Moral Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

The cover story, by Leon Aron, at the June/July Foreign Policy, "Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong."

I think that title is over-promising, actually. The key explanatory innovation is the role of moral ideas in overthrowing the old order. Aron writes, for example:

LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity to correct the economy or make the international environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union.

For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state's relationship with civil society be?

"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position."

At least from an ideational perspective, the argument is familiar. I'm reminded of the edited volume from Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, published in 1995. Ideas are contrasted with material interests as a mobilizing factor in historical change. So Leon's argument builds on themes that have been common in international relations literature for some time. Aron's book on this is forthcoming, and looks interesting: Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.

Chasing the Dying Memories of Soviet Trauma

There's a retrospective on the fall of the Soviet Union at the new Foreign Policy. I'll be reading and posting more from it, but this essay from Orlando Figes is fascinating, "Don't Go There":

In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working under my direction on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era. Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone. The conversation went like this:Panova: So that's how it was.… [Notices the tape recorder and shows signs of panic.] Are you recording this? But I'll be arrested! They'll put me into jail!

Interviewer: Who'll put you in jail?

Panova: Someone will.… I've told you so much; there's so much I've said.…

Interviewer: [Laughs.] Yes, and it was very interesting, but tell me, who today would want to put you in jail?

Panova: But did you really make a recording?

Interviewer: Yes, don't you remember? I warned you at the start that our conversation would be recorded.

Panova: Then that's it. It's all over for me -- they'll arrest me.

More at the link. Ms. Panova thought she'd be killed. Here's another part this was gripping:

For years, what the world knew about the Soviet Union was limited entirely to the public sphere. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers caught up in the repressions of the 1930s, particularly Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, there was little from a personal perspective coming out of those years. More representative testimonies began to emerge only in the glasnost period, when victims of Stalin's repression were encouraged to come forward with their stories. Organizations like Memorial helped them look for information about their missing relatives, took interviews, and organized archives from the mass of documents, letters, photographs, and artifacts that people brought into their offices in plastic bags and boxes following the Soviet regime's collapse.

And yet even these documents were difficult to interpret. Take diaries, usually regarded as the most direct expression of an individual's private thoughts and emotions. Diarists of the 1930s and 1940s, however, faced serious obstacles. When a person was arrested, the first thing to be confiscated was the diary, which was likely to be used as incriminating evidence. Many diaries that came to light during the glasnost years express conformist political ideas. Should we take their words at face value, as expressions of a genuine yearning to belong to the Soviet collective, which was no doubt felt by many people insecure about their place in the system? Or should it be assumed that fear drove more to hide themselves behind a mask? Two major finds have been translated from Russian: the 1930s diary of Stepan Podlubny, a kulak son fashioning a Soviet identity for himself in a factory school, which was published in Germany as Tagebuch aus Moskau (1996) by historian Jochen Hellbeck; and Nina Lugovskaya's schoolgirl diary from the same decade, published in English as I Want to Live (2006). For Hellbeck, the Podlubny diary shows how the individual was practically unable to think outside the terms defined by Soviet politics. In this vision of the "Soviet subject" -- developed by Hellbeck from several newly discovered Stalin-era diaries in Revolution on My Mind (2006) -- there is little space for private life at all, if we take that to depend on independent thought. Yet the Lugovskaya example shows that even a schoolgirl subjected to the full array of propaganda about the "radiant Soviet future" was not only capable of dissenting, pessimistic, and even "anti-Soviet" thoughts, but eager to confess them to her diary as an expression of her individuality.

Living in fear as a direct result of communist totalitarian control. This is where today's progressives seek to return. They're communists, and just take a look across the radical left establishment today. To simply speak out against the PC commissars is to risk a termination of employment, personals attacks, threats of violence, or even possible jail time in country's like Canada and the Netherlands. Progressives are communists. Like Soviet citizens under Stalin, there is no dissenting from the progressive line without threat to life and liberty.

Political Scientist Michael McFaul Tapped as Ambassador to Russia

A professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. McFaul had an obligatory essay back in 1992, widely assigned on graduate syllabi: "A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era." This is quite an accomplishment for him. At New York Times: "Policy Adviser to Become U.S. Ambassador to Russia":

WASHINGTON — President Obama has decided to send the architect of his so-called Russia reset policy to Moscow as the next United States ambassador there, seeking to further bolster an improved relationship as both countries head into a potentially volatile election season.

