Vines & Fig Trees for All!, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-03-21 Mo
First: Vines & Fig Trees for All!
I Am Provoked by the Excellent Ezra Klein Show Interview on Foreign-Policy “Realism”, with Emma Ashford:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-emma-ashford.html>
My big problem with foreign-policy realism is nicely encapsulated by a scene in Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus of Epirus <https://archive.org/details/plutarchslives03unkngoog/page/344/>—the one in which Pyrrhus’s advisor Kineas asks him what he will do after; after, that is, Pyrrhus has waged war to the utmost, defeated Rome and forced it to be his ally, become king of southern Italy and Sicily, conquered Kart-Hadesht, and then used the resources of this western empire to dominate Hellas and Makedon. What will Pyrrhus do then after?
Plutarch recounts:
Then Pyrrrhus smiled upon him and said: “We shall be much at ease, and we'll drink bumpers, my good man, every day, and we’ll gladden one another’s hearts with confi- dential talks.”
And now that Kineas had brought Pyrrhus to this point in the argument, he said: “Then what stands in our way now, if we want to drink bumpers and while away the time with one another? Surely this privilege is ours already, and we have at hand, without taking any trouble, those things to which we hope to attain by bloodshed and great toils and perils, after doing much harm to others and suffering much ourselves."
By this reasoning of Kineas, Pyrrhus was more troubled than he was converted; he saw plainly what great happiness he was leaving behind him, but was unable to renounce his hopes of what he eagerly desired…
Realists say that states have interests and rationally behave in order to accomplish things that promote those interests in the anarchy that is international relations. But who is this “state”? How does it think? And what are its interests?
Even when the state is unproblematically a single guy—Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, hoped-for Emperor of the Western Mediterranean and hegemon over Hellas and Makedon—what his interests are and what rational behavior is are very knotty questions. Pyrrhus probably did not think his interest was to be killed in battle at 46, let alone killed by an old woman—killed by a tile thrown down on his neck from a surrounding roof by the mother of the warrior he was currently fighting hand-to-hand. “ I do not like wars,” said Elizabeth I Tudor. “They have uncertain outcomes.”
And as we move away from a king who wants glory, prestige for his prowess at conquest, respect from others, and “security”, things become even knottier. Is a state’s interest to see everybody in all other states worship God the right way, so that they will have rather than lose their chance at Heaven? Perhaps a state has an interest in waging commercial wars to engross monopolies so that the treasure from foreign trade flows through it and makes its citizens rich, but even then the question is: which citizens get the wealth, and what induces others to go along, and is that really the interest of the “state”, whatever that thing may be?
Max Weber believed that the German state had an interest in having peasants descended from Germans living in the Oder Valley, rather than have the peasants move to higher-paying jobs in Hamburg and Frankfurt-am-Mein:
German peasants and day-labourers of the East are not being pushed off the land in an open conflict by politically-superior opponents. Instead, they are getting the worst of it in the silent and dreary struggle of everyday economic existence, they are abandoning their homeland to a race which stands on a lower level, and moving towards a dark future in which they will sink without trace…
And that the German state had interests in advancing a German view of the decisive questions of history:
The question... is not 'how will human beings feel in the future' but 'how will they be'.... Our successors will not hold us responsible before history for the kind of economic organization we hand over to them, but rather for the amount of elbow-room we conquer for them in the world.... The ultimate and decisive voice should be that of the economic and political interests of our nation's power, and the vehicle of that power, the German national state...
And, presumably, that power needs to be wielded to ensure that humanity in the future partakes of some Germanic essence, and not (or not merely?) of Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Romance essences.
One might say that the most “realistic” take on international relations is to recognize the vanity of striving for ever-more power so you can die with your neck crushed by a tile thrown from a roof, or striving to kill people so that those remaining will worship God like they should, or killing people so that the future is inhabited by a greater proportion of people of German descent, or even so that more non-Germans in the future will think like Germans. One might even say that it is “realistic” to note that production and trade is probably a better way to gain from the wealth of others than by a conquest which blows much of that wealth up.
And were one to say that, I would not say nay.
I would, in fact, say that when you ask what is the interest of a state, the Prophet Micah got it right. A state’s interest is to work to bring this to pass:
The law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid…
Vines and fig trees for everyone! A taco truck on every corner! Be excellent to each other!
