by Ralph Raico
The sharp contrast that Alexis de Tocqueville drew in 1835 between the United States and Tsarist Russia — "the principle of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude"[1] — became much sharper after 1917, when the Russian Empire was transformed into the Soviet Union.
Like the United States, the Soviet Union is a nation
founded on a distinct ideology. In the case of America, the ideology was
fundamentally Lockean liberalism; its best expressions are the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The Ninth
Amendment, in particular, breathes the spirit of the worldview of
late-18th-century America.[2] The Founders believed that there exist natural,
individual rights that, taken together, constitute a moral framework for
political life. Translated into law, this framework defines the social space
within which men voluntarily interact; it allows for the spontaneous
coordination and ongoing mutual adjustment of the various plans that the
members of society form to guide and fill their lives.
The Soviet Union was founded on a very different ideology, Marxism, as understood and interpreted by V. I. Lenin. Marxism, with its roots in Hegelian philosophy, was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century. The leaders of the Bolshevik party (which changed its name to Communist in 1918) were virtually all revolutionary intellectuals, in accordance with the strategy set forth by Lenin in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done?[3] They were avid students of the works of Marx and Engels published in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter and known to the theoreticians of the Second International. The Bolshevik leaders viewed themselves as the executors of the Marxist program, as those whom History had called upon to realize the apocalyptic transition to Communist society foretold by the founders of their faith.
The aim they inherited from Marx and Engels was
nothing less than the final realization of human freedom and the end of the
"prehistory" of the human race. Theirs was the Promethean dream of
the rehabilitation of Man and his conquest of his rightful place as master of
the world and lord of creation.
Building on the work of Michael Polanyi and Ludwig von
Mises, Paul Craig Roberts has demonstrated — in books that deserve to be much
better known than they are, since they provide an important key to the history
of the 20th century[4] — the meaning of freedom in Marxism. It lies in
the abolition of alienation, i.e., of commodity production, production for the
market. For Marx and Engels, the market represents not merely the arena of
capitalist exploitation but, more fundamentally, a systematic insult to the
dignity of Man. Through it, the consequences of Man's action escape from his
control and turn on him in malign ways. Thus, the insight that market processes
generate results that were no part of anyone's intention becomes, for Marxism,
the very reason to condemn them. As Marx wrote of the stage of Communist
society before the total disappearance of scarcity,
“freedom in this field can consist only in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature”.[5]
The point is made most clearly by Engels:
"With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of the product over the producers. Anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround men, which ruled men up until now comes under the dominion and conscious control of men, who become for the first time the real, conscious lords of nature, because and in that they become master of their own social organization. The laws of their own social activity, which confronted them until this point as alien laws of nature, controlling them, then are applied by men with full understanding, and so mastered by them. Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness; only from then on will the social causes they set in motion have in the main and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them. It is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom".[6]
Thus, Man's freedom would be expressed in the total
control exercised by the associated producers in planning the economy and, with
it, all of social life. No longer would the unintended consequences of Man's
actions bring disaster and despair — there would be no such consequences.Man
would determine his own fate. Left unexplained was how millions upon millions
of separate individuals could be expected to act with one mind and one will —
could suddenly become "Man" — especially since it was alleged that
the state, the indispensable engine of coercion, would wither away.
Already in Marx and Engels's day — decades before the
establishment of the Soviet state — there were some with a shrewd idea of just
who it was that would assume the title role when the time came to perform the heroic
melodrama, Man Creates His Own Destiny. The most celebrated of Marx's early
critics was the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, for whom Marx was "the
Bismarck of socialism" and who warned that Marxism was a doctrine ideally
fitted to function as the ideology — in the Marxist sense: the systematic
rationalization and obfuscation — of the power urges of revolutionary
intellectuals. It would lead, Bakunin warned, to the creation of "a new
class," which would establish "the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant,
and contemptuous of all regimes"[7] and entrench its control over the producing
classes of society. Bakunin's analysis was extended and elaborated by the Pole
Waclaw Machajski.[8]
Despite this analysis — or perhaps as a confirmation
of it — the Marxist vision came to inspire generations of intellectuals in
Europe and even in America. In the course of the vast, senseless carnage that
was the First World War, the Tsarist Empire collapsed and the immense Imperial
Russian Army was fragmented into atoms. A small group of Marxist intellectuals
seized power. What could be more natural than that, once in power, they should
try to bring into being the vision that was their whole purpose and aim? The
problem was that the audacity of their dream was matched only by the depth of
their economic ignorance.
