A bloody road to nowhere

There are few historical events about which it can be said that they were thoroughly rotten to the core. What happened 100 years ago in Russia is one of them.

The Bolshevik effort to put czarism in overalls killed an estimated 20-30 million of their own citizens. Acolytes in China, Cuba, and other distant lands killed another 80 million or so of theirs, confirming the notion that a single lost life is a tragedy, a million an incomprehensible statistic.

As someone who has spent most of his life studying Soviet Russia, I am often asked what books to recommend among the thousands that the attempt to create the “new Socialist Man” inspired, if only to better understand and thereby inoculate against the disease.

On the ideology that Lenin and company thought they were imposing on Russia and then the world, there is of course the works of the old crank himself, Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, and the error-ridden three volumes of Das Kapital

(the second and third of which were posthumously published by Marx’s benefactor and co-author Friedrich Engels).

A comprehensive treatment of both Marxism and the often dubious modifications made to it after Marx’s death, including most spectacularly by Lenin in his efforts to justify a premature revolution in backward Russia, can be found in Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (1976).

James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe (1966) was the first book I read on Russian history and helps to alert readers to the possibility that, contrary to Bolshevik intentions, Russian culture might have ultimately influenced Russian communism more than Russian communism influenced Russian culture.

The revolution itself will never be better explained than by Richard Pipes’ three volumes, Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), with their central thesis that “Red October”

wasn’t so much a mass-based revolution as a midnight coup d’état carried out by a small band of ruthless radicals that the vast majority of Russians had never heard of.

The consequences of Stalin’s victory over Leon Trotsky in the power struggle following Lenin’s death were captured by the late Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow (1986), on the genocide in Ukraine euphemistically known as “de-kulakization,” and The Great Terror (1968), on the “show trials” and bloody purges of the late1930s. For the larger body count from communism as a whole, there is the

indispensable Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997), edited by Stéphane Courtois.

Life and death in the gulag was, of course, most vividly presented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and more exhaustively accounted for in his Gulag Archipelago (1973), recently updated by Annie Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003).

On the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, and the common elements of the totalitarian model that they defined, there is always Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991).

That there really were Soviet spies in high places, even if “Tail-gunner Joe” McCarthy never found them, is made clear by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood (1998) and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes’ various works, including Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999) and their work with Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009), in the invaluable “Annals of Communism” series published by Yale University Press.

Finally, the mystery of how so many Western intellectuals could have

embraced something as ugly as Soviet communism, even during the gory peak of Stalinism, can be cleared up some by Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (1984) and Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981), with the latter documenting how the search for heaven on earth by Lenin’s “useful idiots” eventually shifted away from a disappointing USSR toward more exotic locales like Beijing, Hanoi, and Havana, with equally disappointing results.

That some with more developed moral sensibilities were able to break away from the false god is confirmed by Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness (1952), that some continued to worship even when they were on their knees in the Lubyanka by Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940).

When Robert Conquest was considering a title for an updated edition of The Great Terror, his friend Kingsley Amis pointedly suggested, “how about I Told You

so, You **** ing Fools?”

Indeed, perhaps the most appalling aspect of communism was not communism itself, horrific as that invariably was, but that so many people who should have known better deluded themselves and bent over backwards to avoid seeing the piles of bodies it produced.

Alas, there are few more pernicious ideas floating about among the ignorant among us than that communism never “failed” because it was “never really tried.” Actually, it was tried in all kinds of places and produced the same gruesome results in each.

About which Kingsley’s son, Martin, noted in a recent New York Times essay, “It was not a good idea that somehow went wrong or withered away. It was a very bad idea from the outset, and one forced into life—or the life of the undead—with barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism, and horror.”