By John O'Sullivan
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
In the run-up to Theresa May’s speech on Brexit in
Florence, there was one of those minor kerfuffles that tell us in passing some
odd little truth about the modern world and how we are governed. It began as a
standard political correspondent’s report of a change in Whitehall and its
significance: The senior civil servant in the Department for Exiting the
European Union, or DEXEU, one Olly Robbins, had left the ministry to become the
full-time adviser on Brexit to the prime minister in Downing Street.
“Full time”? Well, Mr. Robbins was already splitting his
time between DEXEU and Number 10. His departure was therefore written up as a
sign that DEXEU and its secretary of state, David Davis, were losing influence
on the direction of Brexit policy and going down a few rungs in the Whitehall
pecking order. One down for Davis, it appeared.
Next day, however, the departure of Robbins suddenly
looked less embarrassing to Davis. Maybe it had even given him a modest fillip
or at least saved him from a real embarrassment. For the conservative blogger
Guido Fawkes had uncovered an article that Robbins had written in the 1990s,
when he was a student at Oxford, praising the Soviet Union and expressing some
regret that it had collapsed a few years before.
Naturally, he did so in a properly cautious and measured
way: “I would never disagree that some of the deeds done in the name of
Communism were evil, but it is as well to look at the era’s aims and
achievements.”
Those evil deeds, incidentally, include the forced famine
in Ukraine that murdered millions in a particularly horrible fashion; starting
the Second World War jointly with Hitler by agreeing in the Nazi–Soviet Pact to
invade Poland and the Baltic states; the Gulag in which millions more perished;
and much more. So it’s good that he’s on the record disapproving of them.
That done, Robbins got down to listing the Soviet
achievements. Here his judgments are less armored against criticism. Let’s go
down an abbreviated list:
“The experiment
which failed is what liberal Russians call the Soviet era — and yet no one
seems to have noticed that the experiment was hardly conducted in fair
conditions.”
No one seems to have noticed . . . ! This was the
standard argument of fellow-travelers once it was clear that the Soviet economy
was an economic basket case and that the regime was a totalitarian monstrosity
that murdered its opponents (and quite often its supporters too). All nations
that underwent an industrial revolution started from poverty and backwardness,
but the British, the French, the Americans, and other non-Communist countries
married political progress to economic progress — to the point where democracy
arrived and the competitive appeal of Communism gradually evaporated.
Political reforms were slower and resisted more strongly
in Russia by Left and Right, but the radicals’ assassination of Stolypin, the
most important Czarist reformer, would not have held them back indefinitely.
Pressure for constitutional change was growing and economic progress would have
increased it. But the system of planning under Communism disrupted the
efficient allocation of resources, producing shortages and gluts alongside each
other, on top of which periodic purges and executions of managers and experts
groundlessly accused of “sabotage” completed the destruction. The Communist
experiment failed above all because it was Communist.
“The Soviet leaders
changed Russia from a backward peasant autocracy, despised by the West, into a
technological giant at whom the world cowered in fear for half a century.”
Where to begin? Russia was already a fast-industrializing
capitalist economy prior to the First World War — the fifth largest economy in
the world. One of the main reasons for Germany’s decision to go to war was that
the Russians would overtake them economically and strategically if they did not
defeat them first. If that war had not given the Bolsheviks the opportunity to
seize power in a coup, Russia would have continued its economic rise.
Economically, the Soviet Union was a massive failure 70 years later to the
point where Gorbachev complained to the Politburo that it exported less
annually than Singapore.
Technically, it lagged in every field except the
military, where a massive concentration of capital and research, amounting to
at least 25 percent of GDP, ensured that an otherwise backward economy could
match the U.S. in nuclear and rocket technology. Even then, Soviet leaders
recognized that it couldn’t compete with the U.S. in the newer technology of
missile defense and sued for peace. The cost of this military spending was
borne by Russian consumers starved of everyday goods and by Russian industry
and agriculture starved of capital resources and modern management. The result
was an economic wasteland before which not even its satellites and constituent
republics cowered.
