choreographed by a Communist party that apparently believed that holding power was not enough. Power had to be validated by the creation of a historical drama that would appear to correspond to what Karl Marx and his followers had imagined. This essay will briefly recount the story of Communist violence in China, mostly that of rural areas,2 placing particular emphasis on the ability of the

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authorities to create appearances that conformed to the official conception of what such a revolution should look like. Creating these appearances was key to the success of the perception of the Chinese ideal of a Communist society by both the natives and foreigners. *

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By the time the Communist Party took full control of China in 1949, it already possessed substantial experience and expertise in violence and killing. Soviet training of Chinese experts had begun in the 1920s, when the Kuomintang of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) had begun cooperation with Moscow. In the 1920s extensive, Sovietstyle purges were carried out in the party’s base areas in Jiangxi.3 The best-known demonstration of a willingness to kill large numbers of their own members came when Mao Zedong (1893–1976) purged members of a possibly imaginary “A. B. L. (Anti-Bolshevik League)” leading to the rebellion of a Red Army unit that was subsequently massacred at Futian, Jiangxi, in December 1930.4 But the milestone event was the 1937 arrival at Yan’an, the Red Army’s wartime capital in the northwest, of Kang Sheng (1898–1975) who had been thoroughly trained in the Soviet Union. Kang reorganized and brought up-to-date the Chinese repressive apparatus, over which he would then preside through the Cultural Revolution, with occasional interruptions owed evidently to mental breakdowns.5 Numerous prisons and labor camps comparable to those of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago were also set up.6 Under full Communist control, mortality, directly or indirectly linked to government policies, greatly increased. Estimates are difficult: the most recent figure is in excess of seventy million, as suggested by Chang Jung in her exhaustive study of Mao Zedong.7 For the Soviet Union, Alexander N. Yakovlev suggests a figure greater than fifty million.8 These figures are of the same order of magnitude. The way in which state violence was incorporated into the architecture of Communist rule in China differed in important respects from Soviet practices. In the USSR a facade of calm and orderly government was maintained even during the periods of greatest turmoil. Repression was incorporated into the judicial processes, as in the carefully stage-managed show trials. Actual violence was regularly concealed and denied. In China, by contrast, violence was often intentionally public and presented as the spontaneous action of the angry masses, not as the creation of the state. Sometimes it was genuinely spontaneous when it escaped control, as in the case of the rural struggles that antedated the party’s rise to power. Activists emerging from the rural population dragged land owners to the village squares for denunciation, beating, and often death. Once sparked, rural violence often proved difficult to control. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1965–1967) marked the high tide of this approach. Red Guard faction battled Red Guard faction in ways that did not follow a script prepared by the authorities. Though Mao Zedong endorsed the movement, the destruction it brought about, both of human life and of cultural treasures, became spontaneous and self-sustaining, sometimes reaching almost unimaginable extremes, such as politically sanctioned cannibalism of “counter revolutionaries.” I focus on the spontaneous aspects of violence in the Cultural Revolution and other mass movements because in this essay I want to explore the ways in which the Communist party—and in the 1960s Mao Zedong himself in opposition to the party establishment—succeeded, through a variety of ways, including reliance on personal

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grievances, to achieve its goals without orchestrating every violent act. Notwithstanding its irrational aspects, the Cultural Revolution did attain Mao’s primary purposes: the destruction of those in the party whom Mao considered his enemies and his restoration to the paramount power he had lost after the famine of the Great Leap Forward. This method—which may be compared to the controlled fires sometimes set by rangers to stop larger and more threatening forest fires—was rare in other Communist regimes, but ubiquitous in China for reasons that we will examine. One reason for the protracted struggles in China was that when the party came to power, it was relatively weak in relation to the size of the population it sought to control, and with many of its own leadership questions unresolved. In the Soviet Union a protracted and bloody civil war had prepared the way for the Bolsheviks. In China the civil war was bloody to be sure, but only in certain places, such as Manchuria, and in certain battles, such as Huai-Hai in 1948–1949. Victory was achieved more by the disintegration of the enemy rather than by actual military defeat, with cities such as Shanghai passing to Communist control largely uncontested. A bandwagon effect brought the nationalists down and the Communists to power— which meant that at the hour of victory many “counter-revolutionaries” had joined the winning coalition. A second reason is that Mao’s absolute power was never secure even to the end of his life. He was in greatest peril in the early 1960s, when the famine that followed his Great Leap Forward (1958–1959) saw his colleagues sideline him, as they hoped, permanently. In its essence the Cultural Revolution was his way of regaining his power, a feat he could not accomplish through the regular party mechanisms that he no longer controlled. Hence, quite brilliantly, he conjured up what appeared to be a grassroots revolutionary movement aimed at purging the old and creating a new world, and one which, not coincidentally, repressed opposition and brought him back to power. *

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A full understanding of the part played by violence in Chinese Communist politics requires one to go beyond the personal political calculations such as those already discussed. If we examine classic Chinese texts about governance, such as the Daxue or Great Learning, we find clearly described an idealized society that is self-actualizing. It comes into being not by the actions of “guardians” as in Plato, or an enlightened vanguard party (Lenin’s contribution) as it did in most Communist states (extinct and surviving), but emerges from the spontaneous moral self-rectification of individuals, a process that expands, spreading a new moral order from the family to the village and to the national level.9 Although political power in China has regularly been imposed by organization, and punishment—the vision of the legalist school or fajia—such governance has never been considered morally acceptable by the mainstream of Confucianism, which has continued to affect popular expectations down to the present. It was thus for cultural reasons that the Communist authorities in China attempted to portray the ideal political system not as one imposed by an elite according to a blueprint, but rather as the spontaneous product of the people acting autonomously, after being “liberated” from the oppressive structures imposed by the previous political order. Once those shackles were broken, the people, acting on their own, were going to create a new society—and that is what the People’s Republic of China was supposed to be.

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This expectation of spontaneous political transformation placed a difficult burden on the party, which needed to achieve its ends by means that were transparent and seemingly uncoerced. Even while the party kept control, it needed to create the appearance that was is not dominating society. Hence the public outbursts of spontaneity such as the posting of placards, “struggle sessions” against “bad elements,” waves of enthusiasm sweeping the countryside—manifest, for example, in the campaign to build backyard furnaces to make “steel” in the Great Leap and in the joyous destruction of the British embassy by Red Guards in Peking in 1967. All such campaigns and trends had cultural and historical roots. This is not to say that the Chinese Communist policies aimed at creating a semblance of spontaneity and voluntarism were absent from other Communist systems. In the Soviet Union choreographed mass rallies and marches were common, as were the apparently spontaneous workers’ movements to increase production, the most famous being the one initiated by Alexei Stakhanov, who in 1935 reportedly mined over 100 tons of coal single-handed in five hours, driven by his passion for socialism. It was typical in all Communist states for workers at mass meetings to offer to increase their level of productivity on various occasions, some important historic anniversary or the birthday of their supreme leader. Workers also “volunteered” from time to time to donate unpaid labor; students volunteered to do unpaid work in state or collective farms. Arguably the entire one-party system of uncontested elections was a simulation of spontaneous support for the regime, underscored by a festive atmosphere created by the authorities (stimulated by greater availability of food supplies for the occasion) with the voters marching together under banners flying and signs held to the voting places joyously endorsing the system. *

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Belief in self-actualizing change, driven by an awakened Chinese people, was widely shared in the period leading up to the abdication of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and after. This was the theme, for example, of the early tract by Zou Rong (1885–1905) titled The Revolutionary Army (1903), which envisioned the emergence of selfmotivated heroes arising from the Chinese people who would lead the overthrow of the dynasty. The metaphor of awakening, or enlightening, the people into action was widely used.10 Subsequent events led many to despair of such change, but a longing for it and even belief in its existence is found in literature. From the 1920s novels romanticized the sacrifices of the young and those on the left, as they confronted both domestic political enemies and, from the beginning of the 1930s, the Japanese invaders. A good example is the short story In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen (1926) by Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936), arguably the greatest twentieth-century left-wing writer. It is an elegy for a young college student who was among those killed by police on March 18, 1926, as they demonstrated in Peking outside the government headquarters of General Duan Qirui (1864–1936).11 Lu Xun’s Miss Liu is a figure of innocence and luminous idealism. She went forward gaily. Of course, it was only a petition, and no one with any conscience could imagine such a trap. But then she was shot before Government House, shot from behind, and the bullet pierced her lung and heart. A mortal wound, but she did not die immediately … She was able to sit up, but a soldier clubbed her savagely over her

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head and her breast, and so she died. So gentle Liu Hezhen who was always smiling has really died.

Yang Mo (1914–1995) similarly romanticizes innocent and idealistic sacrifice in Song of Youth (begun in 1950, published in 1964). Like Lu Xun, she is firmly on the left. Her story is of a young woman caught up in resistance to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that began in 1931, and in opposition to the government of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), which, the left claimed, was not resisting. She writes in her introduction, dated 1963, “Light is stronger than darkness, nobility stronger than baseness; unselfishness must triumph over selfishness and happiness over sorrow … we must live like real men.” [ellipsis in original]12 Such works would be far more convincing if one did not know the historical context in which Lu Xun and Yang Mo were writing: specifically, the already substantial violence by the left, often directed at its own supporters, of which both writers were certainly aware, but to which they never refer. In 1926 the Nationalists, with Soviet advisers, were marching north toward eventual victory over the Peking government. En route they were stirring up rural violence and killing, as will be discussed below. Mao was also involved, albeit indirectly, as a member of the Communist party, which at the time was allied, at Moscow’s instence, with the Nationalists. Chang Jung relates that Mao recommended a weapon, “the suo-biao, a sharp, twin-edged knife with a long handle like a lance” to all rural fighters and exulted over the violence, exclaiming “It is wonderful! It is wonderful!”13 In so doing he revealed a disposition that would endure throughout his career. Certainly, far more perished in the killings in southern China initiated by the left than the forty or so who died, tragically and unjustly to be sure, in Peking as memorialized by Lu Xun. To imagine that Lu Xun was not aware of the violence of the left is to insult his intelligence and knowledge. Yang Mo, who wrote Song of Youth even as purges and famines were costing China millions of lives, most certainly knew what was actually going on. Why did neither of these gifted writers tell the truth? Attempting an answer goes to the heart of the issue this paper seeks to explore. On some level both writers knew that spontaneous, self-actualizing revolution was a fantasy. They were initiates who understood that a small Communist vanguard would have to use all methods, violence included, to push history, as they imagined, forward. That realization, however, was only for the few and not to be shared. For ordinary people, political realities were presented through the prism of socialist realism, depicting what should be rather than what in fact existed and concealing the stage machinery of manipulation and terror. Such concealment was relatively easy before the left came into power. The Beiyang government (of which Duan Qirui was a chief executive) and the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek who succeeded it, produced enough violence to keep attention focused on them, rather than on the unsuccessful rural insurgency of the Communists. But as the Communists drew closer to power after World War II, and seized it completely at the end of the civil war in 1949, it became far more difficult to conceal the use of state violence, which was beginning to be widely used as a tool of social change. The task was especially difficult because the Chinese Communists set themselves the task of making society live up to the propositions of Marxist theory and socialist realism. *

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The tension between utopian goals and appearances, on the one hand, and violent and manipulative methods, on the other, emerged in the bitter fight against land owners that began after the war with the Japanese and when the Communists seized power in towns and villages across northern China. Nearly twenty years before, Mao Zedong had already begun to pay attention to the rural population as a potential revolutionary constituency notwithstanding the mainstream Marxist view of the rural people as unmitigated “reactionaries.” After a brief visit to Hunan, where society was in chaos, he published in 1927 a very important essay, his Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, which contained a vivid prediction: In a very short time,” wrote Mao, “in China’s central, southern, and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.14

Nothing like this had happened in Hunan during the years immediately following Mao’s visit, or had indeed ever happened. We now know, moreover, thanks to the work of Professor Edward McCord, that the unrest in Hunan had nothing to do with class antagonisms, but rather was the result of the disruption and devastation caused by military violence in the province during the preceding years.15 Left-wing writers of the time, however, discounted the idea that military force might be an independent social variable. Instead they saw “warlords” (a Marxist term, borrowed from Japanese) as embodiments of landlord power, which they most emphatically were not.16 The idea of rural revolution nevertheless became a staple of left-wing fiction in China and in the West, a very good example of which is Spring Silkworms (1932) by Mao Dun (the pen name, meaning “contradiction,” of Shen Yanbing 1896–1981). Perhaps the best example of the approach that emphasized the revolutionary role of peasants may be found in one of the most influential books ever written about China: William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village.17 Hinton was the son of the prosperous Chicago lawyer Sebastian Hinton, who patented the “jungle gym” a staple of American backyards for decades to follow (and took his own life in 1923), and Carmelita Chase Hinton (1890–1963), daughter of a newspaper publisher in Nebraska, graduate of Bryn Mawr college, and founder, in 1935, of the progressive Putney School in Vermont.18 William Hinton’s vivid and supposedly eyewitness account of rural struggle in Longbow Village, complete with precisely quoted dialogue, was also turned into a play by the well known British playwright David Hare19 and performed in New York City in 1983;20 it continues to be performed, mostly on college campuses. Hinton’s tale captured the imagination of many undergraduates in the 1960s, when the book was omnipresent on campuses and in reading lists. I well remember as a freshman challenging a fellow student who was enthusing over revolution in China and advised me to read Fanshen. The book’s title describes it as a “documentary” and a New York Times reviewer accepted without hesitation that the play is based on a firsthand account. As Hinton makes clear in his preface, however, he was not present at any of the events he describes. He visited the village only “during the spring and summer of 1948. At that time, local land reform, which had already been in progress for two years, was under

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investigation by a work team dispatched jointly by the People’s Government and the Communist Party Committee of Lucheng County. I was attached to this work team as an observer.” He was also accompanied by two interpreters21 Thus his account was at best a reconstruction, drawn from what official investigators were learning, much later, from possibly reticent participants. What makes Hinton’s work of particular interest is that toward the end of the 1970s he was able to return to Longbow Village several times to follow up the story. His sequel, Shenfan, appeared some thirty-five years after he had first started taking notes for his first book.22 A careful reading of Fanshen alone promptly reveals the critical role played by the Communist party in orchestrating violence that was anything but spontaneous. Reading the first book against the sequel discloses even more. Let us note a single telling example. The immediate problem faced by the Communists was that rural inhabitants did not think or behave the way they were supposed to according to Communist doctrine. They had their own deeply held ideas of right and wrong, and their affiliations and loyalties—to clan and village—did not conform to the official ideas of class solidarity and its superiority over all social and other bonds. Thus, for example, rural inhabitants had supported China against Japan in the war and were willing and eager to denounce collaborators with the Japanese who were to be executed by their new rulers. But when the Communists tried to persuade rural inhabitants that to own land was just as odious as collaborating with the Japanese, the farmers were not convinced. They did not comprehend what was wrong with owning land and renting it out. To them the important question was whether a landowner was a “good” one, who made fair agreements and kept them, or a “bad” one, who cheated them. Given such deep-seated beliefs, the rural inhabitants did not initiate violence against land owners; it was, instead, spearheaded by party activists. Hinton introduces us to one, Wang Man-hsi, “a 19-year-old of tremendous strength and enthusiasm” who in 1946 was known as the “terror of the gentry.” It was Wang who had tied up the first victim of the antilandlord campaign in Longbow Village and dragged him into the village square, where another cadre took the lead in beating him. To Hinton in 1948, he seemed a model of radical consciousness.23 When Hinton returned for his series of visits in 1977, he asked after Wang Man-hsi. He learned that appearances were misleading. Wang was not a class-conscious proletarian hero; he was a sociopath, who had been attracted to the party-sponsored activities for the opportunity they afforded him to engage in violence. Although he became an official, Hinton found out that The Party had expelled him almost twenty years earlier for raping a young woman without even a shadow of an excuse. Man-hsi’s female victims in the land reform period had either been women of the dispossessed gentry whom everyone hated, or the daughters of “struggle objects,” poor and middle-aged peasant collaborators whom nobody cared to defend. For forcing his attentions on women like these he had been severely criticized in 1948, and he had promised to reform. But in 1952 he stepped completely out of line by raping one of his neighbor’s daughters. This shocked the whole community and the Party branch, convinced that criticism could no longer help, expelled him.24