In August 1917 — three months before he took power —
this is how Lenin, in State and Revolution, characterized
the skills needed to run a national economy in the "first phase" of
Communism, the one he and his associates were about to embark upon:
"The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic".[9]
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading "Old Bolshevik,"
in 1919 wrote, together with Evgeny Preobrazhensky, one of the most widely read
Bolshevik texts. It was The ABC of Communism, a
work that went through 18 Soviet editions and was translated into 20 languages.
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky "were regarded as the Party's two ablest
economists."[10] According to them, Communist society is, in the
first place, "an organized society," based on a detailed, precisely
calculated plan, which includes the "assignment" of labor to the
various branches of production. As for distribution, according to these eminent
Bolshevik economists, all products will be delivered to communal warehouses,
and the members of society will draw them out in accordance with their
self-defined needs.[11]
Favorable mentions of Bukharin in the Soviet press are
now taken to be exciting signs of the glories of glasnost, and in his speech of November 2, 1987,
Mikhail Gorbachev partially rehabilitated him.[12]It should be remembered that Bukharin is the man who
wrote, "We shall proceed to a standardization of the intellectuals; we
shall manufacture them as in a factory"[13] and who stated, in justification of Leninist
tyranny:
"Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labor, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of molding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period".[14]
The shaping of the "human material" at their
disposal into something higher — the manufacture of the New Soviet Man, Homo sovieticus — was essential to their vision of
all the millions of individuals in society acting together, with one mind and
one will,[15] and it was shared by all the Communist leaders.
It was to this end, for instance, that Lilina, Zinoviev's wife, spoke out for
the "nationalization" of children, in order to mold them into good
Communists.[16]
The most articulate and brilliant of the Bolsheviks
put it most plainly and best. At the end of hisLiterature and Revolution, written
in 1924, Leon Trotsky placed the famous, and justly ridiculed, last lines:
Under Communism, he wrote, "The average human type will rise to the
heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks
will rise." This dazzling prophecy was justified in his mind, however, by
what he had written in the few pages preceding. Under Communism, Man will
"reconstruct society and himself in accord with his own plan."
"Traditional family life" will be transformed, the "laws of
heredity and blind sexual selection" will be obviated, and Man's purpose
will be "to create a higher social biological type, or, if your please, a
superman."[17] (The full quotation can be found in the article on
Trotsky in this volume.)
I suggest that what we have here, in the sheer
willfulness of Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks, in their urge to replace God,
nature, and spontaneous social order with total, conscious planning by
themselves, is something that transcends politics in any ordinary sense of the
term. It may well be that to understand what is at issue we must ascend to
another level, and that more useful in understanding it than the works of the
classical liberal economists and political theorists is the superb novel of the
great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
Now, the fundamental changes in human nature that the
Communist leaders undertook to make require, in the nature of the case,
absolute political power in a few directing hands. During the French
Revolution, Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders set out to transform
human nature in accordance with the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was
not the only cause but it was surely one of the causes of the Reign of Terror.
The Communists soon discovered what the Jacobins had learned: that such an
enterprise requires that Terror be erected into a system of government.[18]
The Red Terror began early on. In his celebrated
November 1987 speech, Gorbachev confined the Communist Reign of Terror to the
Stalin years and stated:
"Many thousands of people inside and outside the party were subjected to wholesale repressive measures. Such, comrades, is the bitter truth".[19]
But by no means is this the whole of the bitter truth.
By the end of 1917, the repressive organs of the new Soviet state had been organized
into the Cheka, later known by other names, including OGPU, NKVD, and KGB. The
various mandates under which the Cheka operated may be illustrated by an order
signed by Lenin on February 21, 1918: that men and women of the bourgeoisie be
drafted into labor battalions to dig trenches under the supervision of Red
Guards, with "those resisting to be shot." Others, including
"speculators" and counter-revolutionary agitators, were "to be
shot on the scene of their crime." To a Bolshevik who objected to the
phrasing, Lenin replied, "Surely you do not imagine that we shall be
victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror?"[20]
The number of Cheka executions that amounted to
legalized murder in the period from late 1917 to early 1922 — including neither
the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Red Army itself nor the
insurgents killed by the Cheka — has been estimated by one authority at 140,000.[21] As a reference point, consider that the number
of political executions under the repressive Tsarist regime from 1866 to 1917
was about 44,000, including during and after the Revolution of 1905[22](except that the persons executed were accorded
trials), and the comparable figure for the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror
was 18,000 to 20,000.[23] Clearly, with the first Marxist state something
new had come into the world.
