BOOKS

The real Soviet Union

Colin Welch

THE USE AND ABUSE OF SOVIETOLOGY: ESSAYS CRITICAL AND POLEMICAL by Leopold Labedz, with a preface by Zbigniew Brzezinski and edited by Melvin J. Lasky

Survey, A Journal of East and West Studies, March Issue, £10, pp. 372

Those who aspire to know about and understand the Soviet Union and its evil empire read the quarterly Survey. Those who do know and understand write for it. Pre-eminent among these is the editor Leopold Labedz himself. There at the beginning with Walter Laqueur, he has since edited Survey for decades on his own — a heroic effort, worthy to be honoured. You may see him among his peers at Encounter parties and the like, short and gnomish, his bald, well-stocked head agleam, his cheerful smile always welcom- ing and beaming (unless some daft progres- sive swims into his ken), never out of temper yet nearly always happily arguing. You will not be long in his presence without becoming aware of his wide but unostentatious culture, his mastery of lan- guages and love of literature, his formid- able knowledge of history, political thought and the social sciences, which last have engendered in him none of the dire effects they produce in people more gulli- ble, with less common sense and sense of reality, with less sympathetic imagination and humour, with less awareness of the sorrows of the world and the tears which are in things.

For Leo was born in an unlucky place at an unlucky time. Nineteen years old in 1939, he was a Polish Jew. Much of his family perished in Hitler's Holocaust, much in Stalin's Gulag archipelago. Their sufferings and fate burnt into his mind the conviction, which has never left it, that totalitarian regimes and societies, whether so-called Left or Right, have far more in common with each other, all of it horrible, than with anything else.

This current issue of the quarterly Sur- vey is in fact a book: hence its presence here. It is an anthology of Leo's writings, mostly from Survey or Encounter. They cover a vast area. Those who think of Leo as a sovietologist in any narrow sense will be rebuked by a stirring call for European unity, yet the grim history and realities of the Soviet Union do shadow most of the book. The student revolution of the 1960s is penetratingly analysed. So is the Cambo- dian Holocaust, and the new myths by which left-wing fabulists like William Shawcross try to shift the blame for it from the Khmer Rouge to Washington's bomb- ing of remote parts of Cambodia occupied by the Viet Minh. They thus seek to throw a lifebelt to fellow-leftists who might other- wise be compelled to recognise in the Khmer Rouge a ghastly parody or even fulfilment of their own dreams. Their logic is as perverse as that underpinning an argument never yet advanced save by Leo here as a reductio ad absurdum: that it was not Hitler but Bomber Harris who caused the Nazi Holocaust.

The idea of detente is here by Leo sceptically examined, leaving the reader with fewer illusions but not without hope. Incidentally, in this context has not a dangerously exaggerated significance been attached in the West to the possibly im- pending rehabilitation of Bukharin? This is seen as an important sign of the Kremlin's coming to terms with one of the better bits of its buried past and thus in another way rejoining the civilised world. Indeed, as Leo repeatedly reminds us, such convul- sions in Soviet historiography, such re- arrangements of the lies, are never just of academic interest but always offer clues to present internal struggles and tendencies. On the other hand, as he also repeatedly reminds us, the Kremlin moves in a myste- rious way its wonders to perform. It can rehabilitate without revealing the truth: it can just tell new lies. The regime which could rehabilitate Dostoevski as a 'progres- sive' writer and 'builder of socialism' could easily rehabilitate Bukharin, did it choose to, without damage to its own essence.

How the Left proceeds in such delicate matters is vividly illustrated by its rehabi- litation of George Orwell, caustically de- scribed by Leo here. What it canonises or re-canonises it distorts and emasculates. In the hands of Raymond Williams, Orwell has been transformed into a precursor of the New Left and 1984 primarily into a response to Fascism. Bernard Crick, in his biography and other writings on Orwell, has been little more perceptive — or honest? 1984 has also been 'rehabilitated' as an attack on America or even on the `horrors of a consumer society'. Even in the Soviet Union Orwell has been half- exhumed. 1984 has been represented as 'a grim warning precisely to bourgeois socie- ty, . . . [to] bourgeois democracy in which, as Orwell feared, the poisonous roots of anti-humanism, all-devouring militarism and oppression have today thrust up mon- strous shoots', and further as 'a fully realistic picture of contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism'. Astonishing in themselves, such views are more so ema- nating from a regime which in 1984 would not permit the publication or importation of a book it found so salutary, which indeed punished anyone found in posses- sion of it with 12 years or more in the Gulag. Presumably it thought readers might get the wrong (i.e. the right) mes- sage, as all readers behind the Iron Curtain always have, wondering how on earth Orwell can possibly have known?

With mordant sarcasm Leo wonders whose body the 'progressives' will snatch next — Koestler's? Will they turn Dark- ness at Noon into an anti-American tirade, Midnight in Manhattan, so to speak, with Rubashov revealed as modelled on Rosen- berg and Gletkin on Judge Irving Kauf- man?