To create the appearance of spontaneous action, the rural Communist cadres created incentives, including the possibility of looting property from the landlords. Once it became clear that things were up for grabs, the farmers joined in, cautiously at

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first, then with more enthusiasm—taking buckets, stools, livestock, etc. (The landlords of the area about which Hinton writes lived in no luxury). Those willing to carry out the physical violence were getting special rewards. The Communists might have thought that such activities would attract those with a highly developed class consciousness. In fact, those attracted were, for the most part, driven not by class consciousness, but by a propensity for violence possessed by men like Wang. The Communists got the violence they wanted, and those they wanted dead were killed—the rural elite, the Catholics, and so forth. But the idea that the rural inhabitants would genuinely support these killings proved to be an illusion. Likewise under pressure, the villagers went along with the Communist antireligious campaign, but today Longbow is once again solidly Catholic. With official manipulation and pressure diminishing, rural society is gradually reverting much to how it was before the campaigns of land reform. *

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The problem faced by the activists whom Hinton listened to and observed is of course nothing new in the history of Marxism. It is rooted in a basic contradiction at the heart of Marx’s social theory; his economic determinism. As he saw it, social change occurs, indeed must occur, regardless of what human beings may wish, be it to accelerate or to hinder it. Marx also asserted that, as a rule, violence is necessary to achieve these changes. Yet mass violence often has little to do with matters material or economic. As Eugen Duhring and others pointed out, violence is an independent variable that cannot be subsumed under economic factors. Rather than give proper recognition to this matter, Marx and his followers made every effort to suppress awareness of it. Friederich Engels attempted to disprove, in Anti-Duhring (1877), that force was an independent variable in history and those who disagreed were anathematized as “idealists of violence.”25 Marx himself, however, seemed to have been something of an “idealist of violence” insisting in the famous passage in Capital that “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.26 The importance of political violence in China also arose from Mao’s ideas. He had held that at a certain point in time, the antagonism—such as that between the capitalists and the proletariat—conceived of as the engine of history, would come to an end. Political change, as he saw it, was propelled by conflicts over the control of the means of production. Politics and conflict would end when a single, large class of the exploited would take power from the remaining handful of capitalists, ushering in an era of peace and abundance. The Soviet Union and other Communist countries claimed to have eliminated class conflict—an assertion that found expression in the one-party state, supposedly capable of representing the interests of all citizens. An appearance of harmony was maintained, as in the virtual unanimity (99%) of the voters regularly endorsing the ruling party in uncontested elections. Repression was carried out discretely; people were typically arrested at night and shipped away to distant locations or shot in the basement of prisons in secret. Show trials were didactic, acquainting the population with the remaining handful of enemies and trying to reconcile the alleged threat the accused represented with the triumphant invincibility of the rulers. When mass repression was required—as at Novocherkassk, where the army killed striking workers in 1962— it was given little publicity.27

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In this connection it is of interest to note that by the time Leonid Brezhnev rose to power, following Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Soviet sociologists became convinced that far from becoming ever more uniform under socialism, as Marxist theory predicted, Soviet society was in fact becoming more and more complex and diverse. This meant that the new conflicts of interest could not be resolved by existing mechanisms. To be sure, most of these conflicts were not supposed to involve human rights or political freedom. Instead, they had to do with questions such as the rights of one factory versus another, of urban versus rural inhabitants, etc.—that is to say, the myriad issues that in most complex industrial societies are resolved by the judiciary.28 The situation in China was quite different. Mao believed that “contradictions” were a permanent feature of society and would persist even under Communism. He laid out the argument in 1937, in On Contradiction, that while “antagonism” may disappear from time to time, depending upon circumstances, “contradiction”—the “law of the unity of opposites”—is permanent.29 His conception of what Communist rule should look like therefore differed profoundly from what was found in Eastern Europe. He did not share the distrust of the masses that Stalin seemed to display and the resulting bureaucratic methods and instead reveled in chaos and disorder— manipulated or real. By the 1960s, when many on the left were complaining about the “bureaucratization” and “commandism” that seemed alien to Maoism, the latter began to exercise a growing appeal due to its emphasis on the mass mobilization of people apparently involved in political decision making. Only after Mao’s death did most observers come to understand that Chinese popular involvement in political action, including violence, was as organized as it was in the Soviet Union—but in a different manner. Mao’s belief that contradictions survived even the final turn of the wheel of dialectic gave birth to the doctrine of the “mass line.” As the late Jürgen Domes puts it: “In comparison with other Communist countries, the ‘mass movement’ … as an instrument of political communication from above to below is particularly representative of Chinese Communist rule.” Problems of legitimation in China were particularly acute given the attempt to reconcile the actual attitudes of the population and the purported superior understanding and theoretical knowledge of the Communist elite, which allegedly enabled it to guide society. If supposed mass support legitimated the system why the reliance on this vanguard-elite of the party? Domes further observed: If one is convinced that one belongs to an elite of socially critical and historically conscious prophets who have recognized the true needs of the masses, these needs have to be made inherent in the masses … The leaders need the legitimation from below. Where there is a lack of it, it has to be created … However this presented the Chinese leadership with a serious problem. What should be done if the “will of the masses” did not articulate itself in the way that was demanded by the top level? How could they invoke before their own people and before the world the impression that the people consented to them and at the same time mobilize the people to realize their own conception?30

Given these concerns with popular legitimation, interaction between the party elite and the masses shifted from state terror to attempted persuasion, manipulation, and coercion as means to create seemingly spontaneous “mass movements.” These movements began as soon as the party took power. Most important was the land reform movement (1950–1953) that saw hundreds of thousands of cadres

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sent to the countryside—270,000 in East China alone—where they classified inhabitants by property, created “peasant associations” to spearhead attacks, which were usually “struggle rallies” at which accused landowners would be beaten or killed. As the extracts quoted from Fanshen at the outset indicate, this was not the beginning of a spontaneous movement. But once score settling, expropriation, and killing had begun in the countryside, it was difficult to stop. As the Agricultural Commissar of Guangdong province declared: If we do not allow the peasants to beat and kill the landlords it is difficult to stir them up. Without mobilising them it is not possible to stamp out the exploitation of a thousand years by the landlords. Once the peasants have been stirred up the government cannot and should not check them.31

Moderate estimates of the numbers killed during these campaigns are roughly five million.32 No sooner had the land been redistributed as private property among the farmers than the authorities turned to the equally bloody business of collectivization, reversing what they had done before. *

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The various agricultural programs—land reform, collectivization, etc.—came to a crashing end with The Great Leap Forward of 1958–1959. The latter began with a theory of how to rapidly increase China’s agricultural and industrial production by the substitution of human resources for capital, an idea substantially derived from Soviet policies. The theory can be traced to the work of the influential Soviet agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko who argued that plants would adapt to new environments and that acquired characteristics would be passed on. As the historian of the Great Leap, Jasper Becker tells it: Lysenko’s greatest triumphs came after the Second World War, when he dreamt up the “Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” To create a new and warmer climate in the bast lands of Siberia, Lysenko proposed planting millions of trees. The peasants had to plant the seeds and saplings close together, because, according to Lysenko’s “law of the life of species,” individuals of the same species do not compete but help each other to survive. Naturally all the seedlings died but not before the composer Shostakovich (1906–1975) had written his choral symphony, The Song of the Trees, and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) had penned [a] poem.33

A similar spirit animated Mao’s Great Leap. The 1950s were a time when the Soviet Union was widely thought to be overtaking the West in production, technology, and standard of living. Mao was impressed by reports about the triumphs of Soviet agriculture. Furthermore, the idea that plants of the same species would not compete against one another appealed to his ideas of the class struggle. Soon experiments in China were beginning to duplicate the alleged Soviet achievements. Some of them was carried out by Shi Yiqian, “China’s Michurin,” and his colleagues. (Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin was a geneticist favored by Stalin). Shi, had been a farmer who became a professor in Henan after he grew grapes on a persimmon tree. Other experimenters managed “to cross-breed animals such as rabbits and pigs.”34 In 1958 Mao personally drew up a list of eight policies that would guide and transform Chinese agriculture. The first was “close planting.” Since plants of the

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same species would not compete, but cooperate, it followed that one could safely plant, for example, many more rice seedlings in a single paddy than was customary, thereby increasing the yield. Farmers were skeptical, but complied under government pressure: [In Guangdong], close planting was initially obligatory in all fields. A density of 1.5 million seedlings per 2.5 acres is usually the norm in the south, but in 1958 peasants were ordered to plant 6.75 million seedlines and the next year 12–15 million seedlings per 2.5 acres. The same close planting was done throughout China with wheat, cotton, sorghum, millet and every other important crop: the results were identifical—the seedlings died. Yet the press published photographs apparently showing wheat growing so densely that children could sit on top of it. A retired Xinhua photographer later told the author that the pictures were faked by putting a bench underneath the children.35

Not surprisingly the result was a catastrophe. Close planting, along with other mistaken measures, led to crop failures and famine all over China. Three years of mass starvation followed. To relieve pressure the regime loosened controls on movement from Guangdong to neighboring Hong Kong, then British-run. By April 1962 the flow of refugees had “assumed the proportions of a tidal wave … As word of the exodus spread, people in provinces neighboring [Guangdong] began to make their way towards Hong Kong in order to join in.” Overwhelmed, the British authorities asked Beijing to stop the flood, but this was not easy. “On June 1 [1962] thousands of people who wanted to buy tickets to the border … rioted at the Canton East Railway Station, forcing the authorities to impose martial law.” Some 142,000 starving illegal immigrants had reached Hong Kong in two months.36 When questioned, these refugees explained that starvation had driven them to flee. In spite of this, Western China specialists, with a handful of exceptions, did not believe that famine of any kind existed in China. Close reading of the official press permitted Jürgen Domes to state that: In 1963, Chinese newspapers called the famine of 1961–2 the most severe which had afflicted the country since 1879. Some estimates of the number of victims of the famine and of the following epidemics reached numbers which are beyond comprehension. At least ten million people died from the consequences of food shortages, but an estimate of even several times that number cannot be entirely dismissed.37

The Western China-watching community dismissed such assessments with near unanimity. In the mid-1980s, however, the Chinese authorities decided to share their population database with a group of demographers at Princeton University, headed by the late Ansley Coale. Coale and his group concluded that perhaps thirty million had perished as a result, direct or indirect, of the famine. This stunning figure was made public in 1984 in a little noticed pamphlet published by the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., having the anodyne title: Rapid population change in China 1952–1982.38 For now thirty million remains the best estimate for the number who perished. Higher figures, as high as sixty million, have been published and discussed by scholars in China.39 A host of unanswered questions remain about this famine. One, of course, concerns the failure of Western specialists to notice it, in spite of accessible written evidence in the Chinese press and from refugees. Perhaps the most puzzling question is: how much Mao did and his colleagues know? The Chinese Communists had long

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been interested in the new methods of agriculture pioneered in the Soviet Union. After 1949, delegations of Chinese farmers were sent on long visits to Ukraine and Kazakhstan “to see model collectives with their own cinemas, bath houses and daycare centers. They ate in peasant homes from tables groaning with food.” Such highly atypical comforts made the Soviet policies attractive. Soviet pseudoscience was imported by Mao. State coercion forced reluctant farmers to follow methods they knew could only be catastrophic. “Yet,” as Becker notes, “the truth, as many in the Chinese Communist Party knew, was that collectivization had been a disaster in the Soviet Union … Stalin had created the worst famine in Russian history in which millions had perished … The Ukraine famine of the early 1930s was in many ways the forerunner of what was to happen in China. Mao and his followers must have had some knowledge of the events.”40 The results were every bit as gruesome as what Robert Conquest describes in Harvest of Sorrow.41 *

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This famine was well known by the Chinese leadership, although concealed from the people, who were told that it was merely a local phenomenon. It led to a political crisis that was the turning point of the Mao era. Leaders, notably military commander Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), who learned from his troops what was happening, politely brought the catastrophe to the attention of the famous party plenum at the mountaintop resort of Lushan in July 1959. Although no acknowledgment was made of the disaster, Mao was removed from the day-to-day exercise of power—which later led to his launching the climactic mass movement of his rule, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in order to recover his power and destroy those who, like Peng, had opposed him.42 Like the Great Leap Forward, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not kept secret. Rather it was flaunted as a vivid example of the sort of thoroughgoing and spontaneous popular action that would bring China into a new era. We have numerous memoirs by those who lived through it, films made of it at various times, as well as books written by foreigners then resident in China—such as William Hinton, who participated, and recorded his experience in Hundred Day War.43 Igniting the struggle was not easy, although tinder in the form of grievances was available. Through the 1950s young people from non-Communist backgrounds were targets of discrimination, while the offspring of party members rose quickly in schools, youth organizations, universities, etc. The excluded young people were eager to vindicate themselves and the Communist bureaucracy was somewhat on the defensive. In the countryside the Communist bureaucracy was discredited by enforcing the policies that led to the famine of the Great Leap. In urban areas, where the unfettered power and privileges of the party bureaucracy were well known, it had long lost the trust so many had placed in the system in 1949. Because there was no public admission of either the famine, or of Mao’s role in it, Mao Zedong still enjoyed great prestige and was thought by the masses to be the only leader who truly understood them, who would go over the heads of the bureaucracy and address the people directly, the only leader capable of stirring them up against the Communist party itself, the party that had taken power from him after the collapse of the Great Leap. At the same time, in 1965, Mao did not even have the power to place an editorial in any of the Beijing newspapers. The story has been told many times of how he eventually managed to get an essay by a colleague,

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calling for change, into a Shanghai military newspaper, bypassing his opponents, to establish some direct communication with the people.44 The bureaucrats whom Mao targeted were certainly not guiltless, nor were they capable of defending themselves. The Chairman and his close colleagues rallied those who had been previously excluded for the attack on the establishment. One after another, towering figures of the Communist movement were brought down through a combination of mass action choreographed by Mao’s followers and cooperation by officials who sensed the coming change. Mao encouraged young people to organize themselves as Red Guards, dressed in military-style uniforms, and to attack, detain, denounce, and often kill local officials who were considered “counter-revolutionary.” As these methods gradually allowed Mao and his followers to recapture the machinery of state, former top leaders were arrested and many perished. The most senior among them was Mao’s former designated successor, Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) around whom Mao tightened the noose with great care.45 Memoirs of then-young participants are indispensable in understanding how Mao managed to create, in effect, an army of his own that was purging the ranks of Mao’s opponents and all those he disliked or distrusted—a large number of people—while under the impression that it was combating old thoughts and culture and clearing the way for the new. One of the best such books is Son of the Revolution.46 Liang Heng, the author, was born in the 1950s. “My parents,” he recalls “were deeply involved in all the excitement of working to transform China into a great Socialist country, eager to sacrifice themselves for others.” But both had political problems and “dreamed passionately of the day when they would be deemed pure and devoted enough to be accepted into the Party.”47 Eventually, the parents divorced, hoping to spare their children political problems. Young Liang Heng was a perfect subject for Maoist manipulation. His parents had taught him to revere Mao. He saw that despite their suffering, they never lost faith in China’s leader. By the same token, however, he was an outsider in his school and school organizations. Mao bypassed the usual chain of command and used the media to address such people directly. Gradually, one by one, young people began to do his bidding: [O]ne morning … Little Li walked in. He was the smartest of my playmates and my good friend, and I was glad to see him. He sat down with his customary seriousness on the edge of he bed and said: “You know, everyone has been quoting Chairman Mao saying, ‘There is no wrong in Revolution; it is right to rebel. We should do something too. There are a lot of Capitalist tendencies in our old primary school. Remember how Teacher Luo was always quoting the Russians? We should organize the other students and launch a Cultural Revolution there too.” I thought this was a great idea. We would be following Chairman Mao just like the grownups, and Father would be proud of me. I suppose, too, I resented the teachers who had controlled and criticized me for so long.48

Soon young Liang was writing big character posters and running up against the local authorities. The movement gained steam as millions of other young Chinese made decisions like his and, working with the handful of pro-Maoists in local organizations, quite literally tore down the bureaucratically organized Communist party that had been built in the 1950s. By the time of the IX Party Congress in 1969, Mao had reestablished his control over China and left the question of who would succeed him in the hands of his followers.

