Off the cuff Chomsky email is a better history of the USSR than most of the voluminous garbage that's hailed as literature:
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On several of the points you raise, I completely agree. In fact, I've frequently discussed all of this in print, in particular, in Z magazine. To take one example, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall I had a series of articles in Z ("The Victors") discussing in some detail the fact that, contrary to standard assumptions (pretty much across the spectrum), the Soviet development model, horrendous as it was, was a relative success as compared with Western development models, when we use rational standards of comparison. One chapter of my book "Deterring Democracy" (1991) is drawn from those articles, and the same points are extended in subsequent books. I should add that, to my knowledge, these (not very profound) points appear nowhere else, and were mostly unintelligible even to sympathetic reviewers, and elicited howls of rage from unsympathetic ones.
So your criticism on this score seems rather misdirected.
That aside, for years I have been citing US government records to illustrate the deep concern of US (and UK) planners with regard to Soviet economic development. Again last year in Z, in several articles I cited recently declassified records of the early Kennedy years identifying the Soviet threat in Latin America in these terms: "Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation."
Again, your comments are misdirected. The point you mention is one I've emphasized and discussed fairly extensively for many years.
But none of this has anything to do the question of whether (to quote your letter) the USSR was "a tyrannical power, which oppressed its citizens." It certainly was, just as Stalin was a brutal mass murderer. That Stalin presided over forced economic development does not change the fact that he ranks among the leading monsters of history. Freedom and development are separate matters; thus, from 1870 to World War II, Japan had the world's highest rate of development, in a country that was hardly a model of freedom, justice, and democracy. Development can be carried out under the lash, and in Stalin's Russia, was, at an enormous human cost. One did not have to await Khrushchev's secret report to discover that Stalin had murdered millions of people while he constructed a terror state in which freedom was crushed. In fact, Khrushchev's revelations added little if anything to what was already known -- what I knew personally years earlier, from left sources (Maximov, Souvarine, Beck and Godin, etc.). The numbers you cite from ex-Communists and the right-wing press are, indeed, fantasies, but the real facts are horrifying enough, and could have been known by anyone who wanted to know 50-60 years ago. That aside, there is very strong evidence, in my opinion, that the seeds of Soviet totalitarianism and repression were laid by Lenin and Trotsky, from virtually the moment of their assumption of power (both before and after the Western intervention, incidentally, and not caused by it, the evidence indicates). Again, there is ample testimony from the left, at the time, quite apart from the documentary and historical evidence, which seems to me pretty compelling.
As for the post-Stalin period, I don't think it is accurate to attribute the stagnation and decline to Khrushchev's reforms.
There are more plausible factors, among them the huge military build-up in the 1960s in response to the vivid demonstration of Soviet weakness that could no longer be covered up with rhetoric after the missile crisis and Kennedy's enormous military build-up, as well as Kennedy's rejection of steps towards mutual disarmament advocated and in fact initiated by Khrushchev.
Another crucial factor is the harsh discipline of the Soviet regime, which barred independent thought and initiative.
zmag.org |
