"Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front," by Constantine Pleshakov. Houghton Mifflin, 2005, 334 pages.

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Useless Idiots

by Stephen Cox

"Once," according to Constantine Pleshakov, Joseph Stalin was guiding some military leaders to his dining room in the Kremlin. Passing the policemen who guarded his quarters, "he suddenly said, 'See how many of them are there? Each time I take this corridor, I think, which one? If this one, he will shoot me in the back, and if it is the one around the corner, he will shoot me up front. Yes, each time I pass them I get these thoughts.' The terrified commanders didn't know what to say and proceeded to the table in silence" (p. 72).

None of the commanders took these thoughts to heart and killed him. Even on the numerous occasions when he hinted that some highly placed official was about to be carted off to be tortured and killed, none of the victims decided that if he was going to die, he might as well take Stalin with him. Even on June 30, 1941, eight days into the Soviet Union's war with Germany, when Hitler's forces were speeding toward Moscow, determined to destroy Stalin's regime, and Stalin himself was holed up in his dacha, "depressed and confused," none of the cut-throats around him thought to liquidate him. Instead, Molotov, Beria, and the rest of them merely paid him a polite visit, hoping to rally their despondent leader Ñ and found him "genuinely surprised and relieved" that they had not arrived to arrest him (219–20).

If you think you understand human motives, Pleshakov's book may suggest that you have something more to learn, or at least to marvel at.

It's true that rebellion against tyranny is so statistically unlikely that audiences of the third act of "King Lear" react with shock when a servant suddenly steps out of the shadows and objects to the injustice proceeding on center stage. It's a daring violation of dramatic probability, a violation for which Shakespeare makes sure to atone: the servant is immediately killed.

It is also true, as Pleshakov explains, that the powerful men who surrounded Stalin had several reasons not to revolt against him. Beria, the head of Stalin's goon squad, knew that he would undoubtedly be the next to go. Others were too "stupid" or "loyal" or "paralyzed by habitual slavishness" to revolt (219–20).

But reasons like that require their own reasons. How do people get too stupid to protect themselves? How do they develop the habit of slavishness? Why do they stay loyal to a man who has murdered millions of innocent people, a man who is prepared to take their own lives at any time that suits him, a man who, at the moment, is visibly destroying the country by his incompetence as a military leader?

Stalin, as Pleshakov informs us, could never even get the hang of military maps. Paying no attention to "the arcane marks indicating marshes and forests, and the thin blue threads announcing the presence of rivers," he simply commanded his armies to "march from point A to point B in a straight line, following a precise schedule" (77). The results were predictable. It was a miracle that the Soviet Union survived the first ten days of its entrance into World War II. During that week and a half, Soviet armies were swept from the board like pieces of a children's game. Only with the deaths of millions would the tide of war be reversed.

Pleshakov tells the story of the first ten days with assurance and clarity Ñ the assurance provided by a thorough command of the books and archives currently available on his subject, the clarity inspired by a mature intuition for the relevant fact, the significant episode. For him, the story cannot be reduced to tables of statistics or charts of military movements. It is the story, instead, of the decisions that individual people had to make, day by day, hour by hour, as Hitler's invasion progressed. He follows frontline soldiers as they try to find food, find shelter, find their military units, find out where they themselves are located on a rapidly changing field of battle, a field on which the simplest efforts at self-defense, let alone resistance to the enemy, were paralyzed by the dependence of everyone on the tardy and confused decisions of the commander in chief.

Every kind of nonsense has been talked about Stalin's role in the start of the war that began on June 22, 1941. Pleshakov's research provides convincing evidence that Stalin was just as lost in events as he seemed to be.

In August 1939, Stalin had signed a pact with his former archenemy Adolf Hitler. The pact gave Hitler the confidence he needed to begin a one-front war against Britain and France. It gave Stalin the right to join Hitler in mastering Eastern Europe. For communists and gullible modern liberals, the justification for the Hitler-Stalin pact was the time it supposedly allowed the Soviet Union to mobilize a defense against Nazi attack. According to Pleshakov, however, no defense was organized except a string of fortifications sitting directly on the Soviets' frontier, fortifications that were sitting ducks for a German invasion. All that Hitler had to do was take point-blank aim at Stalin's planes and soldiers; no backup positions had been provided. Up to the last minute, Stalin kept sending a flood of strategic raw materials to his Nazi ally, hoping to appease him.