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Mao’s goals were not readily grasped. Few understood his personal agenda when the attack on “old culture” began. Violence routinely went out of control, as in Xiamen and Fujian, where rival Red Guard factions raided military stores obtaining weapons, including missiles and even a tank, that they attempted to use against one another.49 In some areas, the hatred stirred up against supposed class enemies led Communists to kill, cook, and eat portions of their victims. Perhaps the single most harrowing Red Guard account of such events is the Scarlet Memorial by Zheng Yi.50 As the country spiraled into chaos, the army finally stepped in. Local Communists in the great central Chinese riverport of Wuhan refused to follow the Maoist line, supporting instead their own Red Guard organization. When envoys were sent from Beijing, they were detained. In July 1967 the regular army was sent in to disarm military units in the city. “In the months that followed, more than 184,000 alleged members and supporters of the Million Heroes [the local Red Guard organization] in Hubei province were beaten up or killed; in Wuhan 66,000 were wounded and over 600 killed.” Fighting evidently continued into the spring of the following year.51 This “Wuhan Incident” suggested that China was on the brink of civil war. Although the Cultural Revolution was not at an end, the military subsequently began to take control and restore order across the country. A grim situation continued until Mao’s death in 1976. *

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A month after Mao’s passing, a military coup ousted his chosen followers ultimately bringing to power Deng Xiaoping and his two handpicked successors, Jiang Zemin (b. 1926) and Hu Jintao. They have made great changes in how China does business, making themselves and many others rich, but have not made substantial changes in how China is governed. Force remains the ultima ratio and it is at once flaunted and denied—as in the Tiananmen Massacre of June 4, 1989, and the associated repression all over China. Indeed, the argument could be made that China’s Communists have never before been as dependent on censorship and propaganda, the secret police, and the army as they are today. This is because faith in the system had vanished during the Communist decades. In analyzing state-sponsored violence in China, I repeatedly juxtaposed the elements of coercion and manipulation by the government on one hand, to the faith of the masses in the imagined Maoist or Marxist dream on the other. These elements proved to be incompatible. *

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This disappearance of political faith has been the result, in large measure, of the Cultural Revolution. Early in this essay I spoke of how left-wing writers and others romanticized violence and struggle. I mentioned, in particular, Yang Mo’s Song of Youth, which glorifies and imputes great meaning to the sacrifices of innocent young people of the 1930s who gave up their lives in the struggle against the Nationalist government and the Japanese invaders. Writers like Yang Mo attached an almost transcendent significance to that violence and to the young peoples’ sacrifices. But after living through the pointless violence of the late 1960s the new generation was immune to such beliefs.

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Yang Mo’s son, the novelist Ma Bo (pen name Lao Gui, “Old Ghost”) was a senior in high school when the Cultural Revolution began. He describes his experiences in a book that was a bombshell when first published in China, where it sold 400,000 copies.52 Unlike his mother’s portrayal of events, Ma Bo’s depiction of violence robs it of any positive meaning or significance. Terrible things happen, people die—but it servers no purpose. He is the voice of the generation of the Cultural Revolution, whose adolescent passions and beliefs Mao mobilized for his own ends and who became utterly disillusioned. One passage in particular is an implicit rejection of the moral value his mother attributed to violence. The passage describes how he and his young group of comrades, having been sent to Inner Mongolia to spread the revolution, find themselves confronted by a prairie fire. The description is the polar opposite of socialist realism and romanticism and marks their disappearance of these theories. Liu Yinghong, an appealing young woman in the story is eager for approval and seeks to follow the party line, helping her comrades selflessly and putting the revolution above everything else. She is the idealist in the group, and regularly in trouble because of it. When the fire roars up, she rushes to help fight it, only to be caught in and engulfed by it. Ma Bo spares no detail: The flames followed her, seared her, never left her. Finally she fell and the greedy flames swarmed over her body. Her hair was smoldering, her clothes burning, her shoes smoking. Fair skin roasted by the merciless heat. Nasal passages, lips, eyes—all incinerated. Breasts, arms, and legs oozing grease, like meat over a spit. Her seared, cracked lips curled upward when they kissed the ground. Scorched earth was a cool refuge from the superheated air. Her mouth opened involuntarily and began gnawing at the ground. Dry grass crackled when it ignited. Her lips, reduced to crusty scabs, continued to kiss the dancing flames, the red and black cinders. She embraced the smoking grass and dug with such force that her nails broke off. Her living body and pure soul underwent the suffering of a roasted lamb; her innocent, unsullied heart was fused to the blackened earth. Her name was Liu Yinghong. She had rescued no one, had performed no heroic deeds, before breathing her last.

The fire burned out, cleanup began: They found Liu Yinghong, her face buried in dirt that filled her mouth. Her body, naked but for a sanitary napkin still in place, was so bloated it was almost perfectly round. Nearby lay another corpse … Tragically, they had been only a few yards from safety when they died. Sometimes that’s all that separates life and death.”53

This is the single most harrowing passage I know in the literature of the Cultural Revolution, possibly more disturbing than descriptions of cannibalism. Ma Bo is a relentless realist and an agnostic. He describes struggle, violence, and death as ugly, cruel, and without meaning. The China that he portrays is no longer a land of fantasy. His prose reflects deep disenchantment and marks, I think, an end of a certain kind of imaginative romanticism. In the late 1970s Leszek Kolakowski wrote, “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.54 That applied to the Soviet Union, and to the intelligentsia of East and West, but nowhere was it more true than in China where belief in revolution and socialism led the believers to devote immense ingenuity and a great deal

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of violence to the attempted realization of the fantasy. The deadly political violence here recalled has destroyed the fantasy and the motivation to realize it as effectively as the prairie fire destroyed Liu Yinghong in Ma Bo’s book. *

*

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In China Communist power continues to dominate society, but the ultimate goals of the rulers are not clear, other than holding on to power. No Chinese leader has so much as whispered the truth about the victims of past Communist rule, let alone reflected on the human costs of revolutionary transformations. In this regard China is very different from the Soviet Union where the past has been subject to a measure of public scrutiny. What China and the Soviet Union have in common is the vanishing of the socialist fantasy that initially inspired these systems. That does not mean, however, that state power must now rely purely on naked force either in Russia or in China. Other new and potentially dangerous fantasies and aspirations—racial, nationalistic, and militaristic—are on the rise and may become dangerous influences on the policies of these states.

Chapter 8

4

Po liti cal Repression in C astro’s Cuba: Poli ci es, Institutions and Victims M a r i a C . We r l a u

The Role of Fidel Castro Among the Communist systems of the past century, and those that still survive, Cuba has been one of the most repressive and depriving as is indicated by the huge numbers of refugees escaping the island often under extremely difficult and lifethreatening conditions. It has also been a system that allowed less freedom of expression than most other Communist states. Especially significant is that, unlike in Eastern Europe, the liberalization and later collapse of the Soviet Union did not lead to the relaxation of repressive policies or to a weakened will to power on the part of its leaders. The personality and political role of Fidel Castro is critical for understanding the nature and durability of political repression in Cuba. By the time he was a law student, writes biographer Brian Latell, he had realized he had exceptional talents and was ready to use them to acquire power and fame.1 It has also been observed that he was “vain, spoiled, and narcissistic” and manifested the character traits of a sociopath, “unable to distinguish between right and wrong.”2 By age twenty, he had shot a classmate without warning and considered “murder and mayhem acceptable means to advance his personal interest.”3 In the subsequent half century, his reign on power has provided ample opportunity for expressing these traits. Castro led the armed struggle against the Batista dictatorship by heading a widespread opposition movement. On January 1, 1959, he rode into power on broad popular support for the restoration of democracy. But, even as he was forcing Cuba on the path to Communism, for nearly three years he emphatically denied his MarxistLeninist ideology. He only conceded his true intentions when totalitarian controls were well in place and were on the way to eliminating the “vestiges of the bourgeois state”4 while a clear alignment with the Soviet Union had been cemented.5 Castro has confirmed that his Marxist ideology had evolved during his six years as a university student6 and that he had already developed a plan for the future, his

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thinking well formed before embarking on his revolutionary activities.7 While in jail for a year and a half under Batista, he read voraciously and took advantage of the lenient prison conditions for political prisoners.8 His manifesto from prison, “History will Absolve Me,” had been “well prepared to hide his true intentions and not harm the wider appeal of the anti-Batista movement.”9 The vision he had developed, he later explained, was one of “utopian socialism, rather than scientific socialism.”10 It is not difficult to conclude that adherence to dogmatic Marxism would have implied too rigid a script and would have been impractical given the actual circumstances in Cuba. He called his ideals “humanist”—their goal being to “bring freedom to the people, but also provide them the means to live and obtain their food.”11 He was “concerned with the chaotic nature of capitalism,”12 and came to the conclusion that only a system that allowed him to run everything could serve his ambitions. His tenure in power proves the point; he has been known to micromanage everything—including the most technical or trivial aspects of the economy. His unique conception of equality provided entitlement for maintaining the lifestyle of a very prosperous capitalist while imposing spartan living conditions on the vast majority of the population.13 Castro had learned from Lenin and Gramsci that deception is not only justifiable, but also necessary in the service of the great goals. By the time he took power, he had refined his version of totalitarian control and plans for third-world revolutions to be unleashed when the moment was ripe. A Soviet-supported Communist system offered the best possibilities for achieving unchecked personal power and glory. Because, in Castro’s own words, the Cuban Communist Party “was isolated by the United States and the reactionaries within Cuba” and would never achieve power,14 he decided to carry out his own revolution. When the time was right, he would coopt the Cuban Communist Party, which he eventually did, quickly and successfully.15 In Chile, during a month-long visit in 1971 at the time of Allende’s presidency, he explained his reasoning: “A road to revolution means taking advantage of every opportunity and possibility of advancing.”16 A close examination of Castro’s account of his road to power and the evolution of his rule makes it doubtful that he was a genuine Communist. Rather, he was first and foremost a “Fidelista”—an opportunist. His belief in his historical mission was difficult to separate from an apparently insatiable hunger for power and self-aggrandizement. His profound hatred of the United States and the realization that the U.S. government would oppose him and the political system he wished to establish made the Soviet connection and support convenient and attractive. His vision of socio-political transformation was not limited to Cuba. Exporting the revolution was part of his messianic agenda. Subversion abroad, beginning with Latin America, was initiated promptly after he came to power.17 Later on, large scale military interventions in Africa would extend his reach. Shaping radical forces worldwide18 and crowning himself as leader of the Third World “anti-imperialist” movement complemented his aspirations. Castro stayed in power longer than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Until he delegated power temporarily to his brother on July 30, 2006, he was the longest-serving head of state. Despite his ill health, he still appears to influence policy making and the exercise of power.19 At least until July of 2006, he was chief of state with the titles of president, head of government, first secretary of the Communist Party, and commander in chief of the armed forces. His overriding need to seize and cling to power and glory, his supreme ruthlessness and skill for attaining this goal, as well as the impact of childhood experiences on his personality are reminiscent of the lives of Hitler and Stalin.

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The Castro Model of Totalitarian Control Castro’s methodology is essentially Leninist-Stalinist—the goal is to concentrate absolute power in the hands of the supreme leader and to create a society in which individual freedoms are severely curtailed; participation in political life is purely symbolic, nonetheless compulsory. The controls he established half a century ago have endured to this day. He has also conducted a highly successful international public relations’ campaign resulting in a widespread perception of Cuba as an authentic socialist system, the blemishes of which—if acknowledged at all—are the result of American ill will expressed in the economic blockade. Cuban researcher Leovigildo Ruíz produced a record of life in Cuba during the years 1959–1961 based on local news reports, official decrees, and fragments of Fidel’s speeches, organized by date, without editorializing.20 This compilation provides a day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month account of how the totalitarian system was established over a period of three years. As of January 1st, 1959, the Cuban people were “among the best informed in the world, living in an unusually large media market for a small country.”21 Cuba’s thriving free press, which managed to survive the Batista regime, was gradually taken over by the Communist authorities and replaced by a state monopoly on all information reaching the citizens. Strict censorship was imposed. Laws were passed by decree, rapidly eroding individual freedoms—civil, political, and economic. Free labor unions were eliminated, labor leaders were imprisoned, basic labor rights were abolished, and a state-controlled federation of unions was created. Private and religious schools were closed down, Catholic nuns and priests expelled, and leaders of other faiths persecuted. Textbooks, curricula, and the education system were redesigned to indoctrinate and militarize the children. Public life and political participation were brought under state control—all organizations, parties, and groups were dismantled, making only the Communist Party and its mass organizations “legal.” Society was militarized at every level, and mechanisms of mass mobilization were created closely following the Soviet model: Communist Party committees at all workplaces and educational institutions and a network of mass organizations such as the Women’s Federation, the Union of Cuban Youth, Young Pioneers, etc. With respect to the economy, almost all private property was abolished sectorby-sector. Funds in bank accounts were confiscated while land, businesses, and commercial property—both foreign and national—were nationalized or expropriated. Agrarian reform included the confiscation of increasing amounts of land, eventually converting 92 percent of it into state property.22 By the late 1960s, hardly any property remained in private hands. Opposition to these and other policies was swiftly and brutally dealt with.23 In just a few years, individual freedoms and civil society had ceased to exist.

