The Age of Incompetence: Chapter XIX

"Because communism is clearly the work of intellectuals, because its ideology appears like its language, so complex, it is difficult to dismiss. But collectivization was no more than an act of simpletons and sadists."
- Brian Moynhan, The Russian Century

PLZEN By habit and necessity I reserve the weekends to write each new chapter. But this issue wouldn't wait for the weekend and long before first light arrived restlessness overcame me. More than restlessness there was a mix of desperation and helplessness. For I feared this subject was too large, too complex for a short essay.

Russian communism has left such a scar on civilization that it can't be compressed or explained in one short essay or a hundred essays. It is precisely as Boris Pasternak wrote, "What I saw could not be expressed in words. It would not fit within consciousness."

I know this reality as well, as I wrote in the last installment: "Some questions have to be answered with a narrative and a story, which is why literature is often more truthful than history." History is built around facts and facts all too often obscure a truth rather than reveal it. That is the reason I became a novelist and not a historian. Facts, for example, cannot explain the barbarism of Joseph Stalin.

If a writer can't get at the truth, there is no point to writing. Without truth a writer becomes an entertainer, that is, a fakir.

The truth is we have not yet escaped the shadow of Soviet Russia and the religion of communism. For that is what it is, a religion. Marxism was a theory. Lenin took the theory and put it into practice and it failed. Thus the need for the NEP (New Economic Policy) in the early 1920s. From failed theory it became a religion and true believer revived it with class warfare against the Kulaks. Thus farm collectivization which left some 14 million dead from starvation and deportation into labor camps.

Vladimir Putin         Alexander Litvienko

But collectivization failed. No matter, next came the first of Stalin's Five-year Plans to industrialize Soviet Russia. To get imported machinery and technical help grain was stolen from the peasants, causing more starvation, But when this didn't meet expectations they blamed the engineers and show trials were arranged to explain the failed religion.

It was more madness and scapegoating of a class. They were accused of spying for Germans and the French and other saboteurs. "The country drifted into madness; by 1931 7,000 of the country's 35,000 trained engineers were in prison. They were so scarce a resource that ‘technical bureauxs' were set up in prisons and camps."

Next came the politicians in 1936, first to go were the old time Bolsheviks comrades of Stalin's, like Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenov. Like some religious fanatics, Kamenov said at his trial, "No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just." He got his wish along with many others, what came to be known as "the eight grams" that being the weight of the bullet of the automatic pistol in the back of the head. In the 1934 Congress there were 1966 delegates, five years later 1108 had been shot.
A footnote; Stalin liked to play cat and mouse with his victims and took a particular

pleasure in embracing them before they were to be taken. "With an affectionate pat he assured historian Yuri Stekov that he was safe; the NKVD came for Stekov that night." Many Russians thought Stalin didn't know what was going on, in fact, he did know. With his chosen henchman, Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin would labor for three to four hours a day going over lists of names. He is known to have approved of 383 lists containing 44,000 names of senior figures - millions of other cases were decided by junior officers - and in his familiar scribble the initials SMP in the margins of the lists which stood for Supreme Measure of Punishment, the eight gram solution. Yezhov, like the hapless mate of the black widow spider, could not escape being devoured. He got the eight gram solution for his service to Stalin.

Next came the military. Their purges and show trials began in 1937. Most were accused of spying for the Germans, tried, found guilty (once on trial there could be only one outcome) and shot. Of the 100,000 Red Army officers on active duty in 1937, about 50,000 were purged. Stalin murdered more of his officers of the rank of colonel and above than the Germans killed in the war. In contrast Hitler's army purge resulted in 16 generals merely dismissed, none imprisoned or murdered.

Artists could not escape. About a thousand writers were killed, with an equal number surviving the camps. "So many disappeared that those left were half paralyzed with fear."

Escape abroad wasn't guaranteed safety either. Fedor Raskolnikov, hero of the Civil War, was murdered in France, Tolstoy ended up with an icepick driven into his brain in Mexico. (Shades of Litvinenko murdered in London in 2006 - more later.)

And there were the usual number of western intellectual apologists, like 1925 Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw who came to Russia in the 1930s and after taking a guided tour wrote back to the London Times: "Tales of a half-starved population dwelling under the lash of a ruthless tyrant were nonsense. Crowds of brightly dressed well-fed happy-looking workers was nearer the truth." And at a time when priests were being sent to the camps and churches turned into

cinemas and warehouses, he wrote, "Unlike Britain, there is freedom of religion here." Lenin called them useful idiots. There were countless useful idiots. Religion does that.

In 1991, shortly before its demise, the KGB claimed forty-two million Soviet citizens died between 1928 and 1952 as the result of forced labor camps, collectivization, and the purges. "More prisoners were killed in a single death camp, Serpantinka, in 1938 than were executed in the last century of the Czar's rule."

These are the facts, the history, but what do they mean today? For one things we can see where the present economic catastrophe brought about by America's brand of capitalism was and is today a kind of religion that, like Marxism, still has its true believers. It was begun in 1980 with Ronald Reagan who preached the religion that tax cuts solved everything. It didn't, of course, but it did triple the national debt in eight years. It became known as voodoo economics. (Coined by Reagan's rival George H.W. Bush in 1980.)

George W. Bush was one of the true believers and immediately put it into practice after taking office in 2001. Fresh mountains of debt and then the crash in 2008. This craziness, like the Spanish Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, and the Iraq War deserves more scrutiny. Stay tuned.

There is another legacy of the Soviet Union: Vladimir Putin and modern Russia. Putin being a gradate of the old KGB seems drawn to the Stalinist concept of stablility. Political opponents are routinely tried on some vague charge and sent to Siberia, such as Khodorskovsky, journalists who report on corruption are given the eight gram solution, such as Anna Politkovskaya, and critics who reveal forbidden state secrets, such as Alexander Litvinenko, if they seek refuge in foreign countries are hunted down like Trotsky and dispatched. None of this has damaged Putin's popularity with Russians. Stalin's ghost must be smiling.
Next: How communism continues to poison modern society and how we pay for it.
All rights reserved Roger Burke 2009