“Realism” is most unrealistic in how it never grapples with the question of by what warrant and how each anarchic state’s “interests” are constructed. And without that, it is barren. And stupid.
One Video: At the End of Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome:
SAVANNAH: This you knows. The years travel fast. And time after time I've done the Tell. But this ain't one body's Tell. It's the Tell of us all. And you got to listen it and ‘member. 'Cause what you hears today, you got to tell the newborn tomorrow.
I's looking behind us now, into history back. I sees those of us that got the luck and started the haul for home. It lead us here and we was heartful 'cause we seen what there once was. One look, and we knewed we'd got it straight. Those what had gone before had knowing of things beyond our reckoning… even beyond our dreaming. Time counts and keeps counting. And we knows now… finding the trick of what’s been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our track. We got to travel it. And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna lead.
Still and all, every night we does the Tell… so that we 'member who we was and where we came from.
But most of all we ‘members the man who finded us… him that came the salvage. And we lights the city. Not just for him… but for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there’ll come a night… when they sees the distant light… and they'll be coming home.
One Picture: The Largest Fig Tree I Could Find on the Internet:
Very Briefly Noted:
Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You <https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/>
David Glasner: Eight Recurring Ideas in My Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: ‘Lapses from full employment result from substantial and widespread disappointment of agents’ expectations of future prices. The only—or at least the best—systematic analytical approach to the study of such lapses is the temporary-equilibrium approach introduced by Hicks in Value and Capital… <https://uneasymoney.com/2022/03/17/eight-recurring-ideas-in-my-studies-in-the-history-of-monetary-theory/>
Ezra Klein & Emma Ashford: Transcript <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-emma-ashford.html>
Jonathan Spyer: In the Russia-Ukraine War, the Contest for Kyiv Continues: ’Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine’s capital intensifies as the city’s defenders prepare to defend it…. The Russian goal appears to be to surround the major cities of Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, and to render them uninhabitable… <<The Russian goal appears to be to surround the major cities of Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, and to render them uninhabitable>>
Procopius: The Secret History of the Court of Justinian <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12916/pg12916.html>
Adam S. Posen: The End of Globalization?: ‘What Russia’s War in Ukraine Means for the World Economy… <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2022-03-17/end-globalization>
David French: What the Russia Invasion Teaches Us About Right-Wing Logic: ‘Contrarians aren’t critical thinkers. They’re gullible reactionaries, vulnerable to conspiracy theories… <https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/6234aa276c90860020516e75/republican-conspiracy-russia-ukraine/>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Andrej Karpathy: ’I don’t think a regular person appreciates how insane it is that computers work. I propose we stare at each other mind-blown for about 1 hour/day, in small groups in circles around a chip on a pedestal, appreciating that we can coerce physics to process information like that… <
Rob Lee: ’One of my big takeaways.. how important small unit leadership and competency is…. Dispersion, initiative, and decentralized execution… and… better NCOs…
Ukraine Memes: ’Every infantry initiative that the Marine Corps has been pushing … is having its tremendous value demonstrated every single day…. Optics, suppressors, NVG, ISR, thermals, anti-tank, anti-air. All… <
Paul Krugman: ’Real interest rates… [calculated using] the inflation rate starting some time in the future…. That makes a big difference when inflation expectations are… front-loaded…
Matthew Yglesias: Taking Putin’s Ideas Seriously (& I Guess Literally, too)
Director’s Cut PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
Paragraphs:
Back just after World War I, when the U.S. had double-digit inflation, Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz judged that the Federal Reserve had moved too far (although too late) when it hiked its discount rate from 3.75% up to 7%—that a smaller, earlier rate hike would have been much, much better. The underlying logic behind their position is very close to what Paul Krugman is saying here, and I think that is sound:
Paul Krugman: ’Real interest rates… we need to be especially cautious in interpreting them…. Inflation expectations are very front-loaded…. And real interest rates are low mainly because of short-run inflation expectations…. We can observe more or less 1 and 2 year real rates as well as the usual 5 and 10…. What both market breakevens and consumer expectations say is that people expect high inflation for the next year plus, but receding to something not much above previous normal after that. So how should we think about real interest rates given that?… Which maturity of rates to look at… clearly longish: interest rates mainly matter for long-lived investments, so… the 10-year rate rather than Fed funds that matters…. But even 10-year real rate is very low; does this give a strong incentive to engage in real investment? You need to think about the actual process of real investment…. Imagine developers considering borrowing money to build new structures on spec…. They get to invest not at today’s prices, but at prices some months, maybe >1 year out…. The inflation rate that we should be using to estimate real borrowing costs isn’t the inflation rate starting today. It’s the inflation rate starting some time in the future…. That makes a big difference when inflation expectations are, as I said, extremely front-loaded…
LINK:
Jason is right to talk about real interest rates, but I think we need to be especially cautious in interpreting them right now. Longish, wonkish thread, with obvious bearing on policy debates, but for now I want to stress the analytical issues 1/The real ten year Treasury is still very, very low--just as low as it was when Powell pivoted. This rate matters a lot more than the nominal Fed fund rate that the Fed controls. The steps above would probably move it to merely being low. https://t.co/1aCAOo1YydJason Furman @jasonfurman
A very smart oldie-but-goodie. “Alienation” in the Marxist sense is not merely a market phenomenon, but is rather characteristic of any very large-scale human division of labor, no matter how mediated:
Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: ‘Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming. But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy… a thoroughly democratic polity… can be just as much of a cold monster…. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends…
LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/>
I am not sure this is right: I do not think Lenin could have enforced a mass Russification policy throughout the USSR had he wanted to. Matt greatly overestimates, I think, the strength and control of the early USSR, and greatly underestimates the strength of nationalism as it had developed in the 1800s. Stalin, of course, is a different bowl of borscht:
Matthew Yglesias: Taking Putin’s Ideas Seriously (& I Guess Literally, too): ‘Lenin…thought he was leading a worldwide communist revolution in which the Russian Soviet Federal Republic and Ukrainian Soviet Federal Republic would soon be joined by Hungarian and Polish and German and French SFRs. SFRs everywhere, SFRs for everyone. So rather than promoting Russification through early Bolshevik mass education, Lenin instituted a policy he called Korenizatsiya (nativization)…. Some of this involved making up new written standard forms for languages that never had them. But Ukrainian did have a literary standard and a corpus of works, and the Bolsheviks supported it robustly…. The timing of korenizatsiya intersected in an important way with the timing of industrialization and urbanization in Ukraine. At a critical period, instead of using mass education to Russify Ukrainian-speaking peasants, it was used to Ukrainianize Russophone city-dwellers…. Stalin rolled back parts of korenizatsiya in the 1930s and promoted strong Russification…. Khrushchev… shifted Crimea from Russia into Ukraine… a favor to the Ukrainian branch of the party (an important part of his power base), not a concession to Ukrainian national identity. On the contrary, the idea that you could just transfer a bunch of Russophone communities into a Ukrainian jurisdiction with no follow-up effort to Ukrainize them underscores the extent to which the postwar Soviet Union just continued the Tsarist policy of not taking Ukrainian national identity seriously…. The point of all this is that while Putin’s insistence that Ukrainian isn’t a real national identity is very strange when viewed from the outside, it’s not particularly eccentric. Lots of very psychologically normal people believe weird stuff…. There really is something unhinged about looking at people who say they’re Ukrainians and saying “no, sorry, you’re actually Russians.” All the historical and linguistic analyses in the world can’t argue people out of the position that they have a distinct national and ethnic identity. None of these things are “real” anyway…
LINK:
It is just crazy how much our sources from the ancient world are a combination of bureaucratic chicken-scratchings, complaints that senators don’t get enough respect these days, and the equivalent of the National Enquirer. These are not even the wildest excerpts from Procopius’s Secret History:
Procopius: The Secret History of the Court of Justinian: ‘She often went to a supper at which each one paid his share, with ten or more young men, in the full vigour of their age and practised in debauchery, and would pass the whole night with all of them. When they were all exhausted, she would go to their servants, thirty in number, it may be, and fornicate with each one of them; and yet not even so did she quench her lust. Once she went to the house of some great man, and while the guests were drinking pulled up her clothes on the edge of the couch and did not blush to exhibit her wantonness without reserve. Though she received the male in three orifices she nevertheless complained of Nature for not having made the passage of her breasts wider, that she might contrive a new form of coition in that part of her person also…