“The Great Terror” in the Tropics 24 The installation of a totalitarian institutional framework required terrorizing the population. Those identified with the old regime were persecuted and themes of class hatred were deftly added to the revolutionary rhetoric to justify bloodshed as “revolutionary justice.” Castro had learned firsthand from his predecessor what not to do. Batista had caved in to public demands and freed Castro from a fifteen-year prison sentence after serving only eighteen months. Castro was given privileges

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afforded to political prisoners, such as fairly comfortable living conditions, visitors, plentiful reading materials, and participation in sports with other political prisoners.25 When Castro’s turn came, political prisoners were treated far more harshly than ordinary criminals. Even before taking power, during the guerilla war against Batista, Castro’s ruthlessness was apparent as he had ordered the execution of deserters or informers on the spot.26 As soon as Castro took over on January 1, 1959, the plan to unleash terror was set in motion. Firing squads began operating, and members of Batista’s paramilitary groups or of the military and police were executed without trial or after summary trials. Some of them had committed killings and torture under Batista, but most had not. Many were accused of “war crimes” for which the evidence was fabricated. Those who could pose a threat due to past affiliation with the armed forces or police were targeted for elimination. Soon, the violence was extended to the rapidly growing opposition, whose ranks were filled with disaffected members of the resistance to Batista. Ché Guevara and Raúl Castro personified the ruthlessness of the new order. While Ché Guevara, an avowed Communist and advocate of terror, served as commander of the province of Santa Clara from January 1st to the 2nd, he was responsible for at least twenty-two executions. On January 7th, Cuban television transmitted the execution of the commander of the Santa Clara Army Barracks (which he had ordered), including the final shattering of his skull with a coup de grace.27 Raúl outdid him in Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city. On the night of January 12–13, he halted the summary trial of a large group of men and ordered all of the accused to be shot immediately. The victims included Batista supporters and members of his government, but most were killed simply for being members of the military and police. Throughout the night, groups of approximately ten to twelve men were taken by truck to a shooting range at San Juan Hill, lined up in front of ditches and shot. Afterwards, a bulldozer was used to cover the mass graves. Reports of the total number killed ranged from 75 to 125.28 The first revolutionary decree issued by the new government “legalized” these executions. On January 10, 1959, an amendment to the 1940 democratic Constitution of Cuba authorized the death penalty.29 Revolutionary tribunals led by bearded rebel victors were set up all over the island and operated in a circus-like atmosphere. Devoid of even the pretense of due process, they tried large groups of men for dubious allegations, brought in false witnesses, and often ended the proceedings after dedicating just a few minutes to each defendant. Those who had committed crimes were tried together with those who had not.30 The trials were often public, held in theaters mobbed by Castro supporters, with the proceedings blasted into the streets by loudspeakers. Capital punishment was dispensed generously. Ché Guevara played a key role in these proceedings. He had been recruited by Castro in Mexico to join the incipient Rebel Army and rose to a leadership position in the guerrilla war. When Batista fled the country and Castro took power, after his two-day killing spree in Santa Clara Guevara was put in charge of La Cabaña fortress prison, where the firing squads performed nightly. Transformed into an icon of social justice after his death in Bolivia, Ché was in fact a strict disciplinarian who enjoyed signing death warrants and had family members and friends of the executed paraded before the blood, bone, and brain-splattered wall (“paredón”) at which their loved one had been put to death.31

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Executions and Extra-Judicial Killings The victims of the Castro regime—their numbers, dates and circumstances of death— provide an overview of the patterns of terror. During the initial phase of consolidating power many people were killed and were killed in public. The goal was twofold: to eliminate the first batch of the real or potential opponents of the new order and to intimidate the rest of the population. Once this had been accomplished, there was no further need to engage in mass killings and the image of the regime abroad could be improved—not that these displays of “revolutionary justice” concerned greatly the sympathizers abroad. Executions by firing squad were the most numerous in 1959.32 Throughout the early 1960s, captured members of the civic resistance and opposition were executed. These forces, organized along the same lines as during the anti-Batista fight, used the same tactics and often the same leadership, which made it easier for the Castro regime to hunt them down.33 The third wave of repression, between 1961 and 1967 targeted the participants of the rural rebellion. The latter was led by small farmers whose lands had been confiscated and included many former members of the Rebel Army that fought against Batista. Law 988 of 1962 allowed the execution without trial of prisoners taken during the guerrilla uprising; many were killed almost immediately after being captured. War crimes were rampant during the massive, governmental search-and-destroy operations (“limpias”), in which thousands of troops combed fields foot-by-foot; heavily outnumbered rebel groups were surrounded and summarily killed or set afire in cane fields after running out of ammunition.34 Executions continued throughout the 1960s, but gradually diminished during each successive year. Cuba Archive has documented 3,621 executions in the first ten years of the Castro government (1959–1969).35 The following decades would see a significant reduction in the number of executions,36 although sporadic applications of the death penalty and more selective extrajudicial killings perpetrated by security forces have continued to this day. In the year 2007 there were reports of eight such killings, mostly of men in prison or in detention.37 In addition, numerous prisoners’ deaths have resulted from suicide or medical negligence.38

Violence Associated with Attempted Escape Since the earliest days of the Castro regime, those trying to flee by sea often faced lethal violence by the Cuban Border Guard or security forces. As in the former Soviet Bloc, most notably the German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany), leaving the national territory without government permission has been defined as treason and is punishable by law. Article 216 of the Cuban Penal Code stipulates eight years of prison for those who attempt such unauthorized departure and five years for those who aid and abet anyone who does. Article 117 calls for ten to twenty years of prison or death for anyone who takes any sea vessel or aircraft or interferes in their normal operation. Because the Cuban state owns all such vessels, citizens seeking to flee must steal them or build primitive rafts from any appropriate material, which is also punishable as theft, as most goods are government property. The ocean surrounding the entire island is, of course, a huge barrier. Aside from the countless thousands likely to have drowned, died of dehydration, or been devoured by sharks, Cuba Archive has documented 247 cases of extrajudicial killings during

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attempted escapes from the island. Two massacres stand out, one in 1980 when at least fifty-six civilians were killed, including four children, another one in 1994, when forty-seven people were killed, including eleven children.39 For nearly five decades and to this day, Cuba has maintained a version of the Berlin wall in the area surrounding the U.S. Guantánamo Naval Base, separated from Cuban territory by barbwire and minefields and fortified by watch towers manned by Cuban border guards with orders to shoot to kill. More than a dozen cases of people killed trying to escape to the base40 have been documented but anecdotal accounts indicate that hundreds, perhaps thousands, may have died there.

Other Distinctive Features The forcible extraction of the blood of men about to be executed, exported and sold for hard currency has not been reported from other Communist systems. This practice began in 1959 and reportedly existed until at least the late 1960s in several prisons across the country and was particularly prevalent at the Boniato Prison in Santiago. The Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights denounced this practice in 1967. Referring to the May 27, 1966, execution of 166 Cubans—civilians and members of the military—its report reads: “The gravity of this occurrence is exacerbated by the fact that the individuals executed were previously submitted to blood extraction procedures with illicit and massive purposes to supply the Blood Bank, which is used by the regime for scandalous business purposes.” The report notes that an average of seven pints per person were extracted, which were “sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of 50 dollars per pint with the dual purpose of obtaining hard currency in dollars and contributing to the Vietcong Communist aggression.” Because extracting a pint of blood, equivalent to half a liter, produces cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis, the OAS reports that the prisoners were then taken by stretcher to the location where the execution by firing squad was to take place.41 This OAS report is consistent with accounts of numerous former Cuban political prisoners that have surfaced over the years. Francisco Fernández, a former political prisoner held at Boniato prison from 1963 to 1968 recalls: “At Boniato, they would extract the blood from the men before their execution. In 1963, we were around 5,000 political prisoners. In the middle of the night every day they would take two or three men to have their blood extracted. This went on for about a year. They took them to special rooms at “the little hospital,” the clinic at the prison, where I was held because I am handicapped. I could not see who was going to be executed, but I was around twenty meters from the door to those rooms. I could hear everything. They did it to everyone they took there.”42 Castro had declared in a speech that the blood of the “counter-revolutionaries” was being extracted before their execution “to save the lives of many militiamen willing to die for the Fatherland.”43 Aside from the blood taken from those to be executed, blood collection campaigns were held throughout Cuba. The population was told it was for government troops fighting in the anti-insurgency campaign, primarily in the Escambray Mountains. All the while, the blood was being exported for hard currency, and not just to Vietnam. Cuban media reported blood sales to Canada in 196444 and economic data published by the Cuban government reflect the sale of blood as an export to Canada.45 The killing of minors is another distinctive feature of Cuban human rights’ violations in post-independence Spanish America. There are at least sixteen documented

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cases of boys executed for participating in or supporting the armed rural uprising of the 1960s or for attempting to escape obligatory military service.46 Two youngsters were executed for attempting to hijack an airplane to flee the island—one, age 17 in 1961, and one, age 15, in 1971. A 15-year-old boy, Juan Owen Delgado, was beaten to death at State Security Headquarters in Havana for seeking asylum at the Embassy of Ecuador in 1981 with his family.47 Many others have been drowned or shot by Cuban Border Guards for attempting to flee the island with their families.

Political Imprisonment Widespread imprisonment has been a major tool of repression in the Castro regime. Cuba does not divulge figures about the prison population or the places of detention, but it is clear that large numbers have been imprisoned for obvious and less obvious reasons including “reform” by fear and indoctrination. Estimates of the number of political prisoners jailed during the Castro period vary widely, as scholars, researchers, and former prisoners provide different estimates. Sociologist Juan Clark, a foremost expert on Cuban repression, believes that around 60,000 prisoners were held in the decade of the 60s.48 Documents of the former Stasi (East German Political Police) mention 18,000 political prisoners in 1965.49 The Stasi documents, however, did not take into account the UMAP camps, the “Military Units to Aid Production” that began operating in November of 1965 and remained in existence until 1968. These forced-labor camps were established to combat “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary” attitudes, particularly among young men whom the regime considered most dangerous. Over 25,000 young men were reportedly held in UMAP concentration camps, including homosexuals, religious leaders of different faiths, and those alleged to display “anti-social” or “counter-revolutionary” tendencies.50 Scattered over isolated areas near sugar fields in the province of Camagüey, the camps were surrounded by electrified barbwire, guards with machine guns, and police dogs. The inmates were marched to work singing the International at the command of their guards. Brutality against the prisoners was common. In 1968, as a result of a growing internal outcry, many UMAP camps were closed and the remaining work camps were given different names.51 Experts believe that the number of political prisoners was highest in the 1960s, when the total population of the island was around six million. The numbers steadily declined since then. In the 1970s 20,000 political prisoners were said to have been released as their sentences expired.52 By the 1990s, when small independent human rights groups emerged and began monitoring the human rights violations, a much lower number of political prisoners was reported, declining from about 1000 to 339 by the end 2006.53 Currently, the number is estimated to be under 300.54 Although much lower than in the past, it still represents one of the highest rates of political imprisonment in the world, both per capita and in total numbers.55 The large size of the general prison population is also noteworthy. There are currently about 100,000 prisoners out of a total population of approximately 11 million.56 The Castro regime has built many prisons and detention centers all over the island, reportedly well over 550. Some house young women accused of prostitution, others are reform centers “for school-age adolescents.”57 Military prisons accommodate young men who refused to fulfill the obligatory military service or display other types of antisocial attitudes. Many are imprisoned for so-called “economic crimes” that would not be crimes in democratic societies. Numerous prisoners are

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not considered prisoners of conscience or political prisoners as they are classified as common criminals for offenses that are essentially political in nature. For example, because the government rations food and controls what kinds of foods citizens may not have, even in the free farmers’ markets of recent years, people caught, for example, with beef or lobster, face years of prison. Thousands of Cubans are serving jail for “economic crimes” such as these and are subject to similar abuses and penury as those of political prisoners. The treatment of all prisoners is harsh. The appalling conditions and abuses political prisoners have been subjected to are amply documented by, among others, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations.58 An abundance of personal accounts also bear witness to this. Among them, Armando Valladares’s 1985 Against all Hope describes his twenty-two years in Castro’s dungeons.59 Dr. Ana Rodríguez, who spent nineteen years in jail for aiding the resistance, chronicled the story of women political prisoners in Diary of a Survivor.60 These and many such accounts chronicle the beatings, torture, malnutrition, disease, overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, rats, contaminated water and food, denial of medical care by prison authorities, forced labor, work accidents, psychological disorders, suicides, and murder in the prisons.61 The Cuba Archive project has collected information on 1,085 deaths of prisoners, yet this number is likely to underrepresent considerably the actual total.62 To this day, Cuba remains the only country in the western hemisphere that does not allow inspections by the Red Cross or international humanitarian monitors and human rights groups.63 In 1958, before Castro took power, Cuba had fourteen prisons64 and Batista held approximately 500 political prisoners during the seven years he was in power as a dictator.65 Clearly, Castro resolved not to follow in Batista’s footsteps as regards the number and the treatment of political prisoners.

Cuban Variants of the Soviet Model of Repression Castro followed his Soviet tutors, but also borrowed from Hitler and Mao. If staying in power for decades is a measure of success, he clearly perfected the model of eliminating challenges to his power. While his methods have not been highly original, they represent ingenious adaptations and improvements of what other police states have done to maintain a monopoly of power and stifle dissent. Immediately after coming to power, Castro created the G-2, which later morphed into what is today known as MININT, for Ministry of the Interior, under which it continues to operate. The model for the Cuban political police was the Cheka,66 the first incarnation of the Soviet political police created by the Bolsheviks after coming to power in 1917. The Cubans perfected this organization with help from East Germany’s Stasi (Staatsischerheit, meaning “State Security”).67 From the Stasi files now available, there is abundant confirmation that it trained and provided material and technical support to the Cuban political police until the collapse of the GDR.68 There is also evidence that the Stasi assisted Cuba in international subversive operations and mounted joint operations with Cuba to monitor and infiltrate educational and religious institutions in North America, Latin America, and Europe.69 Over the years, Cuba’s MININT has undergone organizational and leadership changes and improved its methods without changing its basic mission—to maintain the level of intimidation the stability of the regime requires. According to former

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members, the technical level of Cuba’s intelligence and counterintelligence apparatus is high, its proficiency unmatched by the corresponding organizations of countries of the former Soviet Bloc. The Stasi had the highest density of surveillance per citizen in the former Soviet bloc, with 89,000 officers and 179,000 collaborators.70 According to defectors, the Cuban security police has over 100,000 agents for a population of eleven million, which represents an even higher ratio of density of surveillance per agent.71 In addition, Cuba reportedly has at least half a million parttime informants, more than twice that of East Germany, for a population that is 35 percent smaller.72 Cuba’s gigantic, intricate, and sophisticated repressive apparatus not only monitors and controls the citizenry, it also monitors all communications from abroad and supervises foreign visitors—journalists, scholars, business people—and even members of the ruling elite.

Innovative Mechanisms of Control and Repression The CDRs, or Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, constitute a unique instrument of social-political control. As soon as Castro took over, militias were formed at all levels of society to control the population by militarizing ordinary citizens. This mass mobilization for the purposes of serving as the eyes and ears of the regime led to the creation in September, 1960, of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. These “committees” have become the major instrument of block-byblock and round the clock supervision of the population, with neighborhood CDR members reporting all suspicious activities, real or potential. The CDR is authorized to gather information about patterns of consumption, socializing, and even the radio stations listened to—anything of conceivable relevance for the political reliability of the citizen. The CDR also plays a role in deciding who is admitted to institutions of higher education and employment opportunities. Another device of control is the “Expediente Acumultivo del Escolar” (The Student’s Cummulative Record),73 which follows students through their entire education, including university. This sophisticated tool of control ranks students by quantitative and qualitative criteria and forces teachers to provide information about the political inclinations and conduct of their students. It monitors political attitudes, religious practices at home, and participation in mass organizations. The information obtained helps the authorities in selecting students for higher education and in the allocation of privileges such as study abroad. “Rapid Response Brigades” represent another innovation in coercive techniques operating outside the formal institutions of repression. They are government-sponsored paramilitary groups of construction and other workers who respond instantly and with physical force to any civil disobedience or political protest. Brigade members are assigned to localities different from their place of residence, often relocated to other regions of the country to assure they will not be inhibited by ties of family or friendship from responding forcefully to acts of civil disobedience. These brigades were created after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and the economic crisis that ensued. “Acts of Mass Repudiation” are ostensibly spontaneous but in fact governmentorganized attacks by civilians against alleged “counterrevolutionaries” that pit neighbors against neighbors. They were prevalent during the Mariel boat exodus of 1980, when thousands of Cubans who were allowed to leave the island were attacked by

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mobs in their homes or on the streets. Similar acts were repeated in the 1990s directed at members of Cuba’s peaceful opposition.74

Emigration as Political Control and Safety Valve Between 1959 and 1999 over a million Cubans left and the exodus continues to this day.75 They could only take with them a small amount of personal belongings and received no compensation for the property left behind. They represented every stratum of the population. The government has used emigration to get rid of the most disaffected people and political dissidents. During the first years of the revolution, over 10 percent of the population fled. It has also been common practice to release political prisoners as a result of international pressure if the prisoner agrees to go into exile. The regime also reaps economic benefits from former Cuban citizens living abroad who seek to help their families in Cuba. Since the early 1990s, when the use of the dollar was decriminalized, their remittances average between US $450 million and $1 billion per year, keeping entire families afloat, reaching a large portion of the population, and providing a 20 percent direct return for the state treasury in the form of taxes on remittances. In addition, there are the duties émigrés returning to visit their family must pay for visas, airport entries, and taxes on gifts. Such revenues were estimated at US $48 million in 2003.76 Exiles also fund the expensive telephone rates charged by the state. In sum, since the mid 1990s, exiles provide well over a billion dollars per year in revenues for the Castro government. The Cuban government also tries to use the threat of unleashing huge waves of refugees by sea as blackmail against the United States, Bahamas, and other neighboring countries in its attempts to influence their policy toward Cuba.77

Combining Economic and Political Controls Following the cessation of the massive Soviet subsidies, beginning in the early 1990s, Castro unveiled his own version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP).78 Selective economic reforms were passed, which included making the U.S. dollar legal, opening the tourist sector, and allowing foreign investment in joint ventures with the Cuban state in certain sectors of the economy. The government also designed a system of enclave capitalism with strong state control to more effectively neutralize the effects of foreign capital and tourism.79 It has also launched a campaign to attract investors and softened its revolutionary image by, among other things, having Fidel give up his trademark fatigues to dress in fine business suits. Additional measures included allowing religious practice, inviting the Pope to visit Cuba in 1998, and securing funds and support from foreign religious communities. Exiles earlier designated as “worms,” were allowed to return for visits thereby providing remittances and huge revenues as described above.80 Notwithstanding these reforms and concessions, Cuba under Castro has one of the highest rates of state control of the economy, far exceeding that of the other socialist countries of the former Soviet bloc. Today, Cuba ranks just ahead of North Korea, at the bottom of 157 countries ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation.81 The subordination of the citizen to the state in all economic (as well as political) matters assures that only top government officials can accumulate wealth. In fact,

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even those within the Castro brothers’ inner circle are subject to monitoring by the intelligence apparatus. Only Fidel Castro has enjoyed true economic independence, retaining exclusive discretion over the nation’s resources. Already in the 1960s there was evidence of the skimming of state resources to Swiss accounts held by Fidel or Raúl Castro. In the 1970s, according to defectors, Castro began creating a network of companies and financial institutions overseas. Over time, the Castro brothers have established a vast conglomerate of businesses, financial institutions, and real estate holdings—both on the island as well as in other parts of the world—diverting cash resources to bank accounts under their sole discretion in Switzerland, Grand Cayman, and other locations. These enormous financial resources at their disposal have been used to fund an immense and effective propaganda machine to sell Castro and his revolution abroad and to fund international terrorism, subversion, and liberation movements. Propaganda and public relations, including bribing world leaders, help to explain the regime’s disproportionate international influence and the support of influential figures around the world.82 Castro has also expended huge resources on promoting the idea that Cuba is a world leader in education and health,83 delivering medical assistance globally and to foreigners in Cuba at no cost to them. Likewise generous scholarships have been given to foreigners to study medicine in exclusive universities in Cuba. Meanwhile, Cuban citizens are served by an obsolete and underfinanced medical system that often fails to provide them with the most basic services and supplies.