In the Leninist period — that is, up to 1924 — fall
also the war against the peasantry that was part of "war communism"
and the famine conditions, culminating in the famine of 1921, that resulted
from the attempt to realize the Marxist dream. The best estimate of the human
cost of those episodes is around 6,000,000 persons.[24]
But the guilt of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks — and of
Marx himself — does not end here. Gorbachev asserted that "the Stalin
personality cult was certainly not inevitable."
"Inevitable" is a large word, but if
something like Stalinism had not occurred, it would have been close to a
miracle. Scorning what Marx and Engels had derided as mere "bourgeois"
freedom and "bourgeois" jurisprudence,[25] Lenin destroyed freedom of the press, abolished
all protections against the police power, and rejected any hint of division of
powers and checks and balances in government. It would have saved the peoples
of Russia an immense amount of suffering if Lenin — and Marx and Engels before
him — had not quite so brusquely dismissed the work of men like Montesquieu and
Jefferson, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. These writers had been
preoccupied with the problem of how to thwart the state's ever-present drive
toward absolute power. They laid out, often in painstaking detail, the
political arrangements that are required, the social forces that must be
nurtured, in order to avert tyranny. But to Marx and his Bolshevik followers,
this was nothing more than "bourgeois ideology," obsolete and of no
relevance to the future socialist society. Any trace of decentralization or
division of power, the slightest suggestion of a countervailing force to the
central authority of the "associated producers," ran directly
contrary to the vision of the unitary planning of the whole of social life.[26]
The toll among the peasantry was even greater under
Stalin's collectivization[27] and the famine of 1933 — a deliberate one this
time, aimed at terrorizing and crushing the peasants, especially of the
Ukraine. We shall never know the full truth of this demonic crime, but it seems
likely that perhaps ten or 12,000,000 persons lost their lives as a result of these
Communist policies — as many or more than the total of all the dead in all the
armies in the First World War.[28]
One is stunned. Who could have conceived that within a
few years what the Communists were to do in the Ukraine would rival the
appalling butcheries of World War I — Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele?
"They died in hell, They called it Passchendaele."
But what word to use, then, for what the Communists
made of the Ukraine?
Vladimir Grossman, a Russian novelist who experienced
the famine of 1933, wrote about it in his novel Forever
Flowing, published in the West. An eyewitness to the famine in
the Ukraine stated,
"Then I came to understand the main thing for the Soviet power is the Plan. Fulfill the Plan.… Fathers and mothers tried to save their children, to save a little bread, and they were told: You hate our socialist country, you want to ruin the Plan, you are parasites, kulaks, fiends, reptiles. When they took the grain, they told the kolkhoz [collective farm] members they would be fed out of the reserve fund. They lied. They would not give grain to the hungry."[29]
The labor camps for "class-enemies" had
already been established under Lenin, as early as August 1918.[30] They were vastly enlarged under his successor.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn compared them to an archipelago spread across the great
sea of the Soviet Union. The camps grew and grew. Who were sent there? Any with
lingering Tsarist sentiments and recalcitrant members of the middle classes,
liberals, Mensheviks, anarchists, priests and laity of the Orthodox Church,
Baptists and other religious dissidents, "wreckers," suspects of
every description, then, "kulaks" and peasants by the hundreds of thousands.
