Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Re JRL 2008-134, Nos.34, 34a
Captives of Old Hatreds
By Sergei Roy,
Editor, guardianpsj.ru
On July 15, 2008 a seminar was held at the Russian Academy of Sciences to discuss the Captive Nations Resolution signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959 and ever since celebrated, if that’s the word that fits here, each year in the third week of July. I was cordially invited by its organizer, Dr. Lozansky, but cried off pleading advanced age and ill health but, frankly, mostly out of an acute sense of the grotesque incongruity and present irrelevance of the said resolution which, to me, is just another indication that U.S. Congressmen are a race apart to whose actions and inaction (like, their failure to rescind a painfully obsolete Public Law 86-90) ordinary human logic does not apply.
A document cited in Edward Lozansky’s “Notes on the Discussion of the Captive Nations Resolution” (JRL 2008 #134) shows clearly the Naziist origins of certain elements of that resolution, lobbied by the Ukrainian nationalist Lev “Mr. Captive Nations” Dobriansky out of sheer Russophobia. One would have thought that the mere mention of the fact that such imaginary “captive nations” as White Ruthenia, Idel-Ural or Cossackia insinuated themselves into that resolution straight from the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s minister for “Eastern Regions,” would have made U.S. Congress drop it like a hot potato. Alas, Congressmen are made of sterner stuff, and if the world holds its nose at the Nazi stench, so much the worse for the world.
It appears from Ed Lozansky’s report that much of the discussion at the seminar, just as on many previous occasions since 1959, centered on the issue of whether the Russian nation was a captive to international Communism (presumably much like certain nations these days are captives to international terrorism, with Islamist antecedents) or, as the Captive Nations Resolution implies, it was itself Communist through and through and did nothing but “captivate” and oppress other nations (hence the Resolution’s preference for Dobriansky-inspired terms like “Russian Communism” and “Communist Russia”).
Again, the Resolution is so painfully at variance with historical facts that its Russophobic tendencies simply cry out to heaven. It has been pointed times out of mind that the Russian nation suffered more from Communism than any other people on earth, and it’s not a matter of scholarly preferences for one theory over another but of black-and-white statistics – more Russians died in the Communist Gulags than members of any other nation. Millions of them.
And I use the phrase “international Communism” quite advisedly: it was internationalist both in its Marxist design and in practical implementation, its ultimate goal a world anti-capitalist revolution and its leaders internationalist to the core. For them, the Russian nation was just an instrument that came easiest to hand owing to a confluence of historical events. It could have been German (and nearly was), or Hungarian (ditto), or Spanish (ditto). We know what happened later: victory of Communism in the world’s most populous nation, China, in Vietnam, and elsewhere. Not much Russianness about these, is there.
Furthermore, I had occasion to review for a newspaper a book by Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, “The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev,” which tabulates, among other things, the ethnic origins of the Communist hierarchy, especially at the top, right from the times of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution – and a veritable Internationale it turns out to be.
However, one does not need these learned studies to know that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the bloody founder of the Cheka-OGPU-KGB secret police, was a Pole, the tyrant Stalin (Dzhugashvili) a Georgian, Lenin’s and Stalin’s rival for ultimate power Leon Trotsky a Jew, Stalin’s henchman Beria another Georgian, Anastas Mikoyan, that eternal Politburo member, Armenian, and so on down the line. A couple of weeks ago we marked the suppression by the Bolsheviks of the July 1918 revolt of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow. Who carried out the suppression? Dzerzhinsky’s latyshskie strelki “Latvian riflemen,” that’s who. Who were the most ruthless, cold-blooded executioners in Dzerzhinsky’s system? The Chinese, who also came in very handy when there was a need to suppress yet another peasant revolt in any corner of Mother Russia.
These are facts that any Russian knows from school and often from his own family’s history – only what do U.S. Congressmen care for all this? I guess that bunch is most typically represented by Senator McCain, who sees no difference whatever between “Communist Russia” (the Soviet Union) and post-Communist and very anti-Communist Russia (the Russian Federation). To him, it’s ever the Big Enemy, and this spirit seems to prevail on Capitol Hill, as the continuing business of Captive Nations Week shows.
To me and others like me, questioning the “captive” status of the Russian nation appears all the more ridiculous as we were the guys who came out of Communist captivity and, not to put too fine a point on it, led our people out of it. What were we doing in August 1991 if not throwing off that Communist yoke? What else were we doing as we marched, white bandages wound round our heads, from the barricades around the White House of Russia to Dzerzhinsky (now again Lubyanka) Square, to tear down Dzerzhinsky’s statue? What were we doing as we then marched to Petrovka 38, Moscow’s Police Headquarters, to install our man there? What were we doing as we marched in a column from there to the CPSU Central Committee buildings on Staraya Ploshchad, to form “corridors of disgrace” and yell good Russian insults in the deathly pale face of Yuri Prokofyev, Moscow’s First Party Secretary, and other Communist bosses?
