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

under the impact of . . . scarcity . . . and leaders

who shared, politicized and used such traditional beliefs. What Getty and his colleagues here suggest is that conspiratorial fantasies sincerely entertained help to explain the terror and possibly also its spontaneous, uncoordinated aspects. (The Nazis too sincerely believed in conspiracies, and especially the Jewish world conspiracy, which in no way undermined their ability to devise efficient ways to get rid of the Jews, nor was the outside world inclined to diminish their responsibility on account of these delusions.) In turn, the non- or pre-Soviet factors--the "pre-revolutionary rural culture" and "traditional rural beliefs"--are enlisted to further dilute the responsibility of the Soviet system.

Elsewhere in the volume Roberta Manning wrote:

In the late 1930s, reformist efforts gave way to terror

under the impact of the desperate conditions of the

times. Political, social and economic tensions, aggravated

by the onset of German expansionism, the sudden

escalation of ongoing border conflicts with the Japanese

in Manchuria, the 1936 crop failure, and national decisions

to prosecute former members of defunct opposition

movements created a tense political climate.

When all is said and done "the new perspectives on Stalinist terror" proffer an exceedingly wide range of factors and explanations, all of which appear independent of human political will. It is an approach that relieves the commentator from facing questions of moral responsibility or experiencing a sense of outrage.

The moral sensibility here discussed has not been limited to Americans. A small empirical study of my own (reported in my book Anti-Americanism, 1992) revealed a similar pattern among a group of Canadian academics. When asked (in a mail questionnaire) to list the most shocking historical events in this century, in the first instance 52 per cent chose the Holocaust while virtually nobody mentioned any Soviet outrage. In the second instance 15 per cent made reference to Stalin's Purges. Further light was shed on these attitudes when, in response to the question whom they considered the least admirable political leaders in this century, Reagan was nominated in the first instance by 29 per cent, Stalin by 8.5 per cent.

Another telling illustration is the widespread ridicule President Reagan was subjected to for referring to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." So self-evidently wrongheaded was this attribution that no one bothered to explain why exactly it was so laughable.

The unpopularity of Solzhenitsyn among American liberals and left-of-center intelligentsia is yet another reflection of this mindset. His unhesitating association of the Soviet system with evil, his fiery anti-Communism and determination to give it a moral dimension, did not go down well. It was admissible to express regret or sorrow over the Soviet mass murders, but moral outrage was overdoing it. He also committed the unforgivable offense, Tom Wolfe noted, of suggesting that not only Stalinism and Leninism, but Marxism and the pursuit of Marxist sociahsm led to the camps. Joseph Brodsky thought that Solzhenitsyn's unpopularity had to do with the "disturbing evidence" he presented which threatened the "mental fence that was constructed especially by the Western Left" around the topic of Soviet atrocities.