Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 6, 2000

Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism, by Paul Hollander (Yale, 356 pp., $35)

Paul Hollander, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, is an astute observer of the gap between ideological belief and reality. His 1981 Political Pilgrims surveyed the writings of Western intellectuals who visited socialist regimes in the USSR, China, and Cuba, and believed that they had seen the future. Now, in Political Will and Personal Belief, he examines the beliefs of those who were part of the socialist leadership in the USSR and its wholly owned subsidiaries.

The accounts of the exiled Victor Serge, defectors Victor Kravchenko and Arkady Shevchenko, and others provide fascinating autopsies of once-vibrant faith in the USSR and its Communist party. In the case of Shevchenko, the power and privileges afforded by the system, rather than its poor economic performance, gave way to doubts. The former Soviet leaders Hollander discusses are likewise candid. "The roots of the catastrophe lie in the ideology itself, in Leninism," says Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, biographer of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, who adds, "I was a Stalinist. I contributed to the strengthening of a system that I am now trying to dismantle." Says Valery Boldin, Gorbachev's chief of staff, "The term 'victory in the Cold War' is hardly strong enough to convey what really happened. It was a total rout of the USSR and the moral devastation of a once powerful adversary." Party intellectual Yuri Afanasyev, head of the Historical Archives Institute under Gorbachev, explains that his own doubts began in 1953, when he passed by an alley and heard drunks celebrating the death of Stalin.

Those drunks possessed more insight than the ideologically intoxicated Westerners who refused to connect the horrors of Soviet reality to socialism. The author helpfully includes collector's items from economist John Kenneth Galbraith and high-profile Soviet specialists Seweryn Bialer and Jerry Hough, who in 1991 said that economic reform in the USSR was going ahead with "amazing speed" and that Soviet political problems had been "grossly exaggerated."

The true moral equivalence, it emerges here, is between Western apologists and unrepentant Soviet Bloc apparatchiks such as Stasi boss Markus Wolf. "The capitalist system has no answers to the great problems," Wolf said in 1993. "I still believe in these ideas and I am sure they will come back." In many American universities they never left, making the works of Paul Hollander all the more deserving of careful study and wide exposure.