LINK: <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12916/pg12916.html>
Procopius: The Secret History of the Court of Justinian: ‘Often, even on the stage, she stripped before the eyes of all the people, and stood naked in their midst, wearing only a girdle about her private parts and groin; not because she had any modesty about showing that also to the people, but because no one was allowed to go on the stage without a girdle about those parts. In this attitude she would throw herself down on the floor, and lie on her back. Slaves, whose duty it was, would then pour grains of barley upon her girdle, which trained geese would then pick up with their beaks one by one and eat. She did not blush or rise up, but appeared to glory in this performance; for she was not only without shame, but especially fond of encouraging others to be shameless, and often would strip naked in the midst of the actors, and swing herself backwards and forwards, explaining to those who had already enjoyed her and those who had not, the peculiar excellences of that exercise. She proceeded to such extremities of abuse as to make her face become what most women’s private parts are: wherefore her lovers became known at once by their unnatural tastes, and any respectable man who met her in the public streets turned away, and made haste to avoid her, lest his clothes should be soiled by contact with such an abandoned creature, for she was a bird of ill-omen, especially for those who saw her early in the day. As for her fellow-actresses, she always abused them most savagely, for she was exceedingly jealous…
LINK: <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12916/pg12916.html>
Subject: The USSR in Historical Perspective
More from the current draft of my four-times-longer-than-it-can-possibly-be “Behind the Iron Curtain” forthcoming lecture:
6.1.6. The Terrors of Stalin
6.1.6.1. Stalin Chose the Party & the Party Chose Stalin: Lenin had named Stalin general secretary after the Civil War. It was seen, by both Lenin and his inner circle, as a boring job, a simple job, a job for someone with a good work ethic who was committed to the party but otherwise without great gifts. Stalin’s control of personnel was a more powerful weapon than Lenin or any of the others had realized.
Among Lenin’s failings was that his late-in-life scribbled warnings were insufficient. In the end, Lenin failed to use his prestige to anoint a successor. He refused to set up mechanisms by which the will of the people, or even of the industrial proletariat, could be ascertained. He failed to attend to this “detail,” which would indeed prove to be of “decisive importance.”
So the party would choose Lenin’s successor. And who was the party? The party was people. And who had chosen the people? Stalin. Recruitment drives brought the party membership up to 1 million. It was the general secretary—Stalin—who appointed local committee secretaries. Local secretaries appointed those who screened incoming members, and who chose the delegates to the Communist Party congresses—who would then do as their patron’s patron suggested.
And their patron’s patron was Stalin.
After Lenin’s death and a three-year interregnum, the party fell into line and accepted Joseph Stalin in the driver’s seat in 1927.
6.1.6.2. Was a Different Path Possible?: There might have been another path. It was not foreordained that the Soviet Union would turn into a terror-ridden prison camp. But Lenin’s refusal to plan for succession or create mechanisms for any form of normal politics within the Communist Party meant that Russia was likely to fall back into an old political pattern. It meant that Soviet Russia was likely to acquire a czar. And in a time of turmoil and troubles, a czar was likely to behave like the Rurik dynasty’s Dread Ivan IV—in modern English, “the Terrible” misses the mark. The czar they got was the Dread Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Dzhugashvili: a paranoid psychopath, and one of the leading candidates for the greatest mass-murderer in human history.
6.1.6.3. Stalin Rising: Stalin had turned to revolutionary politics after being expelled from an Orthodox seminary. He was exiled to Siberia four times. All four times he escaped, and returned to Georgia. To some this seemed suspicious. How did he escape so easily? And why was he not afterwards afraid to return to his old stomping grounds? Trotsky and others would later come to claim that Stalin had spent his time before World War I as an agent provocateur who spied on the communists for the Okhrana, the czar’s secret political police.
No matter. In 1912 Lenin needed somebody to stir up agitation at the fringes of the empire, and he chose Stalin. Stalin was the first major Bolshevik to return to what was then the capital—St. Petersburg or Petrograd—after the fall of the czar in 1917. Lenin gave Stalin the post of editor of the party newspaper, Pravda. During the Civil War he was responsible for trying to cement the revolution among the same ethnic minorities he had agitated earlier that decade. As party general secretary, Stalin determined who would be in the party, which meant who and what would be the party. After World War II East German playwright Bertolt Brecht observed that the ideal of his really-existing socialist masters would be if they could “dissolve the people, and elect another”. As far as the party membership was concerned, their ideal was Stalin’s reality.