Leo gleefully topples various false prophets from their pedestals, knocks the horns off various sacred cows. The two minds of George Kennan are carefully analysed, the first being judiciously prefer- red to the second: 'It took Kennan 20 years to learn about Soviet expanionism and 30 subsequent years of experience to unlearn it'. Chomsky is 'revisited': I can't imagine with what feelings the aberrant sage spied the dread figure again on the doorstep! The worthlessness of Alexander Werth is exposed. Heroes like Raymond Aron, Czeslav Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski and above all Solzhenitsyn are by contrast most sympathetically appraised.

The word 'courageous' is often misap- plied to writers who have done no more than, loudly applauded, put a match to some paper tiger. But seriously it must have taken some guts to point to the clay feet of such a pundit as Isaac Deutscher, so greatly revered at the time, alive then and kicking, very ready with threats of writs, which duly followed publication of the first essay reproduced here. Leo's lawyers advised him that there was no case to answer, so he stood firm, but they advised him that publication of a second effort, printed here for the first time, might be construed as part of 'a deliberate campaign to destroy Deutscher's reputation.' Leo seems still mystified by their advice, which nonetheless he accepted, having other things to do at the time. I am not mystified, I must confess. Leo may not have been consciously aware of any 'campaign', but little of Deutscher's reputation survives his irreverent examination.

The Marxist Deutscher was in the Fifties admired and published by Left and Right alike. The British Establishment sat at his feet. Bertrand Russell commended his 'historic impartiality', John Dewey his abandonment of praise and blame in order to achieve and impart 'understanding', the Economist his 'calm temper'. He himself claimed to follow the Olympian tradition of Goethe, to be at the same time, as Leo puts it, engage and au-dessus de la melee. He attached great importance to historic objectivity: sine ira et studio. Behind all his protestations Leo discerns a 'passionate ideologue', a 'frustrated politician' with a far from calm temper. A clue to reality is afforded by Deutscher's own odd choice of a scientific model, none other than Lenin, to him a 'critical student in the laboratory of thought', who pursued research 'with an open and disinterested mind'.

Deutscher was famous for predictions, heard with awe, as if an oracle had spoken. Leo digs up many of these and ridiculous indeed they look today, as indeed do Deutscher's repeated assertions that they had been borne out by events. Making people look silly in retrospect with the advantage of hindsight may seem too easy — a little cheap? Yet the predictions of a supposedly scientific historical determinist like Deutscher (like E. H. Carr, too, also taken to bits in these pages) are an essential test of his methods and quality. His inability to foretell the future must throw doubts on his ability to read and understand the past. In 1959, for instance, Deutscher was predicting that in ten years' time Soviet standards of living 'are certain to have risen above Western European standards'. You will search in vain for anything so silly in Leo's essays, though most of them were published long enough ago for any false interpretations or prophe- cies to have become obvious. Luck? No, good judgment.

In dealing with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, Deutscher was further handicapped, according to Leo, by disre- garding all non-Bolshevik sources. This leads him into such weird fantasies as the following, taken from an imaginary con- versation he wrote between Stalin and the last Tsar: 'Surely you were defeated not by the war itself,' says Stalin, 'but by the Bolshevik party'. Unfortunately Leo does not record the Tsar's reply, though in February 1917 the Bolsheviks must have been among the least of the Tsar's worries.

When justification of the Soviet system is required, however, Deutscher calls in the most bizarre witnesses. In 1945 he reported, for instance, that German sol- diers on the Eastern Front had been 'very favourably impressed by the collective farms in which, they said, they saw effi- ciency as well as social justice'. Really? Was it not one of the most catastrophic Nazi mistakes in Russia to retain the detested collective farms, not because they were efficient or socially just, but because the Nazis intended to keep the Russians in slavery?

I suspect that what really infuriated Deutscher was a resemblance detected by Leo between his vision of Soviet affairs and that of the Red Dean, Hewlett Johnson. Deutscher is far from being a simpleton like Johnson, Leo concedes (which makes it worse), but he remains a simplificateur. His sense of reality prevents him from projecting his vision onto the present, as Johnson did, so he projects it onto the future, with results just as absurd as the future inexorably unfolds.

No more gently treated here is E. H Carr, whose History of the Soviet Union was received at the time with cries of 'superb', 'luminous', 'masterly' and 'monu- mental' and with comparisons to Gibbon. Leo condemns Carr's reliance on official sources and ideological formulations, which conceal rather than reveal real Soviet life; his identification with the Soviet rulers and preoccupation with pow- er (he had earlier been an appeaser of Hitler); his lack of 'feel'; his moral indiffer- ence; his conviction that progress consists in the replacement of what he calls 'capital- ism' by what he calls 'socialism'; his failure to note that you can break eggs without making an omelette; his cold balancing of the sufferings of the Russian people against the illusory benefits supposedly purchased by them; his obsessive preoccupation with a 'modernity' which now seems pathetical- ly dated.

Leo's brilliant last chapter is on 'Litera- ture and Revolution'. It quotes Trotsky's dreams, expressed in his book of the same name, of how, thanks to the Revolution, 'man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler. The average human type will rise to the height of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise'. Leo drily comments that not even the average member of Brezhnev's Politburo had attained such distinction. Perhaps under the philosopher-king Gorbachev the yawning heights will at last be reached.

The Use and Abuse of Sovietology is available from 44 Great Windmill Street, London W1V 7PA, £10 + £1.50 postage.