Of the treasure trove of documents from the Cold War era Soviet Union, smuggled out by dissidents at great personal risk, most still await translation into English. Shunned by publishers, they're still waiting for most anyone to care about them, let alone mine them for history.
There was no Nuremberg equivalent after the fall of the Soviet Union to assess and hold to account the regime that killed tens of millions of innocents, and to discredit communism as a social model once and for all. For many of the same reasons, I suspect, there's little appetite today in the media, the academy or among political elites in the U.S. or Europe, to dredge up the messy details about how collectivism works in practice. It hits too close to home.
Just a couple of excerpts from a fascinating City Journal piece by Claire Berlinski: A Hidden History of Evil, to get you to go read the whole thing.
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi†is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
---Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.†Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
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And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.†. . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Certainly there's more available here than "gotcha" moments for the political right. Topics like the history of Soviet financing and conduct of espionage and terrorism, their attempts to create a socialistic re-united Germany, and their support of foreign groups they felt to be in their best interests...like Britain's official nuclear disarmament campaign...have to be of interest to journalists somewhere. Don't they?
Maybe not in my lifetime. That's what Klehr and Haynes are for.
UPDATE 5/28: Ron Radosh has a few bones to pick with Berlinski
Posted by dan at May 13, 2010 6:40 PM