To the Editor:
Walter Laqueur, in “Glasnost & Its Limits” [July], takes issue with some remarks in my own earlier article in COMMENTARY, “Gorbachev Without Illusions” [April]. For the sake of clarification, let me briefly summarize my position.
- We need to distinguish clearly between Gorbachev’s political intentions and the perhaps involuntary consequences of his policies. His intention is to promote a reform, which will permit him (a) to consolidate his own power, (b) to consolidate the power of the party, and (c) to consolidate the fortunes of “socialism” (as that word is understood in its Leninist sense). In my judgment, this reform is impossible and has already failed.
- The miscarriage of Gorbachev’s intended reform is aggravating the crisis of the Soviet regime. More than one Western commentator seems to have confused some of the diverse effects of that crisis with the intended effects of reform. Since the crisis is weakening the power of the party, such commentators hasten to congratulate Gorbachev on his “liberalism” and conclude that we must help him in his struggle against the “conservatives.” But Gorbachev agrees with his rivals in the party on the ends being pursued; they differ only on questions of the means and on the scope of the General Secretary’s personal power.
- I described Gorbachev’s program as being consistent with Leninist principles. I judged that the domestic-policy aspects of it would fail (while the foreign-policy aspects might succeed) and that the crisis would therefore continue. Concerning the shape, the duration, and the outcome of the crisis, I have no special knowledge and I doubt that anyone does. Insofar as the USSR remains a stable Leninist state, it is the most transparent and predictable country on earth. But once past a certain threshold of crisis it slips away from the artificial regularity imposed by any ideological system and reenters ordinary historical time, wherein it becomes subject to the same unpredictability that besets “natural” states all over the world.
Alain Besançon
Paris, France
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To the Editor:
It is a pity that in his otherwise interesting and informative article Walter Laqueur presents a somewhat inaccurate account of my views of Gorbachev and his policies. Thus, among other things, Mr. Laqueur writes that “Soon after the General Secretary came to power he was called a Stalinist by the prominent émigré intellectual, Vladimir Bukovsky . . . ,” and that my “original thesis was developed in an article in Obozrenie.”
To begin with, there must be a mistake in his reference: I do not recall ever seeing a publication named Obozrenie, let alone writing an article for it. Perhaps Mr. Laqueur means the English magazine Survey (which in Russian is “obozrenie”), where a speech I gave at a conference of the Committee for the Free World was reprinted (Spring 1985).
What is more important, assuming my guess is correct, is that I did not there call Gorbachev a Stalinist. Commenting on the fit of euphoria that had overtaken many in the West upon Gorbachev’s accession, I simply pointed out that nothing in his previous career would indicate that he was in any way different from the so-called “old guard” which had, indeed, brought him up, educated him, and promoted him. I trust that Mr. Laqueur would agree with me that such patrons of Gorbachev as Andropov, Kulakov, and Suslov, and later Ustinov, Gromyko, and so forth, could hardly be described as a “new guard” or “liberals.” Clearly, a man who joined the Communist party in 1952, during Stalin’s last campaign against Jews and intellectuals; who became a local party boss in 1966, just after Khrushchev was dismissed; who became a member of the Central Committee in 1971, and a member of the Politburo in 1980, could hardly be a compulsive reformer. If nothing else, he must himself have been at least partly responsible for the “stagnation” of the Brezhnev era which he was now criticizing so much, and it was at best ridiculous to call him, as the Western media did back in 1985, “a new face in the Kremlin.”
Furthermore, as I tried to explain in that speech, the tendency to portray the internal Soviet situation as a struggle between an old guard and a new guard, or between conservatives and reformers, was a simplification based on the “mirror-image” fallacy so common in the West. The reason for such senseless preoccupation with the personalities of Soviet leaders must lie in a failure to understand totalitarian systems. One could like or dislike Gorbachev, but one would have to “do business” (in Margaret Thatcher’s unfortunate phrase) not with him but with the whole political system. The General Secretary of the Communist party is not an autonomous individual, he is a function. His personal inclinations are irrelevant, because he is not a czar and the Soviet political system is not an autocracy. Thus, the emergence of a new leader does not automatically signify a new policy. Rather the opposite is true: a decision to change policy brings a change in leadership.