It is true that, even while agitating for "peace" and damning the Western powers for fighting an "imperialist war" against Hitler, Stalin was planning his own preemptive strike. But the plan merely floated around in his imagination; little was done to implement it. When it became clear that Hitler's armies were organized and ready to attack, Stalin advanced the "schedule" for the start of his own assault from next year to next month, as if the mere act of rescheduling it gave him power. He also "had a number of popular poets taken to the Radio Committee and ordered to compose bellicose anti-Nazi songs" (93).

Hitler's forces moved first. They easily smashed through the armies nesting on Stalin's frontiers, armies that were useless for any purpose other than attack, and insufficiently organized even for that. Stalin's only reasonable option was to withdraw his men to the rear, until they reached some stable line of defense, but he had never created such a line. So he reverted to his default "plan" and ordered them to attack. It was as if Lee had arrived at Appomattox and ordered a general assault by all Con-federate forces east of the Mississippi.

Stalin's failures were more than those of one foolish politician. They were permitted and encouraged by the system that gave him power, a system in which the socialist idea of central management was carried to its logical extreme, the total unification of authority. All large decisions, and many insignificant ones, devolved on Stalin and his cronies. Even the smartest, most ethical statesman could never have known enough to wield such power successfully. The people who functioned well in the system were much less suited to doing anything productive than they were to plotting and scheming and keeping the Leader from discovering any embarrassing facts. A system in which open private initiative is hated and feared is never one that produces efficient communication and responsible command.

Habits of control went hand in hand with incompetence. Stalin and his friends were afraid to send messages by radio, even if the messages were in code: you can't tell who might be listening! So they relied on telegraph, but they didn't bother to conceal the wires. Well, you can't think of everything. On the eve of invasion, German commandos simply crossed the border and snipped the wires, and Stalin was no longer able to contact his armies. "In a matter of hours," almost half a million troops were "taken out of the equation. . . . The Red Army, modeled on a perfect pyramid with an impeccably straight line of command, had turned into something untidy, unpredictable, and unmanageable" (214–15).

The communist system was supposed to derive its legitimacy from its material accomplishments. When these proved illusory it attempted to extract at least a sense of legitimacy from the myths that it circulated as propaganda. One of them was the story of Stalin, the all-knowing leader. Of course, the more sincerely this propaganda was believed, the more wretched were the effects of acting on it. Stalin himself was taken in: "No matter how cynical Stalin was, he had a dangerous habit for a dictator, which was believing his own propaganda" (212). Because, for example, his propaganda had exalted the importance of Minsk, the capital of a socialist republic, he allowed his strategy to be distorted by the defense, and later the loss, of a place that was actually of little military significance (212). And it is certain that he believed very sincerely in the propaganda about his own significance.

Fearing that others might not, however, he had spent a decade and a half trying to destroy all sources of resistance among the Soviet military and political classes. He admired the willpower of men like General Georgy Zhukov, knowing that he needed strong characters to win his war with Hitler. Yet those strongmen were so impressed by the effects of his purges that they "behaved deferentially and obediently," even in situations in which personal initiative, not deference to authority, was crucial to success (188–89).

We do not ordinarily think of Hitler as someone who cultivated a relaxed management style. But as Pleshakov points out, Hitler's field marshals had much more room for "political independence and strategic ingenuity" than Stalin's generals (123). Effective resistance to Hitler only materialized, Pleshakov argues, when Stalin voluntarily reversed the natural tendency of his regime and allowed his generals to start acting like generals, not errand boys.

Pleshakov makes important contributions to our understanding of Stalin's actions at the crucial point of his career. But the psychological (or, if you will, spiritual) questions about Stalin's movement remain unanswered, especially the one implicitly posed by Stalin himself when he wondered which of his guards would assassinate him. Why, after all, didn't somebody do it? Was it simply because his subordinates were so shell-shocked by his persecutions that they submitted to him without a second thought? There were certainly people who plotted to remove the Great Leader, but none of them got as far as the generals who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. And there are several circumstances that make obedience to Stalin appear even more mysterious than it looks at first.

