American Enterprise Institute

January 24, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

12:00 p.m.	Registration and Luncheon
12:30	Speakers:	Leon Aron, AEI
		Jonathan Brent, Yale University Press
		Ronald Radosh, Hudson Institute
	Moderator:	Michael A. Ledeen, AEI
2:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Michael A. Ledeen:  We are going to begin.  Thank you, all, for coming.  I’m Michael Ledeen, the resident scholar at AEI.  I am in the, one way or another, final stages of the flu so I will be -- I will not speak very much because I can’t.  But I will say that I am delighted that you are here and I am delighted at this panel.  And I can barely think of an event at AEI over the past several years which has so excited and delighted me, and to which I have looked forward which such enthusiasm.  And I’m sure it’s going to be bit as good as my expectations because today we are going to devote two hours to Comrade Stalin, which hardly happens anymore on this side of the water, although, apparently, it is with increasing frequency on the other side of the water.  And I’m sure some of our panelists will talk about it.

The proximate cause for this session is the work that has been done at Yale University Press under the leadership of Jonathan Brent, who is himself a distinguished scholar in this field, having written a terrific book called, Stalin’s Last Crime and has a book coming out, which I think I can pronounce but about which I don’t know nearly enough called, Myshlayevsky’s Chin: A Portrait of Russia from the Soviet Archives.  Basically, what has happened is that Jonathan has laid his hands on previously-unstudied and unanalyzed archival material in Moscow, which includes -- to me the most fascinating thing is Stalin’s Library because it turns out that Stalin was a compulsive marginalia writer.  Who knew? who imagined? - but in any case - that he read books and he thought about books.  And as he thought about them, he scribbled thoughts in the margins.  And as anyone who has worked in archives will tell you, material of this sort, as a general rule, provides remarkable insight into personages, issues, things that are going on that you cannot get at through official archival documents. 

I have spent 15 years of my life in the archives of the Italian fascist state.  Every now and then, I was lucky enough to come across sort of hand-written things, letters, diaries, and so forth.  They were always much, much better than the stuff with official seals and stamps and things on them.  And I just want to make one more point before I tell you the members of the panel and let them get going.  There is an enormous misunderstanding, a great intellectual conceit, which most of us have in the areas of our own expertise, and that is that the basic things are known.  People believe that the basic things are known, certainly, about things that happened half a century ago.  And that most people think that we really do know the basic things about Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. 

But in fact, every year new material is uncovered, which shows us to our great astonishment that even for people who have been so intensely studied as those, there is an enormous amount that we don’t know and a great deal of understanding that we do not yet have.  And so I’m particularly delighted to give you today three people who understand this and whose minds are fresh and will continue to work, and will help bring us up-to-date on recent things that we have learned and, I hope, on things that we think we have yet to learn.

So first will be Jonathan, Jonathan Brent, who has come down from New Haven today, who will tell us, basically, about his project and what is coming out of it and what we can expect to see coming out of Yale on the next several years in this very exciting project.  Then we will hear from Leon Aron, who is a friend and colleague here and a director of Russian studies at AEI.  He is extremely well-known; he is on television all the time when people want to understand Russia.  He wrote a fabulous biography of Yeltsin, which is fundamental to understanding where we are today and his various essays and monographs on Putin and Putin’s Russia are invaluable.  And he will comment on what Jonathan has to say.  And so everybody here knows each other, needless to say.  And so they are not likely to surprise one another, although I hope they will surprise us some. 

And then, Ronald Radosh; Ronnie, I cannot help but call him.  Ronnie and I were schoolmates together at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1890s where he was studying with William Appleman Williams, and I with George Mossy [phonetic].  And we had to have Ronnie because he is the only legitimate former Stalinist on this panel and understands it, so to speak, from the inside.  So this is our panel and you cannot do better.  So we will start with Jonathan and then Leon and then Ronnie, and then, we will hear from you.  Thanks very much.

Jonathan Brent:  Thank you very much.  It is really a pleasure to talk about this project, which, Christian Ostermann reminded me, got started, really, at a panel that was held at Yale University in 1999.  And at that time, two archivists from Russia had come to Yale and were talking about something called Stalin’s personal archive. 

The story behind Stalin’s personal archive is a fascinating one in itself because it began to be assembled shortly after Stalin’s death, simply, with documents that Stalin had kept in his dacha that he considered of particular importance.  So for instance, this very famous letter that Bukharin wrote to Stalin in December 1937 about a month before he was shot, Stalin kept in his dacha.  It is an extraordinary document, a testimony to many things about their personal relationship, about Bukharin himself and so forth. 

But then, after his -- after 1956, additional materials were added to the Stalin Archives - matters of state, matters of dealing with the NKVD and so on and so forth.  And then Gorbachev expanded it even further to include materials going far back into Stalin’s own family life and, in fact, beyond 1953.  Interestingly enough, foreign leaders continued to send condolences to the Soviet Union for Stalin’s death in March 1953 up to 1955.  People, apparently, around the world were just then starting to hear about it in remote corners and they put all of these things in the Stalin Archive as well.

Anyhow, it is quite a big collection of materials - some 40,000 or so documents, over two million pieces of paper.  And it consists of a variety of different opisi as the Russians call it, that is, sections.  And the first is from 1889 to 1953 and these are 5,000 documents written by Stalin.  And it is not well-known which documents ever were written by Stalin and which were composed for him by the Central Committee and then, simply, signed by Stalin.  So documents that were actually written by him are exceedingly important.  Many of these have to do with communication between him and the head of the NKVD. 

Opis 2 is from 1911 to 1944 and these are an additional 151 documents; 2000 pages that have to do with internal politburo matters.  Opis 3 is his library.  And when I went to Moscow recently with a group of scholars to talk about whether the Soviet archive was worth publishing or not -- working on -- it amazed me that the scholars were not at all interested in his library; they had no interest in it whatsoever.  They thought, “They are the books.  It is like a lawyer’s library, just a big row of books that nobody reads and they are just there for show.”  And we had three days of meetings and, finally, on the third day I said, “You know, I wonder:  Did he happen to have a volume of Trotsky in his library?”

And the archivist said, “Well, we will go and have a look.”  And sure enough, the next day, they brought me Trotsky’s History of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin’s edition that was marked up on every page.  And I could not believe my eyes nor could -- although I had suspected something of the sort.  But the scholars I was with could not believe their eyes.  And at the top of some pages, Stalin simply wrote, “Liar. Lies.” And in a big pencil on many pages, he just drew harsh Xs through the material.  But on other pages, he underlined carefully and wrote marginal notes of his reflections on what Trotsky was saying. 

So this got our attention, and I said, “Do you happen to have a copy of Lenin’s State and Revolution,” which, of course, is a fundamental text.  And they said, “No, no, no.  We do not have that.  That is certainly not on the list,” and they showed me the list and it was not on the list.  But something happened - and this gives you a little insight into the way these archives work – something happened that evening and the next morning, they brought out a copy of the State and Revolution.  And this was an extraordinary revelation to me.  It was printed in 1917.  There is evidence to show that he read it in 1917 and not in 1946 when they were writing the short course on the history of the Communist Party.  And the evidence for this is that he marked it up like a graduate student; he marked it up on the -- the front cover was completely covered with this comments; the inside of the front cover was completely covered with his comments; every page had under-linings, marginal notes, directives to himself.  On the back of the inside cover, it is filled with his reflections just the way I marked up any number of books when I was in college. 

And I thought this is really interesting.  Why?  Because it shows a variety of things:  One, the intellectual tenacity that Stalin had; two, the level of detail he was capable of commanding intellectually; three, his desire to learn.  He did not begin with the assumption that he knew everything, and this is a very important thing to know in terms of the sensibility of that man.  He did not begin with the thought that because he had lived with Stalin, worked with Stalin, inherited Stalin, taken over from Stalin, that he knew -- Lenin, I mean -- that he knew what Lenin was all about.

But, in the margin, from time to time, as you read through this you come upon a more astounding detail which is in the margin of the book, he will write, “Style” with a little fine line.  What does that mean?  It means he was reading this not just for content, not just for argument, but he was reading it to learn how to write.  He was reading it to learn Lenin’s style.  He was, in other words, learning how to become a leader; he was training himself.  It is an extraordinary document from a psychological, from a political, from a historical standpoint.

And as I got into this more, I asked for the Bukharin materials that he had, this man whom he so horribly tortured, maligned, and, ultimately, shot.  Well, he held Bukharin clearly in great esteem because every lecture that Bukharin gave, the transcript of which was in this material, was carefully annotated, carefully underlined.  Ideas were argued with back and forth.  He clearly had the utmost respect for that man’s intelligence.  