This was certainly true in the case of Gorbachev, whose renowned policies of glasnost and perestroika were worked out in principle long before he became General Secretary—according to some reports, during the last years of Brezhnev’s rule and Andropov’s subsequent short term in power (see, for example, Dusko Doder, “Andropov Rushed Renewal into Motion,” Washington Post, July 28, 1985). Needless to say, this decision was not prompted by anyone’s great urge for reform, or by a concern for the well-being of the Russian people, but by the catastrophic decline in the economy which was undermining the status of the Soviet Union as a superpower.
There is no need to ascribe this interpretation to me, as Mr. Laqueur does in his article. The fear of lagging behind South Korea, to say nothing of the United States, is a constant theme in the Soviet press. The fear of being unable to maintain superpower status, of allowing the “position of socialism in the modern world” to suffer, has also been a constant theme of Gorbachev’s speeches starting with his maiden speech in 1985, and a justification for introducing radical change. Somehow, I find it easier to believe in the sincerity of this fear than in a sudden change of heart in yesterday’s oppressors.
The point I tried to make in my speech was that the West should not hasten to rescue its bankrupt enemy, should not eliminate the need for painful internal reforms by providing economic assistance to the Soviet Union and its client states or by reducing the pressure of the military competition. Mr. Laqueur asserts that “the Russians have not been beneficiaries of massive credits,” and therefore that my “fears that the West will end up paying for Communist expansion” are not “fully warranted.” But recent OECD estimates show, to the contrary, that Soviet-bloc debt has increased 55 percent since 1984. According to the Wall Street Journal (December 7, 1987), the current rate of Soviet borrowing has reached a staggering $700 million a month; at least half of the country’s hard-currency income is spent to prop up client states like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Moreover, the journal indicates: “Remarkably, as debt rises, terms decline. From 1983 to 1986, the Soviet Union saw the average interest rate it pays drop from one to 0.15 point above the Libor benchmark. Brazil pays at least 0.75 of a point above Libor.” This is exactly what I call “paying for Communist expansion,” whether Mr. Laqueur finds my view “fully warranted” or not.
Even more frightening is Western willingness to disarm just for the sake of glasnost. No one has as yet explained why we need an INF treaty. In what way does it improve Western defense? All we hear are vague (and debatable) assurances that the treaty will not affect NATO capabilities. If so, why do we need it? Just to “help Gorbachev” in his struggle with the mysterious “old guard”? Or, perhaps, to appease the Western peace movement? Or, better still, to pave the way for a START agreement? None of these reasons seems to me “fully warranted.” And what if the Soviets were to redeploy SS-20s, or their like, three or five years hence? Can anyone truly believe Western governments would be able to summon the political will to counter-deploy Pershings?
No, I do not think that the West can actually make Communism work: there is probably not enough money in the entire world to fulfill that particular dream. But it is quite possible to keep the Soviet system alive, though doing so might entail the disappearance of a few more nations from the face of the earth. Why must we undertake such a thankless task? Franklin D. Roosevelt liked “Uncle Joe” Stalin and apparently felt he could “do business” with him, and millions of East Europeans had to pay with their lives for that presidential urge. Ask the Cubans how they liked Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence.” Ask the Ethiopians, Angolans, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Afghans how they liked Brezhnev’s “détente.” In those days, too, we were supposed to be helping “doves” fight “hawks” in the Kremlin. We were told that Brezhnev was the best we could hope for, and that we must not miss this golden opportunity to “improve relations.” And now, just fifteen years later, no less an authority than Gorbachev himself has disclosed that Brezhnev was actually a “hawk.” Whoops! Never mind, just a mild embarrassment for such wizards of Western Sovietology as Stephen Cohen and Marshall Shulman, and a bit too late for the nations listed above.
So why not stick to what we know reasonably well? And we do know that the huge Soviet empire is in the grip of a grave structural crisis. To judge by the experience of some East European countries, the empire is unlikely to solve its problems within the existing political framework, and seems headed for a period of popular unrest. We also know that in the past, every period of “thaw,” “relaxation,” “détente,” etc. has ended in a further expansion of Communism and has led to a renewed period of “cold war” and international tension. Such is very likely to happen again, as the Soviet ruling elite may not be able to slow down the erosion of the political system by any other means. Should their current reforms fail, as they are likely to do, a renewed aggressiveness may be the only way for the members of the Soviet elite to save their political hides. Would it matter, then, whether they themselves are Stalinists, anti-Stalinists, or neo-Stalinists?