One is the fact that, unlike the Hitler regime, Bolshevism had been in crisis from the very start. Its political program regularly produced social and economic disasters so massive and obvious as to drive large sectors of the population to despair. Further, Stalin repeatedly purged the military and the ruling party Ñ unlike Hitler, who indulged in only one big purge, soon after coming to power. When a leading politician or general confronted Hitler, he had to watch his step, but Hitler never went out of his way to make his collaborators fear that they were about to be dragged off to the torture rooms. How does a leader retain hegemony when he leads his political movement into one defeat after another, meanwhile creating conditions exactly the opposite of those that are normally conducive to loyalty? What accounts for the supineness of so many people before such a gross parody of political wisdom?

Pleshakov's answer is this: "Dictatorial regimes can be terribly inefficient. . . . However, they do one thing extremely well: they deprive people of their will. Since the Enlight-enment, mainstream Western thinkers have been arguing that an ineffective regime that destroys its people's initiative and brainwashes them instead of educating them will crumble in time of crisis. This may be true in some instances, but it was emphatically not the case in the Soviet Union in June 1941. In Stalin's USSR, state brutality compensated for everything. . . . As long as the dictatorship was able to manipulate its own people, it was efficient and could sustain almost any challenge, despite a faltering economy and jamming guns" (273).

Now wait. Pleshakov's prime datum in support of the deprivation-of-will argument is the behavior of Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Polish general who was imprisoned and tortured by Stalin, then resurrected for use in World War II, then dispatched to communist Poland to superintend its armed forces. This, one might think, would have given him plenty of motivation both for personal revenge and for rebellion against communism itself. But in 1956, when Polish students began to protest against the communist regime, Rokossovsky distinguished himself by volunteering to crush their rebellion. While other people dithered, as he was proud to say, he acted: "I went up to my office and summoned a tank corps to Warsaw" (273). Is this a man deprived of will? No, it's a man who believes in what he's doing.

Of course, generals and statesmen have opportunities that other people don't. But that's just the point. In 1941, a Soviet peasant or a Soviet soldier had, at best, the choice of deserting to the Germans or continuing to cooperate with his Stalinist bosses. No matter what he did, however, he couldn't hope to influence the course of events. Still, millions of people in the way of Hitler's invasion chose the first option. They went over to Hitler Ñ only to discover that he, unlike the communists, didn't even pretend to be fighting for the welfare of Byelorussians, Great Russians, or Ukrainians. So disaffected Soviets selected the second option, wherever it was still open for them.

But some people had more substantial choices. They could leave communism without welcoming fascism. In some cases, they could leave and take Stalin with them, by the simple expedient of assassinating him. If they didn't do so, it wasn't because they were wholly deprived of will. They retained, in full, their will to believe.

This idea comes through emphatically when one reviews the lives and public utterances of some distinguished advocates of communism. Consider Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister. In 1940, Stalin removed Molotov's wife, Polina, from the Central Committee; Molotov abstained from voting. In 1949, Stalin brought charges of treason against Polina, claiming that she was a Zionist. Once more, Molotov declined to dissent. Polina was sent to prison, and Molotov continued to collaborate with Stalin as a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee. An interesting situation: imagine Colin Powell continuing to serve as secretary of state, after George Bush packed his wife off to prison for some imaginary political crime. And Molotov loved his wife. She was "beautiful, intelligent, and, the main thing, a genuine Bolshevik, a genuine Soviet person" ("Molotov Remembers," ed. Albert Resis [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993] 323).

When, in 1953, Stalin finally died, Polina was released. Her husband's reaction, provided in conversations many years later, when Stalinism was no longer in vogue, was this: "Of course, she should have been more fastidious in choosing her acquaintances. . . . A black cat had, as they say, crossed our path. . . . She certainly endured great hardship, but I repeat, she never changed her attitude toward Stalin. She always thought highly of him." It is reported that when one of Polina's relatives criticized Stalin in her presence, she snarled, "Young man, you understand absolutely nothing about either Stalin or his times. If only you knew the burden he bore in office!" ("Molotov Remembers," 323–24).

Now let's look at the attitude of someone who had every opportunity to jump off the communist ship: Anna Louise Strong, one of America's leading partisans of Stalinism, and later of Maoism. Strong was, from the communist point of view, a believer of unstained integrity. Yet she was arrested and (lucky for her!) deported from Stalinist Russia for non-existent ideological sins. Her response? A continued defense of Stalinism. When Khrushchev finally came along, three years after Stalin's death, and admitted that Stalin had been a monster, Strong nearly lost her mind. "We knew all these things for twenty-five years," she wailed, "and I kept silent for the cause of socialism. What am I supposed to say?" (Tracy B. Strong and Helene Keyssar, "Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong" [New York: Random House, 1983] 283).