The consequences of this for understanding Stalin are immense because, unlike Churchill, unlike Roosevelt, unlike many other world leaders, he kept no diary and no one kept a diary of him.  There is the diary of Georgy Dimitrov, but the diary of Georgy Dimitrov is really a slavish work of daily noting down what Comrade Stalin said without commentary.  Putting it in the safe, this is what Dimitrov would do.  He would have his meetings - he was the head of Comintern - and at the end of the day he would simply write in his diary what Stalin said, what Molotov said, what others said.  And then he would put in the safe in the Comintern where he knew once a month Stalin would get it and read it.

So this was not exactly a diary; it was more like a secret communication between him and Stalin.  He had no love letters; he may have had mistresses but there is no correspondence.  There is no correspondence with his wife.  There is no personal correspondence with Molotov.  There is nothing personal that is extant about Joseph Stalin.  It is quite an amazing fact, except for memories -- memoirs of people who wrote things after Stalin had died; there are testimonies of various government leaders.  But very little else.

And what we have here in these materials from this portion of the Stalin Archive is his private thoughts in a private place where he did not think anybody would look.  And so it constitutes the most revelatory of any materials about him, personally, that we have.  Now, I was speaking to a very savvy Russian scholar about this; she is the director, in fact, of the archive of the Central Committee, a very, very important archive in Moscow.  And I was telling her about this remarkable stuff that I was looking at and she was quite exited about it.  And when I said, “He did not think anybody would see it,” she said, “Oh, no.  That is where you are wrong because he thought history would see it.  He believed in history and he thought that after he was dead, people will eventually remember him.  He thought of himself as a historical actor always.”   And this is a very interesting comment about him and I believe it is probably true that he did believe in his legacy.  But that is another issue.

In addition then to these materials of the library, there are some others.  One is Opis 5 to 10; five entire sections of the Stalin Archive are given to congratulatory telegrams that he received on his birthdays and gifts that he received, which were quite extraordinary.  For instance, he received a headdress, an Indian headdress from some chief of an Indian tribe in the United States; he received cigar holders made out of machinegun bullets; he received a telephone receiver made out of a petrified armadillo; he received an amazing fur coat, sent to him by the Furriers’ Union in New York.  He received unbelievable, extraordinary things from all over the world. 

When I went to see these materials, the only think I could think of was the Three Kings bringing their gifts to the Christ child because that was what it was like - all of the world was sending him their bounty.  It is quite an amazing collection and he never paid any attention to any of it.  He had no keepsakes; he never wore that fur coat; he never used those cigar holders; he never used that telephone.  They were all just put in a room someplace because he had no use for them.  He was completely Spartan; he led quite a Spartan life devoid of personal attachments and devoid of personal objects.

Opis 11, however, contains all of his correspondence and this is very important because, whereas Yale University Press published all of the letters between him and Molotov from 1924, I believe, to 1936, the correspondence with Molotov ends abruptly there.  And what then continued from 1936 to 1939 was kept apart from the materials we originally had access to; that is all here.  All of his correspondence with Yezhov is here.  All of his wartime correspondences with FDR and Churchill are here.  His correspondence with Averell Harriman is here.  When I spoke with a historian of World War II about this, he said he had no idea that Harriman had ever corresponded with Stalin.

In addition to this, there are letters -- for instance, I saw a letter from Upton Sinclair to Stalin, dated 1937, in which Sinclair is begging for the life of a young Soviet director with whom he worked in Mexico on a film, and it was quite fascinating to see this.  And this is going to form part of the way we present this material because the presentation of it is so important.

Sinclair writes a letter: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I wish to bring to your attention the case of so and so director with whom I worked in Mexico at such and such a time.  He is a student of Sergei Eisenstein, a very fine man of great literary distinction and extremely a good director.  He has absolutely no interest in politics.  I understand he has been arrested in Moscow.  I beg you to intervene.  Yours sincerely, Upton Sinclair.”  Stalin writes back on a piece of paper like so [Brent folds a napkin in half], in a tiny hand, which is nevertheless, crystal-clear.  And this piece of paper is then transcribed by a typist and the piece of paper is attached with an oversized paperclip to the transcription and placed neatly in the file.  It read as follows: “Dear Mr. Sinclair, Thank you very much for your letter.  After an inquiry, I find that the case you referred to has already been transferred to the necessary authorities who have disposed of it.  Yours sincerely, Joseph Stalin.” 

But he wrote back and he had no hesitation in doing so and he had no hesitation in telling Upton Sinclair exactly what had happened also.  It is very interesting.  And he did it himself; he did not have an underling write that letter - his secretary or some nobody in the bureaucracy.  He wrote it himself.  It is very clear on this little slip of paper.  And this is a fascinating thing about Stalin.

When we looked into the materials in the archive, what we discovered were not only that he annotated books endlessly, but those books which were thought to have been written by the Central Committee -- two important books in particular, The Short Course and the History of the Communist Party, which bears the title page written by the Central Committee, were written by Joseph Stalin.  Those and his biography of which I have various pages here, which if any of you is interested, I would be happy to show you.  But when you look at this, what you see is that he wrote in straight lines, in a very neat, careful hand.  He wrote with precision, he corrected rhetoric, he corrected word choice.  He was as interested in the flow of the rhetoric as he was in the ideas that were being presented.  For him the two were identical.  That is to say, for him form and content had to be identical. 

And this is also a very important thing about him because one of the most important premises of The Short Course, which was written in 1946, I believe -- no, 1937.  It was first published and -- yes, 1937 -- is that it is a history of the struggles of the Communist Party for leadership within the Socialist Movement in Russia.  It is an account of how Lenin won the battle; it is an account of how they established a power.

In that account, what is essential and can easily go unnoticed is the reliance on a very simple Bolshevik tactic, that of centralization.  And he notes this throughout The Short Course that one of the real problems of Russia at the beginning of the century was the fragmentation of the intelligentsia into all kinds of different groups.  And the great thing that Lenin accomplished was that he centralized it.  And how did he centralize it?  He destroyed the Narodniki; he destroyed the Mensheviks; he destroyed Plekhanov.  He destroyed them all.  And he centralized it and he won this great victory.

Now, this is an intellectual commitment of Stalin’s.  There is no question but he believed this and he understood that that is how the Bolsheviks won.  So then, you go forward to World War II, to the Blockade of Leningrad.  And Zhdanov, who is the head of the Leningrad party while the city is blockaded, organizes a defense of the city; he organizes a committee for the defense of the city.  The Nazis are at the gates, the people are in danger of being starved to death, and Zhdanov has only spotty communication with Moscow.  And word gets to Stalin that Zhdanov has organized a committee for the defense of Leningrad.

Now, what does Stalin do?  Does he praise Zhdanov for this initiative?  He writes him a letter and he says, “How dare you take an initiative like this?  Where do you think you are, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?  Do you not know that every decision must be approved by the Central Committee?”

Now, you say to yourself, “This is crazy.  This is lunacy.”  But it is part and parcel of a world view that goes back to his understanding of the need for centralization; that that was a tactic that worked.  The problem is that it worked in 1917 but it perhaps did not work in 1941, perhaps not in 1950, and certainly, by 1991 it no longer worked. 

But this insight into his mind, into his way of thinking, into the connection between his political dicta and his deeply- held ideological and tactical beliefs is, I think, going to be one of the key illuminations of the Stalin Archive project.  And -- am I over time?  Do I have a little time left?

Michael A. Ledeen:  Sure.

Jonathan Brent:  Okay.  We started this in 1999 and we started it because I had made the acquaintance of Alexander Yakovlev in Moscow through my friend, Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov.  Yakovlev had been, as you all know, Gorbachev’s right hand man.  He had engineered pretty much the concept of glasnost and perestroika.  He also performed signal service to Yeltsin at the beginning of the Yeltsin period.  And the consequence of this is that Yeltsin went to Yakovlev.  And Yakovlev told me this story, a little bit like one of those water sprites in a Russian fairytale.  He goes to the peasant and he says, “What may I give you for your help?”  And Yakovlev said, “I want only one thing, and that is to publish the Stalin Archive.”  Yakovlev said, “You have that right.  You have that right.”

However, it was not quite so simple because this material was highly contested by various parties and Yakovlev was not the only one because although Yeltsin gave him the permission, the archive claimed that it owned the material.  And in as much as the archive claimed ownership of the material, it was difficult for anybody to gain access to it.  So this struggle went on for quite some time, and when I at one point asked the head of the whole Russian archival service, Vladimir Petrovich Kozlov, whether it will be possible for Yale to publish this material, he said, “We are not sure who owns it.” 