If there is even the slightest possibility of such an outcome, what right do we have to ignore it? Instead of playing the stupid game of good guys/bad guys in the Kremlin, why do we not prepare ourselves? Why weaken ourselves just at the moment when we may need all our strength? It is frightening to think how the West might be forced to respond to an unrestrained act of Soviet nuclear blackmail aggravated by a huge unrepaid Soviet debt. We have already had the pleasure of witnessing the mass hysteria of the peace movement of the early 1980’s, when NATO still provided a sufficient deterrent; imagine the hysteria when there will be no such deterrent! We already know how helpless and accommodating creditor nations are vis-à-vis debtor nations. And we have seen how servile democratically elected governments can become when dealing even with ordinary terrorists. Are we willing to test all this against the most powerful machine of subversion and terror ever known, a machine which has so far been completely unaffected by perestroika?
Unfortunately, after living nearly twelve years in the West, I am only too aware that my warnings, and similar warnings by other “émigré intellectuals,” are destined to remain unheeded. Where Mr. Laqueur is quite on target is in reminding us how wrong were the seemingly sophisticated diagnoses of many Western Sovietologists in the 60’s and 70’s. Yes, indeed, these Sovietologists have a skeleton in their filing cabinets. Unlike real scientists, they would rather be “moderate” than correct, and so they invented a lot of “reasons” why the testimony of émigrés should be ignored. We were, they said, “reactionary” and “biased”; and our views represented, at best, only a tiny minority. We were supposed to have chips on our shoulders, albatrosses around our necks, grudges in our pockets. Thanks to the efforts of these people, whose arrogance was matched only by their ignorance, we émigrés were virtually ostracized, banned from the public debate, silenced in the media.
I am therefore afraid that the “full post-mortem on two decades of Western Sovietology” called for by Mr. Laqueur will be grossly incomplete unless there is some admission that the failures were due to more than simple mistakes of analysis. How many scholars were forced to sacrifice the truth in order to be accepted in academic circles as “moderates,” or in order to get their works published by prestigious presses? How many of those (particularly in the émigré community) seeking grants and tenure were forced to lie in order to survive professionally? What we have here are not the honest errors of some misled scholars but the acts of a mafia establishing its authority and protecting its interests.
And yet, at the end of the day, all the sophisticated books and learned articles of the Sovietological mafia have been exposed for what they are—a pile of trash. When we émigré intellectuals were living in the Soviet Union we were sent to jails and lunatic asylums for demanding glasnost; today, now that glasnost has become official policy, Moscow itself has confirmed, almost word for word, what we have been saying for a good twenty-five years,
What amusing reading these “scholarly works” thus provide. But can we say that justice has finally triumphed? Have the godfathers of Sovietology lost their prestige and influence? Are they ashamed and repentant? Far from it. They are still all over the place, advising governments, enlightening the public, writing their sophisticated articles and books about the struggle between “conservatives” and “reformers” in the Kremlin, all as if nothing had happened.
As for us, we are still “émigré intellectuals” with something on our shoulders, or around our necks. We are still “too extreme” and not sufficiently “balanced.” But I am confident that a few years hence the Sovietologists will be proved wrong once again, and we right, because they have only their (or someone else’s) opinions, while we have a knowledge of that unique political system in which we were born and brought up. If only the price to be paid for their “mistakes” were not so tragically high.
Vladimir Bukovsky
Cambridge, England
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To the Editor:
I read Walter Laqueur’s short description of my book, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform, with genuine disappointment. The problem is not that he misrepresented my views (he summarized the book quite accurately) or that he treated it too harshly (I feared the worst from COMMENTARY). And we hold a common judgment about “the pervasive harping by American commentators on the notion that Gorbachev needs our ‘help.’”
The problem is that Mr. Laqueur and I come from the same intellectual tradition, with many similar original assumptions. Yet, instead of recognizing this and engaging in a serious dialogue with the argument of my book, he simply suggests that I am a gadfly, not always serious, and, of course, wrong on most points.
In fact, I am always completely serious in what I say, and, whether I am right or wrong, I am surprised that Mr. Laqueur does not recognize that I am presenting a very old-fashioned argument with which he used to have sympathy.