Good question. But, we are told, Strong found consolation "in an epigram from Stalin: 'The logic of events is stronger than the logic of intentions.' It convinced Anna Louise that if her work had in fact furthered the cause of socialism, it did not matter what she had known or believed." (Strong 283) Of course, "the cause of socialism" included such "events" as the starvation, imprisonment, and torture of millions of people, and the miserable impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. But never mind the senselessness, the absurd lack of "logic" of the whole affair. Strong was still, according to the title that her biographers gave their work, "Right in Her Soul." This is not deprivation of will.

How shall we explain the allegiance that many (reputed) intellectuals, in the free and prosperous West as well as the shackled and demoralized East, maintained to Stalin? Isabel Paterson described them as people who had made an investment that they were unwilling to liquidate. They had bought (or at any rate taken a lease on) certain ideas, and rather than lose the franchise or sell at a loss, they kept trying to talk the value up again.

That's a good theory, and it has its uses. There are other good theories, too. One involves the idea of political "identification." Early in life, people associate themselves with certain political ideas or movements, which they later defend, no matter what, as if any attack on the ideas were an attack on their own identity. I have used this theory to explain Americans' relationship to this country's two major parties. No doubt the identification theory goes a long way toward explaining communist behavior, too. But it won't go all the way. Maintaining loyalty to the communist movement Ñ particularly in circumstances in which its leader has arrested and tortured you, or sent your wife to prison for not being "fastidious" enough in her "acquaintances" Ñ is qualitatively different from maintaining loyalty to the Grand Old Party, no matter what you think of President Bush's spending plans.

When one recalls the loyalty that many Western intellectuals showed to communism, it's important to remember that this stalwart feeling was maintained in the face of not just one discreditable episode, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact, but of hundreds of such episodes. Communism suffered catastrophic blows to its intellectual prestige throughout its life. No one had to wait until Khrushchev's "revelations" of Stalin's crimes to learn the truth about any of it.

Communist economic ideas, based on the labor theory of value, were announced at precisely the unlucky hour when the theory itself was being conclusively refuted by real economists. Marx's theory of history was also discredited from the start, spurned by everyone who understood historical fact. And communism wasn't slow to exhibit its abhorrent practical effects on human conduct. Nineteenth-century communists disgraced themselves by a generation of terrorist outrages. When communists came to power in Russia, they immediately gave the lie to all pretensions about democracy and equality. Lenin ruled by war and terror. ( "'Who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin?' 'Lenin, of course . . . I recall how he reproached Stalin for his softness and liberalism'" ["Molotov Remembers" 107].) He also confessed the inadequacy of communist economics by legalizing enough capitalist enterprises to save his regime from total collapse. After his death, the farcical conflict between his two would-be successors, Trotsky and Stalin, emphasized the inability of communism to produce a leadership with any respect for justice or truth.

Stalin's crimes are notorious; and they were notorious from the beginning, to everyone who cared to read or think. Stalin reformed agriculture by starving the peasants into submission. He enhanced Soviet public works projects by mobilizing slave labor to construct them. Then came the party purges, the army purges, the pact with Hitler, Soviet atomic espionage, and the destruction of democratic and labor movements in Eastern Europe. In 1956 and 1968, Stalin's successors followed his example by crushing national rebellions in the communist satellites. The latter decades of the century witnessed the erection of the Berlin Wall, the sinister buffoonery of Khrushchev and Castro, the bloody suppression of workers' movements in Novocherkassk and other places, the mass exterminations in Cambodia, the destruction of Tibet, the murder of millions that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China, and the degeneration of North Korea into primitive psychosis.

Since 1880, no generation of intellectuals has come to consciousness at a time when communist ideas have not already been discredited, both in theory and in practice. Yet European and American intellectuals continued, generation after generation, to take communist ideas seriously. Many of them do so today.