Furthermore, the image and the legacy of Stalin in Russia has undergone a very important turn over these last 10 years.  And so these Stalin documents, while -- it began as an initiative by Alexander Yakovlev to find a way of blasting through the lies of the Communist system and the Soviet system because here, now, finally, we were going to get the image of the Master.  Now, finally, we were going to be able expose what was at the heart of what Yakovlev considered the greatest criminal enterprise that man had ever undertaken, which was the Bolshevik Revolution, or, as he put it, counterrevolution. 

But now, Yelstin leaves office and Vladimir Putin comes on the scene.  And I’m in Moscow and I am nervous about this and I asked Yakovlev, “Well, what is with the Stalin Archive?  And are we ever going to be able to make this deal?  Because I’m worried that the promise to enable us to publish it will be withdrawn -- the guarantee.”  And he said, “No, Putin has reaffirmed the right to publish this material.”  And to this day Putin has never withdrawn that permission, though the politics of the Stalin Archive have now quite changed.  It is quite clear now that the use of documentation and knowledge of the past is not sufficient to prevent a resurgence of Stalin, Stalinism; if not Stalin and Stalinism, at least a sort of Sovietization of the regime in Russia.

And so the role -- I will not talk about it now but the role that these Stalin materials may be playing within internal Russian politics has become a much more complex affair than it was in 1999 when I first spoke to Alexander Yakovlev about it.

I will end simply by saying that Yale Press intends to digitize all of these materials.  We have received a large grant from the Mellon Foundation to do so.  We are also going to construct a digital platform for these materials so that scholars worldwide will have access to these materials as if they were all sitting around a table together, talking with each other about them.  The image of the original will be put up on the screen.  A transcription of Stalin’s marginalia will be available; a translation of it as well as annotations.

We expect that the building of the platform will be done within two years and that the digitizing of the first big chunk of material will be done within two years, as well.  But the whole project will not be completed for at least another four years.  In the end, once this is done, we will then be able to link these materials to the Comintern Archive and to the Politburo Archive and, also, to the Archive of the Russian Federation, which contains all of the materials about the Gulag.

Therefore, a researcher, a graduate student, anywhere in the world - in Australia, in America, in Timbuktu - will be able to log on to these materials and do research that will enable a scanning of the entire archival system, which is an extraordinary new development in the process of, certainly, research into the history of the Soviet Union.  And our ambition is that, eventually, we are going to be able to take this platform and apply it to a great many other huge databases which will enable scholarship to essentially reach a new phase of development.  So that is all I have to say for now.

Leon Aron:  Thank you very much, Michael.  First of all, I’m marvelously happy, very happy -- an unexpected opportunity to give in person the heartiest thanks to the Yale University Press for the wonderful books published within the Annals of Communism archive project.  And the men behind this mammoth effort -- and I would like to make it clear - it will become even clearer in the course of my chat here - that this is a selfless dedication to giving Russia back its own history.

Unfortunately - and I’m previewing the end of my talk - we are not at the point where Russia could recover its own history on its own.  Doing this on the anniversary of the death of Stalin’s great teacher and buddy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 84 years today, is especially pleasant.  When Nabokov finished his five-volume translation and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, he wrote, I believe, to Wilson because anything with importance was written between Nabokov and Wilson; he wrote, “Russia owes me.”  I think Russia owes Jonathan Brent and I hope that, unlike Nabokov, he will get his thanks in person in this world. 

Now, I hope for this because virtually from the day Stalin died, which will be in about a month and a few days, 55 years, the national conversation about him and about his system and about his rule have been not only and perhaps not so much about Russia’s past as about Russia’s present and Russia’s future. 

And this was very well understood by those who precipitated and led the revolution of ideas and ideals, which is now known as glasnost and about which I’m very happy to be able to be writing a book.  That revolution of ideas and ideals in turn led to the revolution in politics and the economy.  Now, while glasnost began the revolution, glasnost itself was begun literally by an anti-Stalinist allegory, a film by Tengiz Abuladze called Pokayanie or Repentance, which Yakovlev personally and in very heated debate, pushed through the Politburo, in a way, lying to the Politburo that it will be a limited release only.  And they believed him.

There followed at the end of ’86 and first half of ’87, during the time, glasnost was essentially synonymous with the release of several major explicitly anti-Stalinist -- although, of course, they were also great works of literature.  Three works: Anatoly Rybakov's The Children of the Arbat (Deti Arbata), the late Alexander Tvardovsky's poem, Po Pravu Pamyati or In the Name of Memory, and, of course, and perhaps most importantly, what I considered the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, Zhizn’ i Sud’ba, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, who died in 1963 after his novel had been arrested, literally, taken with all the copies and the carbon copies, and after Mikhail Suslov, who was already the chief ideologue under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, told him in a very frank conversation, of which we have diary notes by Grossman, that this novel will not be published in the next 200 years.  So essentially, he died of a broken heart, as well as, sheer poverty because nobody would publish anything that he has written.  This is 1963, mind you; this is still under Khrushchev.

Now, why did they go -- and by “they,” I mean, both the three editors of the liberal literary magazines, the key literary thick -- so called, thick magazines Novy Mir Oktyabr that Znamya at the time, Anatoli Ananiev and Grigory Baklanov.  Why did they and other troubadours of glasnost -- why did they go, first and foremost, after Stalin?  And to the extent that I have discovered up to today, there were several reasons.  One, intensely personal; this was a way to make up for a quarter of a century of silence, and in most of their cases - I’m sorry to admit - complicity with the regime that they started to hate after Khrushchev.  They all considered themselves the children of the 20th Congress, 1956.  They were known as Shesti Desyatniki, those who lived in the ‘60s because they experienced two anti-Stalinist outbursts, 1956 and then 1961/63, the highlight, of which of course, was the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in Novy Mir by Tvardovsky. 

But incredibly, almost incredibly, steep curve of glasnost simply finished what Khrushchev started was soon not all enough. And so glasnost began to dance very quickly outside the perimeter of the Khrushchev’s Thaw and as they proceeded to do so, Stalinism was no longer about Stalin only.  The formerly forbidden word systema, “system” to denote the entire panoply of social political economic realities of the Soviet was coming very fast in increasingly sharp focus because, in essence, this was still the state that Stalin built.

Another flagship of glasnost, the magazine Aganyok, the most popular at that time, wrote in the winter of 1988: “We must understand how we have become non-free.”  And by the way, this digging towards the foundation of the Soviet regime results in the collapse of the founding mythology of the Soviet state and that happened by the end of ’89.  By that time, it was all exposed and collapsed.  And so when the revolution of ’91 would come, only an empty and burned-out shell was left, which Yeltsin sort of kicked aside.  But that is still in the future.

Apart from this intense, personal vengeance, and also these proximate political goals of which they were, by the way, very self-aware, telling the truth about Stalin almost immediately became an aspect of an even more urgent, more ambitious, and in the long run, the main project of glasnost, which is, as a leading Soviet sociologist at that time, Vladimir Shubkin, wrote in 1988, moral education.

Now, a better term of course, would be “moral reeducation,” because after almost a century of Stalin’s rule and another 20 years of Breshnevism, the country was in a horrible, near-fatal moral paralysis, moral debility.  You just peruse at random any materials of glasnost to find that out.  And in fact, if you read Yakovlev’s memoirs, glasnost and perestroika were first and foremost undertaken in order to pull the country out of this moral debility and paralysis.

Frank Fukuyama, in a very fine book called, The Great Disruption, refers to this as a national re-norming, and that is precisely the moral watershed that Russia came to at the end of the 1980s.  So the rise of a new and free and moral Russian state was impossible without the rise of a moral and free man who would be a master of his own life and, therefore, a responsible steward rather than a serf within the system.  And so again, Aganyok wrote in February of ’89, “We must understand finally that only man, incapable of being a police informer, of betraying and of lying, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from a totalitarian state.” 

Yakovlev, incidentally, in his memoirs said that the idea of glasnost, which as far as we know he shared with Gorbachev, was “an attempt to end the immorality of the regime.”  And if you read his wonderful memoir, Sumerki (Twilight), he refers to what happened as revolution, yes.  But more frequently, he refers to it as reformation.

Sakharov, too, I think summarized it wonderfully in the summer of ’89 when he only had a few months to live.  He said that the regeneration of the Soviet society is possible only on a new moral foundation.  There have been tragic deformation of our people because of the terror and the many years of living in lies and hypocrisy.  But I believe that morality is always alive in people.  We are talking not so much of a renaissance but about the moral force that is present in every generation that is capable of growth and that must be given a choice to develop.

