Vote for the Czar, It’s Important: Ruth Wisse
A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse.
American politics are in such a scramble that we need to think about how we vote, not just for whom. Should our choice be determined by party loyalty, policy, the perceived qualities of the candidates? I turned conservative when I learned to vote for the lesser of evils.
That lesson was unexpected. On my first trip to Poland, in 1978, I was put in touch with a woman who offered to show me around the Jewish ruins. She was an excellent guide, but as we came to the memorial for the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, she said that I could learn about that phase of Jewish history on my own. What she had to tell me, however, I could hear only from her.
In the late 1920s in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), she had been a student of the Jewish literary historian Max Erik, a fervent Communist who one day stole across the sealed border to the Soviet Union so that he could join the great socialist experiment. Radicalized by him, she had joined the Communist Party, which was illegal in Poland. She followed his example and emigrated several years later. But once in Soviet territory, she was arrested as a “Polish spy” and sent to labor camps in the Gulag. In the last of them, she met her former teacher—before his execution in 1937. Erik didn’t want to talk, except to tell her one thing: “It was better under the czars.”
This was no endorsement of czarism. Life under that regime had been grim, for Jews especially. Historians debate whether czarist authorities instigated anti-Jewish pogroms or merely allowed them to rage until their energies were spent. There were expulsions and political suppression. By reneging on his promises to allow democratic reform, Czar Nicholas II, who reigned from 1894 until his abdication in 1917, spurred the coming Communist revolution. Erik was among thousands of idealists who embraced socialism in defiance of czarist and authoritarian rule.
Rather than justify Erik’s youthful idealism, or her own, for having resisted oppression, my guide wanted to ensure that as a student of the Jewish ruins I understood what was truly at stake. There were three parts to the lesson—two that she spelled out for me, and a third that I have since added on my own.
The first was the all-important political distinction between bad and worse. Czarism might have seemed intolerable, but the Communist regime proved crueler than the evils it had come to replace. The Communists had learned from their time in czarist prisons to make conditions harsher, torture more painful and deadlier. When weighing political options, never assume that change is for the better. First ascertain with ultimate caution that you aren’t opening the door for something far worse.
Far worse than czarism was the socialist road to totalitarian hell. That was the second lesson. The Poland under communism I saw in 1978 was freer than the Soviet Union had been under Stalin, but my guide wanted to be sure I appreciated the full lie of the socialist promise. Under the guise of raising the downtrodden, it trod everyone down equally to the lowest level in culture, education, health and prosperity. She hadn’t left Poland with most of the remaining Jews after the anti-Semitic purges of 1968 only because she felt too exhausted to start over in Israel. But even for Jews it had been better under the czars.
This wasn’t what I had expected from my visit to Warsaw. The venue she chose for this tutorial seemed especially incongruous. Approaching what had been the ghetto, my mind throbbed with images of Nazi brutality and its consequences—starved children in the streets, the heroism of the Jewish fighters, the treachery of the Jewish police, the horror of the final liquidation.
That might have been why my guide felt certain that I could learn about the Holocaust on my own. Thanks to the Allied victory over Germany and to Jewish insistence on commemorating the victims of Nazism, Americans had been made doubly alert to the evil of fascism. I would never underestimate that threat. Socialist progress, on the other hand, still enjoyed some of its romantic glow. Hence the third lesson: In my own politics, I should concentrate on warding off the likelier mistake.
America today is far removed from czarist Russia, but that lesson has governed my political thinking ever since. Because we in the U.S. start from such a better place, our “progressives” may destroy even more of the good that exists. When there is no better choice, it is all the more important to vote for the merely bad over the worse.
Ms. Wisse, a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and professor emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard, is author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2020).
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