#8 - JRL 7304
RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly
Vol. 3, No. 34, 27 August 2003
REVIEW
IS RUSSIA DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER COUNTRIES?
By Jeffrey Brooks
Jeffrey Brooks is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore and is the author of "Thank You, Comrade Stalin!" (2000) and
"When Russia Learned to Read" (2003, 1985).
Steven Marks, "How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti- Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism" (Princeton University Press, 2003);
Anne Applebaum, "GULAG: A History" (Doubleday, 2003);
William Taubman, "Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" (Norton, 2003);
Yale Richmond, "Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain" (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
Scrutinizing Russia's particularism relative to the West is a constant and recurrent project among historians. Not unlike the assigned role at the Seder, the question why is Russia different derives from an active curiosity, sometimes but not always from the younger generation. In historical inquiry, unlike at the Seder, the answer is not scripted, and varying approaches provide important insights into the scope and boundaries of Russia's uniqueness within Western civilization. These four works intersect in their examination of Russian particularism and its later Soviet manifestation, although each covers a wider terrain as well. Steven Marks emphasizes the Russian rejection of liberal democracy and the institutions of the market. Anne Applebaum chronicles the fratricidal ferocity of the Gulag. William Taubman introduces Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a creation fully of his Soviet time and place, and a misfit outside it. Yale Richmond attributes the most recent phase of separateness to the barriers inherent in the communist restrictions on travel and exchange of information.
Marks offers two lines of argument. On the one hand, he describes Russia as a font of anti-Western politics and, on the other, as an inspiration to enemies of liberal democracy elsewhere. Tsarist Russia, he argues, was "the main origination point for world terrorism." Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy are its sappers. "[Dostoevsky] inflated the Slavophile sense of Russian uniqueness into a strident and hostile anti-Western credo." "Tolstoy's entire body of writing reeks of contempt for Western capitalism, materialism, parliamentary democracy, law, and constitutionalism." Anti-Semitism and aesthetic modernism swell the illiberal revolt. "The paranoid demonization of the Jews by members of the Russian government and elite saturated the mass press," he writes. As for modernism, it runs from Sergei Diaghilev's "messianic expectations about Russian culture" to the abstractionists' utopian urge "to see the fractures of society overcome." Chapters on "the dream of communism" and "new forms of dictatorship" close the circle. Yet aggregation has a price. One might, if so inclined, discover similarly curious American nationalistic pronouncements in the Puritans' "mission into the wilderness," in Henry Ford's anti-Semitic ranting, and even in current developments.
Marks need not have told so one-sided a story -- and not only about literature and the arts. In the case of anti-Semitism, a more nuanced discussion might have worked better. Russia had no monopoly on anti-Semitism. Indeed, the Russian variety before World War I was probably less virulent than the Austrian or German strains. Russia's most popular newspaper, "Gazeta kopeika," was Jewish owned. Russian popular fiction contained little anti-Semitism, and when politician Peter Struve voiced anti-Semitic views, Pavel Milyukov and other Kadet leaders broke off personal relations with him. Marks shows how Russian culture appealed to enemies of a "good" Europe. His coverage of the foreign reception of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Russian drama and dance is fascinating. Yet was Russia really such an exotic entity unto itself, engendering pathology abroad? Perhaps Russia simply joined pan-European trends such as anti-Semitism, state worship, and anti-bourgeois politics. In any case, non-European enemies of liberal democracy soon also found inspiration closer to home.
Taubman has written a wonderful book, more detailed and livelier than anything on the subject available to date. Khrushchev appears in all his ambiguity, relentlessly careening along his career, outdoing rivals in satisfying Josef Stalin, suppressing doubts about his own bloody deeds, and struggling above all to overcome the shortcomings of education and polish that diminished him in his own eyes. Taubman is excellent on Khrushchev's tangled family life, his management of Ukraine, the "Thaw" and the intelligentsia, his trip to America, and his role in Cold War dramas such as the U-2 affair and the Cuban missile crisis. The picture is unforgettable. The subject comes alive in his baggy suits and his efforts to make himself presentable. His suspiciousness and jealousy of rivals are all too apparent. How could such a man rule Russia? There is no easy answer.