And so confronting Stalin and Stalinism was absolutely necessary in order (a) to destroy one of the founding myths of the state, which essentially legitimized mass violence in search or in pursuit of an ideal.  But, secondly, because -- and again, Aganyok was very explicit here: “We have to confront our slavish submissiveness.  We are all victim of Stalinism even if we were not in the gulag camps.  Only by freeing ourselves from this slavish submissiveness, we can change the moral climate in the country.”

And so the still-unacknowledged horrors Stalin visited on Russia had to be recognized in shame and remorse, shattered and wailed over forever and unequivocally condemned and finally, re-creation of a state and society that would never allow the country to be ruled by mass murder.  And this rebirth was not possible without cleansing.  Cleansing was not possible without repentance.  And repentance was not possible without truth about Stalin. 

As many glasnost authors wrote at the time, :  Net pokayania bez otkrovenia.  “There can be no repentance without revelation.”  This, of course, is the language of the Russian Orthodox Church but these echoes of Church Slavonic did not seem out of place because the stakes were so high and because they were talking about the moral fate of their country.

I will give you one more quote from Alexander Yakovlev.  This is one of the most remarkable instances of glasnost.  On August 20th, 1990, Yakovlev appeared on the Soviet television to read a 10-minute speech dedicated to Gorbachev just signing two decrees.  One was about the restoration of the rights of the victims of Stalinism from the 1920s to the 1950s, and the other one invalidated the laws that deprived dissidents of citizenship.  Yakovlev titled his talk, Akty spravedlivosti i pokayania (The Acts of Justice and Repentance).  It is a very short speech but even from there, I just chose a few sentences.  “History,” Yakovlev said, “has not known such a concentrated hatred towards human beings.  When we say that we rehabilitate someone as if benevolently forgiving them for some transgression of the past, it is a hypocrisy.  It is not them that we are forgiving; it is ourselves.  It is we who are to blame for the years during which they were slandered and oppressed.  God saved me from calling for revenge, for a new vicious circle of violence.  But our people must know the names and the deeds of the perpetrators in order to judge them by moral criteria, which our society, having gone through everything imaginable and unimaginable, needs so much.”

I would like to conclude by showing you a few photographs which are among the absolute treasures that I have discovered in the course of this research.  They are from the end of December issue of Aganyok and it is about an event which Aganyok sponsored and which was dedicated to the memory of the victims of Stalin.

The title of the event and the title of the article was Nidelya Sovesti (The Week of Conscience).  Can we have the first picture?  Look at this line.  From morning till night, this is the end of December in Moscow, ’88.  People waited for hours and Aganyok was reporting that there were blizzards, white snow, and piercing cold.  They waited for several hours and in the end, 33,000 people came to this event.  Now, it is hard to imagine in Putin’s Russia today, which is so obviously enveloped in a moral vacuum, corruption, and utter cynicism typical of all post-revolutionary restorations but made even uglier and more vulgar by the intoxication with the oil and gas wealth. 

In that Russia, it is hard to think of this passionate quest for truth, self-knowledge, and moral cleansing.  And imagine this pure and hot flame that kept these people warm while they were waiting for hours.  I very much hope that I could put this on the cover of my book.  Next photograph.  Okay, that is the end of the line; in fact, we cannot see the end of the line.  It goes around the block.  All right.  Once they get into the place, they were met by some of the top members of the Russian creative intelligentsia.  I did not reproduce the pictures - actors, poets, singers, musicians.  Perhaps one of the most revered and popular Russian actors, Mikhail Ulyanov, was there and the poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  But the heart and, of course, the heartbreak of this event was this - what they called “Wall of Memory.” 

Here there are dozens of notes in which the relatives of those murdered and starved and worked to death are placed on the wall in an effort to get anything, any information about their lives or their deaths.  Yes, here are some of them:  “Who knew my father Sergei Alexevich Zaisev?”  And here is another one asking for information about Sergei Ivanovich Makeyev [phonetic], a printer who was arrested in Moscow in 1937, spent two months in the Lubyankan and Buterka [phonetic] Prisons and then lost in the camps.

And if we go on, the next two photographs show the people placing flowers.  This is a collection of money for the memorial of the victims of Stalinist repressions.  And then there is a woman placing a flower, right?  Yes, in that wall.  So to conclude, the latest Russian revolution began with de-Stalinization and it is fitting, although, of course, sad that the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin and Stalinism became the hallmark of the restoration.  We are full-circle.  When you look at the next high school textbook, many of you may have followed that debate where Putin himself like Iosof Kaservionovich dictated of what should and should not be on the book.

We are back to 1984.  We are back to [audio glitch] to Gorbachev’s taking power as far as Stalin is concerned because the official version now is that he was a great leader; he made a few mistakes and the greatest of them and the only one -- the only big one that really counted was the extermination of the political and military elite in 1937-38.  Of course, nothing about 7.5 million peasants, and nothing what happened afterwards, nothing about the Chechens and so on and so forth.

Now, my hope is this -- that it is impossible that this brilliant outburst of intellectual and moral wisdom, this fearless soul-searching that we witnessed in ’87 to ’91, this decency in citizenship are all gone without a trace.  And when the Putin restoration fails, as all restorations fail, and the truth will again be in demand, much of its valuable caches will have been saved and preserved by Yale University Press.  Thank you.

Ronald Radosh:  I would like to thank Michael for putting me on a panel of such distinguished commentators.  As some of you may know, I’m actually a historian of the 20th-century United States, not of Russia.  I have read a lot of Soviet and Russian history and I think my role is essentially to raise some questions that I have thought of in both these presentations.  And we have far more distinguished people here.  Some of them - Stephen Schwartz [phonetic], Steve Austin [phonetic], Jeffrey Herf is a major European historian and, probably, a lot of other people in the audience who should have time to really comment and add their insights.

Leon touched-- and some of the concerns and things I wonder about as I hear this -- how much of this material as it is published by Yale will lead in the direction Leon has suggested and hopefully it will lead to moral restoration.  Or will it enable Putin and others who want to resurrect Stalin as the great nationalist leader?  Will they pick up on things to try and use these to serve their own purposes?  That is one question that emerges. 

As Leon has said, they have written out a lot of the past and what they say now - Stalin made some mistakes but is still a great leader - that is essentially the Chinese Communist line on Mao.  The current Chinese Communist leadership now is 80 percent great, 20 percent bad; they keep changing because sometimes it is 70/30.  But they tell you if you go to China that Mao is a great leader and his photograph still is on Tiananmen Square.  Mao would turn over in his grave if he could see China today but they cannot break with a myth because if they do, it will harm the legitimacy of their own political power and that, of course, they do not want to do. 

And what is striking is -- am I correct or incorrect to say that the polls in Russia - Gallup-type polls - show that a good percentage of the populace once again has a favorable view of Stalin and says, “We wish we can have a government like Stalin --

Leon Aron:  That second part, I’m not sure about that.  Yes, Stalin is admired because he is not known.

Ronald Radosh:  Yeah.  Well -- [audio glitch]

Jonathan Brent:  Can I just add one thing to this?  Can you imagine the name of Adolf Hitler having [audio glitch] Germany as Stalin has in Russia?  It is impossible to imagine.  And yet, today -- I just came back from Moscow.  And a week ago, when I was in Moscow on my trip out of the country, I stopped at the Duty Free Shop.  And there one can buy a box of chocolates that has on the bag a picture of Stalin at the head of the ship of state staring with a benign and confident expression into a stormy future.

Ronald Radosh:  Are they good chocolates?

Jonathan Brent:  I have not tasted them.  On the other side of this little box of chocolates is a cellophane cover so you can see through to the individually wrapped chocolates, each of which is wrapped in a reproduction of a 1930s, 1940s poster.  One poster, in particular, stands out and that is of Rosie the Riveter: “We Can Do It!”  And so you realize that on the back cover, there is Stalin looking into the future of war with Germany and on the front you see Rosie the Riveter, “We Can Do It!” who symbolizes a point at which American and Soviet interests were aligned.  And then you say, “Who is the enemy?”  So you would think the enemy was Hitler.  Instead, the enemy is right there in the bottom left-hand corner of this little box of chocolates.  And who is the enemy?  The enemy is wearing a little black bowler hat, has a big fat face, greedy lips, a hook nose, fat hands, a big gold chain on a big belly, and his pudgy hand is on a pile of gold.  That is the enemy.  The enemy is the capitalist, and if you go a little bit farther, it is the Jewish capitalist.  And you can buy this today at Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow.

