RON RADOSH ON CLAIRE BERLINSKI’S MISLEADING COLUMN ON SOVIET ESPIONAGE
Ron Radosh. May 16th, 2010 11:13 am …..
pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/
Ron Radosh
May 16th, 2010 11:13 am
Claire Berlinski on Soviet Espionage: A Misleading Article Appears in City
Journal
A few days ago, City Journal posted an important article on its website. It
was written by Claire Berlinski, an American journalist who lives in
Istanbul, and titled “A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care
about the unread Soviet archives?†We all know that since the fall of
Communism, the world’s response to Soviet totalitarianism was quite
different than that which occurred after the end of Nazism in 1945. The
Nuremburg trials put the leaders of the defunct Third Reich on trial for war
crimes, and in so doing, told the world the extent of how the entire Hitler
regime was based on illegality, murder, genocide, and criminal behavior.
Berlinski writes:
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi†is synonymous with
evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism,
anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly
to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that
Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was
applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely
acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150
million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains
inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in
history.
There is nothing exceptional about this argument. Indeed, these points are
the entire basis of the famous Black Book of Communism published in 1997 in
France and two years later in the United States, and the major book by the
late Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion:The Idea of Communism in the
Twentieth Century, a best seller in France that was translated into thirteen
languages and published in our country in 2000. And in her Pulitzer Prize
winning book, Gulag:A History, Anne Applebaum addresses herself to the very
issue of why the Soviet camps did not make the same impact on the West as
those which killed the Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. The message of these
three books and others like it may not be “widely acknowledged†by some on
the Left, but enough has been written to leave few others with any excuses
by now not to know the truth.
Communism saw no Nuremburg trials, and the world Left continued to argue
that there was an essential difference between Communism and Nazism; the
former supposedly emerged from Enlightenment philosophy and a well-meaning
search for a more humanitarian and equal social order for the people of the
world; the latter emerged from volkish ideology, espousal of war as a
philosophy, and the espousal of evil and extermination of the Jewish people
as a necessary basis for a new Aryan order. One could argue that in fact,
Communism and its leaders killed more people numerically than Hitler’s
fascist order. But no matter, the Left believes that anti-fascism was
essential for progress, while anti-Communism was morally and politically
wrong.
Berlinski addresses the issue of what she says are “unread [and by
implication unknown] Soviet archives,†compiled in London by one Pavel
Stroilov, a Russian exile living in London, and yet another archive put
together by the famed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who possesses “a
massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party.†On the Stroilov archive,
Berlinski claims that the originals remain classified in Russian archives.
The Bukovsky collection, copied by the dissident illegally during the short
lived trial of the Communist Party in the early years of the Yeltsin
post-Soviet government, was also potentially quite explosive, since his
documents, as do Stoilov’s material, reveal much of Soviet activity in the
regime’s waning years that casts Mikhail Gorbechev in “a darker light than
the one in which he is generally regarded.†Berlinski proceeds to give
examples from both collections.
The documents, she argues, also reflect badly on Western and U.S. leaders,
all anxious to achieve détente with the Soviets and hence willing to get
“far too close to the USSR for comfort.†She points to material that
compromise Kenneth Coates, a British member of the European Parliament whom
she says “sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe;†Spain’s Francisco
Fernandez Ordonez, who sought “success of the socialist revolution in
contemporary conditions†in Europe, and France’s Premier Mitterand, who
sought along with Gorbachev to get Germany united as a “neutral, socialist
entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.†And Britain’s Labour Party leader
Neil Kinnock, she writes, sought to end Britain’s Trident nuclear missile
program with Gorbachev’s help.
Her own essay, however, acknowledges that in fact these documents were
available, and that political figures did address their implications. For
example, she writes that one Gerard Batten, a British political figure,
publicly wrote that if true, it meant that Kinnock had approached “one of
Britain’s enemies†to gain approval for Labour’s defense policy. So if they
were buried, how did Batten know about them? How was he able to tell this to
the European Parliament in a speech given last year? Berlinski never answers
that question.