Mr. Laqueur does not like my thesis that the Bolshevik takeover was the Khomeini revolution in Russian history—a xenophobic, anti-Western revolution that was a break with the natural course of Russian history. But that analysis is simply the old totalitarian model, especially as developed by scholars such as Hannah Arendt.
The scholars advancing the totalitarian model treated the revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 as the natural line of Russian development and saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a coup d’état by fanatics who transformed Russian society and changed the course of its history. These scholars treated right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism, Nazism and Communism, as essentially similar. (It was, of course, recognized that there were also some differences between Hitler and Stalin, just as there are differences between Khomeini and the founders of the Bolshevik system.)
The sophisticated developers of the theory of totalitarianism understood that totalitarian movements sometimes attract considerable mass support in periods of great social dislocation. W.W. Rostow called Communism the “disease of the transition.” In my opinion Hannah Arendt focused too much on anti-Semitism per se in discussing the rise of Bolshevism, but I think that she would have been right if she had generalized her point to talk about a xenophobic reaction to those perceived of as alien, including ultimately the Westernized Russian elite. As I stated in my book, “In a real sense the same xenophobic emotions that produced the anti-Jewish pogroms then produced the Bolshevik Revolution but now were directed at the entire Europeanized part of the population.”
In my opinion Lenin received a good deal of support—and he did win 29 percent of the vote in the fairly free election of January 1918—not simply for economic-class reasons, but also because many of his supporters were rejecting the Western cultural-intellectual-political superstructure that had come with European capitalism.
Marxism has two possible implications in a Third World country like Russia of 1917: (1) capitalism follows feudalism, and the adoption of the European superstructure—Westernization—is hence historically inevitable, or (2) Western civilization has no inherent value but reflects the interests of alien, exploited classes. Those in the Mensheviks, the Bund, Legal Marxism, and so forth were Westerners who accepted the first implication in their hearts; the Bolsheviks and their supporters found the superstructure repulsive (“satanic”) and fought to overthrow the classes who had the interest of introducing it. The essence of the revolution was the creation of iron curtains against frightening Western ideas and market forces.
That is, right or wrong, I strongly disagree with the current Soviet tendency to treat Lenin as a Swedish social democrat and I think that the conservatives were right in saying that the essence of Communism was the rejection of Western civilization. It was Alain Besançon’s view of Lenin and the West that I quoted at length on pp. 50-51 of my book.
Those who developed the totalitarian model in the 1940’s and the 1950’s were right in suggesting that the autarchy of Communism was not soon to disappear, but the logic of the model was that change would eventually occur. As Raymond Aron predicted in 1955, a large educated middle class would eventually be created, with corrosive results; the youth who were not xenophobic in the 1950’s but instead yearned for Western music and clothes would eventually become middle-aged; and since total autarchy meant total protectionism for Russian monopolistic industrialists, Western economic theory certainly predicted that autarchy would eventually produce economic stagnation that could be overcome only by a major opening to the West to attack the protectionism. The drive for power inherent in the ideology would eventually require an end to autarchy: the disease of the transition would in the long run be transitory.
Mr. Laqueur is very critical of the predictive record of Soviet studies in the past, but his memory is selective. For example, I wrote a series of books and articles in the late 70’s and early 80’s (including Soviet Leadership in Transition, 1980) that emphasized the importance of the coming social change—especially the coming to power of the Gorbachev generation born after 1926—and that led to predictions of which I am quite proud.
Of course, everyone has now abandoned Aron and Arendt and accepted the Trotskyist analysis of Isaac Deutscher. In the current conventional wisdom, the Soviet Union does not have a middle class, but only the ruling managers of the means of production—the bureaucrats; the political leaders do not dominate society, but are a superstructure that cannot challenge the interests of the ruling class; ideology is not dedicated to transformation and total power, but to the preservation of the status quo (the old definition of an authoritarian state in contrast to a totalitarian one).
In my view, this is nonsense. The middle class, including “bureaucrats” and middle-class workers, want freedom and challenging jobs and the chance to enrich themselves instead of total security. They are not privileged bureaucrats, but instead are people suppressed by a severe dictatorship.
