Fools for Communism: still apologists after all these years

Reason, April, 2004 by Glenn Garvin

The Conquest anecdote comes from In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, an improbably riveting dispatch from the battlefields of historiography by scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Chilling and often perversely funny, it details the intellectual sleight of hand to which many American historians of communism and the Soviet Union have resorted as newly revealed archives in Moscow and Washington suggest they were, well, fucking fools.

Their efforts haven't been very successful. As Haynes and Klehr note, the world's final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world.... A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."

Bold words, especially in academia, where suggesting somebody has communist sympathies--even if he's carrying a bloody hammer and sickle in one hand and Trotsky's severed head in the other--instantly draws gleeful cries of "McCarthyism!" I say, if this be blacklisting, make the most of it:

* Miami University's Robert W.Thurston, in his 1996 book Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin's purges took the lives of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and 1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day. Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no "mass terror ... extensive fear did not exist ... [and] Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder."

* Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay in The Historian. He says it's the damnable Russian peasantry that ought to be begging poor Stalin for forgiveness: "He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized super-power under unprecedented adversities. Though his achievements were at the cost of exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country, still highly vulnerable, with a territorial security absent in all history." And Stalin was no mere poet, Von Laue adds, but a damn fine technocrat too: "The sophisticated design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated"

* Columbia's Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, staking his bid as founder of what might be called the Smiley-Face School of History, denounces "the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages in the history of the Soviet era." He wasn't talking about pesky American historians using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out new horror stories about J. Edgar Hoover but about a Moscow exhibition on the Soviet gulag.What possible good could come of learning the details of that?