Her point is that no one seems to care, since “the rules are different…for
Communist fellow travelers.†She also writes that other material implicate
then Senator Joe Biden and Senator Richard Lugar who, in 1979, evidently
said “they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called
dissidents.†If so, their statements reveal that the two Senators were so
anxious for détente that they would have gladly sacrificed doing anything to
help imprisoned and persecuted Soviet era dissidents. Other similar
statements were made in the past regarding the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
They may or may not be true. But are they surprising? I think not.
Neo-conservatives first came to prominence as critics of the realpolitik
practiced by members of both political parties in that era. Remember the
great opposition to Henry Kissinger from neo-conservatives, especially by
Washington’s Senator Henry “Scoop†Jackson.
Finally, Berlinski addresses the issue of why Stroilov could not find anyone
willing to publish his material as a book, and why Bukovsky, whose Judgement
a Moscou was published in France and Moscow, could not get it published
here. Bukovsky told her that Random House bought it but insisted that he
“rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective,â€
something which he nobly refused to do. Did she check with Random House to
get their version of the story? If so, she does not tell us.
More shocking is her implicit attack on one of the giants of American
publishing, a man who has done more to educate the public about the secret
history of the Soviet Union, including Soviet espionage, than any other
person in the industry. This, of course, is Jonathan Brent, formerly
editorial director of Yale University Press, and editor of the seminal
series “Annals of Communism,†of which many volumes Brent had to force the
press to publish against much opposition. (Much of the details of Brent’s
accomplishment can be found in this profile by John J. Miller that appeared
in National Review.)
Taking Strilov’s word, Berlinski accepts that he and Bukovsky approached
Brent, who supposedly was at first enthusiastic, and who then asked Bukovsky
to write a book based on the documents pertaining to the first Gulf War and
the Soviets. Strolilov told her he sent them off, and simply never heard
from him again, despite sending e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate
what so much frightened him in that book,†he told her. She tried herself to
contact Brent, she says, but also got “no reply.†She sees this as simply a
sign that Brent had other things on his mind, but she cites Stroilov’s
belief that the “Establishment†would rather let “sleeping dogs lie.â€
Berlinski has an easier reason: “No one much cares.â€
Right after this paragraph, Berlinski cites what she calls “the widely
ignored†book by Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of Gorbachev’s
perestroika, who unlike his boss, broke completely with Marxism, and who
says that the Soviet Union murdered over 30 million people. She does not
mention that the book was published by none other than Jonathan Brent, who
would have been delighted if the book had great sales—something no press can
guarantee. Indeed, her assertion of some perfidy on Brent’s part, that this
brave man was somehow scared to publish the Stroilov or Bukovsky material,
is more than absurd. It amounts to an unjust and unwarranted slander on the
one editor who more than anyone else in the field has worked to get
Americans to comprehend the crimes of Communism.
She ends her article with the following clarion cry. Let Berlinski speak in
her own words:
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those
who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a
perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These
documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable
library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all,
they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the
Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky
say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the
obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the
scores of millions dead.
The academic world and publishers, she is alleging, are derelict in their
duty to history, truth and to those who died as Communism’s victims. A harsh
charge. No wonder it has been picked up and reprinted everywhere. The
Weekend Edition of The Wall Street Journal features it in its “Notable and
Quotable†column, which thousands of the paper’s subscribers read. The
website “Lonely Conservative†asks “why those who aren’t true believers
refuse to expose the truth?†Red State calls it “Inconvenient History†that
those who “have academic affinity with the tenets of communismâ€refuse to
accept, and as the days go on, more on the conservative blogosphere will
pick it up.
Is Berlinski correct? I don’t think that the evidence supports her claims.
To answer the question, I consulted with major experts familiar not only
with Bukovsky’s and Striliov’s claims, but with what is in the Soviet
archives, and what is and what is not available? It was not hard to do. Why
did Berlinski not take this easy step?