Ronald Radosh:  This is really worthy of an op-ed.  I mean, it really should be known.  It is incredible.  But again, I do not understand how [audio glitch] with so many books, I was telling Leon before I have read the book Stalin and His Hangmen; I read the Simon Sebag Montefiore, and as much as I thought I know about Stalin and what he did, when you read these works you are chilled to the bone.  It is so graphic; it is so horrible that even I who I think I know about the truth about Stalin was shocked.  Now these books exist, so how can they not know this in Russia? 

Another question that occurred to me from Jonathan’s presentation mentioned the Bukharin letter that Stalin so carefully saved and the marginalia.  Does anything in this marginalia or any of the future correspondence shed light on some of the questions historians have thought have been answered?  Do they change anything in any way or have they not been that carefully gone through?  For example, did Stalin -- was Stephen Cohen right that if Bukharin had lived and taken over, there could have been a gradual reformation of the Democratic Communism that the system did not have to be overthrown?  Bukharin in Cohen’s work, for those who have read it, was the viable alternative to Stalinism that ended when Bukharin was killed.  Does Stalin say anything that showed that, in fact, he feared this kind of possibility? 

Are there any other historical matters pertaining particularly at the end of the war?  We have some books about the Vladislav Zubok’s book and Timothy Natflee[phonetic].  There are new books being written that do base themselves on the most up- to-date archives.  Is there anything more that has found that would shed light on the issues of the Cold War, for example, that would deepen our understanding of these events?  Or do you think that has essentially been done that would just provide more character?

Jonathan Brent:  Well I’ll try to answer some of those questions first.  First of all, yes, I believe we are going to learn a lot about Stalin that we did not know before, largely about the relationship between his political action and his belief system.  There has been a big debate in Stalin historiography on whether he was cynical, whether he was a pragmatist, whether he was an ideologue, whether he was just a thug, a Caucasian chieftain, an illiterate Mafioso type.  I think these materials are going to help us understand the importance of the belief system to everything that he did, which is not to say that he did not violate his belief system when it was necessary to do so.  But those were the railroads tracks on which this train moved.

The question about Bukharin is absolutely fascinating and, probably, there needs to be a lot of historical thinking about this.  But, first of all, in that letter that Bukharin writes to Stalin, he writes that the idea of the purges was his idea, Bukharin’s idea.  That is number one.  Number two, he approves of the idea of the purges.  Number three, he says in that letter to Stalin of December 1937 that this is the great idea of the Soviet system.  Why?  Because these purges create distrust throughout the entire society and this is so fundamental.  How does it create distrust?  Nobody can trust his neighbor any longer.  Everyone is afraid of being informed on.  Once all social trust is gone, then, as Bukharin puts it, the government has created an everlasting guarantee for itself.  It can seize and maintain power.  Bukharin understood this completely.  There may well be a great deal of other information about Bukharin which mitigates this, but it is not at all clear that Bukharin was a dissident to, essentially, the Stalinist interpretation of the Leninist system.

Male Voice:  If I may [audio skip] Michael, we sort of [audio skip]

Leon Aron:  Discussion right now or --

Michael Ledeen:  This is a free society.

Leon Aron:  Okay.  I’m sorry.  I transported myself 55 years ago.  I’m sorry.

Michael Ledeen:  Too much time inside.

Leon Aron:  Exactly.  Well, first of all, I probably have a similar feeling studying the materials of glasnost as Jonathan has studying the archives.  I know that -- I mean, despite four years of work and close to 8,000 documents that we -- I’m only touching on the tip of the iceberg.  A lot of the things that you said were discussed in books and it was not a remarkable outburst.  I mean, almost impossible, technically, outburst of historical truth and deep and very brilliant thinking about Russia and its history.

In those four years, ’87 to ’91, one of them was that, presumably, Bukharin called Stalin Genghis Khan with a phone. And, of course, Stalin was immediately informed of that.  I forgot to whom he said it but -- so this really formed a less- than-cordial relationship between the two.

Secondly -- and you are absolutely right.  I think Stalin -- and actually, I was thinking of this as you were discussing the marginalia Stalin left while reading the Gosudarstvo i Revolutziya, State and Revolution.  He did admire Lenin and, of course, Lenin in the last letter, among other things, the letter to Congress as he was dying, said, “Bukharin is the darling - literally lubimiy - the darling of the party.  Although he does not know dialectics that much but, you know, everybody loves him.”  And of course, of the great ones he is the last one to be killed.  Everybody -- Trotsky was not killed only because he was out and would be killed two years after.  But everybody -- by that time, the Mildatuvachevskys [phonetic], Zinoniev, Kamenev - everybody was killed. 

Bukharin was kept.  And as you read this -- I guess, it is second hand -- we did not have access to this.  It appeared that Stalin vacillated.  Remember, there was the famous anecdote that everybody -- I mean, it is truth when during the military parade, November 1937, he sees Bukharin somewhere in the crowd and he says, “What are you doing there?  Come stand next to me on the mausoleum.”  So that is one thing and I -- again, in the materials of glasnost, there is great deal of discussion of this, the Cohen [phonetic] line about -- they were not -- after studying this, they were not in support of this theory.  They remember how Bukharin said -- and it is written; he said it. 

There is a record how he said famously that, “Our job is to create the right human material for the glorious society that we are building.  If we have to kill nine out of 10 to create that material, we will.  And even better.”  One last thing on Bukharin [audio glitch] once it became clear that he lost in 1929 as the rightist opposition, he welcomed the dekulakization which of course, was genocide.

Ronald Radosh:  I just want to [audio skips] suggest a lighter side.  I have been thinking of the novel [audio glitch] and BBC TV movie that I told Jonathan to read and some of the other people here.  If you -- it was released only recently in DVD because Timothy Dalton plays the new James Bond; he is the star of this film.  And I cannot think of the title.  It was an American espionage film [sounds like] of writers, a wonderful novel.  Do you remember the name?  Well, just look it up under Timothy Dalton.  It starts with Jonathan and his friends going to Russia to find out what revelations about Stalin come out of the archives.  And you must see this film.  It is wonderful. 

I will not ruin the ending but all I can say for this film -- thank God the ending will not be as bad as this film.  I suggest you get this film.  It is wonderful.  Nobody knows of it.  Sorry, I cannot figure the name.  Just type in “Timothy Dalton.”  You will see it right away.

Jonathan Brent:  Yeah, I wanted to add something about Bukharin.  Everybody knows of Stalin’s famous phrase that writers are the engineers of human souls.  But not that many people know of Bukharin’s treatise on dialectical materialism in which he writes that a human being is nothing but a sausage, the outer skin of which is his personality.  But he is packed with social, economic, and political reality.  And there is not a great distance between packaging sausages and packaging souls in novels.  And that as [audio glitch] mild as he may have seemed - and in this, I concur completely with Leon - I think that that system -- and this is where the new materials are going to lead most directly into analysis and understanding of this system and, perhaps, a little bit away from individuals and the personalizing of the system but how that system operated and they all bought into it. 

As my friend Naumov says to me repeatedly, “Nobody was innocent.  The system demanded complicity of everybody.”  By 1951, there were over 5 million informants within the Soviet system.  So that in a gathering like this, there would be at least three or four people who at the end would make a simple telephone call at the end, and that is all.  And so you could not trust anybody.

Michael A. Ledeen:  [Audio skips] this being Washington, you can be sure that that will happen in any event.  It is just that the consequences are not [audio glitch] to be so drastic.

Thank you, gentlemen, for what I think what has been a really illuminating and provocative and stimulating and very useful session.  And Jonathan, we look forward to having you back as this project progresses so that at each consecutive stage of revelation, we can update ourselves.  Okay, I will take questions.  I know Steve has a question and we have plenty of time.  We have 45 minutes, so I will get to everyone.

Steve:  I wanted to ask Leon to confirm my [audio glitch] in response to Ronald that the books are there but the people are not reading them anymore, especially young people.  But then, I have another comment to make.

Leon Aron:  Let me just answer this.  Yes, and I was about to say -- I did not want to interrupt the speaker.  I, myself -- my favorite bookstore called Moskva it is about half a mile from the Kremlin -- I, literally, went there.  I bought Yakovlev.  I bought the final - corrected by the author - edition of The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn.  It is all there.  Yes, indeed.  My sense is that -- and this takes us away from the topic, so let me just be very brief.  My sense that in general restorations are not simply coup d’etat that someone comes in and imposes.  It is a period of tiredness, cynicism, the desire to finally live well after all the turmoil.  And the hell with history, the hell with -- I do not want to know what happened before and I do not particularly want to know what happens the day after tomorrow.  Tomorrow, I’m slightly interested in.  So there is this general -- when I said that there is a sort of moral vacuum -- there is this general kind of, I think, a lack of desire to continue with the same intensity.  But then, it is probably impossible to continue with the same intensity as was burning in those days.