Listen to the late Louis Althusser (1918–1990), a Marxist philosopher who had much to do with shaping the cultural theories now current in American college classrooms, as he summarizes his final view of the Soviet experiment: "Any public involvement in politics is, of course, forbidden and dangerous, but as far as everything else is concerned, what a splendid life they lead! . . . [I]t is a country where the right to work is guaranteed and, I might add, planned and compulsory." In the USSR, he is pleased to find, "groups of friends" actually "get together and sell their services to businesses which have fallen behind. . . . You could not imagine it happening here [in France]" (Louis Althusser, "The Future Lasts a Long Time," ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, trans. Richard Veasey [London: Chatto & Windus, 1993] 190–91).

Yes, I could; it happens all the time in "bourgeois" society. But by this point, one understands that one is dealing with a person who has absolutely no idea of what the world is like, a person who is determined to believe that capitalism is always fundamentally wrong and communism is always fundamentally right, and who will invent whatever observations he needs to dramatize his beliefs. Even the feeblest intellect can observe and reason better than that, so we can be sure that some kind of egotistic defense mechanism must be involved.

But that can hardly be the sole explanation. If it were, Althusser would not have responded so blandly to Soviet suppression of his own works: "Not surprisingly[!], I found the USSR a philosophical desert. My books had been translated, like all other foreign publications, but they were hidden away in reserve collections in libraries, available only to select specialists who were politically safe" (191). No one goes more berserk than an author whose works are censored Ñ unless the author happens to be a communist whose works are censored by communists. And Althusser is only one of many instances of a fairly common phenomenon among Western communists and fellow-travelers.

What moved people to act in such peculiar ways? It is ordinary to answer, and dismiss, that question with some brief reference to the alleged similarity between communism and other "religious" movements. The idea is plausible. Many adherents of absurd religious dogmas appear completely unaffected when their beliefs are shown to lack any logical or empirical foundation. People in the Hitler movement often acted in the same way. Although Hitler himself objected to being worshiped as a "messiah," that didn't stop his followers from continuing to do so, believing that if anything went wrong in Nazi Germany, the Fuehrer must not have heard about it.

But suppose that a religious cultist actually witnessed the object of his devotion wantonly slaughtering his compatriots. Or suppose that he saw him jailing and killing the worshiper's own family and friends, or threatening to do the same to the worshiper himself. Suppose that the worshiper had labored for years to conceal the frailties of his god from others, twisting facts, inventing outright lies, and otherwise scheming to convince the world that what he knew to be true was actually false. Suppose, in short, that the worshiper knew that his faith in his god was false and hollow. What could explain his continued enthusiasm for the religion itself, an enthusiasm surviving even the god's death and burial (or, in Stalin's case, his being embalmed and put on display in the world's most lugubrious Mystery Spot)? There may be examples of Nazis who behaved like Strong or Rokossovsky or the Molotovs, but I don't know of any. And I can't think of any that I've discovered among the devotees of the many religious cults I have studied. Yet this sort of thing is not at all uncommon on the hard-core left.

I can think of four factors Ñ factors that Pleshakov does not examine Ñ that seem to distinguish communism from other species of political "folly" (to use his well-chosen word). They are: cultural isolationism, theoreticism, the extinction of conscience, and militant self-righteousness.

By "cultural isolationism" I mean the conviction of intellectuals and other supposedly responsible people that communism offered the only explanation that really mattered of the world around them. I don't know whether Chairman Khrushchev or Marshal Zhukov had any more pretensions to philosophy than the average Southern Baptist, but it's clear that they never actively investigated any ideology other than communism. The same can be said of Robert Oppenheimer, the famous American physicist. When this ostensibly brilliant thinker decided to interest himself in political events, he went directly to the source of all wisdom: he read Marx's "Capital" and the works of Lenin. That constituted his political and economic education. He later renounced his romance with communism, but he never seems to have explored any other ideology.

Oppenheimer was a Western intellectual with free access to every book in the world. Consider the effect of communist doctrine on a military or political personality in the Soviet Union. If he wanted something to believe in, he might easily assume that the choice was between Marxism and nothing. And Stalin represented himself as the embodiment of Marxism.

He found it a lot easier than you might think. Because of what I am calling the "theoreticism" of the communist movement, anyone with enough self-will can use Marxist thought to justify almost anything he thinks or does. A prominent academic once gave a lecture at the University of California, San Diego, in which he offered a Marxist interpretation of certain events in 19th-century American history. At the end of his talk, someone asked him how his interpretation could possibly be true, considering the fact that some of the effects he mentioned had actually preceded their putative causes. "Well," he replied, "it's dialectically true." This astonishing riposte did no visible damage to his authority.