First, I turned to Mark Kramer, editor of the American edition of The Black
Book of Communism, and editor in chief of The Journal of Cold War History,
published at Harvard University. He responded with the following two
assessments:
First, Kramer said that Berlinski “knows very little about the Russian
archives.†Kramer has seen Stroilov’s documents,and says that “there is
nothing in them that isn’t readily available to researchers at the Gorbachev
Foundation archive.†(my emphasis.) Moreover, this material is also
available at Harvard’s Cold War Studies collection, as well as the National
Security Archive at George Washington University, which has additional
material that Stroilov’s archive does not have. He notes that when Stroilov
worked at the Gorbachev Foundation and copied its manuscripts, the
collection was not yet complete.
It turns out as well that Bukovsky did not realize- and Kramer personally
told him more than a decade ago- that “almost everything in his collection
has been available in Fond 89 at RGANI since 1993.†(My emphasis. Kramer is
referring to material in the Russian archives in Moscow, using their
identification system of “fond†and the name of the archive.) Moreover,
these 3000 documents were microfilmed and are available at the Library of
Congress as well as many other libraries in the United States! For those
scholars who wish to see them, there are item level finding aids with
cross-indexing that can easily be used. Bukovsky, he acknowledges, has a
rather small number of documents on dissidents and on his own case that are
not in Fond 89, but Kramer photocopied these long ago, and posted them eight
years ago on the Internet. As he concludes: “The notion that the Stoilov and
Bukovsky collections are being willfully disregarded for some nefarious
reasons is absurd.â€
Later, Kramer added the following in another e-mail to me.
I’m not sure precisely what Bukovsky approached Jonathan [Brent] about, but
I think it was about putting out an English edition of Bukovsky’s “Jugement
à Moscou,†which came out in 1995 from Robert Laffont (the same publisher
that later put out “Le livre noir du communismeâ€). The “Jugement à Moscouâ€
edition was a translation of the Russian edition, but the Russian edition
(“Moskovskii protsessâ€) didn’t come out until 1996. Subsequently, a Polish
edition was also put out. The reason that no English edition has been
published is partly…[that] the commercial prospects are minimal at best —
but it’s also because a lot of the stuff Bukovsky cites has already been
published in full in English translation, and the value added by the book is
not at all evident…All of the documents have in fact been available for more
than a decade as scanned images on Bukovsky’s website. But, as I mentioned
earlier, almost the entire Bukovsky collection is just a duplicate of items
in Fond 89, and the images on his website (which were pieced together from a
handheld scanner he was using in early 1992) are inferior to those available
in Fond 89, including the Fond 89 microfilms that we have here and that are
also available at numerous other university libraries and large public
libraries. Moreover, Fond 89 includes a lot of things that are not in his
collection…The[Wilson Center] Cold War International History Project has put
out translations of many of the documents.
Next, I asked Anne Applebaum, who knows as much about these records as any
working scholar, what her response is. She e-mailed me the following:
Ten years ago, I would have agreed with Berlinski. Unfortunately, she seems
totally unaware of what has been published and what has been made available
over the past decade. Since 1990, hundreds of thousands of Soviet documents
have been microfilmed by the Hoover Institution, published online, and
reprinted in enormous collections sponsored by Yale University press and
others. One of the collections she seems most incensed about – Bukovsky’s
document collection – is easily available to researchers. I made extensive
use of it at Hoover where it can be read on microfilm. These many documents
have revolutionized Soviet scholarship, and have provided the basis for
hundreds of academic books, popular books and scholarly articles in the past
decade.
She is also quite wrong in thinking that US publishers are uninterested in
publishing books based onâ€unofficial†KGB document collections either. The
Mitrokhin Archive and the Vassiliev collection, for example, have both been
used to produce excellent books. (The latter produced Spies, by John Earl
Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the definitive account of the history of Soviet
espionage in the United States).
I share Berlinski’s desire to have more of this history published, but her
anger is completely misplaced. She should be denouncing the Russian
government, which has slowed down the declassification of secret documents,
and which continues to hold back material vital to understanding Stalin and
Stalinism.