Male Voice:  I wanted to simply point out I do not think people in the West grasp -- I go to ex-Yugoslavia and Hungary four times a year now and in Albania.  I do not think people in the West grasp the extent of nostalgia.  A month ago, I was walking down the street in Sarajevo and to my utter shock, Tito  calendars printed in Serbian dialect - something you would not normally find in Bosnia and Sarajevo - were on sale on the main street.  When I said in Bosnian, “How sad,” two Muslim women walking by said, “Yes, his death was a catastrophe.”  I mean -- and this is everywhere.  This is everywhere and this, also, you find among young people. 

And anyway, I did have a couple of very quick questions.  One, any anti-Jewish comments on the paper?  Two, any new light on the death of Nadya Alliluyeva his wife?  And, three, any light on the slowness of his decision to get involved in Spain?

Jonathan Brent:  The question of anti-Semitism in the papers -- it depends which papers you look at.  There is still -- at least, Yakovlev told me the last time I spoke with him about it.  The anti-Semitic xenophobic papers are not now available within 50 yards of the Kremlin.  But there are still some 220 such newspapers being published daily throughout Russia which are anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and, quite frankly, fascistic that use the swastika as a symbol.  Hitler is held up as an immoral man.  The idea that Jews drew Stalin and Hitler both into the war is a continuing motif. 

Up until recently, the Orthodox Church felt that it had to undertake an analysis of whether the death of the czar was actually a ritual murder performed by the Jew, Yakov Yurovski.  And when I asked a patriarch, a father of the church, what he meant by ritual murder, he simply said, “It is when Jews take our child and use its blood to make matzos.”  This is an idea that has not gone away, though, frankly, most people tell me that anti-Semitism is less an issue than anti-Chechenism and so on and so forth; that their big problem is not Jews right now.

Male Voice: Within the Stalin -- any anti-Jewish memoirs? 

Jonathan Brent:  In the Stalin -- oh, oh, by Stalin?  Oh, I thought you meant the newspapers.  No, nothing I have seen.  In any case, it makes no difference - he hated everybody.  [Cross-talking] No.  Oh, no.  I have seen nothing of that.

Coming back to this question of atonement, however, the question of what happened to the children, we talked about Bukharin; we talked about Isaac Babel, we talked about -- but what happened to their children?  And I raised this question to the head of the archival system, Rudolph Behoya [phonetic] back in 1992 because it just occurred to me:  “Where did they go?”  And he told me that, in fact, they went to orphanages.  And when I asked who ran these orphanages?  He told me the NKVD ran the orphanages.  And the question of what happened to these children is probably one of the greatest catastrophes of Soviet society because these children raised in NKVD orphanages are on the streets of Russia today. 

However, I then asked these children who were in the orphanages - they were still children - did they draw pictures?  He said, yes, they did.  I said, “I would like to see those pictures.  Where are they?”  And he said, “Well, the KGB keeps them in a safe[audio glitch].”  And apparently -- and I’m still trying to find them because I think this would be an extraordinarily revelatory body of material.

Steve:  I asked about the wife [inaudible]

Jonathan Brent:  Alliluyeva -- 

Male Voice:  You know anything about her?

Jonathan Brent:  No, I do not know anything about her.  No.

Male Voice:  How do you think the revelations in the Stalin publications will affect the struggle that was going on in this country between those who were called red baiters in the ‘30s and the Henry Wallace Movement in the ‘40s and the people who were saying the Soviets had the best of intentions [audio glitch] stay with them?  From what you have said, this is going to have a great implication, is it not, for the historians in the ‘40s and ‘50s?

Jonathan Brent:  I think Ron can answer this question better than [audio glitch] can but it is clearly a huge question.

Ronald Radosh:  The strange thing about this is [audio glitch] especially Cold War history, history of fellow travelers like Henry Wallace.  There is still a whole slew of what we call anti-Communist historians and none of the work that John Haynes and Harvey Klehr have done -- Venona, The Secret World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism, two books in Jonathan’s series for Yale.  None of this has changed anything they published a few years ago after these books came out.

A historian named Ellen Schreker published a volume in which all the work John Harvey had done -- they accused them of triumphalism and favoring American victory in the Cold War.  So, the fact is we are dealing in this country with the profession that is very ideological.  None of the revelations, none of the facts causes anyone to reconsider, and that is shocking. 

Jonathan Brent:  Maurice Isserman did.

Ronald Radosh:  Yes.  Partially.  He goes back and forth.

Female Voice: Did you find any fiction?  Was there any fiction in the library that apparently had been read by Stalin?

Jonathan Brent:  I have not seen the entire library, so I do not know.  I was looking mainly for the historical and political works.  There may be, but I have not seen anything so far.  However, what we did find was also quite amazing and it comes back to the construction of Soviet society.  Stalin wrote a children’s book. 

Female voice: [Inaudible] One of the scariest sentences in the English languages, I’m thinking about writing a children’s book [background noise]

Jonathan Brent:  Yes.  So Putin is writing a textbook but Stalin got to the real source, which was the children.  We have the manuscript of that.  That is going to be a tremendous publication. 

Leon Aron:  Michael, can I add to this very briefly?  Again, I think you will find fiction and the reason for that is that he had a very good taste and it showed in the only way it could be shown in Stalin’s time - by keeping certain writers alive.  One great connoisseur of Russian literature told me, quite correctly as it turned out, he did not touch the greats who were not Communists - Boris Pasternak, Marteva, Andrei Platonov, and Mikhail Bulgakov - the four arguably greatest writers still living in Russia at the time.  Bunin of course was gone; Nabokov was very young and probably not known at that time; the émigré writers of course.  But with all my love of Babylon, so on -- but the reason I am saying this -- another reason is that Andrei Platonov, who is just a magnificent writer, incidentally, the author of one of the earliest explicitly anti-Stalinist, anti-Utopia Kotlovan, The Foundation Pit.  And again, this is based on the materials that I’m researching. 

Stalin apparently wrote “What a bastard” on the margin of one of his stories, and yet that bastard was not arrested and killed as 99 percent of the writers in that group were.  And of course, there is this famous call from Stalin to Pasternak about another great writer, a great poet Osip Mandelstam, where Stalin essentially wanted Pasternak to tell him whether Mandelstam was, in Stalin’s words, “a master.”  This was very important to him because on Pasternak’s opinion -- and he trusted Pasternak.  He arrested his wife, he arrested his mistresses, he never touched him. 

The conversation is a fascinating one but in any case, it ended by Stalin saying, “If I were a friend of Mandelstam, I would have defended him better.”  And he hung up on Pasternak, and, of course, Mandelstam was eventually arrested and killed.  But even then, he wrote an explicitly -- Mi zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany [We are living sensing no country] he wrote an explicitly Anti-Stalin verse in 1934; anybody would have been killed a long time ago.  Stalin tempered and waited.

Male voice:  The nostalgia that you have been talking about -- is the nostalgia for strong central leadership, or is there a nostalgia for the Communist, collective, anti-capitalist system?

Leon Aron:  Just taking my Stalin hat off and the research of contemporary Russia, no, it is definitely not the latter.  But the so-called nostalgia existed in 1970s; it is a nostalgia for -- when Steve was talking about Tito, it is a very complex issue but, virtually, in every post-Communist country -- for that matter, post-Authoritarian country -- because if you go to Franco’s Spain there is a significant movement, I think, based on an incorrect perception of what it was like. 

In many cases, it is purely generational.  We were young.  There is a line in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago where he interviews the survivors and one of them said, “Well, I was in a camp but I was young and the life was good.”  There is a generation that looks nostalgic at those things.  It seemed to them that there was order; it seemed to them that it was an order of the prison but you knew where the meal was coming from and what time.  Apparently, there is to certain people this very powerful attraction.  But, no, there is no movement in Russia I can think of.  Incidentally, if you look at the details of the public opinion polls, democracy as a system is much preferable. 

There was an issue -- no matter how popular Putin was, when the question was asked: “Do you think he should become a president for life,” a very strong majority said no, even while 80 percent felt that he was approved of his performance.  There are all kinds of things.  Travel abroad, read what you want, send your children to whatever school you want, freedom of religion - all those things that were inimical to Stalinism, they are there.  They have a great deal of support. 

Jeffrey Herf [phonetic]: I’m Jeffrey Herf.  Ron, thanks for the comment.  As a Historian of Germany, what strikes me about Leon Aron’s comment about 1987 - 1991 is that Russia is very typical of dictatorships that collapse, but have not been invaded and occupied by occupying powers.  And the extent to which memory or justice emerged in postwar West Germany was inconceivable without the Allied Occupation, postwar occupation, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and the occupation of the country for another 50 years.  I think that we forget that often.