Selective Moral Indignation in the West and Political Repression in Cuba Even among the longstanding Western misperceptions and misjudgments of Communist systems, those of Cuba stand out as the most durable and most resistant to information. This is all the more remarkable since Cuba is barely ninety miles from the United States and the exodus of almost 15 percent of its population is a powerful refutation of the moral and propaganda claims of this government as well as a reliable source of information about conditions in Cuba. The intensity of rejection of the system has been reflected in the desperate attempts of tens of thousands of Cubans of different social backgrounds to escape by sea with the aid of a variety of primitive flotation devices. It is not easy to comprehend why political violence and repression in Castro’s Cuba has inspired so little moral indignation and condemnation in the West, especially when compared to such sentiments directed toward right-wing dictatorships in the same hemisphere. To cite one example, historian and Georgetown University professor Clive Foss, in his recent study, The Tyrants: 2,500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption,84 excluded Castro but included Chile’s Pinochet, Argentina’s Peron, and Trujillo of the Dominican Republic—dictators who stayed in power for far fewer years than Castro. It was hardly an oversight, since Foss has written an entire book dedicated to Fidel Castro.85 In 1997 the American Association for World Health published a report on the impact of the U.S. embargo on healthcare and nutrition in Cuba.86 Despite an impressive list of visits to patient-care facilities and institutions in Cuba and 170 interviews, not one was conducted with the numerous Cuban professionals who have left the state system of health care and now fill the ranks of the persecuted opposition on the island or have gone into exile.87

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A major explanation of why neither visitors nor sympathizers abroad learn more about the less-than-admirable aspects of Cuban society and political life is due to the totalitarian control over information both abroad and within Cuba. Many journalists and visiting scholars admit in private that they are inhibited from being critical of the Castro regime because of their apprehension of losing access to the island. Many have already paid a price by having been detained or imprisoned in Cuba or being expelled, never to be allowed to return.88 In addition, there is a lack of access to documentary evidences, to state agencies, and to people willing to speak freely. Cuban citizens telling the truth about conditions of life face predictable harassment or persecution. In turn, the Cuban exile community’s fragmentation and insularity hinders it from being an effective force in the struggle for freedom in Cuba. The charisma of Fidel Castro has also played an important role in romanticizing the revolution and has helped to overlook or excuse the repression it has institutionalized. Until the recent decline of his health, he succeeded in maintaining the revolutionary credentials and sense of continuity of the system by staying in power and providing legitimation as the founder of the system. While we cannot understand Cuban Communism without understanding Castro, it would be a mistake to assume that the system he designed and solidified cannot survive his final exit. The “Fidel model” has been institutionalized in Cuba and can be taken over by another leader or leadership able to maintain cohesiveness of the political-military elite and control of the apparatus of repression. Despite uncertainties after Castro’s retreat from center stage, signs point to regime survival. The Cuban model has also become revitalized by Hugo Chavez’s ascent to power in Venezuela and his adoption of Castro’s roadmap to concentrated power. In turn, Chavez provides substantial economic assistance to Cuba, thereby helping perpetuate the system. Robert Conquest, called by Paul Johnson “our greatest living modern historian,” predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, a system that attempted to implement a flawed theory of society and human nature. Castro’s Cuba has been guided by the same theory in a different setting and under different historical circumstances, yet it has been equally unsuccessful in uniting theory and practice. Soviet Communism endured until the Soviet leadership decided on thoroughgoing reform ( glasnost and perestroika) that undermined the system and exposed its vulnerabilities. No such reforms are on the Cuban horizon since the Cuban leaders are well aware of where these reforms lead to. Notwithstanding the defects of the Cuban system and the hardships it has imposed on the population, as long as the leadership following Castro retains the will to power and is determined to impress this determination upon the population, the system is likely to endure.

Chapter 9

4

Revolutions and R evolutionary I deologies in Latin Amer ica Mark Falcoff

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ne of the central conceits of contemporary culture is the notion that Latin America as a continent hovers continually on the verge of revolutionary transformation. This reflects the capacity of a few events, rather than the facts on the ground, to capture the imagination of foreign publics—that, and the unusually influential role that Latin American intellectuals have played in shaping foreign perception of their societies. In fact, the Latin American republics have proven for the most part to be surprisingly resistant to any fundamental change in their social hierarchies and values ever since their emergence to independence in the early nineteenth century. This is not to say that political violence has not played an important role in the public life of many republics. Indeed, except for Brazil and Chile, most of them came into existence through upheavals that were in effect civil wars. But contrary to official historiography, these struggles did not necessarily pit haves against have-nots; in many places the poor and disenfranchised fought on the side of the colonial power, and not always without reason. Indeed, as one Mexican historian has suggested, in terms of social and racial power, his country’s liberation from Spain was a kind of counter-revolution.1 This paper argues that it is not revolution itself but revolutionary ideology—or “revolutionism”—that characterizes the more dramatic moments of Latin American history. It proposes to examine some of the leading examples and concludes with some observations concerning the perennial fascination that the subject holds for outsiders.

I The Mexican revolution (1910–1917) was the first Latin American movement to attract the attention and sympathy of foreigners. This was so partly because of its venue—next door to the United States—and partly because it was the first civil war

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in Latin America to succeed in draping a quest for power in modern ideological terms. The Constitution of 1917 drafted in Queréretaro was, on paper at least, more “advanced” than any in the world, at least insofar as labor rights and land reform were concerned. For the first time, too, a Latin American government arrogated to the state the ultimate ownership of subsoil deposits such as oil and minerals, expropriating by a stroke of the pen properties belonging to Spanish, British and American citizens. Although the U.S. government reacted by subsequently accusing the nascent revolutionary government of “Bolshevism,” that government could hardly be inspired by the Russian example, which followed it chronologically. Rather than Marxism, Marxism-Leninism or “Bolshevism”, Mexico’s revolutionary ideology, such as it was, combined several radical European currents in no particular order— anarchism, socialism, syndicalism—with homegrown tendencies toward personalism, militarism and outright pillage. Before St. Petersburg and Moscow became sites of revolutionary pilgrimage, Mexico had already become a magnet for American radicals. Indeed, one of the first English language tracts attempting to justify and explain the Mexican upheaval was actually written by the American journalist John Reed,2 later famous for his romanticized view of Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia.3 Behind Mexico’s radical façade things were not always what they seemed. Although some properties seized by the revolutionaries were divided into rural collectives (ejidos), the most valuable lands tended to pass into the hands of a new “revolutionary” class of landowners. The urban labor movement, originally led by anarchists, was firmly placed in the hands of a gangster class that found no difficulty in reaching agreement with employers behind the scenes. Eventually, the Mexican government even made peace with the United States, opening the road to new investment on the basis of joint ventures. The result was to reinforce the wealth and power of a new revolutionary elite, or its children or grandchildren, many of whom continue to dominate the country today. The most important impact of the Mexican Revolution, in fact, was cultural rather than political. Apart from unleashing an outburst of literary and artistic creativity (much of which, however, was actually under way in the immediate prerevolutionary period) it led to a definition of Mexican identity. School textbooks were rewritten to emphasize the country’s Indian roots to the point of denying, even ridiculously so, the Spanish contribution to the country’s language, religion, architecture and social customs. Ironically, however, the principal beneficiary of this change were not Mexico’s Indians but its Spanish-speaking mixed race (mestizo) majority, which formed the basis of a new middle class in the 1930s and 1940s. It was precisely this cultural revolution that caught the imagination of Americans and Europeans, and led them to overlook the consolidation of more traditional social structures, often through the intermarriage of “revolutionary” families with survivors of the ancient régime.4 Mexico was also the first Latin American country to utilize “anti-imperialist” rhetoric as a kind of official discourse. For many decades outsiders tended to assume that there was a coherence between Mexico’s ostensibly left-wing foreign policy and its internal economic and political system; in fact, just the opposite was the case, and not by accident. Moreover, Mexico was the first to deliberately co-opt the artistic Left, through subsidies, preferments, state employment and other devices. The country’s tiny Marxist parties and grupuscules were irrelevant politically but permanently on display in various cultural manifestations, much to the delectation of assorted foreign innocents. As late as 1980 anyone who wandered into a Mexican bookshop could be forgiven for thinking—had he been otherwise uninformed—that he was

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visiting a Communist bloc country. This was in a country whose distribution of wealth was among the most unequal in the world.

II Far more drastic in its transformations and lasting in its effects was the Bolivian revolution of 1952, which remains one of the least known of all Latin American social upheavals. It effectively expropriated without compensation the tin and wolfram mines (the country’s major source of foreign exchange) and enacted a radical agrarian reform that broke up the great estates and divided them among Indian families. Overnight Bolivia was transformed from a conglomeration of huge feudal estates to a country of rural small holders. At the same time the miners’ unions became the principal interlocutor of the government. To be sure, these reforms did not buy lasting social peace. Almost immediately the unions went to war with the new government agency that administered the nationalized properties—demanding ever larger salaries or fringe benefits and opposing all efforts to permit foreign companies to invest in exploration and improved technology. Moreover, over time family-sized plots became unsustainable as each generation divided its patrimony among multiple siblings. Eventually, the only crop that handkerchief-sized farms could produce profitably was the coca leaf, since it is possible for the land to yield four separate harvests a year. This state of affairs in turn has led in recent years to a crisis in Bolivian relations with the United States, which had actually supported the revolutionary government in the 1950s and 1960s. This was due partly to the fact that the expropriated mining interests were Bolivian rather than American and partly because the revolution lacked a transnational ideology. Indeed, for complicated reasons of domestic and international politics the local Communist party had actually opposed the triumphant revolutionary party. Thus lacking support of the global Communist cultural apparatus, the Bolivian transformation remained a provincial episode rather than part of a global narrative. The limits of Bolivia’s land reform, persistent urban poverty and political instability eventually undermined the consensus that underpinned the revolution for nearly a half century.5 Lately a new Bolivian movement, led by Evo Morales, a mixed-race politician elected to the presidency in 2005, has appeared to challenge the status quo. Morales first came to prominence as the leader of the coca farmers as well as an activist capable of summoning angry (and violent crowds) into the streets of the capital La Paz. Although he utilizes a semi-Marxist rhetoric, it is unclear precisely what Morales’ “revolution” is all about. At one level it would seem to be nothing more than the expropriation of mineral resources previously contracted out to foreign companies by previous governments starved of adequate capital and technology. On another level it would appear to be a vindication of the rights of coca planters to cultivate and export their product, the United States be damned. It also has a “cultural” dimension that appeals greatly to foreign admirers—a kind of indigenist nationalism very much attuned to current antiglobalist trends in the more advanced societies. The Morales government has called not just for a place of privilege for native culture in education and public discourse, but for a series of measures that would drastically alter Bolivia’s identity. His maximalist program calls for, among other things, changing the country’s name to Kollasuyo (its old Inca designation), substituting a multicolored flag for the old national emblem, placing indigenous languages at least on par with Spanish and even placing native healing

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techniques on a plane of equality with “Western” science at university medical schools. This agenda is, needless to say, extremely ambitious, and threatens to lead to a partition of national territory between the Indian-dominated highlands and the mestizo lowlands. As it happens, most of the country’s oil and gas deposits are located in the latter. The outcome of Morales’ “revolution” could well be nothing more than a civil war between two regions that are very different in culture, ethnicity and self-definition. If the lowlands succeed in leaving the federation altogether (something not outside the realm of possibility) the rump state whose capital would be La Paz would be forced to survive on a relatively meager diet of drug trafficking and revolutionary tourism. It is extremely doubtful whether such a government would have either the resources or capacity to modernize its society—indeed, whether it would even wish to. In that sense the new Bolivian revolution may in fact be reactionary in the most literal sense of the word.

III The Cuban revolution is the only serious revolution ever to take place in Latin America. To some extent it remains an inspiration for leftists within the region and outside it, but nowhere has it been successfully replicated. Moreover, Cuba is the only country in Latin America where the Soviet model of economic and political organization has been put fully into place. One might argue that in its heyday the Cuban version of Soviet socialism was more successful in delivering on its promises— subsidized foodstuffs, free education, free medical care, etc.—than elsewhere.6 If so, it was the case because Cuba was something of a spoiled child of Soviet Socialism whereas the Soviets regarded its Eastern European satellites—particularly the German Democratic Republic—as resources to be exploited for the motherland. Quite apart from an annual subsidy of roughly $6 billion (mostly in the form of oil that could be reexported for hard currency), Moscow ordered its more industrialized dependencies in Eastern and Central Europe to sell products to the island at cut rates or on extended soft-currency credits. The collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet version of the Common Market (COMECON) forced Cuba into the most serious economic crisis of its history. By some estimates it suffered a 40 percent drop in GDP between 1991 and 1994. While the economy has made a modest recovery since then, partly due to its opening to international tourism, partly from remittances from Cubans overseas, but mostly because of gifts of oil from Venezuelan’s strongman Hugo Chávez, Cuban living standards have yet to recover their 1989 levels. Moreover, the legalization of the U.S. dollar has introduced new and sharp economic (and racial) inequalities between Cubans who receive money from relatives abroad and those who do not (the latter being disproportionately black or mulatto).

