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The Soviet Archives and Wikileaks
My piece at City Journal, Fruits from the Tree of Malice, is an update to the article I wrote last year about the hidden Soviet Archives.
In the Spring 2010 issue of City Journal, I described an archive of documents from Soviet government agencies smuggled to the West by the Russian researcher Pavel Stroilov and the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. These documents, I noted, were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.
Yesterday, Okan sent me a link to this piece describing the reaction of the editors at the New York Times and the Guardian to the revelation of the existence of the Wikileaks cache:
“…an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested?I was interested.”
Okan asked a question so obvious I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t ask it first. Of course it should have occurred to me immediately:
Why no such interest in the Soviet archives?
Published in General
Right on, Claire. We celebrated too early the end of the Cold War. The effects of Soviet diplomacy, misinformation and propaganda are still powerful. So much for our Partners in Peace.
Thanks for reminding us of these documents. If you deny greatness, then please accept Terrific!
Why no such interest? Because solipsism is the soul of liberalism. The narcissistic belief that we are somehow responsible for everything bad that happens is comforting in that the solution to all problems lies simply in controlling our own behavior. It is akin to the co-dependent logic of the child of an alcoholic: “daddy drinks because I’m bad.” It provides an illusion of control in an otherwise chaotic world. Acknowledging real evil, on the other hand, means allowing that there are forces out there that are amenable only to realistic –and therefore complex and difficult– responses, and indeed may be beyond any practical solution at all. When the solipsistic mind runs up against a large and immovable fact like the Soviet Union, the alternate strategy is denial.
Claire,
I assume your question is rhetorical.
Why no such interest? Because the Guardian and the New York Times have no desire to besmirch the reputation of their late ideological compatriots.
1.) Damning information tends to be sought by those to whom the information is useful. Neither the Guardian nor the New York Times have a bone to pick with ex-Soviet leaders, so they don’t care about information that indicts them.
2.) We “know” how bad Soviet socialism was. More people are concerned with the covert activity of an actual government than with that of a defunct government.
Maybe they worry about how many times and in what context the name ‘Sulzberger’ will appear in those archives.
Or maybe they worry there will be a note from the 1950s mentioning how the GRU (military intelligence) managed to turn a young Annapolis grad from the US state of Georgia who was in Adm. Rickover’s nuclear propulsion program. Given the course of history from the 1970s on, that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
And no dough. And this isn’t from the usual suspects, but this is the peso with the say-so. Yup, the NYT , si claro ? Like that dog Duranty returning to his own vomit. Assange has to be about the benjamins. Thanks for reminding people about Ashton. The Venona Papers are free too, but few have perused them on their own time.
2.) We “know” how bad Soviet socialism was. More people are concerned with the covert activity of an actual government than with that of a defunct government. ·Jan 27 at 5:11pm
I think some hypothetical “hidden Nazi archives” might get some interest, don’t you?
Mike LaRoche: Why no such interest? Because the Guardian and the New York Times have no desire to besmirch the reputation of their late ideological compatriots.
Entirely correct, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Fellow-travelers don’t rat, Claire; it’s in The Code. Watch any mob movie, you’ll see.
Does making these Soviet archives public advance the cause of socialism?
Besides they might turn up another Walter Duranty.
I thought the obvious question was:
Why aren’t the Soviet documents hosted by Wikileaks? I thought the whole point of the website was to host exactly these kinds of lone whistleblower documents (unless Assange is now dictating what gets hosted and what gets turned down).
Also, why doesn’t Wikileaks sic their team of volunteers and translators onto Stroilov’s cache?
BTW, Claire, I neglected to say that I think you are just about the greatest person in the world for harking back to these documents.
[I have bever used the verb to hark before in my life, and probably will never use it again.]
Claire, they don’t want to upset what remains of the “red scare” myth: the idea that communist paranoia in the 50s and 60s was unjustified (now-declassified KGB documents clearly show it was).
The fact that Joseph McCarthy was justified (though partisan) undermines their meme of right-wing paranoia, fear and superstition.