What Taubman does not explain, however, is whether Khrushchev made a difference. He shows Khrushchev's role in de-Stalinization, but is unclear whether it would have happened without him. More important is the Cold War. The transition to Khrushchev lasted a couple of years. Immediately after Stalin's death, Georgii Malenkov and Lavrentii Beria seemed intent on making a deal with the West, downsizing the arms race, and legitimating themselves by satisfying Soviet consumers. Did Khrushchev nip a possible turnabout in the bud because he was more of an ideologue than the others? Taubman does not say. Yet he portrays Khrushchev's rivals as men who largely shared his orientation. If they were indistinguishable in this regard, then perhaps Boris Yeltsin's and Vladimir Putin's shortcomings reveal the staying power of Soviet political culture.
Applebaum also inspires readers to think about contemporary Russia if only because she writes of Russia's most illiberal aspect. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the prisons and camps as a culture, a place, and an experience. She presents them also as a series of linked stories that continue to unfold to this day. She communicates the excitement of new discoveries and oral accounts, some of which she has solicited. She begins by asking why tourists who would never don a swastika blithely pin on Soviet insignias. She wrote the book, she explains, to dispel this ignorance. And she might well accomplish that task. This is the account for our times. It will be used in classrooms and read by all who wish to know what happened. She shows the Gulag's importance for Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, and for their successors, who limited its scope. The book is organized chronologically and topically. There are chapters on the camp system's origins, the 1930s, and World War II and afterward. She also discusses specific camps and projects, describes the prisoners' descent into the maelstrom, and characterizes the dramatis personae -- managers, guards, prisoners, and families. The chapters on the "Thaw," the dissidents, and the "smashing of statues" are particularly illuminating.
Communism's passing in Russia sparked no commissions of truth and reconciliation, trials, or punishments. Victims are dying off without receiving apologies or meaningful compensation. Russians' examination of their victimization, culpability, resilience, and resignation is missing from today's public discourse. Where one would expect accusations, denials, and condemnations, there is silence. Even Jews, elsewhere energetic in demanding an accounting, are quiet. Perhaps the subject is too raw. Among the reasons, Applebaum suggests, are nostalgia for lost grandeur, widespread culpability in the crimes, fear, and the power of post-Soviet rulers, many of whom worked in the repressive apparatus. The consequences, she argues, are considerable. "To put it bluntly," she writes, "if scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no way have been seen to triumph over evil."
She also stresses the importance of our own memory. Knowledge of the evil done by our great antagonist is central to our identity. She complains, "Already we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of 'the West' together for so long: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against." She might have added that we define ourselves by our enemies. Perhaps our focus on Nazi rather than Soviet atrocities reveals wariness both about our victory and about our current international role.
Richmond recounts a story that ended without ending. He traces Soviet-American cultural interchange, including formal exchanges of scholars and scientists, institutions such as Moscow think tanks, and phenomena from the Moscow Youth Festival to commercial pop music. He demonstrates that at almost every step Soviet authorities demanded concrete benefits before agreeing to openness of any sort. He quotes Soviet Americaologist Georgii Arbatov, a proponent of exchanges, complaining in1969: "Underlying U.S. policy is the so-called 'erosion' of our social system" and identified that as the "chief obstacle to interaction." Yet many actors breached the barriers of the Cold War, including book publishers, journalists, tourists, students, scholars, and scientists in both countries. Richmond portrays a long cycle of engagement, driven by U.S. policy, cautiously permitted by Soviet authorities, but never entirely dependant on either government. He concludes optimistically that despite disappointments with the post-Soviet transition, public and private exchanges continue to bring the two countries together. Thus he offers a lesson in dealing with societies we consider objectionable. This book will also be useful in classes. Yet in casting such exchanges as the chief cause of the Soviet collapse, Richmond tends perhaps to reinforce the idea of Russian exceptionalism also underlying the other books.
Each of the four authors explores a chilling feature of Russia's modern history -- the pan-European revolt against modernity, an unstable ruler in the nuclear age, mass persecution, and self-imposed anti-Westernism. A decade ago, "civil society" dominated historical discourse on Russia and convergence with the West was at the top of historians' agendas. Civil society does not appear in the indexes of these books, although some of the subject matter would seem to merit its inclusion. Perhaps the murkiness of Russia's transition has encouraged historians to ask once again why this country is different from all other countries.
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