“The Russian state
has endured more than any other major nation in the 20th century, and has
achieved more too. Among these were the aims of free and fair education,
housing, and health care. . . . What is more, they were achieved. More Russians
can read than Britons, there are almost no homeless people in Moscow, unlike
London . . . ”
Reality check: Achieved more than the United States? More
than Britain? More than Singapore? Or Japan? Or Australia? Or Taiwan? Or Hong
Kong? All of them doubled and redoubled their per capita incomes in the last
centuries like successful players of roulette. No liberal capitalist country
achieved as little as the Russian state between 1917 and 1991 at the cost of so
much investment and (forced) human effort.
The Russian people have certainly endured more than most
countries in the last century, mainly at the hands of the Russian state or its
reincarnation as the USSR, either directly as in the Gulag or indirectly
through allying itself in aggressive war with Hitler and then suffering the
consequences when its ally turned on them. Millions died from both causes. The
only people which can be said to match their suffering in the last century is
the Chinese people, and of course they have achieved an astonishing economic
rise since they abandoned orthodox Communism for an authoritarian capitalism.
On top of that, it is a fantasy that the USSR compensated for these failures by
making greater social gains than liberal capitalism: Doctors had to be bribed;
patients had to take bandages and medicines into hospital with them;
homelessness in Moscow was reduced by an internal passport system that kept
people out of the city; and so on.
One undoubted achievement was that the Red Army tore the
guts out of the German war machine to the world’s great benefit. But the
fairest way of describing that achievement would be that it was the USSR that
helped Hitler to start the war and gave him the means to invade Mother Russia,
but it was a Mother Russia who inspired her sons and daughters to fight and
sacrifice their way to defeating him (in part by discarding her Communist
attire).
“To the thinking
man and woman, Soviet Russia may not have been ideal, but it was food for
thought in the ‘greed is good’ climate of the 1980s.”
Well, the best answer to that argument comes from Hayek:
“The last resort of the competitive economy is the bailiff, but the ultimate
sanction of a planned economy is the hangman.” Nor is that a purely abstract
debating point. Only two years before Mr. Robbins was writing, mass graves were
being found across the Soviet Union, some containing as many as 300,000 corpses.
One was in Moscow itself. Greed may be a personal vice, but it’s only one of
many self-chosen goals that power capitalism — others include altruism, the
drive to solve problems (e.g., disease), and even the desire for approbation
made concrete in the “edifice complex” — and its negative consequences are far
less horrendous than those of envy and the lust for dominance that powered
Communism.
So much for the thoughts of a civil servant when young.
Having been young myself once and gone through several changes of mind since
then, I’m not disposed to be overly censorious. We all make mistakes, recover
from them, stagger on, and then make different mistakes. The middle-aged
mandarin looks back at the youthful socialist with sadness for his lost
illusions. I’m even inclined to feel slightly guilty for putting on a pair of
hobnailed boots and jumping up and down on what a young undergraduate wrote in
his salad days.
That said, his little essay raises two questions. The
first is: Why did he believe such things? After all, he was writing immediately
after the 1989 and 1991 Velvet Revolutions had revealed both the economic
wasteland and the genocidal charnel-house created by the 1917 Revolution. But
he paid more attention to the theory than to its results.
His admiration for that theory, his sympathy for its
ambitions, and his tendency to glide over its failures are worrying things.
They suggest he is what Adam Smith called a Man of System of whom he wrote:
“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit;
and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of
government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
Another enduring mark of such minds is that they prefer
large enterprises and centralized direction to a multitude of competing actors
operating in an environment of dispersed authority. They don’t see how this
uncoordinated activity (“greed”) of millions will get what they want
done—especially on the shortened time-scale they demand. When the system of
competition actually produces abundance, especially if it’s an abundance of
things they personally don’t value, they are inclined to see it as “waste.” Yet
when they direct resources to the production of other “social” goods that in
the event don’t materialize, they find themselves measuring their success by
inputs rather than outputs. And when that
is done on a national or continental scale, the result is the Tower of Babel or
some other Utopia.