Mr. Obama plans to nominate Michael McFaul, his top White House adviser on Russia policy, for the post, according to administration officials who declined to be identified before the formal announcement. Mr. Obama told the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, of his choice during a meeting in France last week, officials said.

In selecting Mr. McFaul, Mr. Obama is breaking with recent tradition in Moscow, where all but one of eight American ambassadors over the last 30 years have been career diplomats. But in choosing someone from his own inner circle, Mr. Obama underscored his determination to keep Russian-American relations a centerpiece of his foreign policy after his early push to reset the relationship following years of growing tension.

“Mike, as the guy who really helped the president establish the reset, is the perfect person to go to Moscow to make sure there’s no lapse in momentum in the relationship,” one of the administration officials said ...

Although not a diplomat, Mr. McFaul, 47, is widely considered one of the foremost American voices on Russia, with deep contacts in Moscow. He was a Rhodes scholar who first traveled to the Soviet Union in 1983 and lived there at several points over the next decade. A Stanford University professor and Hoover Institution fellow, he is the author or editor of more than 20 books, establishing a reputation as a vocal advocate of Russian democracy and sharp critic of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s crackdown on dissent.

Mr. McFaul’s friendly ties with neoconservatives at times have generated suspicions among his fellow Democrats, but since joining the White House he has also occasionally been at odds with fellow democracy advocates who have been critical of the reset policy.

He's a good guy. Amazing Obama's not sending some ACORN communist to Mosow.

Yulia Terentyeva (Russia): jacket nonchalance

For the SS11 runways, Phillip Lim stylists sent girls down the runway with jackets nonchalantly slung cape-like over shoulders.

Yulia does it just as well with her own Off Duty Style.

p.s. blogspot was down and this post was lost as well as several comments from the last post.

Who Was Worse, Hitler or Stalin?

At New York Review, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?":

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

Ultimately, folks'll have to assess this essay themselves, given the nature of the discussion. The author, Timothy Snyder, isn't as clear as he should be, given that he's claiming the Nazis killed more than the Soviets. But the basic gist is that the Soviet numbers have been revised downward. And does it matter at this point, despite the discussion of the marginal enormity of one more single death out of the 100s of thousands or even millions? Only God knows the suffering of each of the families that lost loved ones. It becomes a metaphysical thing, at some point. And despite the author's numerical exegesis, I'm not convinced that Stalin's modernization planning and ruthless political liquidation programs are of the same kind of totalitarianism that resulted in the Holocaust. It's all depressing, and if folks recall Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, the permissive causes (especially anti-Semitism) were found all across Europe following the turn of the 20th century. Beyond this, I'm leaving it to the experts. At least in reflecting on these things, the last thing that comes to mind is the GOP's budget balancing programs today. Progressive Democrats are hoisting signs emblazoned with STALIN, HITLER, WALKER. And the effect --- beyond sheer stupidity --- is simply to illustrate how fleeting is the left's legitimacy and its grip on the social welfare state in early-21st century America.

Dozens Killed in Moscow Suicide Bombing

So far, 31 people reported killed (at BBC and Memeorandum).

And at Atlas Shrugs, "Islamic Terror Attack: Homicide Bomber Kills At Least 31 Human Beings UPDATE: Bomb Packed with Shrapnel." Plus, at Wall Street Journal, "Deadly Explosion Rocks Moscow Airport":

A suicide attacker detonated a bomb at Russia's busiest airport Monday, killing at least 31 people and wounding more than 100 others, authorities said.

The 4:32 p.m. blast near the international arrivals area of Moscow's Domodedovo airport was the country's worst terrorist attack since twin bombings left 40 dead in the Moscow subway last March.

President Dmitry Medvedev convened an emergency meeting of top law-enforcement officials and ordered airport and other transportation security tightened across the country. He said the "preliminary" indications were that it was a terrorist attack.

Officials at Domodedovo, south of the capital, said the airport was still functioning. Some international flights were diverted to other Moscow airports, where security was also tightened.

The blast took place outside a security zone near the baggage claim area, near the Asia Kafe, where people await arriving passengers, Interfax news agency said, quoting the Federal Customs Service.

Russian news agencies quoted security officials as saying the bomb, laced with metal pieces to increase its power to kill, was detonated in the crowd of people meeting arriving passengers. The blast was equal to seven kilograms (15 pounds) of TNT, the reports said.

ADDED: The New York Times reports that this video "appears to show the smoke and flames in the terminal and then the bodies of victims of the blast":

Sasha Pivovarova (IMG, NY) jumps!