It is no surprise then that Stalin came out on top, though he acquired many enemies in the process. Nor is it surprising that a paranoid personality like Stalin with many enemies, including powerful ones, took the next steps he did.
Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack in 1926, before Stalin had consolidated power. Stalin shot all the others whom Lenin had mentioned in his testament, save for Leon Trotsky and perhaps Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Trotsky was exiled. He was then killed by Soviet secret police in Mexico City in 1940—with an icepick. Perhaps Ordzhonikidze managed to shoot himself before the secret police could. We do not know. But, in short, Stalin silenced, and then executed, all of his former peers. And he promoted to the second rank of power people who were utterly dependent on him, and who served—and kept their lives—at his whim.
6.1.6.4. The Holodomor: Stalin claimed that the scissors crisis had been caused by a few bad apples: the kulaks, rich peasants who he thought were holding back their grain in order to extort unfairly high prices. The kulaks, he said, were the problem.
No kulaks, no problem.
The government determined that it would have to do something about these peasants—the ones they believed were producing a surplus of agricultural products and yet were unwilling to deliver it up to the party. The solution? Confiscate their land and animals and force them onto collective farms along with other peasants. Tighten down their standard of living, though, so it would be a little bit worse than the others. The other peasants would be happy, the party thought: only the kulaks would be upset—and their resistance could be handled. Thereafter, the entire agricultural surplus could be taken to the cities, with no need to supply the countryside with any consumer goods at all.
The government was wrong.
Some 94 percent of the Soviet Union’s twenty-five million peasant households were gathered into state and collective farms, averaging some fifty peasants per farm. Many peasants were shot; others died of famine. During the 1930s, millions were exiled to Siberian prison labor camps. Perhaps fifteen million died. Agricultural production dropped by a third. The number of farm animals in the Soviet Union dropped by half.
Were there any benefits to the policy? Not likely. Food for the cities could have been obtained—more food on better terms—by devoting a share of urban industrial production to consumer goods that farmers would find useful and buy. Serfdom is not a very efficient way of squeezing food out of the countryside—especially if the peasants see the serfdom coming and slaughter their animals and eat them before the government bureaucrats arrive to take them. It would have been far more efficient to have kept millions of people who were killed alive (was it two million? five? fifteen?) and engaged them in trading their agricultural goods for consumer products.
6.1.6.5. Forced Industrialization: That there was a better way to have obtained results doesn’t mean the Bolsheviks didn’t obtain results. During the First and Second Five-Year Plans, Soviet statisticians claimed that industrial production—which had stood 11 percent above its 1913 level in 1928—was some 181 percent higher by 1933, and some 558 percent higher by 1938. Heavy industry had the highest priority: coal, steel, chemicals, and electricity. Consumer goods were to come later, if at all.
The plans consisted of a series of selected objectives—finish this dam, build so many blast furnaces, open so many coal mines—to be achieved whatever the cost. The aim was to build up heavy metallurgy. The task was to acquire—by buying from abroad or making at home—the technology that American heavy industry deployed. In this spirit, a “steel city” was to be built in the Urals, at Magnitogorsk, and supplied with coal from the Chinese border. Without Magnitogorsk, it is hard to see how Stalin could have won World War II, for the factories of western Russia were under German occupation from July 1941 until late 1943. Similarly, dams, automobile factories, and tractor (or tank) factories were all built far to the east of Moscow. That there were far fewer people east of Moscow was a solvable problem.
How was Stalin to get workers to man the new heavy industrial plants—especially since he couldn’t pay them much? The answer was by drafting the population. Internal passports destroyed your freedom of movement. Access to housing and ration books depended on you keeping your job (and satisfying your employer). Satisfying your employer also helped safeguard your life. For there was always the threat of Siberian exile to a concentration camp or a bullet in the neck for those whose bosses accused them of “sabotage.” At the start of the industrialization drive, there were show trials of engineers accused of being “plan-wreckers.”
Squeezing the rural standard of living further produced a mass exodus: as unhealthy and low paid as living in the cities was, for an adult male, being a semi-serf on the collective farm was worse. More than twenty-five million people moved to the cities and the factories during the 1930s. And it worked, in its way. The Soviet Union would go on to outpace Germany and Britain in war weapons production during World War II—and many of the weapons were of acceptable quality. Acceptable, however, was set to a low bar. The Soviet T-34C tank was designed to last for six months and for only twenty-four hours of intensive combat.