IV During its heydays the Cuban-Soviet relationship was not limited to economic relations, international support or ideological affinities. Arms and logistical assistance were immediately provided to insurgents aspiring to topple governments in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama. In subsequent years Havana devoted considerable resources to training, equipping and deploying guerrilla forces in Venezuela, Peru

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and Bolivia. The doctrinal legitimation of these insurgencies was a pamphlet by Ernesto Guevara, which—wrongly extrapolating from the Cuban experience, in the process discarding more than a century of classical Marxist theory on the etiology of revolutions—argued that the only element necessary to topple existing Latin American governments (even those freely elected) was the will to do so.7 The only impact of this Cuban-stimulated “revolutionism” may well have been the undermining of elected civilian governments in several South American countries and the encouraging of the armed forces to replace them. When Guevara’s theories proved unworkable in Latin America, he disappeared from view, spending a long and fruitless insurgent season in the Congo before moving on to Bolivia, where his attempts to provoke a peasant revolution on the Cuban model came to naught, as did he himself. It is quite possible that Guevara’s capture and execution by Bolivian special forces was assisted directly or indirectly by the Bolivian Communist party under orders from Moscow, which had no taste for financing another Cuba. In the 1970s Castro’s revolutionism and Soviet global aspirations converged more readily in Africa, where Cuban troops participated with pro-Soviet client forces in the civil wars of Angola, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Since the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of subsidies from the Soviet Union and its European satellites, two developments on the island are worthy of notice. The first is the emergence of the Cuban army as the most important institution in the country, far exceeding the influence of the Communist Party (although Fidel and designated successor Raúl occupy the first and second positions respectively in the Politburo). The crucial economic enterprises have been turned over to military officers both active and retired, most significantly the tourist industry (which after Chávez’s donations of oil is now the single most important source of foreign exchange). The accession of the military to the leading role in the regime (with correspondingly generous economic rewards) ensures that there will be no anti-Castro coup now or in the foreseeable future regardless of how deleterious the general economic situation might become. It also insulates the regime from the consequences of a weakening hold of Marxist ideology on most Cubans and its apparent lack of appeal for the younger generation.8 In many ways the Cuban regime since the collapse of Soviet socialism has morphed into a variant of the patrimonial dictatorships that have plagued the Caribbean area in times past, most notably the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic (1930– 1961) and the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua (1937–1979). What distinguishes it from both is the fact that it covers up naked power with certain ideological trimmings, which, if not exactly Marxist-Leninist, are at any rate, “anti-imperialist”, antiAmerican, nominally socialist and opposed to all forms of globalization. One might argue indeed that while the Cuban revolution itself has died, Cuban “revolutionism” is alive and well around the world. Perhaps in this respect the Cuban regime has benefited from the end of the Cold War, allowing irresponsible or politically ignorant people in wealthy countries to worship (or at least, vicariously admire) a version of Communism that poses no conceivable threat to their way of life. Thus, in spite of the unarguable decline in ordinary living standards on the island, not to mention a deleterious human rights record, Fidel Castro himself before his recent illness was an honored guest at many international gatherings. Likewise, the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary soldier of fortune Ernesto Guevara has become a cult figure and a symbol of authentic rebellion the world over, with a nimbus enhanced by the fact that he died forty years ago and therefore presumably cannot be held responsible

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for anything that has gone wrong in Cuba since his departure from positions of power on the island.9

V The truncated presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970–1973) represents a curious variant of Latin American revolutionism. Although in his own mind Allende saw himself as a committed Marxist—maintaining close relations with the Santiago station of the KGB, often visiting Cuba and even Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war—by the time he was elected to the presidency he had already participated in conventional democratic politics in Chile for more than three decades. Moreover, his personal habits were far from those of a hardened revolutionary. “During his visits to Havana in the 1960s,” two specialists have noted, “he had been privately mocked by Castro’s entourage for his aristocratic tastes: fine wines, expensive objets d’art, well-cut suits and elegantly dressed women”10 His KGB minders in the Chilean capital reported to Moscow that his characteristic traits were “arrogance, vanity, desire for glorification and longing to be in the spotlight at any price. He [is] easily influenced by stronger and more determined personalities.”11 Paradoxically, it was precisely Allende’s shortcomings that commended him as the candidate of a coalition of Communist, Socialist and populist parties. His frivolous and self-indulgent personal characteristics seemed almost reassuring to swing voters and disarmed many critics. Even so, his election was only made possible by a division of the Center and Right, who six years before had backed a common candidate, each running a personality of their own. Allende slid into office with less than a two percent plurality12 and his victory was confirmed by the Chilean Senate only because of a long-standing tradition of awarding the prize to the candidate with the largest plurality of votes.13 It is entirely possible that Allende himself had not anticipated his victory and was in fact unprepared for it. During the campaign the contradictory goals of his coalition partners were somewhat irrelevant. In power, however, he was forced to confront many difficult choices, none of which he was capable of making, or, on those rare occasions when he did make them, he was unable to compel his followers to respect them. For its part, Moscow saw Chile primarily as a showcase for its own project of a “historic compromise” in Western Europe between Communist and Socialist parties, and therefore tended to discourage actions or policies that would frighten off voters in more strategically valuable venues. As its local representative and acolyte, the Chilean Communist party did what it could to restrain more radical tendencies, preaching class conciliation and respect at least for the appearances of legality, often without success. Allende’s own Socialist party, on the other hand, strongly influenced by the Cuban revolution, Mao’s China and Vietnam, saw the election quite differently, namely, as an opportunity to achieve an irreversible transformation—and said so often and publicly.14 While Allende dithered, his own party or elements further to its left simply took action on their own—seizing farms and factories and producing drastic dislocations in the economy, which eventually produced shortages and hyperinflation. By mid-1972 the president was only able to maintain his authority by calling on senior officers of the armed forces to assume key ministries. This ploy performed the function of a temporary stopgap but provoked a civil-military crisis within the government; many senior officers balked at having to intervene in domestic politics,

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particularly in an environment of increasing polarization and violence. Allende’s own army commander General Carlos Prats was finally forced out of the interior ministry and into retirement. The president’s failure to fashion a compromise with his civilian opponents eventually led to a military coup in September, 1973. Whatever President Allende’s goals (or fantasies), one could hardly characterize his government as revolutionary except in the sense that the rule of law and longestablished customs were under assault, frightening many who had voted for the president or at least had accepted his victory in 1970. For three years Chile was the scene of much political theater, which convinced many ordinary citizens that an apocalypse of some sort was just around the corner. Cuban Premier (as he then was) Fidel Castro paid a curious state visit to Chile that lasted nearly a month, spending much of his time reading revolutionary lessons to his hosts; there were serious disruptions of public services; the country was overrun by leftists from other Latin American countries15; a proposal was floated to reorganize the educational system along East German lines; there was an unsuccessful attempt to shut down the opposition press; some of Allende’s associates—most notably, Senator Carlos Altamirano, head of the president’s own Socialist party—made it clear that in the near future there would be no place in Chile for the bourgeoisie. The net effect was to effect a reconciliation between the formerly estranged parties of the Center and Right, who together controlled the Congress and declared Allende’s government to be outside the law. When the bill for all this fell due Allende manfully agreed to pay it, holing himself up in the presidential palace and committing suicide with an automatic rifle given to him by his friend Fidel Castro. His manner of death finally assured him the “glorification” that he had sought in life, and the vicious and inhumane treatment of many his followers by the military regime that followed blurred and distorted the realities of his three years in power. However inaccurate, Allende’s version of events has won the battle of the books. As one standard reference volume explains it, “he tried to build a socialist society within the framework of parliamentary democracy but met with widespread opposition by business interests supported by the US CIA.”16 In fact the role of the CIA was largely limited to subsidizing a domestic opposition— including an independent press and radio—threatened by confiscation and politically inspired strikes.17

VI Allende’s ideological calling card was the notion that there was a peaceful, democratic road to Marxist socialism. His failure to find it had the effect of strengthening the Cuban hypothesis that in Latin America the rifle was the only road to power. Six years after the collapse of the Chilean experiment, a group of Marxist guerrillas— the Sandinista Front of National Liberation—seized power in Nicaragua. In many ways the events in that Central American country replicated to a remarkable degree the circumstances that had brought Castro to power in Cuba a generation before: a hated dictator abandoned at the last minute by his own armed forces and the United States, a dithering opposition, and a small but determined revolutionary force.18 As in the case of Castro, the Sandinistas came to power with broad popular approval, having convinced non-Marxist and non-Leftist civic leaders to join them in the first instance. Here too, the authoritarian, collectivist and even pro-Soviet tendencies of the new government were quick to reveal themselves, leading to a peeling

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off of support from the more conventional elements in Nicaraguan politics. No doubt the Sandinistas saw their revolution as a repeat of the Cuban precedent, right down to maintaining more than platonic relations with neighboring revolutionary forces, particularly in El Salvador, where a guerrilla war had been underway even before their victory. The hesitations of the Carter White House no doubt encouraged their audacity. On the other hand, since the Cuban revolution had already reached full flower, there was no mistaking whither Nicaragua was headed. Unfortunately for the Sandinistas, the Carter administration—immobilized by guilt, indecision and its own misreading of history19—came to an abrupt end in 1981. Its successor under Ronald Reagan was determined to strangle the Nicaraguan revolution in the cradle. This proved easier than the Cuban case, since Nicaragua is not an island that can be readily sealed off from the outside; the Sandinista leadership was somewhat divided—there was no unifying charismatic figure similar to Fidel Castro; above all, the Sandinistas antagonized many of the social groups from which an antigovernment insurgency could be recruited, trained and put in the field, operating from bases in nearby Honduras.20 The role of the United States in all of this was quite obvious; indeed, the Reagan administration openly appealed to the U.S. Congress for funds to support the anti-Sandinista forces. Meanwhile liberal and pacifist groups in the United States and Western Europe strove mightily to represent the Sandinistas either as slightly deviant versions of themselves, or forced by Washington into an authoritarian posture that went against their own (the Sandinistas’) best instincts.21 In order to validate the latter, the Sandinistas decided in 1990 to hold an open, internationally observed election, which to their own surprise and that of many of their foreign admirers they promptly lost. From an ideological point of view this defeat was far worse than the overthrow of Allende in Chile—which at least produced a usable martyr and an enduring legend of U. S. malevolence. Although Daniel Ortega, the leading figure of the Sandinista regime, was finally returned in 2006 after three subsequent unsuccessful electoral races, by then there was nothing revolutionary about him except (at times) his overheated rhetoric. Indeed, the blatant way that he and his associates pillaged the states resources on their way out in early 1991 left a bitter taste in the mouth of leftists in Nicaragua and elsewhere.22

VII The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Central and Eastern Europe undercut the mystique of the Left all over the world, but had perhaps a less significant impact on Latin America because its revolutionary culture had roots that actually predated the Russian revolution. To be sure, the initial impact of this collapse in many Latin countries in the early 1990s was to elect a series of Center-Right governments, including in major states like Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. Even the nominally Center-Left coalition in Chile that followed the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1989) continued the economic policies of its predecessor. By the end of the decade, however, the pendulum had begun to swing in the other direction. The most important watershed was the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998. Virtually unknown to Venezuelans a half dozen years before, Chávez first burst on the scene in 1991 when, as a lieutenant-colonel, he led an army regiment into the presidential palace with a view to assassinating President Carlos Andrés Pérez and seizing power in the name of a disenfranchised people. The event itself was stunning partly because of the venue: Venezuela had not known any serious military

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unrest for decades and for forty years had enjoyed a solid multiparty democratic system. This was true, however, only as far as appearances went. Civic peace had been brokered in 1958 by an agreement between the three major political parties to share patronage on a prorata basis (extrapolated and periodically readjusted according to electoral performance). Venezuelan democracy was therefore a game played with largely predetermined outcomes, and the corruption and calcification that naturally followed led to a gulf between the political class and the population as a whole. Moreover, a long period of decline in the price of oil, the country’s principal export, produced a scissors effect—one upward curve representing a rising population, much of it young, crossing another, representing declining resources with which to purchase social peace. While Chávez’s attempted coup ended in failure, overnight he became the country’s most popular political figure. Like Adolf Hitler, he was condemned to a long term of imprisonment that turned out to be inconveniently brief, and like Hitler, too, he used his period of incarceration to develop a full ideological scheme. Although Chávez constantly speaks of his ideology as “21st century socialism,” in fact it is a mélange of Marxism, fascism, populism, personalism and antiglobalization, the outpourings of a semieducated man who has read too many books without much discrimination. Released in 1995 under a premature amnesty, Chávez immediately undertook an extended political campaign that brought him to power by free and fair elections three years later. One could almost argue that Chávez’s election was a vote for higher oil prices—an eventuality that obviously no Venezuelan politician could credibly promise. But by a serendipitous confluence of events, his accession coincided with the first serious upturn in years and allowed him to gradually unfold an authoritarian design that some have called a “post-modernist” dictatorship. That is to say, unlike Fidel Castro or the Sandinistas, Chávez proposes to construct a dictatorship step by step, by apparently legal and open forms. Whereas the extreme scarcities of the Cuban economy contributed to Fidel Castro’s reliance on a highly developed system of repression and the export of over a million of discontented Cubans to the United States, high oil prices have allowed Chávez to expand his power through generous dollops of government patronage. In reality there is nothing new about the techniques of the Chávez government; all Venezuelan administrations have proceeded in precisely the same manner for many years. What is different about Chávez is his rhetoric, his ramshackle ideology and, above all, his ultimate purposes, which amount to a plebiscitary dictatorship. What is emerging in Venezuela, however, is less a revolution than a classic case of “revolutionism,” or revolutionary theater. Huge resources are pouring into the country through the sale of oil—now reaching undreamt-of prices—the disposition of which is wholly in the hands of the president and his immediate associates. To be sure, the long- or even middle-term effects on the population may not be particularly significant. In spite of “missions” to carry literacy and health services to the slums of Caracas or the remote villages of the interior, the social indicators remain roughly the same as they were when Chávez took power nearly a decade ago. The principal beneficiaries of the oil boom so far have been the middle classes and the business elite, neither of whom are particularly fond of the president. Chávez’s ambitions are not, however, limited to Venezuela. Indeed, one might almost argue that his real interests lie outside national boundaries. Grandiose projects

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spanning the entire continent are being bandied about, including a huge gas pipeline that supposedly will reach Buenos Aires, or the newly-inaugurated Bank of the South (capital a mere $7 billion) that is supposed to replace the Latin need for the International Monetary Fund. Unknown (and unknowable) quantities of money are being squandered, either to support the few governments Chávez has helped into power or to finance critics of those leaders who refuse to ally with him.23 Million are being spent on weaponry that Venezuela is unlikely to ever use, including parts for F-16 jet fighters and Soviet-era Russian submarines.24 Meanwhile, the country’s basic source of wealth, the oil industry, is being starved for new capital and deprived of fresh infusions of cutting-edge technology as foreign investors are being pushed out.25 This lemming-like plunge toward extravagance and grandiosity is typical of countries where the source of wealth falls from the heavens; it does not augur well for Venezuela’s future, nor for Chávez’s own political prospects.26

VIII In evaluating the role of political ideologies in Latin America over the last 175 years, three considerations should be borne in mind. First, in spite of the achievement of political independence in the 1820s most countries remained firmly in the thrall of European cultural and ideological imports. The departure of the metropolitan powers left a huge intellectual vacuum that has never really been filled. Instead, the region has been continually attracted to foreign beliefs and notions—Napoleonic styles and practices in the nineteenth century, and positivism, fascism and Marxism in the twentieth. Second, there is a curious circularity to Latin American ideological history, with trends moving back and forth along a continuum, at one end of which is patrimonial authoritarianism, at the other some version of European liberalism, with social democracy and Marxism in between. For more than a hundred years the political history of the region could be characterized as a random embrace of one or another until the next turn of the wheel. Third, because the wars of independence (1810–1824) did not definitively resolve the problem of legitimate authority, the region has been plagued by an extreme degree of personalism in politics. Even the Castro regime in Cuba, in spite of a formal identification with Marxism-Leninism, is for all intents and purposes a family dictatorship, in which political succession is determined, to an important degree, by consanguinary relationships.27 The personalist temptation is even more evident in Chávez’s Venezuela, where the regime’s ideology— such as it is—is an incoherent mélange.28 Without Chávez it is difficult to imagine any kind of “revolution” in Venezuela at all. The very fact that the revolutionary idea remains so powerful in Latin America underscores the degree to which many of these countries have failed to achieve genuine nationhood. It is not merely a matter of poverty—though poverty, even extreme poverty, persists in many places—but the failure to accept large numbers of people as members of the national community, particularly in countries with large racial minorities (or in the case of Bolivia or Guatemala, majorities). Moreover, even when power changes hands through democratic, electoral means, politics tend to be a winnertake-all affair with the victors displaying little interest in the problems of governance. It is precisely these deficiencies that allow a region to ignore the lessons of history where some of its favored revolutionary fantasies have actually been tried. Meanwhile emigration to the United States remains perhaps the most credible revolutionary idea in the region, favored by an increasing number of people.

