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

Upton Sinclair wrote in 1938 about the collectivization and resultant famines:

They drove rich peasants off the land and sent them to

work in lumber camps and on railroads. Maybe it cost

a million lives--maybe . . . five million--but you cannot

think intelligently about it unless you ask yourself how

many millions it might have cost if the changes had not

been made. . . . There has never been in human history

great social change without killing. In the mid 1940s it appeared to Jerome Davis, who was a professor at Yale Divinity School, that during the Purges

only a tiny percentage of the population was involved

and the same years which saw the treason trials saw

some of the greatest triumphs of Soviet planning. While

the screws tightened on a tiny minority, the majority of

Soviet people were enjoying greater prosperity. In 1953, seeking to justify violence associated with the Purges, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, two American academic Marxists, asked:

Is violence used to perpetuate a state of affairs in which

violence is inevitable, or . . . [is] it used in the interests

of creating a truly human society from which it will be

possible at long last to banish violence altogether? This was a rationalization the Nazis could also have gladly endorsed; after all, once they purified the world of Jews there was not going to be any further need for violence.

Thus to the extent that the Soviet mass murders and political violence were confronted by those on the Left, and especially the far Left, they were morally neutralized by the time-honored device of viewing them as regrettable means to glorious ends. Legitimizers of Soviet violence were interested only in the ends and knew little of the means, nor were they anxious to learn about them. Sartre provided the most ambitious (and morally repellent) rationalization for this position:

Like it or not, the construction of socialism is privileged

in that to understand it one must espouse its movement

and adopt its goals; in a word, we judge what it does in

the name of what it seeks and its means in the light of

its ends. . .

Even more remarkable, in the 1930s the Soviet prison camps were often viewed as humane institutions of character reform rather than places of slow extermination. According to Anna Louise Strong, they were "remaking criminals." Professor Gillin, a leading authority on penology and former president of the American Sociological Society, averred that "the system is devised to correct the offender and return him to society." Ella Winter was delighted to learn that criminals were not treated as outcasts. Harold Laski (the hundredth anniversary of his birth recently celebrated) had no doubt about the superiority of the Soviet penal system over its Western counterparts. He was also struck "by the excellent relations between the prisoners and the warders . . ." (Reference to any such foolishness was missing from the article in the December 1993 New Republic entitled "Our Harold," written by his biographer.) The Webbs found the prisons "as free from physical cruelty as any prison in any country is ever likely to be." Maurice Hindus, the veteran reporter on Soviet affairs, concluded that "Vindictiveness, punishment, torture, severity, humilation have no place in this system." Mr. and Mrs. Corliss Lamont spoke to prisoners who informed them that they did not feel as if they were in prison, and the Lamonts had no difficulty believing this. This was in the 1930s. A decade later Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore still found much to praise in the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Far East.