The Marxist way of explaining the world is so theoretical, so distant from any frank survey of the facts, as to transcend all normal checks and limits. Suppose that while passing through the cafeteria line at the Che Guevara Museum of Military Science and Heterosexuality I neglect to banter with the check-out clerk. Clearly, according to the Marxist way of thinking, I am undermining socialist "solidarity," contributing to the clerk's "alienation," and, in "objective terms," launching an "interrogation" of the labor theory of value. But suppose that I do stop and chat. Then, from the perspective of the same dialectical theory, it is just as clear that I am disrupting the flow of socialist production, indulging a mere "intellectualist" weakness for superficial contact with the working class, and therefore "objectively" contributing "yet more" to the clerk's alienation than I would have if I had never thought of chatting with her. (Don't laugh; I've heard both these applications of Marxist theory, at length.)

The same logical freedom can be used to debate the Hitler-Stalin pact or the Soviet invasion of Hungary or the exegesis of Krazy Kat cartoons. And remember that communist theory is, by definition, "materialist"; its conclusions are regarded as emanations of reality, not as the products (which they are) of an effete intellectual game. People who believe in the reality hypothesis are likely to see every turn of the theoretical wheel as an epiphany of scientific truth, a truth that is all the better for its shiny newness. If they participate, as Stalin did, in the giddy, anything-goes invention of theory, they may soon start to feel like Hindu gods, perpetually inventing new states of being, or like addicts with an endless supply of drugs.

Minds less inclined to theory may fear, with good reason, that the addicts will turn on them the next time the dialectic takes a lurch to the left or right. That is what kept happening with Stalin and his friends. There was no independent standard of fact, logic, or common sense to prevent him from expressing his paranoia in any way he chose, or to assure his victims or followers (frequently the same group) that he was wrong. And of course there was no standard of morality, either.

In personal terms, such a standard is called a conscience, an internal limitation on the individual's ability to construct his values to suit his whims, or even his necessities. Every great religious movement appeals to conscience. Conscience, indeed, has given birth to the worst abuses of religion in its puritan form. But conscience does not appear to have played any role in Stalin's variety of puritanism. What did play a role, and a starring role, was the implacable self-righteousness that has so often been noted by critics of communism Ñ the kind of self-righteousness that allowed communists to do absolutely anything they wanted to do, or felt that they "had" to do, without regretting it later.

Religious people become self-righteous when they believe they are fulfilling a set of moral standards; communists become self-righteous when they conclude Ñ as their political theory invites them to conclude Ñ that there are no moral standards, except the exceedingly malleable ones that they themselves make up. If you want to feel good, just call yourself good; no evidence will confute you.

I said that there was no standard of morality in the Stalinist movement. But there was more than enough "morality" to make it a paradise of self-righteousness. Marxism was not erected on factual or even spiritual conceptions; it was erected on moral dogmas, and it has always remained inseparable from them. Marxist thinkers may fight over rival definitions of exploitation, imperialism, and colonialism, but they have never doubted that those things were bad. They have killed one another over rival definitions of the working class, social evolution, and the leading role of the communist party, but they have never doubted that those things were good. Yet because their moral judgments cannot be sustained either by a fair appeal to facts or by anything so bourgeois as an individual conscience, communism has always been wrapped in an impenetrable aura of cynicism. Communists have always made a profession of lying, and the bigger the lie, the thicker the swathing of self-righteousness.

Take, for example, a garden-variety communist sympathizer, who was also, quite probably, a member of the Communist Party (but what's the difference, really, when the issue is belief, not party dues?), an American academic named Haakon Chevalier. Today this person is known, if at all, as one of the leftist hangers-on who got Oppenheimer into trouble with the U.S. government. But it's in the memoir he wrote about his friendship with "Opje" that Chevalier's true cultural interest emerges. The book offers a perfect, or perhaps I should say a perfectly typical, display of communist self-righteousness. Describing his early period of communist acculturation, the high Stalin days of 1937–1942, Chevalier writes:

"It was a time of innocence . . . in the sense that in the face of the manifold and confused manifestations of unresolved social conflicts at home and the gathering war clouds abroad, those of us who had taken a clear political position felt a type of spiritual serenity due, I think, in large part to the fact that we suffered no conflict between heart and mind, between aspiration and what reason sanctioned. We were animated by a candid faith in the efficacy of reason and persuasion, in the operation of democratic processes and in the ultimate triumph of justice. In a world in which evil forces exerted their cruel sway, we held high the banner of justice, freedom and equality, asserted the sanctity of human rights and proclaimed the cause of peace" (Haakon Chevalier, "Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship" [New York: George Braziller, 1965] 19).

