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The Globe and Mail (Canada)
November 2, 2002
An insider's bitter indictment of Bolshevism
By AUREL BRAUN
Aurel Braun is professor of political science and international relations at the University of Toronto, and a member of its Centre for Russian and East European Studies. His most recent book is The Dilemmas of Transition.
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia
By Alexander N. Yakovlev
Translated by Anthony Austin
Yale University Press,
254 pages, $46.50
Sixty million dead. It is not only the shock of the numbers, but also the scope of the degradation and the depth of the crimes against conscience. This is an angry and bitter book that is at once depressing and riveting, in part the history of a vast state, and an even larger social movement, yet one that also presents insights into the present and a warning for the future.
Alexander Yakovlev, viewed by many as the "father of glasnost," was an important player in the post-Second World War Soviet Union, often uniquely positioned to observe the nature and policies of the Soviet regime. In charge of party propaganda in 1969, a member of the Politburo in 1987, he served as the Soviet Ambassador to Canada from 1973 to 1983 following a party demotion when he courageously took a stance against anti-Semitism. Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual inspiration for Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet system, and since the 1990s he has worked assiduously to document and to try to rehabilitate the victims of Soviet communism. In this book, he not only documents the terror and analyzes the causes, but also writes about the personal disillusionment that eventually led him to question the very philosophical foundations of the Soviet system.
Conservative Western scholars like Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes had written earlier about the millions of victims of terror of the Bolshevik system created by Vladimir Lenin and his allies. Their analyses, though, were often attacked for allegedly being driven by a Cold War agenda. This is clearly not the case with Yakovlev. He not only had unparalleled access to Soviet documentation and participated in a number of key decisions, but contends that it is essential to have an honest and informed re-examination of the past in order to build a decent future.
His quest in principle, therefore, is not unlike that of de-nazification committees in postwar Germany or the truth-seeking commission in post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, Yakovlev's anger and bitterness are directed not only at the longevity of a system that brought about such human tragedy, yet was supported and excused by so many and for so long, but also at himself, in part for investing so much faith in a system that proved to be so destructive.
This is no standard academic work, though it is published by Yale University Press and is well documented. Although specialists will certainly benefit from some vital insights and revelations, it is addressed to a much larger audience in Russia and the West. Ably translated, it is free of impenetrable social-sciences jargon, clearly written and well organized.
Nevertheless, it is a difficult book to read; the horrors that it recounts are so unrelenting and the crimes so mindless that it is bound to generate at least some impulse to disbelieve, or at least to discount. This would be a mistake. Yakovlev not only backs up his assertions with solid evidence, he also carefully tells the story of the rise and fall of a political order in Russia without which the history of the 20th century cannot adequately be understood. Yakovlev analyzes from within the largest attempt at social engineering in human history, one designed to change social interaction in the most fundamental way and ultimately create the ideal society.
Though Yakovlev at times seems melodramatic, with chapter titles such as The Sowing of Crosses and Harvest of Crosses, he provides a systematic and keenly insightful analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet system up to its collapse. He is especially strong on dissecting the nature of revolutionary repression under both Lenin and Stalin, the fate of the intelligentsia and the nature of anti-Semitism.
Stalin has been an easy target, and even the Soviet Communist Party conceded many of his psychopathic excesses. Lenin is a different matter altogether. Many Soviet reformers, including Gorbachev, have contended that Lenin was correct in the overthrow of the Provisional Government in 1917, but that his ideas had been distorted. Therefore, the Soviet system could be saved by going back to its Leninist roots and creating a kind of "socialism with a human face."
Yakovlev, however, launches a devastatingly effective attack, showing that both the institutions and the ideology of repression were established by Lenin himself. He characterizes Lenin as "organizer of the fratricidal Russian civil war and the concentration camps, including camps for children . . . personally responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens." Yakovlev reluctantly but firmly comes to the conclusion that the problem was the very nature of the Bolshevik system, that it could not be reformed and instead had to be eradicated.
In his examination of the fate of the intelligentsia and the nature of anti-Semitism, Yakovlev further demonstrates the fatal and tragic faults of the system. The destruction of much of the intelligentsia was not an accident, and anti-Semitism was a symptom of the constant need to find enemies to explain the failures of a salvationist doctrine. At the book's end, Yakovlev puts together a bill of indictment of Bolshevism which leaves little doubt about its criminality. Yet he also recognizes that, in addition to de-Bolshevization, Russia must change from a 1,000-year-old tradition of a land "ruled by men" to one ruled by laws. This is a book that deserves to be widely read.
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