Chapter 10

4

Wester n Perceptions of Postcolonial Violence in Afr ica Anthony Daniels

The Western misperceptions of the postcolonial African states and their violent

political turmoils following independence are among the more remarkable chapters in the long, yet-to-be-written history of well-meaning and wishful projections on the part of intellectuals fueled by guilt, ignorance and wishful thinking. In his essay “The Middle East and the Powers,” Elie Kedourie draws attention to the ability of Middle Eastern political leaders to adopt the political language of the Anglo-American Enlightenment for their own ends, which includes duping Western governments and publics, particularly the intellectuals, and inducing in them a state of guilt and uncertainty. Such guilt and uncertainty were seen to lead Western efforts to improve the lives of the poor and the powerless. He writes: The language of modern English and American politics is now adopted by the whole world and, divorced from the tradition in which it has value and dignity, becomes a debased, inflated jargon, a showman’s patter by which tyranny is made to seem constitutional, and crookedness to look straight.1

In the mouths of Arab nationalists, the word “freedom” does not meant even approximately what it means to most citizens of Western countries; but words can exert a hypnotic power, and can easily put rational faculties to sleep. In a similar vein, Robert Conquest points out that among many influential intellectuals concrete, empirical realities matter less than abstract notions: “a large circle of the ‘thinking,’ ‘educated’ class take ideas as more veridical than facts.”2 Since ideas are expressed in words, the choice of vocabulary is self-evidently important, and nothing is easier than to mislead intellectuals willing to be misled by means of that choice, by certain kinds of rhetoric to which they resonate. The overvaluation of abstractions, or what the development economist Peter Bauer called “the disregard of reality”3 is prevalent among intellectuals for at least two reasons. It requires a certain dialectical sophistication not to be able to see what

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is plain before one’s face or, if one does see it, to be able to explain it away by means of plausible-sounding rationalizations that allow one preserve the abstractions. The intelligentsia as a class also has a vested interest in not making the most obvious judgments, and in not using simple, jargon-free language, because by doing so it would lose status and its claims to superior discernment as compared to the general population. Indeed, in certain circumstances, the more counterintuitive or contorted a judgment, the better: a priesthood, after all, needs its mysteries. It was Lord Byron who first projected unrealistic hopes onto Africa. Whether he would have been much pleased with the reality of decolonization cannot, of course, be known. With very few exceptions, the generation of African leaders who derived their legitimacy from the “freedom struggle” turned out to be more tyrannical than their late colonial rulers, as well as more economically rapacious. As a consequence, Africa is the only continent on which the standard of living has not risen substantially in the last fifty years; and while economic growth has now resumed, there were many countries in which per capita production and living standards declined for long periods of time on end. This is not the place to rehearse the legacy of the European colonial empires, or to remark upon the fact that the greatest indigenous beneficiaries of those empires were the class of people who most opposed them, namely the nationalist politicians and their bureaucratic allies who inherited their institutions. Few would deny that the European incursion into Africa brought technical progress: most of Africa had no writing, for example, and no wheeled vehicles or beasts of burden before the arrival of the Europeans. But technological progress cannot be equated with moral or cultural progress, let alone happiness. Besides, it cannot be proved that colonialism was a prerequisite of such progress. It would not be difficult, of course, to view the history of colonialism in Africa as nothing but a catalogue of cruelty, exploitation and depredation. The worst example was probably King Leopold’s Congo.4 In the 1920s, Andre Gide and the great journalist Albert Londres had good reasons to write scathing denunciations of French rule in France’s vast African territories.5 More recently, historians of the MauMau uprising in Kenya have suggested that the colonial power, Britain, suppressed the uprising with a ferocity and brutality that equaled those of totalitarian regimes.6 These accounts tend to overlook that the Mau-Mau uprising itself used what amounted to primitive totalitarian methods, and that, more importantly, no tribe other than the Kikuyu supported the uprising, suggesting that these tribes might have had a better grasp of reality than subsequent historians who tried to interpret the movement as one of Kenyan national liberation. It is sometimes alleged that the artificial boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers in Africa are responsible for the malaise, violence and civil wars that postcolonial Africa has experienced. This is a questionable proposition. It is true that many countries in Africa are not defined by “natural” geographical features or ethnic homogeneity. However such homogeneity could only have been achieved by massive ethnic cleansing. It is difficult to weld a national consciousness and a shared sense of national interest among people composed of divergent groups with different languages. PanAfricanism, the welding of Africa into one superstate, promoted by Kwame Nkrumah was an unrealistic response to these problems; for what is impossible on a smaller scale is unlikely to be possible on a much larger one. It is of further interest that countries which were more “natural” entities such as Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia are among those with the most disastrous postcolonial histories. In other words, something other

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than artificial boundaries underlie the difficulties of contemporary African states. Africa and the nation state are in effect like those married couples who live in a condition of hostile dependence: they cannot live together and they cannot live apart. As Robert Conquest points out, it is a dubious belief that all problems, no matter how large and intractable, have a solution: “What is more, the delusion that problems are susceptible, in principle, to being solved by political decision has led many backward countries further and further into the grip of incompetent autocrats.”7 The word “incompetent” in this passage might be questioned. Men who stay in power for twenty-five years, as, for example, Julius Nyerere did (to whom I shall be returning), can only be considered incompetent if their professed goals are confused with their real ones. Thus if Nyerere’s goal was to bring prosperity to his country, Tanzania, he was supremely incompetent as he reduced a promising, if poor, country to pauperism; but if his purpose was to stay in power for a very long time, with practically no opposition, he was admirably efficient. He even managed to die, if not in his own bed exactly, at least in the bed of a private hospital in London. It is indisputable that the vast majority of African states became dictatorships soon after the achievement of independence and remained such for many years. Some of them were bizarre in the extreme, causing condescending amusement in better-ruled parts of the world. In Britain, for example, the regime of Idi Amin was turned into a joke by the humorist Alan Coren,8 notwithstanding the fact that the regime was responsible for the death of 250,000 people, the equivalent of 3 million in Britain or 15 million in the United States given their respective populations. More attention was paid to Idi Amin’s grotesque antics than to the untold misery and terror he brought upon his nation. His expulsion of the Asian population of Uganda, on the grounds that the Asians were exploitative economic intermediaries, was by no means absurd from the standpoint of the development economics at the time in vogue. According to the latter, local traders or “comprador” bourgeoisies such as the Asians of Uganda were the local representatives of exploitative international economic forces rather than forces for economic expansion within the country. Amin’s policy also drew inspiration from a serious academic-intellectual current exemplified by the work of Emmanuel Wallenstein and Andre Gunnar Frank,9 among others, that for a time had a virtual monopoly among those who were interested in the Third World and considered wealth to be in a dialectical relationship to poverty. Accordingly, the Asians of Uganda were rich because the Africans were poor and vice versa, economies being in essence zero-sum games. The writings of academic or journalistic Africanists, eminent visitors to Africa, in this period of history would be humorous, if one could disregard the alarming ignorance they displayed. The misdiagnoses, false prognoses and bad prescriptions were in all probability the result of wishful thinking and a tendency to see only Platonic forms in place of tangible realities. There are some striking parallels between these misperceptions, and those of many Western intellectuals, of the Soviet Union, and later of Third World Communist countries, such as China, Cuba and Vietnam. Malcolm X was impressed by the grandeur in which the Osagyefo, the Savior, of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and other African leaders of the time, lived.10 This was not unlike earlier Western visitors being impressed by the living conditions of Soviet leaders and elites, including intellectuals subservient to the regime. The privileged treatment of these visitors made it difficult to imagine that the living conditions of the masses could be dismal. Thus G. B. Shaw ridiculed the idea of famine in the Soviet Union on the grounds that he was served excellent meals and John Kenneth

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Galbraith doubted the possibility of food shortages in China after he was shown the kitchen of a plant in Beijing. At the time of Africa’s decolonization, the orthodoxy among development economists was that people in poor countries could not be expected to accumulate and invest capital spontaneously: they were far too poor to do so. It was of no account that the cash-crop farmers of West Africa had already contradicted this point of view. The Economic Commission for Latin America under Raul Prebisch11 had been extremely influential in establishing the orthodoxy that it was up to the state first to raise and then to allocate capital. Only the educated servants of the state, acting on behalf of the nation as a whole, had enough intelligence, both in the IQ sense and the informational sense, to allocate resources efficiently where they were most needed. This was music to the ears of the inheritors of the colonial state and their political clientele. In the name of national necessity, they were to assume the immense powers of the colonial governors who had often pursued highly statist economic policies under orders from metropolitan countries whose economies were themselves statecontrolled. For example, the idea of a state monopoly on purchasing the cash crops of the African peasantry was a colonial one,12 that was (as the Soviets used to say of their Marxist doctrine) “creatively developed” by the new masters of the state. The surplus extracted from the peasantry was supposed to go toward development, but it was almost entirely lost between white-elephantine projects of no conceivable economic worth, except to those who worked on them before they collapsed under their own weight, and outright and very straightforward corruption. Foreign aid went the same way and is still doing so, with the full knowledge and complaisance of aid donors. A shortage of capital, the premise of development aid, is not, or need not be, Africa’s key problem. A recent report from the United Nations estimated that Africans invested twice as much capital abroad between 1900 and 2000 than Africa received in aid.13 The question of corruption and its relation to the state control of the economy is scarcely addressed in the writings of the Africanists of the time. In highly controlled economies wealth is obtained mainly by forced extraction from what little productive activity remains (or, of course, from foreign aid). Under these circumstances corruption is far worse and more far reaching than in economies that remain productive. The almost comical failure to understand the meaning of corruption in postcolonial regimes is illustrated in John Hatch’s book Africa Emergent published in 1974. Hatch was one of the most eminent British commentators on Africa at the time who had taught many African leaders at the Labour Party and Fabian Schools, became a professor of African studies in Texas and was eventually elevated to the House of Lords. He wrote: Of course it can be argued that the scale of corruption in the public life of Africa has been much lower than that of other continents, notably of America. According to the United States Attorney-General, more than 170 public office holders or former officials were indicted or convicted on corruption charges during the 32 months to October 1971. He commented, “Corruption of public officials must sicken every American who honours his birth-right.” For every public official charged or convicted there are many more who use office for personal gain … And there are few public men or women living modestly in Europe.14

He adds: “Yet few Africans would be willing to judge their standards of public morality by the values of Europe or America.”

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It is a passage that in its steadfast refusal to take note of underlying political, social and economic realities equals anything the Webbs have ever written about the Soviet Union. A personal recollection may shed further light on some of these economic problems in Africa. In 1975, shortly after I qualified as a doctor, I went to work for six months in what was then Rhodesia. I held at the time most of the orthodoxies about Africa to be found in liberal British newspapers; Rhodesia was then a pariah among states, kept from collapse by a lifeline through South Africa and the usual degree of international hypocrisy. To my surprise, I found a country that was clearly functioning and whose economy was growing, though of course it was a country that denied the great majority of its citizens the franchise and equality under the law. Whatever the underlying injustices of the system, it was uncorrupt and efficient. Wages were paid on time, and no one thought of bribing officials to obtain favors. International sanctions, partially but not fully employed, had stimulated a great deal of local ingenuity, and whole industries had grown up because of them. (The prime minister at the time, Ian Smith, whom I met, walked about freely and drove himself to the airport. In one of the most astonishing reversals in modern history, he was given a standing ovation by black students at the University of Harare after the economic disaster brought about by Robert Mugabe’s presidency could no longer be explained away as anything other than the result of Mugabe’s policies. Toward the end of his life, Smith said that if he and Mugabe went for a walk together in a black township only one of them would emerge alive, and it wouldn’t be Mugabe. Smith, but not Mugabe, was willing to try the experiment.15 It is unlikely that the last white ruler of Zimbabwe will ever be forgiven by members of the western intelligentsia for having accurately predicted what would happen to Zimbabwe once the nationalists took over.) The comparative efficiency of the Rhodesian state at the time of Ian Smith is not my point here. Instead I would like to recall something that puzzled me at the time and has further relevance to the economic difficulties here discussed. In the hospital where I worked there were a number of African doctors, and racial discrimination being somewhat less monolithic and absolute in Rhodesia than in South Africa of the time, they received the same salaries as the white doctors. There were therefore African doctors receiving precisely the same wages as I, yet their standard of living was very much, indeed vastly, below mine. While I lived in an attractive house surrounded by a gracious garden, they lived in overcrowded quarters, with chickens and goats in a dusty yard. Why was there this enormous difference when we were paid the same? It arose from our social obligations. The African doctors were not improvident, as some at the time would allege. My income was mine alone, to dispose of as I saw fit; I had to share it with no one; while they, often the better-off, or the only money earners in their extended families, and certainly the best educated, had to spread their income very thin. If they had failed to support others in this fashion, they would have been considered very selfish individuals. None of the black doctors of my acquaintance behaved in this fashion. At the same time it would have been against human nature if they had not envied, or at least aspired to, the standard of living of the whites. It would have struck them as an injustice that they, who had almost certainly made much greater personal efforts to be educated than had any whites with the same qualifications, should nevertheless be constrained to live at a level much below the whites. Because of their social obligations to provide for a large and probably ever-expanding circle of dependents, the achievement of that superior

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standard of living required an income many times larger. The only way to come by such an income was by extraeconomic means. The social obligations were inescapable, and honorable, but not conducive to honesty in the circumstances. The importance of such social obligations held by most Africans was confused, both by African leaders and many intellectuals outside Africa with a special affinity for socialism. This was not the first time in history that such a mistake had been made. The Slavophiles in Russia in the nineteenth century16 and certain Marxist theoreticians in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s17 attributed similar propensities to peasants in their countries engaged in communal economic efforts. The latter supposedly proved that they were not individualistic, unlike Western Europeans and Americans; they held land in common and were as much interested in the welfare of their neighbors as in their own. Agrarian socialism was therefore possible without industrialization. I found the same argument employed in Guatemala in the 1980s during the civil war there, both by indigenous and foreign supporters of the guerrilla movements.18 That Africans had, by virtue of their wholesome traditions, a special propensity to embrace socialism was a widely held view in intellectual circles around the time of African independence. In 1963, the British Labour politician and campaigner, who was in Parliament and known as “the Member for Africa,” Fenner Brockway, proposed, in his book African Socialism that virtually all of Africa was coming under the sway of that doctrine in one form or another. He cited the Tanganyikan concept of “Ujamaa,” familyhood, advocated by Julius Nyerere: Nyerere emphasises the basic idea, already quoted from the writings of the Ghanaian professor de Graft (sic!) Johnson, that socialism is a natural expanding development of the tribal system of Africa. Every individual was completely secure in African traditional society. Natural catastrophe brought famine, but it brought famine to everybody. Nobody starved, either of food or of human dignity, because he lacked personal wealth; he could depend on the wealth possessed by the Community of which he was a member. “That was socialism. That is socialism.” [Nyerere.]19

Under modern conditions, African Socialism came to mean something rather different that evidently required an administrative class with considerable powers of decision making: The developing pattern of African socialism in its present stage has become broadly clear as we have traveled from country to country. It is based on the co-operativization of agriculture, sometimes supplemented by the collectivization of the larger plantations; a network of publicly-initiated village industries; state initiative and ownership of impressive national projects for irrigation, generation of electrical power, dockyards and transport; some public participation in the ownership in the ownership of private industries and their incorporation in overall economic plans—all this accompanied by the enthusiastic expansion of education, health and housing and the dedicated service in construction of co-ordinated groups of armies of voluntary workers.20

There are a lot of abstractions in this passage and few references to the actual behavior of the people who were going to bring about these laudable developments. It is presumed that they would work disinterestedly for the good of all, without allowing personal, familial or group interests to influence their good works when administering the government and its enterprises. The fact that no group of people has