If the Tower of Babel evokes for you the European Union,
that may not be purely coincidental. It’s a little disturbing, therefore, that
someone who once displayed the characteristics of the Man of System should be
placed in charge of negotiating the U.K.’s departure from the European Union.
Such a mind will have an instinctive admiration for a vast continental polity
over a medium-sized nation-state. Given the right policies, he might think, the
EU could become a superpower equal to China and the U.S. before which lesser
nations would cower. Worrying? Yes, but surely not very worrying. Mr. Robbins
is, when all is said and done, a civil servant whose political masters will
take the final decisions. And they apparently heard no echo of these ideas in
his official work. See Oliver Letwin’s new book, Hearts and Minds, for an admiring portrait of Mr. Robbins from the
top of David Cameron’s administration.
The second question is: How come no one seems to have
noticed or remembered opinions that were, ahem, controversial at the time? And
the answer — which is also a strong defense for Mr. Robbins — is that although
these were not majority opinions, they were shared by a very large number of
the clever people around him. His article was published, after all, in a little
college magazine (called, with an almost reckless disregard of mockery, Progressive Thinker) that otherwise
seems to be of a broadly left-liberal character, in one of the world’s great
universities. Today a student might go through four years of education in some
colleges without having his left-liberal prejudices sharply challenged. Indeed,
such prejudices would far more likely be confirmed and set in a concrete. These
great institutions throughout the West are increasingly what Jeane Kirkpatrick
called “islands of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom.” Even then, however,
sympathy for the ruthless imposition of “social justice” in places from
Cambodia to Cuba was widespread on the academic left.
Indeed, it was embraced by significant minorities of the
metropolitan intelligentsia, British society, and the wider West. The Soviet
Union had been largely overtaken by Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and other
radical-left regimes in the sympathies of the Western Left by the 1980s. Its
prestige had never really recovered from such undeniable betrayals as the
Nazi–Soviet pact and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. It was seen
as dull and gerontocratic. For a variety of reasons, however, the Soviets never
received the wholesale moral condemnation that their mass murders and other
crimes plainly warranted. Serious media and current-affairs journalism did
cover the crimes and failures of Communism as
they occurred. But as the Vietnam War and the 1968 “revolutionaries”
increasingly shaped Western attitudes across the political spectrum, so the
ambivalent attitudes of moral equivalence towards East and West familiar from
the novels of John Le Carré emerged as a kind of new moral status quo. In this
environment, Communism’s past crimes
gripped the moral imagination of the intelligentsia less and less. And when the
Cold War finally ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the
Kremlin counter-coup, a brief moment of celebrating freedom was followed by an
atmosphere of anti-climax — “not with a bang but a whimper.”
It was in this curious post-Communist mood of post–Cold
War weariness that Mr. Robbins wrote his nostalgic lament for Communism. He
wasn’t alone. Firmly anti-Communist governments were not immune to this
atmosphere: The Blair government gave Britain’s second-highest honor, the
Companionship of Honour, to the undoubtedly distinguished Communist historian,
Eric Hobsbawm, who, pressed by the interviewer Michael Ignatieff, had argued in
a television interview that Stalin’s mass murders were justified by the hope
that they would result in an ideal society. Apart from a morally angry protest
from fellow-historian David Pryce-Jones, this award was greeted with mild
approval to lack of interest in the media and academia.
The truth of the matter is that the West never confronted
the radical evil of Communism as it confronted that of Nazism. Both Left and
Right had their reasons for forgetting the past as Communism imploded in front
of them: The Right wanted a smooth diplomatic resolution of the Cold War and
therefore avoided anything that smacked of Nuremberg, crimes against humanity,
justice, or, as the smooth diplomatic evasion had it, Western “triumphalism.”
