WHEN THE SOVIET UNION went under, Russian historians and citizens’ movements began to confront Communist crimes. Mass graves were unearthed. New documents pointing to Lenin’s culpability were uncovered. In Western Europe, as well, the recent publication of The Black Book of Communism and Francois Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion has marked a major shift, even a revision, in traditionally lenient attitudes toward Stalinism. While these books’ likening of communism to Nazism created a vigorous debate, no one challenged their indictments, let alone sought to defend Stalinism.
The United States, however, is a different story. As one might expect, the Nation ran a hostile review of The Black Book and declared Furet’s book worthless. But an even more vigorous denunciation of the works has now appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. The reviewer, UCLA history professor J. Arch Getty, offers a telling example of how revisionists continue to tart up old myths about communism. Getty’s novelty is to portray Stalinism almost as a powerful interest group that pulled America in a progressive direction: “Labor reform in the West in the past century,” he explains, “came about under the threat of a radicalized international labor movement protected and supported by the USSR. Social goals that are commonplace today, including women’s rights and racial integration, were planks of the Communist party platform long before mainstream American parties took them seriously.”
Getty exemplifies the new revisionism that has taken hold in Soviet studies; rather than deny outright Stalin’s crimes, it seeks to justify them. This kind of revisionism would be condemned — indeed, it would be a career-killer — if its subject were Nazism, but it continues to be rewarded and acclaimed in the field of Soviet studies. Getty, for instance, is not some junior faculty member trying to make a name for himself, but a member of the board of Yale University Press’s important Annals of Communism series, with access to, and control over, important Moscow archives.
Revisionism first took hold in the 1970s, when a younger generation of academics shaped by the Vietnam war dismissed as Cold War propaganda the notion that the Soviet Union was totalitarian. Stephen F. Cohen launched the first revisionist on-slaught in 1973 with a biography of Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, which claimed that had the more moderate Bukharin only triumphed over Stalin, socialism could have flourished without terror. Before long, a more aggressive breed of debunkers sought to relieve Stalin of responsibility for the purges and show trials of the 1930s. By 1986, even Cohen, writing in the Russian Review, worried that his fellow revisionists were “closing one or both eyes to a major dimension of social reality — the prolonged mass terror of the Stalin years.” Soviet scholar Peter Kenez was less politic: The revisionist’s “choice of subject matter reminds one of a historian who chooses to write an account of a shoe factory operating in the death-camp of Auschwitz. He uses many documents, and he does not falsify the material . . . [but] he does not notice the gas chambers.”
Perhaps no revisionist fit this description better than Getty, who had earned his revisionist stripes with a 1979 dissertation in which he claimed that Stalin had not been directly responsible for the great terror. Instead, local officials had spun out of control, and “many thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands) of people were unjustly arrested, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps, and thousands were executed.” Getty complained that historians’ reliance on the accounts of death-camp survivors had grossly distorted the Stalinist record. Victims of the terror, he felt, were not reliable witnesses: The “dominant tendency . . . has been automatically to believe anything an emigre asserted while automatically denying the truth of everything from the Stalinist side.” He argued that Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror could not be trusted because he may have “accepted payment from British intelligence agencies.” Conquest’s work is now considered to be a landmark history of the Stalinist purges.
Once Gorbachev and other Soviet officials began to face up to Stalinist crimes, Getty and other revisionists upped the death toll slightly but still maintained that Stalin had simply been unable to control an overzealous bureaucracy. In The Road to Terror, a new book of documents on Stalinism that appeared under the auspices of Yale’s Annals of Communism, Getty and co-editor Oleg Naumov dismiss the notion of a Stalinist “terror machine,” arguing that the secret police felt embattled. And they search for parallels that they think let Stalin off the hook, but actually read like a parody of Communist propaganda: “Both colonial America and Stalinist Russia had bureaucratic constituencies and popular masses who went along with the bloodletting and who thought it right and even proper.”
In his treatment of The Black Book, Getty dispenses with any scholarly throat-clearing. It’s absurd to pin the blame for mass murder on Communist ideology, he insists, because unlike Nazi death camps, Stalin’s camps “were planned components of the Soviet economy, designed to provide a stable slave-labor supply and to populate forbidding territories forcibly with involuntary settlers.” This is a distinction without a difference. Millions of religious and ethnic minorities, merchants, peasants, and (after the Second World War) returning POWs were murdered in Stalin’s camps. Does it matter that some of them were worked to death rather than gunned down? Getty goes on to play the numbers game: From 1934 until Stalin’s death, “more than a million perished in the gulag camps.” But more than a million, of course, could be 40 million, which is probably about the number murdered by Stalin. Perhaps Getty’s most audacious claim is that “on the international scene the Soviet Union provided support for Nelson Mandela and other reformers.” Like that great reformer Mengistu, whose man-made famine murdered millions in Ethiopia? Like Fidel Castro?
“Why are we seeing books like these now, when communism is gone and there are no more dragons to slay?” Getty asks. But revisionism is rampant. Two years ago, Yale denied Vladimir Brovkin’s proposal for a three-volume project on the Gulag because board members complained of, among other things, its “excessively ‘anti-Bolshevik’ tone.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, who teaches at the University of Chicago and who is also a member of the Yale Annals of Communism board, observes in her book Everyday Stalinism, of what was probably the most murderous regime ever: “mostly it was a hard grind, full of shortages and discomfort.” Rather like the Great Depression, one gathers. Robert W. Thurston, in the introduction to Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Yale), notes that “this book argues that Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941 and did not plan or carry out a systematic campaign to crush the nation. This view is not one of absolution. . . . This fear-ridden man reacted, and overreacted, to events. All the while, he could not control the flow of people within the country, job turnover or illegal acts by managers.” Which makes the ruthless dictator sound like a small business owner trying to comply with immigration law.
But wait, there’s more. In the recent textbook Russia: A History, Brandeis professor Gregory L. Freeze writes that Stalin “extinguished large numbers of people . . . more prophylactically than purposefully.” In the same volume, Michigan State professor Lewis Siegelbaum, whose chapter is titled “Building Stalinism,” declares that while some workers “succumbed to industrial accidents . . . many others became true Soviet patriots.”
Thus Getty’s question is answered: If we are seeing more works on the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, well, there are indeed still dragons to slay. If the work of Getty and Co. in sanitizing the record of one of the most murderous tyrants in history is any indication, the number of dragons is increasing. In the United States, at least, and especially in the most prestigious academic outposts, illusions about communism are alive and kicking.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a writer in Washington, D.C.