The claims of nearly sevenfold growth in industrial production from 1913 to 1940 were significantly exaggerated. Perhaps industrial production in 1940 was (measured using standard techniques) 3.5 times industrial production in 1913. As best as one scholar could estimate, Soviet real national product grew at some 4.5 percent per year, on average, from 1928 to 1958, which was impressive. But the butcher’s bill was immense.
6.1.6.6. Terrors & Great Terrors: Factory workers were shot or exiled to labor camps for failing to meet production targets assigned from above. Intellectuals were shot or exiled to labor camps for being insufficiently pro-Stalin, or for not keeping up. Being in favor of the policies that Stalin had advocated in the previous year, but not in the current year, could also get you killed.
Communist activists, bureaucrats, and secret policemen fared no better. More than five million government officials and party members were killed or exiled in the Great Purge of the 1930s. It is a grim historical irony that the most dangerous place to be in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was among the high cadres of the Communist Party. Of the 1,800 delegates to the party’s 17th Congress, in 1934, fewer than one in ten went on to become delegates to the 18th Congress in 1939. The rest were dead, in prison, or in Siberian exile. The most prominent generals of the Red Army were shot as well. The Communist Party at the start of World War II was more than half made up of those who had been recruited in the late 1930s, and all of them were keenly aware that they owed their jobs—and their status in Soviet society—to Stalin, Stalin’s protégés, and Stalin’s protégés’ protégés.
Because of the poor records kept, we really do not know the full butcher’s bill. We know more about how many cows and sheep died in the 1930s than about how many of Stalin’s opponents, imagined enemies, and bystanders were killed. We do know that the Siberian concentration camps were filled by the millions, again and again and again. The “Gulag Archipelago” grew to encompass millions with the deportation of the kulaks during the collectivization of agriculture. It was filled again by the purges of the late 1930s. It was filled yet again by Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Moldavians, when the Soviet Union annexed those territories on the eve of World War II. Soldiers being disciplined, those critical of Stalin’s wartime leadership, and members of ethnic groups thought to be pro-German were deported during World War II. After the war, perhaps four million Soviet soldiers who had been captured by the Germans and survived Hitler were sent to the Gulag. There they rotted and died.
The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble. . . . Iago was a little lamb. . . . The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. . . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.
6.1.6.7. Is “Totalitarianism” a Useful Concept?: Are fascists and really-existing socialists to be lumped together as “totalitarians”? After all, how much light really shines between the fascist and the really-existing socialist?
A distressing number of people, starting with Mussolini himself, seem to have transited from one to the other directly. That suggests not a left-right political spectrum but rather a horseshoe, or even a color wheel. Red and blue are as far apart in terms of visual wavelengths as colors can be. Yet if you take magenta paint and add a little bit of cyan you get blue; if you take magenta and add a little bit of yellow you get red. George Orwell famously asked, “But aren’t we all socialists?” He was in Barcelona, it was 1937, and the Stalinist-backed socialists were exterminating the Spanish Marxist faction that he had joined when he arrived in the city (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). All the while, Franco’s fascists waited outside the city.
There were important policy differences. As Hermann Rauschning claimed Hitler had said to him, “Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings!” That is to say, really-existing socialism focuses first on control over institutions and commodity flows and only secondarily on control over what people think, say, and do—but we focus first on what people think, say, and do. How profound a difference was this really? And while status inequality was important to really-existing socialists, material inequality and ruling-class luxury was . . . embarrassing. By contrast, for fascists, if material inequality and ruling-class luxury bothered you, it only demonstrated that you were not really with the program.
But do these constitute a difference in species, or just variation within a species properly called “totalitarian”?
Let us bring in as a reference British socialist historian Eric Hobsbawm—a card-carrying communist from before World War II until 1956, thereafter becoming more moderate—who had a couple of asides in his histories that strike me as revealing. The first comes in his 1994 book The Age of Extremes, a history of what he called the short twentieth century, or the period from the start of World War I in 1914 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hobsbawm, writing in his old age, still believed that joining a “Moscow-aligned Communist party” was, for those who desired global revolution, “the only game in town”: “Lenin’s ‘party of a new type’ . . . gave even small organizations disproportionate effectiveness, because the party could command extraordinary devotion and self-sacrifice from its members, more than military discipline and cohesiveness, and a total concentration on carrying out party decisions at all costs,” he wrote. “This impressed even hostile observers profoundly.”
