Without risking my testicles, this is what I always thought whenever I read the complaints of various liberals that wrote “In Germany after the fall of the Nazis swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia were outlawed, but in Russia, where Communism killed more people, the hammer and sickle are still everywhere, the Stalinist national anthem was reinstated etc.” that I would read editorials in the Moscow Times and elsewhere. Nazi Germany never got a chance to legitimize itself the way the USSR and US did after the genocide. If Hitler had stayed at home and killed people instead of antagonizing his neighbors and starting wars, history would look back on him differently and probably wouldn’t be as harsh.

I’m not sure what that means. Whether the Stalin era (or any other era) was good or bad depends on your criteria and what point in time you are judging it from. From the POV of the average person living in that era in the USSR, he was probably pretty good. From the POV of an average somebody living in the USSR in 1945, he was probably extremely good. From the point of view of one of his multitudinous victims, he was very very very bad. There is no contradiction between these judgments, because everybody has a different experience, because everybody has a different life. Cf. blind men and an elephant.

The reason somebody like Hitler is (almost) universally despised is because he was bad for everybody. If he had won the war, established a Reich unifying all of Europe under an ethnically homogeneous and therefore conflict-poor population (due to genocide of the rest), and as a result 100 or so years afterward there was a peaceful and prosperous German Europe, I bet both my testicles that lots and lots of people would be claiming that “yes what happened to the Jews and Slavs was horrible, but without it Europe would not have progressed to this point.” This is exactly what many Americans do with respect to 19th-century American history.

On whether the issue of Cohen giving Putin a pass on Stalinism, well I would ask what you would want him to say? I guess he could have made an emphatic statement denouncing Putin, as many have, but I think that would have betrayed the entire point of his article: That 50 years after de-stalinization, Stalin and Stalinism are still controversial issues in Russian historical memory.

As as we all know, historical memory changes with the present. So after a decade or so (in the 1990s) of denouncing everything Stalin, including the creation of a whole host of myths (somewhat based on the Russian translation of Conquest’s Great Terror), the tide is going somewhat the other way. My suspicion is that this shift has nothing to do with Stalin as such, but with how many Russians feel about Russia in the present. So instead of saying “Stalin is evil” like in the 1990s, many Russians are now saying “yes Stalin was bad but . . .” As Cohen says there is little consensus about Stalin.

Now where I disagree with Cohen is that the “saga of victims” is where the issue lies. What I would suggest, and have several times on this blog, is that a historical reckoning with Stalin and Stalinism must go beyond victims. Stalinism in my view was a very complex and contradictory system and if we want to understand it both as history and as memory, I don’t think reducing it to terror and gulag, victims and perpetrators, will take us very far. Sure, one can take a moral position, like you have, and that is fine, but for me to simply say that Stalin was Evil begs the response, “Okay yes, but now what?” In fact, in my intellectual attempts to understand Stalinism (and Nazism btw) I don’t use the word Evil at all because it obscures more than it explains. In fact, I would go so far to say that calling Stalin and even Hitler evil is immoral because it fails to explain and even absolves the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who actively implemented their policies.

So for me understanding Stalin doesn’t be even begin with Stalin as a person. It begins with the anonymous person in some factory or backwater village who denounced his neighbor knowing full well what their fate would be and then soon after becomes a victim himself/herself. For me, it is the historical agency of this doubled figure-i.e. the lowly ordinary, perpetrator/victim–is what makes Stalinism so difficult to come to terms with. Namely, I call for a microhistory of Stalinism. Or, a history of Stalinism without Stalin.

On the way Putin is dealing with the Stalinist legacy, Cohen is much more forgiving than I am. He pretty much gives him a pass. My guess is that in that respect Sean and Chris are in general agreement with Cohen. Anyway, here is how Cohen ends his article:

“The contradiction in Putin’s behavior reflects Russia’s still profound division over the Stalinist experience. Eventually, the new Medvedev-Putin leadership will also have to confront it, one way or another, for at least three reasons. First, though few Gulag returnees are still alive, Russia remains a country significantly populated by descendants of Stalin’s victims, at least 27 percent of the nation according to a recent survey. Second, as the fifty-five years since the dictator’s death have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no statute of political limitations for historical crimes of that magnitude. And
third, despite Russia’s outward stability today, there is little popular or elite consensus about the nation’s present or future, partly because there is so little about its Stalinist past. In all these respects, the saga of the victims is not over.”

If you read the article, Sean, what did you think of it? Also, have you met Stephen Cohen? At least I know that both Cohen and J. Arch Getty wrote their share about the Stalin era. (I also know that J. Arch Getty gives a considerably lower number of victims than what’s usually given. Even his numbers are high, though.) I talked briefly to Cohen a couple of times in Moscow, but I’m sure he never got my name. At the time (I believe it was 91 or 92) he was doing some sort of work with Yegor Ligachev. That was when Ligachev was already out, but still had some influence and was hoping for some sort of a come back. Yeah, ancient times.

CNN reports plenty of negative news about the US. Anyway, I don’t have cable TV and don’t watch CNN. More importantly, though, blogs are not CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews or whatever. We were talking about blogs such as Sean’s blog. Apples and oranges.

I am starting to find it kind of endearing. It warms my heart to know that those adorable fellows, Ivanov and Dmitry, care so very much about US, that they can’t help but provide constructive criticism every chance they get. Plus, if they didn’t, the comment section would only have a 1/5 of the comments, and we would miss out on all those great blog posts on Dmitry’s site, that he has labored so hard to bring to our attention.

Molodetz young men, for without you, the comments section might stay on topic, and who would want that sort of hell, really.

Let then consider things in parallel. For example, here is an article about “AvtoVAZ” having to stop its assembly line before February 2:

http://www.izvestia.ru/news/news194608?print

Here is another article published by CNN, about Chrysler having to shut down its production:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/17/autos/chrysler_shutdown/index.htm?postversion=2008121722

Why aren’t these news identical? Whatever problem Russia may have, USA has the same (or worse) problems. Welcome to reality!