Soviet terror, American amnesia: there has been a striking asymmetry between the American responses to the two great mass murders of our century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why? - Cover Story

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Paul Hollander

But as the so-called revisionists (their common denominator was a rejection of the totalitarian model and a less critical view of the Soviet system) became more prominent in Soviet studies during the 1970s and '80s new attempts were made to minimize the Soviet mass murders. Best known for these efforts has been Professor J. Arch Getty, who sought to bring new perspectives to the Purges, treating them largely as an administrative procedure whereby certain Party members are periodically expelled. He also sought to discredit the aecounts of the surviving Soviet camp inmates. More recently Professor Getty in a journal article arrived at higher estimates of the number of victims but in another recent publication, edited by Professors Getty and Roberta Manning (Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, 1993), there is a renewed effort to keep the numbers down. More interesting, however, from the standpoint of the moral response to such matters, is the interpretation of the outrages acknowledged. The pursuit of detachment brings back a remark Czeslaw Milosz made in his Captive Mind forty years ago:

From the moment we acknowledge historical necessity

to be something in the nature of a plague, we shall stop

shedding tears over the fate of the victims. A plague or

an earthquake does not usually provoke indignation.

One admits they are catastrophes, folds the morning

paper, and continues eating breakfast. What one finds in the new analysis, if not exactly an evocation of "historical necessity," is certainly akin to a plague or earthquake. Getty and his colleagues are anxious to diminish both Stalin's personal responsibility and that of the political system he created; they consider it a mistake to seek "the origins of Stalinist terror in the person of the deranged dictator, the |administrative system' of the time, or the very nature of Leninism." What then are we left with?

We are left with an explanation of these events which denudes them of a moral focus or definition. Getty and William Chase wrote:

When the terror erupted in 1936-37, it quickly went out

of control, chaotically reflecting personal hatreds [that

is, at the local level--P.H.] and propelling itself with

fear. Explanations of the terror . . . should be supplemented

by approaches that account for lack of coordination,

local confusion, and personal conflicts. "Uncoordinated" terror reduces the responsibility of the political system--as do "local confusion" and "personal conflicts." Earlier in the same volume Getty and Manning also suggest (as they refer to the writing of Gabor Rittersporn, another of the revisionists) that

Stalin . . . Ezhov [chief of the NKVD] and highly placed

NKVD operatives sincerely believed [my emphasis] that

the nation was riddled with plots and conspiracies . . .

He [Rittersporn] intimates that this response was rooted

in traditional rural beliefs that the machinations of evil

spirits accounted for commonplace misfortunes . . . Rittersporn's

work suggests that the elements of pre-revolutionary

rural culture helped fuel Stalinist persecutions,