So to comment, and then a question -- I’m always struck by the many books that you all refer to that referred to millions and millions of people murdered between 1917 and the 1950s; vast crime but nobody has been brought to trial.  This underscores the point that I was making that when dictatorships collapse but they are not invaded and occupied, whether it is Argentina or Chile or what have you, the ruling strata remains in place, and is able to prevent any kind of consequential justice or reckoning or memory with the past.  So it falls to Yale University Press to do the things that German Historians do in collaboration with their American and English and other European colleagues.

Jonathan Brent:  I mean just to add to that, a very revelatory conversation that I had just this last time in Moscow when we were talking to the heads of the archives about how we were going to construct the editorial apparatus for investigating the Stalin archive.   And I said to them that we should have an American working with a Russian.  That has been a principle of the entire project from the very beginning that we have had Americans working with Russians not only to ensure that there is a Russian point of view but, also, politically it is vital that the Russians have some stake in all of this as well.  Oleg Khlevniuk, who has mentioned earlier, who is really a great young Russian historian said to the head of the archive, “I think it would be best for the Americans to take the lead on this.  There are really are no experts in Russia on the subject of Stalin.”  That is an amazing thing.

There are any numbers of books that have been published about Stalin over these last several years on all kinds of questions, but there is nobody who has really studied Stalin.  I want to come back to this question of the textbook because this is really important.  About 10 years ago, I raised with Alexander Yakovlev the question, which I wanted to do when I would finance a textbook that was based on documents so that every section of the textbook would have with it a collection of documents that students could read that would deal with the issues at hand.  I’ll never forget sitting in his office, and he said to me, “We cannot do such a book.  We cannot write such a book.”  I said, “Why?” He said, “Too many enemies.”  Nobody can tell this story; nobody can tell this story.  Nobody knows how to tell this story.  Nobody has the perspective from which to tell the story of the Soviet period.

Michael Ledeen:  It is worse than that.  It is worse than that.  Everybody is guilty.

Jonathan Brent:  Everybody is guilty as well.

Michael Ledeen:  So no one has an interest in telling the story because at a certain point, every one of them -- Jeff talks about Germany, and the Germans were saved because we took over Germany; we took all the archives; we published them; we made them accessible to everybody, and so forth.  Italy for example, which is usual.  I mean Italy is on the winning side at the end of every war; it is one of the basic principles of Italian history. 

So never mind what happened during the war but by the time the war was over the Italians were on the winning side, so they got control of their own archives.  We are now discovering only now 60 years later, 70 years later, after a lot of these events, only now are the stories of a whole generation coming out whose lives were invented; invented largely by the Communist Party by the way, which blackmailed them and used them as the intelligentsia of post-war Italy.

It is a horrible, disgusting but fascinating story.  And which, by the way, there is a great American publication, which is Telos [phonetic], which has been writing about all of this, and which has been talking about all of these documents, and so forth.  But there are two; I found them myself.  I was there relatively early; I was there in the in ‘60s in Italy. You have to go through -- I mean, when the archives were just beginning to open up -- and it took at least two or three years before they would decide whether they were going to let you see the documents that you have to see in order to write whatever it was that you were writing about the fascist period.  Because there were things in there that nobody wanted published; nobody wanted them published. 

My favorite memory of those years -- you will love this as an archivist.  One night on Italian television, they showed Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury story of which the big scene is the firemen come in and burn all the books and everything.  And then there is this huge fire and people are throwing books on the fire.

The following morning, I went to the archives and there was a bar next to the archives where all the schleppers used to go, because you could not go into the archives.  You had to fill out requests and the schleppers would go down and decide what, if anything, they were going to bring to you.  So they were all there early in the morning having their cappuccino, and so forth.  And they were all saying to each other, “Did you see that fabulous movie?”  “Did you see that terrific -- oh.”  And they were saying, “Ah, what a film!  What a movie,” because that is all they wanted.  They wanted to go in there with their flame-throwers and burn it all because it was bad for everybody, because everybody was guilty.  Everybody, everybody, one way or another is complicit in that story.  And so, of course, they cannot do it and, of course, they want us to do it. 

But they only want those of us to do it that they come to trust and say, “Well, you know, he is not going to tell everything.  He is just going to tell the main things about the important people but he will not bother Uncle Vanya or whoever it is; leave him alone.”  But I mean that is the thing, and it is impossible to communicate - I always found when I was teaching - impossible to communicate to students that that whole world that starts with World War I and ends with the end of the Cold War, I suppose.  There are no good people in that world who survived.  The only good people were killed.  They had to be killed. 

So all these stories about Stalin criticizing Mandelstam because he did not really defend his friends well enough reminds me of the time when Kadafi send a note to Sadat saying, “So and so is planning to kill you,” which was true.  And I asked some friend of mine, “Why would Kadafi do that?  He hated Sadat.”  And the person looked to me like I was some kind of fool, which I was, and said, “It is the ultimate expression of contempt: ‘I despise you so much that I even save your worthless life, you worm.’”  Right?  And that is a lot of that is about and that is the way they think.

Then finally, I will recommend my favorite book in this subject.  I think greatest book ever written, which is Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, which -- you know, very difficult, very complicated.  But, boy, does he have it right.  And that whole section on the survivor -- if that does not chill your blood, nothing will.  And it is really about this; he really has got -- and the other great writer on the subject is Erich Fromm. Anyway, your questions.

Leon Aron:  If I could add a little bit, there is, of course, a bit of rejoinder to your story about the textbook, which is that of course, Putin -- fortunately you could still find -- it is not a Stalinist country.  By any means you could find a lot of things on the Internet.  And I was very interested - I’m trying to write something longer on this issue of textbooks.  And there is a transcript of Putin appearing on these two textbooks, presumably, were a subject of a conference.  The top teachers came and the historians and the authors were there and everybody was giving their opinions. 

Putin appeared the last day of the session and started giving his opinions.  And one of them was precisely what you and Yakovlev talked about.  He said -- and I’m almost certain this is very close to the text.  When somebody said, “Why do we need a new textbook?  Because during the glasnost period and in the 1990s, some good textbooks were already written.”  And Putin says, “Yes, but they were written often with grants from foreigners.  And you know very well those who pay also ordered the music.” 

When I read that, I mean by that time I had not had many illusions about Putin.  When I read this we are -- you know, the rhetoric is not even late-Brezhnevist.  I mean, they were embarrassed to say things like this.  We have to go to the ‘50s and, maybe, even the ‘40s for this type of reasoning. 

Female voice: I’m from Russia, a very typical Russian.  My great grandfather was a friend of Trotsky and his wife was one of the secretaries of [audio glitch].  My grandfather was tortured and killed by NKVD-vich, which became KGB-led.  My father committed suicide; my brother is a dissident in America’s [audio glitch] and Stalin for me is a mass murderer. 

To me, personally, and to my family, probably, it is very important to research his life and to do maybe something which would be equivalent of German de-Nazification because Russian never heard de-Stalinization and maybe never had.   So my question is are you going to try to provide any information to typical average Russian citizen about your research and how you are going to do it if now the organizations that could help you to do it such Memorial or Sakharov Center in big trouble?  For example, Sakharov Center was going to close because they do not have any funding and because Russian funders and [audio glitch] do not fund anything that not, well, very close to the Russian Government.  Thank you so much for your book [audio glitch].

Jonathan Brent:  This is a huge, huge issue.  I have thought about it, which is that, as Leon said, this is -- part of the impetus for this is to give Russians back their history and to make it possible.  Unfortunately, for Putin I do not know how else to do this, but Yale helps to fund the publication of these books in Russia.   We have an arrangement with Ross Penn [phonetic].  Perhaps you know that; it is a very fine publishing company, which publishes these books.  Beyond that, in some cases I have also raised money to have books distributed throughout Russia and Putin libraries. 

Once we have the digital platform developed, however, any Russian citizen can go online and get all of these materials.  And that will also help to democratize this information.  But so much remains unknown.  I will give you one little example.  We are publishing a book on the children of the Gulag.  The author of the book did some triangulation and realized that there was a transit point at this particular little city where rail lines met in the 1930s and from which point the trains then went off to Siberia. 

