Remora

Fifty years ago, Stalin died.

LI woke up to an NPR piece about a museum exhibit dedicated to Stalin's reign in Moscow. The exhibit has attracted elderly, nostalgic Russians who say things like he beat my grandma systematically with iron rods for ten years -- he was a truly great man! He shot my dog, ate my baby, and made Russia strong! Then a reasonable elderly man was interviewed who said that he was neither for nor against Stalin. Sure, he killed 10 million people -- but just think of the alternative! Finally the announcer gives the results of a poll also referred to by this NYT story about Stalin being poisoned:


"Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin's role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed."

This matches an American poll quoted by Nicolas Kristof the other day, which shows that twice as many Americans believe in the devil's existence (65%) than believe in evolution (30%). Kristof uses this poll result to berate American journalists for not being more sensitive to God -- in fact, a few, unpardonably, have made fun of religion. No doubt if Kristoff were a Russian, he would quote the Stalin poll to berate journalists for not being more sensitive to Stalin -- he beat my grandma for twelve years, sodomized my cat, and was a great Russian leader!

The dispute over the number of Stalin's victims still goes on. The NPR report skated over the problem with the comment that Stalin killed "millions and millions" of people. Robert Conquest is the most famous advocate of a very high number -- for instance, that there were eight million people in the labor camps in the thirties, as opposed to four million, the number arrived at by Stephen Wheatcroft, one of the key advocates of lower numbers. This is a quarrel that is regularly interrupted by great gushes of dragon fire from the side of Conquest's friends -- they regularly accuse the other side of being crypto-Stalinists. Wheatcroft published an interesting article about the whole business in Europe-Asia studies a few years ago. The tone of the article is laced with pre-emptive attempts to douse the dragon's breath. Here's the way Wheatcroft edges into his much lower estimate of Stalin's victims:

"From his [Conquest's] recent comments it is difficult to unpick what he now thinks is my `conceptual error'. He is clearly annoyed that I continue to challenge his figures, and in desperation has moved on to attack me for things that I have not said. Conquest's statement that I `claim to present the true, "archival" totals for the victims of Stalinism' is ridiculous, as will be shown below. From his comment and the whole thrust of his recent writings, it appears that Conquest is still claiming that although his Kolyma figures are wrong, the rest of his earlier estimates as restated in The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990) are correct. If this were all, it would not matter so much, and we could leave Conquest to his dreams, but unfortunately other influential scholars appear to be accepting Conquest's claims that the new data confirm his `high figures'.(n4) And so I feel obliged to put the record straight (again).

My response to Conquest is long, because most readers of this academic journal will find it difficult to make sense of his brief comment. They will come away from it with the sense that `the biggest name in the profession' thinks that the work of Wheatcroft and others who attempt to analyse the archival data is `fundamentally flawed' and suffers from `conceptual errors'. It will not matter to them that the technical arguments seem so complex that they cannot follow them. The harm will have been done--Conquest will have shown that he can still answer his critics, and that his earlier assessments or `reassessments' are correct. I hope that the more thoughtful of the readers will go beyond this and will attempt to understand the arguments about the value of these new sources."

The numbers argument most recently surfaced when Stephane Courtois edited The Black Book of Communism, which was published in France, and then translated, to a lot of smoke and dragon breath. J. Arch Getty, who is considered "soft" on Stalinism by the hardcore supporters of Conquest, reviewed the book in the Atlantic. Getty gently counters the idea that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were morally equivalent -- a position recently taken by Martin Amis. He also takes Courtois down a notch:

"Courtois writes that he is not trying to present a "macabre comparative system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror." Yet there is a lot of arithmetic in his presentation, and one gets the impression that he is including every possible death just to run up the score. That impression troubled his distinguished co-authors; Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin sparked a scandal in Paris when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's opinions about the scale of Communist terror, asserting that his introduction was more a diatribe than a balanced scholarly treatment. They felt that he was obsessed with attributing a body count of 100 million to communism, and like several other scholars, they rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sober and damning, told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union."

It is the next paragraph that displays Getty's unforgiveable slackness, according to Conquest's standards:

"Stalin's camps were different from Hitler's. Tens of thousands of prisoners were released every year upon completion of their sentences. We now know that before World War II more inmates escaped annually from the Soviet camps than died there. Research shows that Stalin's camps and deportations, unlike their Nazi extermination counterparts, were planned components of the Soviet economy, designed to provide a stable slave-labor supply and to populate forbidding territories forcibly with involuntary settlers. Rations and medical care were substandard, but were often not dramatically better elsewhere in Stalin's Soviet Union and were not designed to hasten the inmates' deaths, although they certainly did so. Similarly, the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."

Well, LI is a little more sympathetic to the notion of a terror famine. We believe that the famines that befell India from the 1870s to about 1910, and certainly the Bengal famine of the 40s, were terror famines -- famines that were exaccerbated to achieve pre-determined economic and/or political ends. The famine of the 30s, in Stalin's Russia, and that of the late 50s, in Mao's China, are also terror famines by that rather broad definition. We think that the common denominator, here, is a certain kind of central planning. We'd make that argument more exact if we hadn't already wearied our poor readers with it over and over in past posts. ... Probably we'll succumb to the temptation to weary you again, but not now.