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ever acted like this, at least for very long, does not seem to have occurred to the writer; an imaginary future had greater appeals than the lessons of history. No one with the most minimal sense of reality could have written that passage after spending thirty seconds in a typical African airport. In addition there is no realization that the rapid expansion of higher education in an impoverished, state-controlled economy might not represent progress and alleviate economic problems. Such expansion may actually be an obstacle to growth, for reasons that an anecdote might clarify. While working in Tanzania, a medical assistant asked me for a loan to pay his son’s school fees, which he was committed to repay, despite the evident difficulties of doing so. Beyond a certain level, continued studies in Tanzania required a certificate of political reliability from the local party representative (which boiled down in practice to the payment of a bribe) and the payment of school fees. I discussed the importance of his son’s education with the medical assistant; he told me that, with luck, it would enable his son to obtain a lucrative bureaucratic position with the government, preferably in the capital, which would secure the future of the entire family, especially of him in his old age. Farming, he said, was for fools, for those lacking in intelligence. At the time of this conversation 80 percent of Tanzania’s people were peasant farmers. It is not difficult to see that, if such aspirations were widespread (and I think they were), the expansion of education would not have helped the country as long as economies remained state controlled. There is, after all, no class of people more dangerous for a fragile polity than the unemployed with higher education who believe they are entitled to certain privileges by virtue of their credentials. Educating more people than the existing economy requires creates pressures for finding them employment, however parasitic, and almost invariably leads to the growth of state bureaucracy thus putting a further strain on resources. This dynamic explains why countries with a relatively large educated population at independence, such as Sierra Leone, have fared no better than those with a much smaller educated segment. It is worth pointing out that, whatever the economic ideology adopted by the governments of African countries, the state sector has been predominant; and even the Ivory Coast, allegedly the most capitalist of African countries at the time, was constrained to double its public service between 1967 and 1971 alone.21 We come now to the question of the connection between state control of the economy and political violence in Africa. First, however, it is important to recall that during the 1960s and 1970s, many Western intellectuals were attracted to the idea of a healing and invigorating political violence. Such violence had its supporters among academic thinkers, of course,22 but it was probably the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who was its most influential proponent. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a preface to Fanon’s most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon argued that violence directed at members of the ruling nation or race on the part of a member of a subject race would help to overcome his sense of inferiority. As far as I can tell, Fanon never forgot his Hippocratic oath in his dealings with individual patients, and the case histories he himself supplies do not support his theory, quite the reverse; in fact, he repeatedly showed in individual cases that violence, committed either by the oppressors or the oppressed, had a deleterious effect on the mental health of those engaging in it. The contradiction between his evidence and his theory did not in the least impede the popularity of Fanon’s theories among Western intelligentsia and those influenced by it at the time. Sartre was the conduit through which his view became mainstream.

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The native [wrote Sartre in his famous preface], cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost Innocence and he comes to know himself in that he creates his self … to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.23

These lines are reminiscent of the sentiments of Norman Mailer, expressed in his infamous White Negro article24 and in his championing the murderer Henry Abbott.25 Sartre either had not read the book he prefaced carefully, or failed to notice that the case histories of Fanon did not support his argument. Perhaps the most important public interpreter of Africa to Western audiences of the time, whose books were widely used in teaching, was Basil Davidson, a brilliant linguist and a fluent and prolific writer. He was an officer in the British army during the war, serving in the Balkans and in some respects was a typical British upper-class radical. In 1946, he published a book about his experiences in Yugoslavia, called Partisan Picture, in which he made clear his sympathies for the Greek Communists, and implied that anyone who opposed Communism in Hungary and Rumania was a supporter of autocracy and reaction. His assessment of the Soviet Union of the time rivals anything the Webbs ever wrote: A federation of such variety [the USSR] would moulder and decay and burst apart in putrefaction under any but a progressive and therefore flexible constitution . . . In one sense, the further it moves towards civilization as we understand the word in Europe— comprehending everything, that is, from self-expression to sewers—the greater the emphasis will be laid on the differences between the peoples of the USSR.26

In 1957, Davidson published his travels in Chinese Central Asia entitled Turkestan Alive, in which he delivers himself of the tragic-comic opinion that: What the Chinese leaders seemed attempting, in this ‘campaign of rectification’, was nothing less than to bridge the gap between the harsh necessities of violent change in a much impoverished country, and the humanist traditions both of socialism and of Chinese civilization.”27

This was written shortly before one of the largest man-made famines in and one of the greatest episodes of cultural vandalism in all of history. Robert Conquest would not have been altogether surprised by what Davidson wrote. When Davidson became an interpreter of Africa, his general outlook did not much change: he remained in search of a supposedly liberating totalitarianism, to be brought about by revolution. He was not only opposed to Portuguese colonialism but was in favor of a movement that demanded, and was prepared to impose “economic, political, social and cultural unity.” He ended his Liberation of Guinea, a pro-guerilla account of the anticolonial movement in Guinea-Bissau, with words that once again strike one as tragicomic: “The men and women of the AIGC are among those who . . . give harried and despairing peoples a new and vital source of life and hope.”28 In the event, a very large massacre relative to the size of the population followed independence in Guinea-Bissau; as well as a short but bloody civil war, very little economic growth and the transformation of the country into a way station for Colombian drug dealers. No doubt there were extenuating circumstances; but none of these

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developments constituted “a new and vital source of life and hope.” It did not require unusual powers of prediction to doubt that Guinea-Bissau was going to become the hope of the world. Ever optimistic and resistant to disillusionment, Davidson found, twenty years later, new grounds for hope in the Cabo Verde Islands, another land of mass meetings, literacy campaigns and women’s cooperatives—and, another liberating oneparty system. His book The Fortunate Isles ends once again by implying that another dictatorship might be the hope of the world: “The weather in the world is bad, and will continue so. At least it will be prudent to expect as much. But in these storms it can be seen that the Fortunate Isles sail with a well-built ship and a steadfast crew.”29 Davidson explained why the one-party system was beneficial: If the practice and theory of mass participation were vital to progress, there could be no plurality of parties. Plurality would bring the disunities of personal or group ambition, useless rivalries, external intrigues: inducing a waste of effort and resources when there were none to spare of either, and eventually frustration and defeat. The warnings they had had were legion, and not only African. For the measurable future … there must be a one-party State.30

In an impoverished state that controls the economy, political power is the main or the sole route to a dramatically improved standard of living; as Kwame Nkrumah put it in a slightly different context, “Seek ye first the political kingdom.” The contest for political power in these circumstances is of desperate importance and frequently ends in violence. Democratic elections by themselves will not alter this, unless the government is also limited in its scope, that is to say, if it becomes a ring holder for contestants rather than being the only contestant in the ring. While multiparty democracy may be a necessary condition for limited government in Africa, it is certainly not sufficient, and it remains difficult to envisage a mechanism for limiting government in Africa. The man who was probably the worst dictator in African history—and the competition for this title is stiff—was elected in free and fair elections. He was Macias Nguema, the first president of Spain’s only colony in sub-Saharan Africa, Equatorial Guinea. Within three months of his accession to power, he had murdered his opponent in the elections and the country, which had been until independence one of the most prosperous in Africa, rapidly slid into a state of utter barbarism. By the time of his overthrow (by his nephew who is still president twenty-eight years later and who was responsible for many of the atrocities committed under his uncle’s rule), the cocoa crop (the finest in the world) was between 6 and 7 percent of what it had been at independence, despite or because of virtual slave labor; there was no electricity in the country except in the president’s compound; the president kept the national treasury under his bed; and approximately 40 percent of the country’s population had fled or died. People who wore spectacles were executed as intellectuals. The country’s senior civil servants were executed in 1976. Eleven of Nguema’s twelve original cabinet ministers were executed, as were two-thirds of the members of the National Assembly at independence.31 The regime survived financially only by assistance from the United Nations Development Program. Macias Nguema was overthrown in 1979 by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, an important member of his regime who remains in power to this day.

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This story bears out Robert Conquest’s wise words, namely, that: “democracy” did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged. Habeas corpus, the jury system, the rule of law were not the products of “democracy” but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English executive. And democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from and is an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition.32 In much writing about postindependent Africa, abstractions conceal the realities. For example, Davidson in Africa in Modern History wrote: “Installed in 1958 the regime of the PDG [the sole party] in Guinea under the innovating but increasingly personal rule of Toure was able to withstand several externally mounted conspiracies and much recalcitrance at home.”33 The reader will not learn from this statement that under this “increasingly personal rule” all trading transactions were illegal and punishable by death, that the dictator was clinically paranoid and a fifth or a quarter of the population fled in terror. Elsewhere, Davidson refers to Guinea having chosen freedom when, alone among France’s African territories, it voted to break all association with France in 1958. What followed that choice was scarcely freedom, unless you take the view that the race of your dictator is the determinant of whether you are free or not. Davidson was far from being the only one to fail to understand the scale of the catastrophe in Guinea. A Guinean doctor, Mandiouf Mauro Sidibe provides a grotesque account of the respect allegedly shown to Sekou Toure immediately before and after his death, at a time when even the presidential palace (the former governor’s mansion) was falling into ruins.34 Similarly, an academic description of Nyerere’s forced villagization policy in Tanzania, though critical, evades the human realities of it, perhaps in order to preserve Nyerere’s saintly image: The compulsory settlement of most of the rural population in villages between 1970 and 1976 had both short- and long-term negative effects … in late 1973, President Nyerere reversed his former position stating that all the rural population should be in villages in three years and that, since persuasion had “failed,” compulsion could be used … The longer-term negative effects include increased travelling time to and from fields, over- cultivation of fields close to the village, greater distances to collect firewood and drinking water.35

This description hardly captures the penury of the population, extremely poor to begin with, in which the GDP grew by 0.9 percent per annum over eighteen years while the population grew by 3.3 percent per annum. Nor does it capture the atmosphere in which an Indian trader (such as the one I met in the town of Njombe) could be imprisoned for six months for economic sabotage, defined as the unauthorized possession of six teacups (appropriated by the arresting officer). The very use of the term “liberation” in the context of African decolonization is somewhat inappropriate, at any rate to rationalists of liberal persuasion. In only a few cases did decolonization, either peaceful or violent, result in an increase in the liberty of the individual citizen in African countries, and often it was the reverse. Nor can it be said that decolonization has increased either prosperity or equality. It was fashionable in the 1970s to suppose that those countries in Africa that “liberated” themselves by force would undergo a more thorough decolonization than those that were granted independence, and would therefore progress better, economically, socially and politically, but this dubious theory proved to be without foundation. Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau and Algeria—all of whom fought

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for their independence—have had disastrous postcolonial histories (in contrast to that, say, of Botswana). In Algeria, a dictatorship was imposed virtually from the moment of independence; censorship followed, opposition to the ruling party forbidden, and a massacre of between 60,000 and 100,000 people took place.36 Liberation is a strange word to apply to such processes, unless the national, social, cultural or racial characteristics of the oppressor (and his previously oppressed status) serve to absolve him of culpability. Perhaps many of us prefer to be oppressed by our own kind rather than by strangers or foreigners even if the oppression by people of our own kind is harsher than that of the foreigners. In the years following World War II, colonial regimes in Africa lost any semblance of legitimacy, and for good reason. Most of them had been imposed by force or, in some cases, fraud; they usually introduced a humiliating racial hierarchy of the kind that had been thoroughly discredited during World War II. They created a social stratum, educated in European culture, science and technology, who were frustrated by the placement of a ceiling on their advancement in the colonial society. It was only to be expected that this class would not remain satisfied for long with a subservient and subordinate position. The colonial powers were unwilling or unable to hang on for long to their African colonies by force (with the notable exception of France in Madagascar and Algeria, and Portugal in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique). Western intellectuals combined a correct understanding of the injustices of colonialism in Africa with their habitual dissatisfactions with conditions in their home countries in the aftermath of World War II. It was thus not surprising that they came to project their hopes for a better, fairer, simpler world on a continent that had hitherto been largely untouched by modernity and the ailments peculiar to it, especially the decline of community. As the Antillean poet Aime Cesaire put it: “Hurrah for those who never invented anything! Hurrah for those who never conquered anything!”37 A significant portion of the intelligentsia took up the cheering. Where decolonization was accompanied by supposedly liberating violence, the cheering was even louder. Having made this initial misjudgment, colored by utopian longings, the intelligentsia was reluctant to admit the error. This reluctance sometimes had practical consequences. The Scandinavians, for example, took many years to admit what should have been obvious from the beginning: that the forced removal of the Tanzanian rural population from where it was living—made possible in large part by the Scandinavian subsidies to the Tanzanian government—had been both an economic disaster and a political crime on a very large scale. Only willful blindness borne out of the idealization of the Third World can explain these attitudes and policies. Much of the writing about Africa during and after the era of independence suffered from the same deformations that writing about the Soviet Union (and other Communist states) suffered from before the work of Robert Conquest. The search for alternatives (to capitalism and Western democracy), ambivalence about modernity, wishful thinking and plain ignorance allowed many Western intellectuals to project their hopes upon postcolonial Africa overlooking its old and new failings, including the new forms of inequalities, repression and political violence. If at the present time we are no longer quite so easily misled by social-political experiments and progressive rhetoric in faraway countries of which we know little and that have supposedly embarked upon overcoming the defects of the Western world and modernity, it is in no small part thanks to Conquest’s pioneering work.

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Chapter 11

4

Apologists of Totalitar ianism: From Communism to Isl am I b n Wa r r a q

I. Totalitarian Aspects Current discussions and disputes about the character of radical Islam and Islamic fundamentalism would benefit from an awareness of earlier assessments of these matters by important Western scholars and thinkers. Some of these conflicting assessments are reminiscent of past disputes about the nature of Communist systems that used to divide Western intellectuals. As will be recalled, there were deep disagreements between those favorably disposed toward Communist systems and movements and those critical of them. A similar divide exists today with regard to radical Islam, perhaps not quite so deep. In both cases, central to the disagreements have been the questions: to what degree do beliefs and ideologies determine policies or behavior? How closely do ideas shape actions? It should be also noted that at the present time there is no Islamic totalitarian system in existence that would correspond to the classical definitions of totalitarianism developed by Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniev Brzezisnki among others and which was applied to several Communist states. Iran, a highly repressive theocracy comes closest. There are, however discernible totalitarian tendencies within the militant, radical Islamic movements and groups and their ideology. Those who at earlier times attributed totalitarian characteristics or propensities to Islam include Charles Watson, G. H. Bousquet, Bertrand Russell, Jules Monnerot, Czeslaw Milosz, Carl Jung, Karl Barth, Said Amir Arjomand, Maxime Rodinson, Manfred Halpern and Hitler, among others. Charles Watson, a Christian missionary in Egypt, in 1937 described Islam as totalitarian (without using the term) by arguing how, “by a million roots, penetrating every phase of life, all of them with religious significance, it is able to maintain its hold upon the life of Moslem peoples.”1 G. H. Bousquet, formerly professor of law at the University of Algiers, and later at the University of Bordeaux, one of the foremost authorities on Islamic Law, distinguishes two aspects of Islam that he

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considers totalitarian: Islamic Law, and the Islamic notion of Jihad, which has for its ultimate aim the conquest of the entire world in order to subordinate it to a single authority.2 According to Snouck Hurgronje another great scholar of Islamic Law, and longtime professor of Arabic at the University of Leiden, Holland, Islamic Law has aimed at “controlling the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from hampering Islam in any way.”3 The all-embracing nature of Islamic Law can be grasped from the fact that it does not distinguish between ritual, law (in the European sense of the word), ethics and good manners. In principle this legislation controls the entire life of the believer and the Islamic community, it intrudes into every aspect of life: from the pilgrim tax, to agricultural contracts, the board and lodging of slaves, the invitation to a wedding, the use of toothpicks, the ritual fashion in which one’s natural needs are met, the prohibition of men to wear gold or silver rings and the proper treatment of animals. Bertrand Russell in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, published in 1920, wrote, Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam … Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet … Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to