Obviously my analysis is controversial. One can understand why the Marxist-tinged post-Vietnam generation may not like it. But those who come out of a pre-Vietnam tradition like Mr. Laqueur should explain where they think my analysis has gone wrong. Do they really believe that total protectionism, coupled with monopolistic ministries, is compatible with economic performance? Do they believe that Soviet leaders no longer care about national power, especially in the face of a rising China? Do they think that even the military chief of staff, Marshal Akhromeev, leads as good a life as the average American colonel—and that he will fight to sabotage any effort to improve his life? And are they really willing to defend the proposition that the Russian-educated middle class—unlike the middle class in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and South Korea—simply yearns to be repressed?
The time has come to think through and debate our assumptions about the Soviet Union with the greatest of seriousness. A return to ancient truths must be part of that debate.
Jerry Hough
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
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To the Editor:
I have just read Walter Laqueur’s article in your July issue. Because Mr. Laqueur’s characterization of my book, Origins of the Great Purges, is so manifestly misleading, I should like to clear up a few points. Mr. Laqueur misquotes, misrepresents, and so distorts my argument as to make it unrecognizable. Compare:
1. Laqueur: “According to this work, the purges of the party conducted in the late 30’s mainly arose out of disagreements at the top over economic issues.”
Getty: “. . . three central issues preoccupied party leaders in the period and comprised the context for the Great Purges. These three problems were economic planning, the fate of the former opposition, and the control and rationalization of the territorial party apparatus. Of the three, the struggle within the party apparatus is the focus of most of this study. . .” (p. 12). The vast bulk of my book is about party-political matters; economic debates are a minor sidelight.
2. Laqueur: “Getty implies that not all that many people perished in the purges, certainly fewer than has been claimed by ‘cold-war’ historians.”
Getty: “The Ezhovshchina [terror] was a maelstrom of political violence that involved all bureaucratic factions and interest groups” (p. 172). “Repression during the Ezhovshchina was widespread and savage” (p. 177). My book made no attempt to estimate the number of victims: “Lacking evidence, all estimates are equally worthless, and it is hard to disagree with Brzezinski’s observation that it is impossible to make any estimates without erring in the hundreds of thousands or even millions” (p. 258). My discussion of numbers related solely to expulsions from the party (on which we do have good data) and noted that such figures are unsatisfactory as a gauge of the incidence of the terror on society.
3. Laqueur: “Getty does concede . . . that Stalin is not altogether to be exonerated, but his main crime was apparently not to pay enough attention to what his underlings were doing.”
Getty: “ . . . regardless of the real nature and extent of [Stalin’s] participation, his position as party leader forces upon him primary responsibility for the events that ensued under his leadership” (p. 9). “Stalin used police repression of ‘enemies of the people’ to settle old scores and to destroy anyone he chose” (p. 172). “All it took from Stalin were catalytic and probably ad hoc interventions . . . to spark an uncontrolled explosion. That he did so intervene speaks for itself” (p. 206).
Having ignored the thesis of my book and disregarded the archival evidence upon which it relied, Mr. Laqueur was able to present it in such a way as to put it in contrast with current revelations from Moscow. This is not true. (He similarly distorts the solidly-based work of Robert W. Thurston and Moshe Lewin, but they can speak for themselves.)
Given Walter Laqueur’s reputation as a professional historian, I am also puzzled by his distress at the “habitual academic tendency to rely on facts and figures” and his explicit condemnation of “the scholarly approach.” Quite aside from the anti-empirical tone of his remarks, one can note that there is a vast difference between using facts and figures disseminated for propaganda and those found in secret internal documents meant for administrative purposes. Studies of Nazi Germany, treatments of other topics in political history, and most of Mr. Laqueur’s own work have relied on such careful and discriminating use of sources.
J. Arch Getty
University of California
Riverside, California
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To the Editor:
Walter Laqueur’s wise article on glasnost whets the appetite for his forthcoming book on the same subject. I would like, however, to take issue with him on one point, not central to his argument, but nevertheless important.
Mr. Laqueur contends that although under Gorbachev there have occurred “revolutions” in literature, theater, and film-making, no such thing has occurred in music and the visual arts—which, he rightly observes, “suffered enormously under Stalin.” (Music, I would argue, suffered less, but that is a separate discussion.)
