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ences and seminars has exaggerated the achievements of communism and
belittled its failures. While Lenin's mistakes and Stalin's crimes were not
denied, it was argued that by and large, and in a long-term perspective,
these were less significant than the political, social, and economic
achievements of the communist regimes.
Such misjudgments have been by no means limited to the left; they
have extended to the political and academic establishment, the media,
and even Western intelligence - as shown, until very recently, by the er–
roneous estimates of the Soviet and East European economies. The doc–
trine of equidistance between East and West was fashionable, and in the
1970s it became bad form to use the term "totalitarianism" in the
political discourse about the Soviet system. Even today this is widely
considered a "loaded," that is to say "propagandistic," term.
In
the
Soviet Union, firsthand experience has lent wide currency to
"totalitarianism," and comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism are
considered perfectly legitimate even among Communist Party members.
Many such examples could be adduced: Soviet and East European
comments on their recent history and on Marxist and radical ideology
are far more outspoken and truthful today than those still heard in
Western circles.
Why should Western thinking have been mistaken so often? This is
a question of considerable importance that will be studied in the years to
come. Yet it would be quite unrealistic to assume that events in the So–
viet Union and Eastern Europe will produce a collective admission of
guilt in Western revisionist thought. To own up to mistakes is a painful
process, and, just as in daily life many prefer to think of justifications and
excuses for their past behavior rather than admit error, many will think
very hard of reasons why they might have been right after alL This kind
of reaction is true even in the natural sciences, where ideology and po–
litical bias play only a minimal role . Max Planck, of quantum theory
fame, once noted that the great controversies in the history of science
have not been resolved by persuasion and admissions of mistakes but by
the disappearance of the party which happened to be wrong. Since many
"revisionists" are in their forties in age, the day of reckoning may be
some considerable time off. A visit to almost any university bookstore in
the United States and in Great Britain tends to show that, to give but
two examples, Isaac Deutscher's
Stalin
(first published in 1949) and
Geoffrey Barraclough's
Introduction to Contemporary History
(published in
the early 1960s) are still used as basic textbooks for new generations of
students. Their teachers obviously grew up with these books, and it does
not make the slightest difference that these books were proved hopelessly
wrong in the light of what has happened since then in the Soviet Union
and the third world.
