Cold warrior Crozier Details Soviet Terror

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 20, 1999 | by James P. Lucier

Brian Crozier has written a massive account of the evils of communism, from its inception under Karl Marx and Valdimir Lenin to its eventual demise on Mikhail Gorbachev's watch.

Brian Crozier has been one of the most distinguished chroniclers of human affairs of the second half of the 20th century. Born in Australia, he became a daily journalist in Great Britain and later returned to his homeland to work for the Sydney Morning Herald, eventually plunging into foreign affairs covering the insurrection in Malaysia for Reuters and the Indochina War from Saigon. Crozier edited the confidential World Report for The Economist, started the Institute for the Study of Conflict in London and, in the late seventies and eighties, organized a private intelligence agency to counteract disinformation coming from the Soviet Union. He was cited in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1988 as the journalist who had conducted the most interviews (65) with heads of state.

Crozier began his career as a member of the notorious Left Book Club, organized by Communists and Marxists, and was deeply influenced by Arthur Koestler's book Spanish Testament, written during Koestler's time as a Communist. Later he learned from Koestler that the book virtually had been dictated by Willy Muenzerberg, the head of the Soviet NKVD (secret police) in Western Europe.

In the meantime, Crozier's views had been turned around by a book written in 1947 by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko titled I Chose Freedom, an early account of Josef Stalin's atrocities in the Ukraine. The second book which he says "taught me to think about politics" was James Burnham's The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom. Many years later he was to become Burnham's successor at National Review, carrying on "The Protracted Conflict" column for 18 years.

His new book, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, is a massively documented account of the reign of terror, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Also a painter and a musician, Crozier is looking forward to a forthcoming performance of a suite of his piano works.

Insight: You began your account of the Soviet empire with Lenin. What did Lenin have in his program that was different from Marx?

Brian Crozier: Well, Lenin took a practical view of revolution. Marx had sat in his little place in London consulting the British Museum Library and, with Engels, drafted the Communist Manifesto. But he wasn't a political leader. What Lenin did was to read and absorb Marx, and in his earlier years write quite a number of books arising out of that. But his idea was Marxism-Leninism -- he wanted "to have a revolution that would succeed and spread to all countries of the world without exception."

Insight: So the term "Marxism-Leninism" is not just a conjunction but has two components: One is the theory of Marx and the other is the action of Lenin.

BC: Yes, and Lenin was completely ruthless. A lot of Communists at the time when Stalin's crimes were being exposed were trying to make believe that Lenin wouldn't have done the same. But that's absolute nonsense. Lenin was the creator of what became the KGB.

Insight: One of the things that you do in your book is to document the purges of the party and the slaughter of millions of civilians. Are these historical facts accepted by the academic world now?

BC: The academic world in general has yielded to the evidence, but there are still exceptions. For example, in Britain we have the curious case of professor Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in Austria but has spent all his academic life in Britain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he publicly reaffirmed his support for communism. When the Labour Party came to power, he was made a Companion of Honor by Tony Blair's government.

Insight: After Lenin came Stalin. What was Stalin's contribution to the Evil Empire?

BC: Stalin was the perfect Leninist -- he fulfilled what Lenin would have done if he had survived.

Insight: Many people would say that there's not much to choose from between Nazism and communism. So why did the United States and the Soviet Union become allies in the war against Nazism? Was that a great strategic mistake?

BC: Unfortunately, whether we liked it or not, it was inevitable. When Hitler and Stalin signed their pact in 1939, it was a great shock to the Western world because it meant that Hitler could go ahead with his invasion of Western Europe without worrying about what Stalin might do. Stalin himself was taken aback when Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. But Stalin couldn't believe it; he was totally committed to friendship with Hitler, and the Red Army wasn't prepared.

Insight: In the postwar period we had the so-called Cold War. Some believe the Cold War was the result of Russia's fear of the West, and others say the West created this atmosphere. What do you think?

BC: I would say that it was neither of those things. It was Stalin's decision, which I think was taken in 1943 when he declared to the Western world that he had dissolved the Comintern, which had been the instrument for spreading communism all over the world. But Stalin didn't actually do that; he just transferred all the Comintern's functions to the International Department of the Communist Party. This didn't become known for many years.