I have to disagree with Mr. Laqueur about the visual arts, where I think he underestimates what has occurred since 1985. In fact, the magnificent George Costakis collection of the Russian avant-garde, 80 percent of which is now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, went (in part) on public exhibition in 1986. Costakis himself, who had been driven abroad in 1978 by a hostile officialdom, and now lives in Greece, was invited back to Moscow as an honored guest for that occasion, and went. An important article about the exhibition by a respected Soviet art critic (Moscow News, No. 37, 1986) in effect swept away the whole absurd edifice of official and unofficial art in the Soviet Union, declaring that the “Russian fine arts of the 20th century” had been “forfeited to the West” and that this constituted a national disgrace. Costakis, about whom. . . I am now writing a book, tells me that young Soviet painters are today painting what they want to paint, that much of it is very good, and that they are free to sell it at home or abroad. If one thinks of the arts scene in Russia only ten years ago, here indeed is a revolution as remarkable as those in literature and theater.
Mr. Laqueur might be interested to know that, on the future of glasnost, Costakis takes the view that (to quote him) “the genie is out of the bottle and nobody can put it back.” He is of course thinking mainly of the arts and intellectual life, and in that context it is an informed opinion which cannot be dismissed. I personally agree with Mr. Laqueur that glasnost has probably reached its apogee, at least for several years to come, and that the best we can hope for is that the indisputable gains which have been made in cultural life should not be weakened as the twin ships of glasnost and perestroika lose steam in the years ahead.
Peter Roberts
Director, The Canada Council
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Walter Laqueur writes:
Alain Besançon and Vladimir Bukovsky are mainly preoccupied with the prospects of perestroika, whereas the subject of my article was glasnost. One cannot, of course, entirely separate the one from the other, but I also could not cover all aspects of contemporary Soviet politics in the framework of one article. I certainly like their new formulations better than their original ones, in which they tended to underrate the extent of the ferment taking place in Moscow. (Incidentally, although there is a journal called Obrozenie, Mr. Bukovsky is quite correct that I was referring to his article in Survey.)
While xenophobia may have been a factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917, as Jerry Hough contends, it was certainly not a decisive one; if Mr. Hough were right, the Black Hundred and not Lenin would have emerged as the new masters of Russia. True, later on “socialism in one country” gave a strong impetus to Russian nationalism, but that is another story.
I have never shared the changing views of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism; she did not know enough about the Soviet Union to theorize on the subject. Isaac Deutscher, of course, knew much more, but his judgment was clouded by ideology. I am less familiar than is Mr. Hough with current academic thought in the field of Sovietology, but I hope that he exaggerates a little when he says that “everyone” has now abandoned Raymond Aron and accepted the Trotskyite analysis of Isaac Deutscher; I know a few people who have not. Even if his assessment should be correct, however, I would be neither surprised nor shocked. In this field, the strangest views have found advocates from time to time.
The wider issues raised by Mr. Hough certainly are of importance but cannot be addressed briefly; I am at present trying to deal with them in a longer study.
As for J. Arch Getty, I do not think I misquoted or distorted his arguments. But I could not possibly do justice to his interpretation of Stalin’s terror in a mere ten lines. I urge readers interested in the subject to obtain his book, Origins of the Great Purges, published by Cambridge University Press in 1985.
Mr. Getty blames me for making it appear that what he wrote is in contrast with current revelations in Moscow. He should blame instead the Soviet editors and censors who have passed Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the work of Vasily Grossman, who have published Shalamov, Razgon, and hundreds of other accounts of the purges, trials, and camps, who will publish Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and perhaps even Solzhenitsyn.
My problem is not with facts, figures, and the scholarly approach, but with the fact that Mr. Getty has come up with the wrong answers, which contradict both historical evidence and common sense. With some justice Mr. Getty could argue that it was unfair of me to single him out from a whole group of authors who wrote studies which they no doubt felt detached, scholarly, and objective, but who, in retrospect, would have been better advised not to publish.
A recent article by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Ogonyok (Number 29, 1988) provides a fitting epitaph to this body of work: “So much material has now been published in our media unmasking the total war against the people which took place at that time that even if nine-tenths of it were exaggerated, it should be sufficient to cure all naiveté. But some people prefer to stay blind. They love not Stalin but their blindness.”
And yet, I feel that most people do learn from their mistakes. I suspect that if Mr. Getty were writing his book in 1988, he would make some interesting changes.
Finally, I would like to thank Peter Roberts for his letter. I should have made it clear that my observations referred to the official artistic establishment, not to developments outside it.
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