So she went to this little village to see if anybody there remembered the transports.  And, naturally, she went to a church because that is where the memory might well have been preserved.  And, indeed, she found the priest who said, “Please, come with me.  I have something I have to show you.”  And they walk to the back of the church where they had been doing renovations, and for the purpose of renovations they had taken off the floor boards and they dug out a new foundation.  They had discovered an area of some 15 by 30 feet that was literally filled with the skeletons of little children.  Nobody knows who these children were; nobody knows anything about them.  The priest said to Cathy Frierson [phonetic], who was writing this book, “We do not know what to do.  How do we expiate this?  How do we atone for this?”  These are the kinds of unexpiated aspects of the Soviet past, which, unless they are in some way, there will never be that moral catharsis that Leon is talking about.

Boris Mushenka[phonetic]:  Boris Mushenka [phonetic] for Democracy International.  I have a question that -- to what extent do the  Stalin archives show any new information on the Great Famine?  To what extent was it really carefully planned by Stalin, and how much of it gained its own momentum to reach such horrific proportions?

Jonathan Brent:  This material is not in the Stalin archives but it was in KGB archives and in the Presidential archive and in the archive of the Russian Federation.  This material has been well-researched.  There was a huge project undertaken in Russia; it produced a seven-volume series called The Tragedy of the Russian Countryside.  We arranged to help finance this; it was undertaken by a Great Russian Historian, Victor Danilov, who is now dead, unfortunately. 

But the research continues.  We have published the first book in the series in English; it has all been published in Russian and we are reconstituting it from seven volumes into three for English-language consumption.  The first volume is called The War Against the Peasantry, but these materials definitively show that the government, though it did not manufactured the famine, made use of it and should be held responsible for if not all of the deaths, then the great majority of them for the way that it handled and completely mishandled for its own political reasons.  And the reason was very simple - it had to crush the peasantry; it had to completely destroy this vestige of opposition throughout Russia and push the peasants out of the countryside into the city. 

This was the first essential component of Stalin’s plan for industrialization.  He had to get the people out of the country into the city.  He had to destroy their system of values, their collective and communal relations and so on and forth.  It is just an absolutely disgusting thing and most people do not know anything about it.  The numbers that have now been more or less established are, in fact, tantamount to the Holocaust. 

Steven Morris: Steven Morris, Johns Hopkins SAIS.  Jonathan, what you have done is obviously magnificent and what you are doing is magnificent, not only in making these archives available, putting them on the Internet, but also trying to get them to Russia.  My only regret, which has nothing to do with what you are doing but about the situation, is the fact of -- well, I think there are two basic problems.  One is the problem of inaccessibility in the former Soviet bloc to the Internet amongst the vast majority of the population.  This is not to say that you should not be doing what you are doing; you should be doing what you are doing just to get to at least the cultural elites to make them aware.  But there is a problem of how the vast mass who salute Putin and believe his various stories about Stalin -- how are they ever going to find out about this?

The second problem is in our culture, and this refers to the fact that people are not reading anymore.  People do not read books.  There is a decline in literacy.  People learn from -- they used to learn from television; now they learn from the Internet; they learn from Hollywood.  Their understanding of American History comes from Oliver Stone.  What can we hope about the history of Russia if they think the fantasy about the Kennedy assassination is reality?  And an answer, which is somewhat cynical, is that somehow rather -- and I do not know how this is going to happen but it will be a long process - we have to get Hollywood interested in your work.  Only a great Hollywood movie is going to explain to the American people - and eventually the people of the world because Hollywood rules the world - what Stalinism was all about, that it was on the same moral plane as Hitler.  I do not know-- and Ron, of course, he is a great skeptic of Hollywood for good reasons; he probably feels that there are not enough people in Hollywood to do the job.  I do not know the answer to that, but I would like to hear your comments.

Ronald Radosh:  Well, I do not think -- in any period I do not think one cannot depend on history per se -- Hollywood is there to make entertaining films, and to make history.  We just mentioned Michael and I both saw Charlie Wilson’s War.  It is a good film.  True, it left Reagan out and it all attributed everything to Charlie Wilson.  It was still a decent -- actually an anti-Communist film.  They made it very clear what the Communists were doing and what the Soviets were doing.  But no entertainment film can really make clear, I do not think, the past history. 

Oliver Stone, in particular -- he has now said, if you saw the interview yesterday, two days ago his new film Bush, he pledges -- he said, “It will not be against Bush and not be for him; it will be a very objective balanced film like JFK or Nixon.”  But it is true Oliver Stone has huge budgets; it is not going to mean anything.  I do not know if there has even been polls how many people -- true in the Kennedy assassination.  But I do not think, anyone thinks what they see in entertainment film is really true history.  I do not know if there have been polls showing that they do. 

Michael Ledeen:  It is worse than that even because[audio skip] last time I checked, 70-some odd percent of the people of the world did not believe that any American astronaut had ever set foot on the moon.  They thought it was Hollywood.

Male Voice:  Would they have thought it was OJ Simpson [cross-talking] [audio skip]

Jonathan Brent:  Let me come back to this.  I think that the dissemination of knowledge has always been a problem.  I am not sure that in the 17th century the majority of people had access to such knowledge either.  But political decisions were not made by the majority of people as they are today.  It is true that most people in Eastern Europe and Russia do not have access but we have to at least ensure that the elites do.  I was in Warsaw before coming home and I spoke with Adam Michnik and he is going to buy a site licensed for this archive for Poland; I intend to do the same thing for Hungary and Czech Republic. 

But I think the key is education.  The key in America is to get professors teaching this to their students in the right way and that is going to take time.  But the relentless effort on the part of journalists, institutions like this, book publications, movies - all of this is helping. 

When Ron’s book on the Spanish Civil War came out, Spain betrayed, there was an uproar in the Left.  They could not believe it.  They could not believe that the Soviet Union was not the great friend of the Republic.  They could not believe that the Comintern had so cynical a policy.  In fact, one professor, I regret to say, Yale told me it was not history at all.  I do not think she would say that today at all.  Because now the preponderance of evidence coming out not just from annals of Communism but from Spain, from the opening of archives in Spain, and the rest of what is going on in historiography in the United States has proved exactly what Ron and Mary Haybeck had shown in that book to be true.  But this takes a long time, unfortunately. 

I’ll never forget when I first started this project.  A high school -- a kid who was going to school with one of my children -- I asked her -- well, she was asking me what I was doing in Russia, and I was telling her and so forth we were working at that point on something called The Secret Lenin Archive; Richard Pipes eventually edited it.  And I said, “What do you know about Lenin?”  She said, “Oh, we were taught that he was a great social revolutionary; he defended human rights and fought for social justice.”  And I thought, well, that has got to change.  That is where it has to change.  It has to change in eighth grade; it has to change in junior high school; it has to change in the universities.  And only by publishing this -- I do not know what else to do.

Leon Aron:  Just add to that and, also, to the question that you asked about the famine and so on, again, first of all, do not underestimate the Internet.  The polls show 20 percent of the Russian citizens have access; among the intelligentsia it is probably 80 percent.  And I hate to say it in this great republic of ours, but the revolutions are not made by the masses.  Tocqueville was very -- I keep rereading his ancient regime and the revolution because there is a line there about how during certain periods in the lives of the nation, the writer and the journalist becomes the teacher of the nation.  That is precisely what happened between ’87, ’91; it may happen again.

The annals of glasnost have touched on the issue of famine.  For example, Grossman’s [phonetic] little book absolutely devastating, tichet, forever flowing, has a chapter on the Ukrainian famine, which I cannot even begin -- you cannot read it without crying.  It is done not as a historian; it is done -- it is a history of a Ukrainian family, how little by little by little by little, the noose is tightening.  First their husband dies, then the wives, then the child, and so on and so forth.  That was said. 

Another thing I thought of, listening to the last few exchanges, is that things come from within.  Not only we have seen Burned by the Sun, for example; great anti-Stalinist film.  The Lives of Others, I strongly recommend.  Horrifying, but, you know, you could tell it without gore, which is even scarier.  The Romanians apparently are now making quite a few films about what it was really like.  You just need two things.  You need -- and by the way, I found that very strangely jarring with the general sort of ethos of Putinism that both of The Children of Arbat and In the First Circle were made in very popular television serials, which millions have seen. 

So, this is not the Soviet Union; this is not a total control over everything.  What needs to be overcome is this fatigue and this intoxication with the oil wealth in the case of Russia.  And I think they might be.  But, again, I started my talk by thanking Jonathan, but I also think that a lot of the stuff could possibly come from within, from the younger people.

The final point I think should be this:  They do not know and they cherish Stalin because it has never been taught in schools, unlike Germany.  When the real textbook is written and when several generations of children have studied the crimes of Stalinism as part of their curriculum, I think we could come somewhere near this moral renewal, without which Russia cannot improve[audio skip].

Michael Ledeen:  On that happy note, thank you all for joining us.  Thank you all for joining us.

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