HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
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them, let alone the Chinese
Public Security Bureau,
more likely to be
taken for an agency dealing with matters of insurance or health than one
dedicated to crushing political nonconformity.
Among these differences we should also point to the respectability of
what might be called "Purge Revisionism" - the effort to reduce
retroactively the number of the victims of the Soviet mass murders of the
1930s and otherwise redefine the meaning of these events. These academic
revisionists, although criticized by some, were not ridiculed or read out
of the scholarly community. Purge revisionism has been far more accept–
able and respectable than Holocaust revisionism. The latter is not taken
seriously in academic circles or by the media. Holocaust revisionists have
generally been treated with well-deserved contempt and relegated to the
realm of cranks and frauds.
A recent collection of essays edited by
J.
Ash Getty and Roberta
Manning,
Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives,
is especially revealing precisely
from the standpoint of the moral response to such matters, reflected in
the interpretation of the outrages in question. The pursuit of detach–
ment that emerges brings back a remark Czeslaw Milosz made in
The
Captive Mind
forty years ago, "From the moment we acknowledge his–
torical necessity to be something in the nature of a plague, we shall stop
shedding tears over the fate of the victims. A plague or an earthquake do
not usually provoke indignation. One admits they are catastrophes, folds
the morning paper and continues eating breakfast."
What one finds in the new causal analysis, if not exactly an evoca–
tion of "historical necessity," is certainly akin to a plague or an earth–
quake. Getty and his colleagues are anxious to diminish both Stalin's
personal responsibility for the terror
and
that of the politicalsystem he
created; they consider it a mistake to seek "the origins of Stalinist terror
in the person of the deranged dictator, the 'administrative system' of the
time or the very nature of Leninism." What then are we left with?
It
is a
peculiarly diffuse explanation of these events by which a moral focus or
definition is removed. Getty and William Chase wrote, "When the ter–
ror erupted in 1936-37, it quickly went out of control, chaotically re–
flecting personal hatreds and propelling itself with fear. Explanations of
the terror ... should be supplemented by approaches that account for
lack of coordination, local confusion and personal conflicts."
Insofar as the terror was "uncoordinated" it does reduce the respon–
sibility of the political system, as do the "local confusion" and "personal
conflicts" which contributed to it. Earlier in the same volume Getty and
Manning suggest (referring to the writing of another of the revisionists)
that "Stalin .. . Ezhov and highly placed NKVD operatives sincerely be-
