The Unheralded Putin—Russia’s Official Anti-Stalinist No. 1
A memorial monument to Stalin’s millions of victims—the subject of intense political struggle for more than 50 years—was commemorated in Moscow by Vladimir Putin, whose support at last made it a reality.
Which contained this passage:
Cohen explains that he has spent decades studying the Stalin era, during which he came to know personally many surviving victims of the mass terror and had closely observed various aspects of the struggle over their subsequent place in Soviet politics and history. (This history and Cohen’s is recounted in his book The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin.) As a result, he and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, felt a compelling need to be present at the ceremony on October 30. Having gained access to the semi-closed event, attended perhaps by some 300 people (including officials, representatives of anti-Stalinist memorial organizations, aged survivors, relatives of victims, and the mostly Russian press), they flew to Moscow for the occasion.
Which is surpassingly weird, as the piece has Cohen's byline and apparently he's referring to himself in the third person.
If anyone writes a biography of Stephen F. Cohen, I would suggest that a working title for the later part of it might be "The Long Tongue Bath".
An anti-Stalinist? How brave! How courageous!
ReplyDeleteHow irrelevant.
They are one weird couple.
DeleteConsidering how Putin has been rebuilding something of a modern terror state, what Masha Gessen noted is a continual low-key state of insecurity and anxiety in the general public, akin to the Stalin-Beria policy of random arrests, torture and murder to produce the same thing, this would more accurately be called a smoke screen than a memorial. Sort of like Trump having Ben Carson on his cabinet. Only much, much worse.
It's a little tangential, but it goes to the issue of the left that lacks any touch with reality. This article LEFT! drove it home. It starts out very well, talking about the commodification of Millennials, it way that even Walter Brueggemann could find agreeable. In the third section however it goes completely off the rails. The transition is "There’s not a single thread we can pull to undo it, no one problem we can fix to make sure the next generation grows up happier and more secure.” What you do with a knot that you can’t untie is cut it." From there it launches into Occupy Wall Street, Anarchists, and so on. It's ultimately the same lazy left, wanting what it wants and wanting it now but with no work. Revolution! is just a shorthand for not having to work for it. My disenchantment with that kind of left I think started with the Gore loss in the 2000 election. The attacks on him by the far left really started to turn me off, along with the whole third party voting. I started to see it as a selfish act. A moment of clarity came with the death of Paul Wellstone in 2002. Michael Moore and most of the agitating left had a Woodstock like event at the funeral. A blog post (where is long forgotten) by a former congressional aide gave a measured assessment. The aide said that for all his perfect left positions, Wellstone was impossible to work with and accomplished very little toward his supposed goals (sound like anyone more recently?). He then went on to point out other Democrats who where regularly attacked by the left, but had been effective and made real difference. In that moment I decided I wanted to be part of the effective left, not the left that is more interested in posturing. The article holds up Occupy as some great movement. Right from the beginning I knew if was a farce. They didn't want to have any goals, work toward them. That would somehow taint their activities.
ReplyDeleteBeing politically effective is messy and hard. Politics is messy, people are messy, getting people to act is very hard, it takes compromise. You need to address the concerns of others, there are no absolutes and more success is incremental. Two more recent movements have done the hard work and been successful. MADD was up against an extremely well financed alcohol industry and lobby. They worked hard, sat in state houses, carried their moral standing as grieving mothers and effected change. It took a long time and there were many failed attempts, but ultimately that change not only legislation but our entire culture. People's attitude on drunk driving completely changed. The same applies to the gay rights movement. They had to overcome the evangelicals, Catholic Church and the far right. It was a long hard road to recognition, hate crime legislation, etc. Gay marriage didn't arrive in one fell swoop. First came recognition as regular people, then rights as domestic partners and finally same sex marriage. Along the way the there was a large cultural shift in accepting those that are not traditionally heterosexual.
Forget Cohen.
I am sure I will be referencing this comment and the article in future post, thank you for them.
DeleteIt was a little later for me to identify what I came to call "the play left" who always seemed to think that insulting people was the way to make them vote for you and that change could be had without work and sacrifice, "revolution" or one in the imagination of illiterate college grad on the basis of some superficial reading and nothing to do with reality is one of their favorite fantasies. That, in reality, even a revolution as necessary as the one that overthrew the Rhodesian apartheid government, is more likely to give you a Robert Mugabe (somehow I doubt that the army which was one of his tools of dictatorship is going to produce egalitarian democracy) than even the highly imperfect example of George Washington. Our own revolutionary generation quickly divided into those with property and power and those without much or any of those, that accounts for most of what is worst in our Constitution, the framing of which was in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.
In addition to Paul Wellstone you can add the Denis Kucinich example, or the neo-cons who, once they realized their model Soviet thug as dictator, Trotsky, would never win all joined the worst of the Republican-fascists. And in many of their cases, it really was with the fascists.
It was the example of the Reverend MLK, the Chritian Leadership Conference, people such as Diane Nash who first led me to believe that any really effective American left would have to be largely a religious left and one which was not led by university professors and students. I think the anti-war movement of the 1960s was far less effective due to both the snobbery and the ideology of so many of its major figures, some of whom became major figures merely by jumping up and grabbing the mic. The media played a big part in that, too.
The gay rights movement, for all its problems, has the decided advantage that many middle-class and wealthy white people have LGBT children, siblings, cousins, parents, etc. I think that those affluent members of the upper classes who came out and lobbied their families, the Cheney family, for crying out loud, had an outsized role in the speed with which change came. It is one of the most disturbing things to me as a white, gay man that so much progress has been made on LGBT issues, especially those affecting gay men, as Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, and other groups have remained under attack and with the rights gained for them being dismantled by the same court which affirmed marriage equality.
The official resistance of the Catholic and other clergy was greatly diminished in effectiveness just as it was with the same sort of opposition to contraception because the middle class and rich wanted to use it, too. Safe, medically performed abortion was always available to the wealthy, less so the middle class. It as a political issue has its own dynamic due to various factors surrounding it.