AND ANOTHER THING
Remembering the other Companions of Honour whom Stalin murdered
PAUL JOHNSON
It is already horribly clear that, in impor- tant moral respects, the new Labour gov- ernment is no improvement on its lamentable predecessor. As the Formula One and Robinson cases show, it can nei- ther avoid sleaze nor, when it is exposed, deal with it promptly. There are, I predict, much bigger scandals ahead. It is obviously preferable for the Labour party to finance itself from individual contributions rather than be dependent on the union barons, but greed for money and lack of scruple in getting it are taking it deep into oily waters. The new government has not been in office nine months but it has already awarded five peerages in return for contributions. Even by the standards of the outgoing Tory regime, which was notoriously ready to sell honours, that is going it.
A Labour government, exposed to all kinds of hidden pressures from the Left including the Far Left — is also capable of moral errors of a different kind, and this lot has already committed a major one. I refer, of course, to the award in the New Year's list of the Companionate of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian. Hobs- bawm, like his equivalent at the other end Of the totalitarian spectrum, David Irving, is not without a certain brutal honesty. Just as Irving defends, excuses, exonerates or, when it comes to the pinch, minimises the guilt of Hitler, so Hobsbawm legitimises Stalin. He was at it again last year on Start the Week. I wish the BBC would publish a transcript of his remarks. So far as I can remember, he said, among other things, that without Stalin the British would not have the welfare state. Ah, so that was how we got it. Like most people, I had always assumed that state welfare was invented by Bismarck to appease the German socialists, was introduced here before the first world war by Lloyd George and Churchill, and amplified after 1945 by Attlee, Nye Bevan et al. But Hobsbawm tells us we owe it to `Uncle Joe', as the Left taught us to call him in the second word war. Yet while Irv- ing is excluded from academia and, quite rightly, from the civilised community gener- ally, Hobsbawm gets the gong which, next to the OM, now safely in the hands of the Queen and so immune from political lobby- ing, is regarded as our highest award for distinction. How come?
In an important article in the current issue of the American monthly Commen- tary, the French historian Alain Besancon advances six reasons for the double stan- dards educated people in the West apply to Nazism and communism. I won't rehearse his arguments, originally put forward in his inaugural address to the Academie Frangaise, to which he was inducted in December 1996, and now updated. His essay should certainly be published in Lon- don. But in brief he points out that the dis- tinction we still make is the result of histor- ical accident rather than of any real doubt about the moral equivalence of these two appalling systems of state crime. It is not as though there is any lack of knowledge about the depravity of communist regimes, particularly Stalin's Russia.
Over here, the basic facts, in all their enormity, were revealed in a series of bril- liant investigations by our greatest living modern historian, Robert Conquest. So far as I know, Conquest has never been offered an honour of any kind, though the only vin- dication he sought has been provided in full: the substantiation of all his conclu- sions, and most of his detailed work, by the opening of the Russian archives. Revela- tions about the horrors of those years and after — continue to emerge. Only five years ago, the bones of some of the person- al victims of Stalin's favourite henchman and police chief, Beria — young women whom he had raped and murdered — were unearthed near Moscow. One of Beria's executioners in 1953, after Stalin's death, Major Gurevich, now 83, provided details of his final months last week, which were published in the Sunday Times. The docu- mentation of Stalin's wickedness, though far from complete — the most secret KGB files are not yet open and perhaps never will be — is already enormous.
Indeed, it is an indication of the continu- ing power of the academic Left in this country that the securing of the CH for Hobsbawm was obtained in a year which saw the publication in Paris of a remark- able book by a group of French historians, `It's the benefits office!' Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, ter- reur, repression, published by Robert Laf- font at 189 francs. This 846-page work, the first book of reference about what it calls 'a planetary tragedy', has been a bestseller in France, and has not been unnoticed over here: I wrote two whole pages about it in the Daily Mail, for instance. But its message has not yet got across. What the book shows, in great detail, is not merely that the crimes of communism far surpassed those of Nazism in sheer magnitude, but that the two systems, in all moral essentials, were indistinguishable. Whereas the Nazis were responsible for 25 million victims, those of the various communist states fall not far short of 100 million, including 20 million in Russia and 65 million in China.
More important, perhaps, Le livre noir subjects these state crimes to the same juridical procedures inaugurated by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, and now being applied in Bosnia. Under Article Six of the Nuremberg statutes, state crimes were divided into three major categories: Crimes against the Peace, Crimes of War, and Crimes against Humanity. The authors show, in detail, that communist states and their individual leaders were guilty of all three on a colossal scale, over and over again. The list of Stalin's Crimes against Humanity is particularly long and horrify- ing, involving over ten million people. He committed crimes of genocide, as defined by the international courts, on at least seven occasions: against the Russian kulaks, in which a genocide of class replaced the genocide of race, in 1930-32; against the Ukrainians in 1932-33; against the Poles, Baits, Moldavians and Bessarabi- ans in 1939-41, and again in 1944-45; against the Volga Germans in 1941, the Crimean Tatars in 1943, the Chechens in 1944 and the Inguches in 1944.
Perhaps Tony Blair, who must take final responsibility for the honours lists he puts out in the Queen's name, will explain to us why he chose to confer such a distinction on a writer who still defends Stalin's Rus- sia. After all, these are national awards: by selecting Hobsbawm for such an accolade, Blair appears to suggest that the British people associate themselves with the crimes of a human monster. In the meantime, it is those innumerable Russians who resisted Stalin and died for it, and now lie unre- membered in unmarked graves, who are the true Companions of Honour.
Previous page