Is this the same archive where the Ludwig von Mises lost papers came from? These were recovered and translated (196 “large files”) and compiled in a massive Mises biography. I’m reading it right now…dry, but fascinating.
It has long been a consternation to me that the crimes of the Soviet Union never rated the same indignation reserved for the nazis.
Why no interest in the Soviet archives? I think we perceived the Soviet threat (my baby-boom generation, anyway) as a kind of distant abstraction. Our conflicts were carried out by proxy and, eventually we became the bad guys in the narrative. We thought Reagan was a nut-job to pronounce them evil. The worst villain was not Josef Stalin – it was Joe McCarthy. Don’t forget that military-industrial bunch, stirring up fear to make a buck.
The closed nature of Soviet society kept us from knowing the truth and our own navel-gazing nature didn’t arouse much curiosity.
We were anti-anti communists. It sounds so egalitarian, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. And they are so equal. Equal, equal, equal. Sounds good; what’s the big deal?
Now we have to admit we were wrong and the reactionaries were right? I don’t think so. Just forget about it; it doesn’t matter anymore anyway… no one cares…
When you’re done with those Soviet documents, and having written a book about Margaret Thatcher, I wonder if you would consider writing a book about Sir John James Cowperthwaite, financial minister of Hong Kong from 1961-1971. His was the wisdom that built Hong Kong’s prosperity and he did it against constant opposition from the British socialists. If not for Cowperthwaite they would have sewn the seeds of poverty in Hong Kong much the way they did in Kenya and India.
I’m not sure whether Thatcher was inspired by Cowperthwaite, but she might have been. I don’t think there exists a good book telling his story, and it’s a good story.
Michael Labeit: 1.) Damning information tends to be sought by those to whom the information is useful. Neither the Guardian nor the New York Times have a bone to pick with ex-Soviet leaders, so they don’t care about information that indicts them.
2.) We “know” how bad Soviet socialism was. More people are concerned with the covert activity of an actual government than with that of a defunct government. ·Jan 27 at 5:11pm
That’s the point I made in the first article–of course it would.
You know I’m interested, but then again, I’ve never been on the pulse of popular opinion.
Most have forgotten or have never made the extra effort to understand it’s significance then and now. Nazism was a slam dunk… bad. Communism… hmm, but it was such a NICE idea! Especially since right-wingers hated it so much.
The only funny thing that pops up fairly often is seeing the reactions of people when Russia acts up on the international stage; “Oh, there go those Commies again.” Uh, not quite, but if you don’t like what the Russian Government is doing, I’ll just let it be for now.
[I have bever used the verb to hark before in my life, and probably will never use it again.] ·Jan 27 at 6:10pm
It’s kind of you to say, but I don’t think this says how great I am: It was Stroilov and Bukovsky who took terrible risks to bring those papers to the world. Bukovsky spent the prime of his life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital because he insisted upon speaking the truth. Their claim to greatness seems quite a bit stronger than mine, to say the least.
And my point–in the second article–is that the Soviet empire is not so defunct as we think. It continues to shape the modern world, even in death.
Paul A. Gregory and the Hoover Institution produced a neat, attention-getting collection of highlights of some of the Soviet Archives released in the 90s (are they the same ones you’re talking about, Claire?). They gave the book the fetching title Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales From the Secret Soviet Archives. The copy I ordered arrived in the mail just 2 days ago, as it so happens.
Looks like they intended the book for a mass audience, by focusing on the most amazing, shocking stories. (The book is only about 150 pages.) This book needs more attention. I did my part and bought a copy; hows about the rest of you knuckleheads?
I did my part and bought a copy; hows about the rest of you knuckleheads? ·
With Ricochet I have no time for mere books! That’s the past, man; this is the present, the now!
(I did just read the sample chapter though…)
Just got it. Man, that Kindle thing is magic!
I read the article in City Journal (where some of the finest essays published today appear) when it was published and was fascinated. Writing about the papers was a brilliant idea.
I have an idea about the papers and their exposure to the world that I will advance soon in a Member’s Feed. I shall welcome the comments of any and all of you about it.