So what does one do if one is inspired by "innocence," "reason," "democracy," "human rights," and "peace"? One becomes a supporter of Stalin, of course! Ñ although our author does his best to avoid mentioning that name. As with Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs or the friends of Fidel Castro or a thousand other communist stooges who have paraded beneath the banner of "progressive" politics, communism remains a love that dare not speak its name, because to speak it would be bad for communist propaganda. Chevalier is a writer who can pat himself on the back for supporting demonstrations for "peace" and then, with no transition at all, give himself another pat for supporting the wars of "Loyalist Spain" and Stalinist Russia. It was all "for the alleviation of human suffering" (24–25). Now imagine how many Haakon Chevaliers must have existed in the Soviet Union, where self-righteous personalities could really come into their own. Again, this kind of personality is the antithesis of the will-less, zombie-like people whom, according to Pleshakov, Stalin created.

For contrasting instances from another absolutist regime, one can turn to Pleshakov's earlier book, "The Flight of the Romanovs," written with John Curtis Perry (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Here we read of Grand Duke Nicholas, a cousin of the last tsar. The tsar wanted to make Nicholas a military dictator. Nicholas did not agree. "If he wants to force me to become Dictator," he said, "I shall take this revolver and kill myself in his presence" (95). That's a lot more than anyone in Stalin's court ever promised to do, for any similarly good reason. In 1917, two of the tsar's other relatives, Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri, risked their necks to assassinate his depraved advisor, Grigory Rasputin. Felix and Dmitri were a pair of idle playboys, but they showed more political conscience than any of Stalin's high-minded ideologists. Even the last tsar was chock full of conscience; he was always doing things he didn't want to do, because of some moral or religious imperative he felt. His decisions were bad, his system of government was bad, but his culture produced quite a different sort of character from the "genuine Soviet person." Both the communists and the Romanovs were replete with "morality" (and "folly" too), but there was a part of communist morality that never got screwed on. The part was an individual and responsible conscience.

Well, what does all this matter now? The influence of specifically Stalinist ways of thinking has almost disappeared from the West, and perhaps even from China. Yet a broader, communist-flavored culture remains alive. In many ways it continues to serve as a recipe for the opposition cultures now dominant in many of the West's elite institutions. There is remarkably little difference between the attacks on "bourgeois" individualism and calls for state-determined "social justice" that characterized 1930s agitprop and the stridently anti-individualist, anti-capitalist assumptions that regularly appear in today's learned journals, foundation reports, and action plans of "liberal" lobby groups.

During the 1970s, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist "theory" occupied the commanding heights of social science and humanities departments throughout the West. Since then, this type of theory has, if anything, only strengthened its grip, contributing greatly to the cultural isolationism of teachers and students, not to mention their self-righteousness. And while the vast majority of academics whom I know are punctilious about their private moral obligations, it cannot be for the good of the humane sciences that individual conscience is almost never recognized as a matter worth noticing in "serious" research.

The influence of elite notions is, of course, impossible to calculate. There's an old joke about a woman who is too sick to go to church one Sunday. When her husband returns from the service, she asks him how it went. "Do you want the good news or the bad news?" he inquires. "Give me the bad news first," she says. "All right," he continues; "the minister preached nothing but heresy." "Good heavens," she exclaims, "what news could be 'good' after that?!" "Well," he replies, "nobody was listening." The same may be true about the post-communist ideas I'm discussing. Yet, as we know, one misbegotten piece of "authoritative" advice can wreck the economy of an African nation.

It is time for intellectuals to be reminded of what the world can become when certain kinds of ideas are acted out by people who really mean business. The story of that world is vigorously and cogently told in "Stalin's Folly." Mr. Pleshakov's other fine books, "The Flight of the Romanovs" and "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), provide the story with an appropriate before and after.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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