At a time when crime after crime is revealed about the horrid Stalin times, there is your ever-so-politically correct "historian" who thinks that the Stalinist times were redeeming!
Luckily, a counter-point was published in Heterodoxy, April-May 1999. The reviewer's pseudonym is Newsom Pace, described as a leading Cold War historian.
Page comments on an article by Theodore Von Laue who had this outrageous, Stalin-lauding treatise published titled under "A Perspective on History: The Soviet System Reconsidered." I don't have that essay itself - but its content can easily be guessed at by his hard-hitting review that quotes selected passages:
IN THE PAST DECADES far too many defenses of Stalin and Stalinism have appeared in the academic world. Most of these apologies, however, have been veiled by a fog of ambiguous phrases or postmodernist verbiage, allowing the apologist plausible deniability in the unlikely event that someone might actually challenge this defense of the most monstrous figure of the modern era. Such is not the case, however, with Theodore Von Laue's essay, "A Perspective on History: The Soviet System Reconsidered" which recently appeared in The Historian (Winter 1999). Von Laue unambiguously and vigorously calls on historians to appreciate both Stalin and Stalinism.
Von Laue is not, as might be imagined from such a commitment, a fringe figure in the academic world. He is a senior historian (professor emeritus at Clark University) who has written widely on German and Russian history. He is one of the authors of a much-used textbook, Sources of the Western Tradition. Nor is the journal that printed his appreciation of Stalin a marginal publication. The Historian is the journal of Phi Alpha Theta, the national academic honor society in history. While perhaps not as prestigious as The American Historical Review, it is a respected scholarly journal with a large circulation among history teachers and faculty.
Von Laue's argument is unambiguous and his prose speaks for itself:
But its [Russia's] vast Eurasian territories, populated mainly by uneducated peasants, did not contain the cultural resources necessary for building a modern state capable of holding its own with western European countries and the United States." (p. 384)
"The liberal prescription, suspended during the war even among democratic countries, made no sense among what he [Vladimir Lenin] perceived as brute Eurasian masses . . . . Peace and order, let along territorial security for his country, could be established only by a determined dictatorship; popular support would follow." (p. 385)
"Lenin's brutal repression, evidence of which has been well publicized in the West, has led to widespread vilification of his policies. But Western experience, evolved in relatively small and much more integrated countries, is inapplicable to the Soviet Union. No European country had suffered as much as Russia in the First World War; Soviet leaders were fighting to save their country from utter collapse in the face of popular incomprehension. Moreover, brutality has long been part of Russian life, and never more than during the Russian Civil War of 1921." (p. 385)
"Regard for individual life was a necessary sacrifice in Lenin's ambition to enhance life in the future. In Russia, necessary changes could be accomplished only by a highly centralized dictatorship mobilizing the Russian masses with the help of the semireligious Marxist vision of human perfection. In the West, individual freedom has always been anchored in powerful if ethnocentric nation states; under the circumstances, ideals of individual freedom would have been an invitation to disaster in the Soviet Union." (p. 385)
"Can we then condemn a Russian patriot, determined to surpass the influence and success of Western nations, for wanting in 1920 to spread the Soviet model and reveal 'to all countries something of their near-inevitable future'? After the collapse of the Russian empire, in short, the Leninist model offered the only rational alternative to chaos if Russian were to regain some standing in global politics." (p. 386)
After this throat-clearing and ideological foundation-laying, Von Laue gets to the point: "Like Lenin, his successor Josef Stalin (1897-1953) dreaded a repetition of the chaos of 1917. Stalin was terrified by the dangers to his country posed by expansionist nations like Italy and Japan. Germany soon would follow, he feared, and American influence loomed even larger. Stalin therefore determined to modernize the Soviet Union in the shortest time possible, whatever the price." (p. 386)
"In his grasp of global realities, Stalin clearly outshone all his contemporaries. Carrying Lenin's prescription to its extreme, he aimed at total control not for his own ego but to guide his ignorant country firmly through a necessary cultural transformation unprecedented in history. In attempting to transform anarchic peasants into cooperative urban-industrial citizens, Stalin forced them against the grain of tradition into a pattern of life utterly incomprehensible to most of them." (p. 386)
Of course, as the old saying goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; and the revolutionary omelet Stalin cooked up for the Soviet Union might have been slightly flawed coming out of the pan but was a "remarkable human achievement" nonetheless.
Von Laue elaborates: "Inevitably collectivization provoked resistance, both unconscious and deliberate, and in his solitary vision and lonely life Stalin was haunted by real or imagined threats. Remembering his adversaries in the early days of Soviet rule, Stalin had reason to distrust his comrades, especially in this time of perilous change." (pp. 386-387)
"Yet Stalin's style of leadership, although crude by Western standards, was persuasive among his disoriented peoples. The sophisticated design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated. However brutal, it was a remarkable human achievement despite its flaws. The Marxist ideology helped suppress the ethnic and national diversity within the Soviet Union in a common membership in the proletariat that promised a glorious communist future to follow." (p. 387)
"But though he knew how to act his public role, Stalin himself retained a sense of fallibility and imperfection, remaining remarkably humble." (p. 387)
And, of course, there is the fact, used by Stalin's foreign fans ever since the Great Helmsman's heyday in mayhem, that much of his violence was understandably reactive:
"Stalin has been greatly criticized for the extent to which he used terror as an instrument to transform traditional attitudes and to force submission to the discipline imposed by the Communist Party-far greater than under Lenin. There is no need here to go into detail on this subject as it has been highly dramatized. Suffice it to point out that Stalin had reason for fear. The experiment of reculturation in the 1930s was at its peak. In addition, external dangers were mounting: Japanese aggression in China, German rearmament under Hitler. While a terrorizing shakedown enforcing loyalty and discipline has been part of Bolshevik statecraft from the start, now the need became especially urgent." (p. 388)
"Under the circumstances, a slower pace of reculturation, as suggested by some critics, would only have encouraged anarchy and retarded the process of mobilization just when external threats were rising. In any case, by 1938 the terror was scaled down, and Stalin himself admitted that 'mistakes' had been made." (p. 388)
And now, a transition from realpolitik to a plea for historical leniency:
"How then are we to judge Stalin? Viewed in the full historical context Stalin appears as one of the most impressive figures of the Twentieth Century. Born in obscurity, he rose to historic significance, a fallible human being of extraordinary qualities. He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized superpower 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 its history." (p. 389)
"But we, the proud source of Stalin's model, can hardly condemn the improvised imitation under non-Western conditions in perilously critical times." (p. 390)
Von Laue closes this essay with this admonition:
"We need . . . to let a loving compassion open our eyes to the alien realities in Russian Eurasia and to the helplessness of its peoples, just as Goethe advised nearly 200 years ago." (p. 391).
Loving compassion. Feeling Stalin's pain. Von Laue's essay may read like a parody of scholarship, but one wonders how many of his colleagues, after finally seeing someone say the unsayable, cognitively pumped their fists upon reading it, and said to themselves, "Right on!"
Thought for the Day:
"THE 'vile' bloodthirsty lines of the Marseillaise are an 'incitement to racism' and should be rewritten to reflect the French love of peace, President Chirac was urged yesterday."
(Source: Article written by Shirish Kalele, sent to the Zundelsite last week, no date or publication given)