During the Great Purge of the middle 1930s, the
Communist bureaucrats and intellectuals themselves were victims, and at that
point there was a certain sort of thinker in the West who now began to notice
the camps, and the executions, for the first time. More masses of human beings
were shipped in after the annexations of eastern Poland and the Baltic states;
then enemy prisoners of war, the internal "enemy nationalities," and
the returning Soviet prisoners of war (viewed as traitors for having
surrendered), who flooded into the camps after 1945 — in Solzhenitsyn's words,
"vast dense gray shoals like ocean herring."[31]
The most notorious of the camps was Kolyma, in eastern
Siberia — in actuality, a system of camps four times the size of France. There
the death rate may have been as high as 50 per cent per year[32]and the number of deaths was probably on the order of
3,000,000. It goes on and on. In 1940 there was Katyn and the murder of the
Polish officers; in 1952, the leaders of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union
were liquidated en masse[33] — both drops in the bucket for Stalin. During
the Purges there were probably about 7,000,000 arrests, and one out of every
ten arrested was executed.[34]
How many died altogether? No one will ever know. What
is certain is that the Soviet Union has been the worst reeking charnel house of
the whole awful 20th century, worse even than the one the Nazis created (but
then they had less time).[35] The sum total of deaths due to Soviet policy —
in the Stalin period alone — deaths from the collectivization and the terror
famine, the executions and the Gulag, is probably on the order of 20,000,000.[36]
As glasnost proceeds
and these landmarks of Soviet history are uncovered and explored to a greater
or lesser degree, it is to be hoped that Gorbachev and his followers will not
fail to point an accusing finger at the West for the part it played in masking
these crimes. I am referring to the shameful chapter in 20th-century
intellectual history involving the fellow travelers of Soviet Communism and
their apologias for Stalinism. Americans, especially American college students,
have been made familiar with the wrongs of McCarthyism in our own history. This
is as it should be. The harassment and public humiliation of innocent private
persons is iniquitous, and the U.S. government must always be held to the
standards established by the Bill of Rights. But surely we should also remember
and inform young Americans of the accomplices in a far different order of wrongs
— those progressive intellectuals who "worshiped at the temple of [Soviet]
planning"[37] and lied and evaded the truth to protect the
homeland of socialism, while millions were martyred. Not only George Bernard
Shaw,[38] Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, and
Jean-Paul Sartre, but, for instance, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who told his
readers, in August 1933, at the height of the famine:
"Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-producing provinces — the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the lower Volga region — has, however, caused heavy loss of life".[39]
Or — to take another fellow traveler virtually at
random — we should keep in mind the valuable work of Owen Lattimore of Johns
Hopkins University. Professor Lattimore visited Kolyma in the summer of 1944,
as an aide to the Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace. He wrote
a glowing report on the camp and on its chief warden, Commandant Nikishov, for
the National Geographic.[41] Lattimore compared Kolyma to a combination of
the Hudson's Bay Company and the TVA.[42] The number of the influential American fellow
travelers was, in fact, legion, and I can think of no moral principle that
would justify our forgetting what they did and what they did it in aid of.
In his speech of November 2, Gorbachev declared that
Stalin was guilty of "enormous and unforgivable crimes" and announced
that a special commission of the Central Committee is to prepare a history of
the Communist party of the Soviet Union that will reflect the realities of
Stalin's rule. Andrei Sakharov has called for the full disclosure of "the
entire, terrible truth of Stalin and his era."[43] But can the Communist leaders really afford to
tell the entire truth? At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita
Khrushchev revealed the tip of the iceberg of Stalinist crimes, and Poland rose
up and there took place the immortal Hungarian Revolution, when they did
"high deeds in HungaryTo pass all men's believing."
What would it mean to reveal the entire truth? Could
the Communist leaders admit, for instance, that during World War II, "the
losses inflicted by the Soviet state upon its own people rivaled any the
Germans could inflict on the battlefield"? That "the Nazi
concentration camps were modified versions of Soviet originals," whose
evolution the German leadership had followed with some care. That, in short,
"the Soviet Union is not only the original killer state, but the model
one"?[44] If they did that, what might the consequences
not be this time?
But the fact that the victims of Soviet Communism can
never be fully acknowledged in their homelands is all the more reason that, as
a matter of historical justice, we in the West must endeavor to keep their
memory alive.
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage,
1945), p. 452.
[2] "The enumeration in the Constitution of
certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by
the people." Needless to say, the U.S. government has seldom lived up to
its proclaimed credo, or anything close to it.
[3] V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning
Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers,
1929).
[4] Alienation and the Soviet
Economy: Towards a General Theory of Marxian Alienation, Organizational
Principles, and the Soviet Economy (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1971) and (with Matthew A. Stephenson)Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis (Standford:
Hoover Insitution Press, 1973).
[5] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy, vol. 3, Friedrich Engels, ed. (New York:
International Publishers, 1967), p. 820.
[6] Friedrich Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific," in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1968), p. 432.
[7] See, for instance, Michael Bakunin, "Marx,
the Bismarck of Socialism," in Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy. A collection of Writings in the Anarchist
Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1966), pp.
80–97, especially p. 87. For a discussion of the theoretical problems involved
in a "new class" analysis of Soviet society and a critique of James
Burnham's attempt to generalize the interpretation to non-Marxist societies,
see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, P.
S. Falla, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) vol. 3, The Breakdown, pp. 157–66.
[8] See Max Nomad, Political Heretics (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 238–41. Also, Jan Waclav
Makaïske, Le socialisme des intellectuels, Alexandre
Skirda, ed. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979).
[10] Sidney Heitman, in the "New
Introduction" (unpaginated) to N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1966).