I’ll tell you what we were doing. We were throwing off the Communist yoke, and we did throw it off. We are no longer a captive nation, same as most of the others listed and not listed in the Resolution – except, of course, for Rosenberg’s inventions. This is something that HAS HAPPENED: a “captive,” or non-free nation has become “non-captive” and free – from at least one ideological-political-social-economic curse. Look at any of these aspects – ideology, politics, society, economy, whatever – and you will see that this nation is, at its core, no longer Communist in any sense, except in marginal ideological-political elements present in practically any truly free and democratic society.
So to anyone who has taken a hand in the freeing process, and in fact to any sentient human being, putting in question the Russian nation’s past non-free status and present free status smacks of alienism, to use an old-fashioned phrase and maybe soften the affront. Yet such doubters persist, and their doubts sometimes assume a somewhat ludicrous form.
Says Professor Zarycki of Warsaw University in a written statement addressed to the aforementioned seminar (see the same issue of JRL as mentioned above, #34a): “In my personal view, recognition of the Russian nation’s status as a victim of communism will be legitimate only if communists as perpetrators, and in a way occupants of Russia, will be clearly condemned in Russia, irrespectively [he means “irrespective” – SR] of their nationality or citizenship.”
Did you get it? Did you appreciate the H.G. Wellsian, time-travel touch? Something that happened in the past will only be adjudged as having happened if we do something in the present – or is it future?… Beautiful. Just – beautiful.
I am here admiring merely the logic of it, of course. The actual meaning is even more clearly expressed in the following sentences: “Than [he means “then” – SR] their crimes should be investigated and made public and at least symbolically judged. Such a process of settling accounts with the communism is going on in Poland since 1989. As the Polish experience shows, it’s a very difficult, complex and painful process, but without it, without paying its price, overcoming of the terrible past and building of a healthy civil society seem impossible.”
“Such a process of settling accounts” is generally known as a witch-hunt. America tried it under McCarthy and said, Never again. I don’t much care how it is done in Poland, what I do care is how Prof. Zarycki’s recommendation applies to Russia. Put briefly, it doesn’t. Suppose we ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar McCarthy question: “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” “Yes, we have,” some 19 million of former Soviet citizens will reply – and what do we do with them? Condemn them? Condemn them for what? For their views? That’s undemocratic and is not done even in the best regulated societies, like France or Italy, with their strong Communist parties. For their crimes? Suppose they say they have not committed any crimes whatsoever – do we appoint nineteen million investigators to find out? No, that would not be enough, we’d need at least twice that number – not a practical proposition, now is it.
Besides, those 19 million might take umbrage at this unwarranted intrusion in their constitutionally guaranteed privacy, and what they might do is anyone’s guess. The polite phrase to describe it would be “civil unrest,” I believe. Of course, a ruckus of some sort, preferably with a bit of shooting (which is ever inevitable on such occasions in Russia), preferably along the lines of a “color revolution,” would no doubt please certain circles no end, but anyone who holds Russia’s interests dear to his or her heart will definitely say “No thank you, no more revolutions, we are doing fine without.”
Of course, there are the crimes of the Communist regime as a regime, not as a collection of individual crimes, and these indeed “should be investigated and made public and at least symbolically judged,” in Prof. Zarycki’s words. Alas, the professor’s grammar is again somewhat askew. These crimes not only “should be” investigated, made public and judged: they have been investigated, made public and symbolically – whatever that might mean – judged. Very comprehensively, I might add, again as someone who has taken a hand in the process. Beginning with about 1986, this country plunged into a vigorous critical reassessment of its past, a process so massive and harsh that after a time it reached saturation point, with just as massive calls to stop all this chernukha, imprecisely translated as “blackwashing.” I still have a closet-ful of the back files of Moskovskie novosti/Moscow News newspaper and Ogonyok magazine that spearheaded the cleansing process, to name just the two most prominent publications with a few million copies circulation each.
So “symbolically” we are all right, Prof. Zarycki. As to whether it is possible or impossible to overcome “the terrible past” – which was not always and not completely terrible, as anyone who lived in it will tell you -- and to build “a healthy civil society” without a witch-hunt, well, only practical, living-life experience will tell. So far, Russia has been doing as well as can be expected and much better than many predicted and hoped for.
In any case, it has luckily left safely in the past the times when America, or Poland, or anyone else celebrating yet another Captive Nations Week or any other mothball-smelling occasion would worry it unduly.
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