Is there a hair’s breadth of difference between the fascists’ worship of a heroic leader and Hobsbawm’s belief that unthinking obedience to the dictator in Moscow—whoever he might be—who had murdered nearly all of his peers—was praiseworthy, and profoundly impressive? To accept that being a follower meant devotion and self-sacrifice at all costs would absolutely have earned Mussolini’s and Hitler’s approval. “This is a fascist coup” were perhaps the last words of Stalin’s peer Bolshevik Gregory Zinoviev, as Stalin’s henchmen shot him.
6.1.6.8. Utopian Faith is a Helluva Drug: Before the twentieth century, ideology—as opposed to religion—did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get.
My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities—if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago.
Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society’s inability or unwillingness to satisfy people’s Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people’s Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so.
Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people’s rights, and people’s lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it “a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.” The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin’s sociological experiment, saying it would end in “a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.” Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler’s Mein Kampf seriously and literally, “we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a ‘preventive’ war.”
The unlikelihood of success at even slouching towards a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious.
Utopian faith is a helluva drug.
6.1.7. The Soviet Union in World War II
6.1.7.1. Why Did Stalin Initially Ally with Hitler?: Hitler became interested in a—temporary—alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Over the years, even while pursuing a “Popular Front” and “collective security” among non-fascist states to counter fascism in the mid-1930s, Stalin had put out feelers to Hitler. Hitler was not interested. Hitler became interested in a deal with Stalin only in 1939, when he recognized how useful Soviet neutrality would be for his conquest of Poland. Or at least half of it, for now. He and Stalin agreed to split Poland down the middle at the Bug River. Additionally, the Soviet Union got a green light from Germany to annex the three Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Stalin had made the mother of all miscalculations. The pact allowed Hitler to fight three one-front wars in succession—one against Poland, one against Britain and France, and then one against the Soviet Union. Only by the skin of its teeth did the Soviet Union survive until the United States entered the war. US factories and logistical support kept the Soviet Red Army fed, fueled, wheeled, and moving, and the US Army and Air Force made it possible for an Anglo-American force to reenter the main theaters of the war. Much better for the Soviet Union to have fought Germany in 1939 with powerful British and French allies fielding armies on the continent than to face Germany’s undivided attention in 1941, 1942, and the first half of 1943.
It is always difficult to understand Stalin, or indeed anything about the Stalin-ruled Soviet Union. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Churchill called it. It is possible, however, to guess at what the thinking inside Moscow’s Kremlin palace-fortress was:
Q: What is Hitler, comrade?
A: Hitler is a tool of the capitalists, comrade.
Q: Why might Hitler wish to wage an aggressive war against the Soviet Union, comrade?
A: To gain cheap access to our raw materials, comrade, so that his big-business capitalist backers can earn higher profits.
Q: So what happens if we offer him as many of our raw materials as possible at an incredibly cheap price, comrade?
A: Then he will not seek to invade, comrade. He will have no reason to do so.
Q: What will happen then, comrade?
A: What always happens in the highest stage of capitalism, comrade. The big capitalist powers become imperialists, and then they fight terrible wars over markets.
Q: Correct. And after the war is over?
A: We will do what we did at the end of World War I, comrade. We move in and expand the socialist camp.
Q: Therefore our goal, comrade, is?
A: To appease Hitler by providing him with all the raw materials he wants. And then wait for our moment, comrade.
Perhaps Stalin wrongly anticipated a replay of World War I: trench warfare that would lead to a prolonged stalemate on the Franco-German border, during which another generation of young men would be slaughtered, another set of bourgeois countries would exhaust themselves, and another group of countries would become ripe for a Moscow-led communist revolution. What is certain is that Stalin did not recognize the danger of even a temporary alliance with Hitler.
You had not shared Chapter 6 before that I remember. I applaud your treatment of the socialist movement. Recognizing the diversity of the famously fractious movement is important. As a non-socialist you avoid the ideological axe grinding which many treatments of the topic devolve into. I've always disliked the characterization of the Soviet command economy as, "actually existing socialism". It certainly doesn't represent a social system which I would to live in.
Fig trees. Would this be a picture of the one the gardener in yesterday's Gospel offered to cultivate for just one more year before it was cut down for not bearing fruit? :)