The Left needed to throw a cloak over its own underlying sympathy and
occasional support for the Soviet experiment and over the family resemblances
between democratic socialism and “really existing socialism.”
Coverage of the discovery of the mass graves in the early
1990s, for instance, was sketchy, perfunctory and quickly consigned to Orwell’s
memory hole. And as memories fade further, so there is a greater willingness to
look on the brighter side of totalitarianism. A recent series in the New York Times has treated Communism as
— yes, you guessed it — a noble experiment conducted in less than ideal
conditions. With the recent upsurge of quasi-revolutionary socialist politics
in Britain, the Labour party now boasts leaders who have a relatively rosy view
of the 1917 Revolution. Jeremy Corbyn’s senior aide, Seamus Milne, is on record
as giving a low estimate that the USSR executed 799,455 people and going on to
conclude: “For all its brutalities and failures, Communism in the Soviet Union,
eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialization, mass education,
job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.” Celebrations of
the two 1917 Revolutions in London, now Londongrad as much as Londonistan, have
an ambiguous flavor combining modernist sculptures, concerts of Russian
revolutionary music, and special vodka cocktails with lectures on Bolshevism by
the remaining true believers. It’s even possible that the celebrations in
London and other European capitals will be more positive than those in Russia.
“It is going to be very interesting to see how the official narrative explains
the events of 1917,” Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin’s former “political
technologists,” told the Guardian.
“It will be portrayed simultaneously as a great event and a terrible tragedy.”
And the victims of Communism? They risk being airbrushed
out of history again in much the same way as the Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin
purged were “non-personed” out of earlier photographs. The mass murders carried
out by Communist regimes — around the world but especially in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe — have caused only a handful of Communist leaders in the
Soviet bloc (and some small fry such as border guards who shot escapers) to
face punishment for committing or assisting one of the greatest crimes in human
history. Most former apparatchiks live far better lives today than those of the
people they once misgoverned and oppressed. And their sympathizers in the West,
mostly but not entirely on the left, seek to smother any interest in this crime
by, among other tactics, arguing that those raising it are prompted by a desire
to “relativize the Holocaust.” Of course, neither the Holocaust nor the Gulag
should be cited to relativize the other; each is a unique historical crime; but
both deserve to be remembered and their victims mourned.
An opportunity to redress the West’s amnesia on this
issue is provided by the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
this year. This is such a world-historical event that the establishment media
and the mainstream parties will have to treat it seriously and in depth — and
any such examination cannot avoid severe condemnation. Attempts to ensure that
the tens of millions of Communism’s victims finally receive some sort of
justice, even if posthumously, have already been launched and should command
our attention.
In Brussels a conference asking the apposite question
“Why was there not a Nuremberg for Communism?” was held last week in the
European Parliament under the auspices of the European Conservatives and
Reformers Group of MEPs supported by several organizations devoted to
remembering victims of the Gulag and the show trials. In Washington Niall
Ferguson and Natan Sharansky will be among the speakers at what promises to be
a truly historic conference on Truth,
Justice, Memory organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, here. In Budapest on
November 8, Professor Robert Service, the distinguished historian of Russia,
will deliver the Robert Conquest Memorial Lecture in honor of the great
Anglo-American historian who first documented the scale and horror of Stalin’s
purges and the forced Ukrainian famine in his books The Great Terror and the Harvest
of Sorrow. Professor Service will receive the Danube Prize for his own
historical works and he will be among a long list of distinguished speakers —
including David Pryce-Jones, Charles Crawford, Norman Stone, and Aron Mathe of
Hungary’s National Committee on Remembrance — at the next day’s Danube
Institute conference on One Hundred Years of Communism. There will be, I know,
many similar commemorations. I would be grateful if readers could send me
information about them.
It’s important. From their unquiet graves, the victims of
Communism cry to Heaven not for vengeance but for justice. We cannot give that
to them. But we can give them and their families the assurance that they have
not been forgotten by History until justice arrives in a higher court.
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