Finally, I asked Jonathan Brent, who is now Executive Director of The YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, to comment on Berlinski’s
attack on his reputation. I reached Brent, whom I got to know when he was
editor of the volume I wrote with Mary Habeck on the Soviet Union and the
Spanish Civil War that was part of the Annals of Communism Series. (It
occurs to me that Berlinski might not have realized that Brent left Yale
University Press, and that might account for her inability to reach him
there.)
Here are Brent’s comments:
What I’ve seen of these materials does not amount to a book YUP could have
published because Bukovsky and his young associate won’t show the originals
but only their redactions of the copies they have. There’s no way of
knowing what is left out—or what may be put in. They use extracts from
documents not whole documents and therefore there is inherent uncertainty as
to context and content. Without proper historical contextualization there
can be no systematic approach to understanding the materials, as there was
with the Vassiliev documents that Harvey [Klehr] & John [Haynes] used. In
the end, frankly, I couldn’t piece their materials together to make any kind
of narrative that Yale Press could stand behind. KGB materials are
notoriously difficult to study. THERE ARE NO SMOKING GUNS and documents
that look like smoking guns are often fakes of one sort or another or taken
out of context. If Bukovsky would make the originals available for study by
qualified historians, then there would be a chance of real results. I’m
afraid that this present publicity is an attempt to make money. Why hasn’t
he produced a study or a book out of these materials and submitted it in a
regular fashion? The reason is that it’s extremely difficult to make a
responsible argument out of them. As for Berlinski’s claim that she tried
to contact me, I have no record of this or I would have told her what I’m
telling you.
As for why American publishers are wary of such a book as Bukovsky and
Stroilov have produced, the reason is hardly that they wish to suppress
knowledge, but that they don’t think they can make money. That is, the
commercial publishers were burned badly by the KGB sponsored books produced
in the early 90s; and the scholarly publishers are wary because of the lack
of scholarly credibility of the authors and the status of the materials.
The Cold War will become a hot topic again at some point but it’s not there
yet. Even SPIES, one of the very best books ever written about the
espionage in America, has only sold about 10,000 copies in cloth—far less
than a commercial publisher could tolerate.
Brent also said he checked his e-mail on his computer in all possible
places, and could find no record of Berlinski trying to get in touch with
him or leaving him any messages.
When John Haynes and Harvey Klehr worked with Alexander Vassiliev, they
cross checked all his material with reports in the Venona decrypted Soviet
KGB messages, as well as convened a panel of scholars who carefully vetted
Vassiliev’s meticulous copying of actual KGB documents, and only after this
panel approved the material, did Yale University Press go ahead with plans
for publication. An academic publisher has standards to uphold, and when a
work of this sort is planned, they must be certain that the veracity of the
documents are taken into account. This is especially the case when
ideological opponents will go on the attack. As I previously noted in my
review of their book in The Weekly Standard, Amy Knight in the prestigious
TLS accused them of “McCarthyite†methods.
In conclusion, I think it is clear that Claire Berlinski has not only
overstated her case; she has also unfairly impugned the reputation of
Jonathan Brent, underestimated what is actually available for anyone to see,
and uncritically accepted some of the claims made to her by both Bukovsky
and Striliov. She did not check with experts who regularly use this archival
material to find out whether or not their claims are accurate.
The failure to publish their documents is not an example of the world
failing to acknowledge “the monstrous history of Communism,†but of a
decision by conscientious editors that these particular documents need more
work before anyone can publish them. And in the meantime, those who do want
to consult them, have every opportunity to do so. Sometimes there is an easy
answer to what on first glance looks like a serious academic and political
scandal. If large numbers on the Left ignore the lessons of Communism- that
is a situation which many of us have long tried to address- it is not the
result of failure to publish either Bukovsky’s or Stroilov’s material in the
United States.
The only scandal is why City Journal, one of the most important and
distinguished journals in the United States, printed such a weak and
misleading article that is far below its usual quality.
Comments are closed.