[15] "The principal task of the fathers of the
October Revolution was the creation of the New Man, Homo sovieticus"Michel Heller and Aleksandr
Nekrich, L'utopie au pouvoir: Histoire de l'U.R.S.S. de 1917 á nos jours (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1982), p. 580. As for the result, Kolakowski states:
"Stalinism really produced ‘the new Soviet man': an ideological
schizophrenic, a liar who believed what he was saying, a man capable of
incessant, voluntary acts of intellectual self-mutilation." Kolakowski,
vol. 3, p. 97.
[17] Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), pp. 246, 249, 254–56. Bukharin
entertained similarly absurd collectivist-Promethean notions of socialist
achievement. He stated, in 1928 (when Stalin's domination was already
apparent): "We are creating and we shall create a civilization compared to
which capitalism will have the same aspect as an air played on a kazoo to
Beethoven's Eroica Symphony." Heller
and Nekrich, p. 181.
[20] George Leggett, The
Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), pp. 56–57.
[22] Ibid., p. 468. The great majority of these
occurred as a result of the 1905 revolutionary uprising.
[23] Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus, eds., Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789–1799, L-Z
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 944.
[24] Robert Conquest, Harvest
of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–55.
[26] On Marx's responsibility, Kolakowski (vol. 3,
pp. 60–61) writes, "He undoubtedly believed that socialist society would
be one of perfect unity, in which conflicts of interest would disappear with
the elimination of their economic bases in private property. This society, he
thought, would have no need of bourgeois institutions such as representative
political bodies … and rules of law safeguarding civil liberties. The Soviet
despotism was an attempt to apply this doctrine." See also ibid., p. 41.
[27] The "war against the nation" —
Stalin's forced collectivization — was not the product of a power-mad cynic. As
Adam Ulam has argued, "Stalin was seldom cynical…. He was sincere and
obsessed." His obsession was Marxism-Leninism, the science of society that
unerringly points the way to total human freedom. If reality proved refractory,
then the cause had to be the "wreckers" — whole categories and
classes of people engaged in deliberate sabotage. Surely, the Marxist dream
could not be at fault. Adam Ulam, Stalin. The Man and His Era (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 300–01.
[28] Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, pp.
299–307. The terrible famine year was 1933; after that, concessions were made
to the peasant: a half-acre plot that he could work for himself and the right
to sell crops on the market after the state's quota had been met. Stalin, however,
begrudged these "concessions" to "individualism." Ulam, pp.
350–52.
[30] Héléne Carrére d'Encausse, Stalin: Order Through Terror, Valence Ionescu,
trans. (London and New York: Longman, 1981), pp. 6–7.
[31] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. An Experiment in Literary
Investigation, vols. 1–2.
[33] David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers. A
Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p.
286.
[34] Robert Conquest, The Great
Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan,
1968), p. 527.
[35] It should be obvious that, in logic and justice,
the enumeration of Soviet crimes can in no way exculpate any other state — for
instance, any Western democracy — for the crimes it has committed or is
committing.
[36] Conquest, The Great Terror, pp.
525–35, especially p. 533. Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, p.
107, estimates the deaths in the camps between 1936 and 1950 at 12,000,000. He
adds, "Stalin's policies may have accounted for twenty million
deaths." Ibid., p. 303.
[38] George Bernard Shaw, for example, expressed his
scorn for those who protested when the Soviet Union "judiciously
liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for
honest men." Ibid., p. 113.
[39] Quoted by Eugene Lyons, "The Press Corps
Conceals a Famine," in Julien Steinberg, ed., Verdict of Three Decades. From the Literature of Individual Revolt
Against Soviet Communism, 1917–1950 (New York: Duell, Sloan,
and Pearce, 1950), pp. 272–73.
[40] Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, pp.
319–20. As Conquest mentions, as of 1983 the New York Times still
listed Duranty's Pulitzer Prize among the paper's honors. If the Times reporter and other correspondents lied so
contemptibly about conditions in Soviet Russia and their causes, however,
others were soon telling the truth: Eugene Lyons and William Henry Chamberlin
published articles and books detailing, from personal experience, what
Chamberlin called the "organized famine" that had been used as a weapon
against the Ukrainian peasantry. See William Henry Chamberlin, "Death in
the Villages," in Steinberg, p. 291.
[44] Nick Eberstadt, Introduction to Iosif G.
Dyadkin, Unnatural
Deaths in the U.S.S.R., 1928–1954 (New Brunswick, N.J., and London:
Transaction Books, 1983), pp. 8, 4.
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