FACES AND PLACES: The Cold War revisited (02/07/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

The Cold War revisited

Permanently blinded to actuality by their long and unrequited romance with Marxism-Leninism, America's leftist academic elite is still struggling with the idea that the Soviet state self-destructed.

While practically everyone was surprised by how abruptly the Soviet empire collapsed, for many so-called Sovietologists it was a life-changing experience. Today, they are political has-beens, no longer called upon to pontificate on the "realities" of Soviet life.

Among the most talk-show visible and op-ed prolific was Duke University Prof. Jerry Hough, a man whose studied ignorance is now legendary. In his 1977 book "The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory," for example, Dr. Hough praised Leonid Brezhnev for introducing a period of individual freedom, egalitarianism and a wider dispersion of power. The Soviet Union will survive because there is no evidence "that the republics are in a position to demand more than limited sovereignty," he once wrote. Dr. Hough admitted that Stalin may have been overly zealous in pursuing Lenin's dream but he was certainly not responsible for the death of "millions of Soviet citizens." This Duke University miscreant's "more realistic figure" was "tens of thousands." The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he argued for years, was a legitimate party, similar to the GOP in the United States; in 1988, he laughed at the notion that the "Soviet system would shatter under pressure over the next five to 10 years." The USSR, he pontificated, was "a country whose political system is associated with ... upward mobility for the ambitious and the talented and with steadily rising standards of living." Predicting in 1990 that Mikhail Gorbachev would prevail until at least 1995, he warned that supporting Boris Yeltsin against him, "is not just a mistake but madness." By 1992 Prof. Hough had faded, no longer the darling of the liberal media.

Another Sovietologist popular with the liberal media was Princeton University's Prof. Stephen Cohen who argued that there was a humane strand of Bolshevism that died with Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin was an aberration, a detour on the road to democratic socialism. Gorbachev was the new Bukharin, promoting an essentially sound idea.

Profs. Hough and Cohen were reflecting a sea-change among Sovietologists that occurred during the 1960s. According to Arch Puddington, author of "Failed Utopias," the study of the USSR up until that time was dominated by authentic scholars such as Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Richard Pipes and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who correctly perceived the Soviet Union as a gangster state violating human nature, deceptive and incapable of reform. These scholars were dismissed as Russophobic, almost racist by the 1960s revisionists caught up in the deconstructive spirit (communism good, capitalism bad) of the times.

The revisionists are still with us. Typical are Texas A&M Prof. H.W. Brands, author of "The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War" and the late Baruch College Prof. Edward Pessen, author of "Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War." Both professors blame the U.S. for Cold War tensions as much, if not more, than the Soviet Union. With its huge nuclear build-up, the U.S. was the aggressor, Prof. Brands theorizes; the Soviet Union was always on the defensive, protecting its legitimate interests and borders from Western encroachment.

Prof. Pessen traces the Cold War's origins to the 1947 Truman Doctrine that committed the United States to supporting free people resisting subjugation. It was America's assistance to Greece and Turkey, then in danger of a Communist take-over, that exacerbated Stalin's distrust of the West, convincing him to adopt a hard-line strategy.

A number of post-Cold War hypotheses have been reviewed recently to explain what really happened during this critical period in world history. In his 1997 book "We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History," Prof. John Lewis Gaddis offers some of them.

The first of the hypotheses suggested by Prof. Gaddis is "the diversification of power did more to shape the course of the Cold War than did the balancing of power." Supporters of this somewhat traditional view argued that bipolarity (Russia and the United States) had replaced the mutipolar system common prior to the second world war. Maintaining this bipolarity was the best way to assure world peace and this could be accomplished only if mutual vulnerability was assured. Hence the arms race. The problem with this position was that power was perceived solely in military terms and here the USSR appeared invincible.

A rather old hypothesis in new clothing is the formulation that the U.S. and the USSR built opposing empires after the second world war and these became inevitably combative. When Europe invited itself into the American "empire," the Russians were isolated and moved to gain influence on other continents, primarily Africa and Asia.

Hypotheses that are regaining favor as a result of recently released documents from Soviet archives were initially popularized by Ronald Reagan. In short, the Cold War was essentially a contest of good and evil; it was initiated by Stalin; Marxism-Leninism was based not on reality but on ideological romanticism; democracy was superior to Marxism-Leninism in maintaining political coalitions.

Despite its abominations, communism retains a certain cachet among Western scholars. They don't want to see the misery, squalor and tyranny visited upon humanity by the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Mengistu, Castro and Pol Pot because they have lost their Judeo-Christian values and have come to despise their Western heritage. They have two basic intellectual needs: to romanticize communism and to demonize the American way. They can meet these needs because academics need never be accountable, only well-meaning and high-minded.

Be prepared for more Cold War revisionism to come from the halls of academe. But don't expect any mention of the way so many university types and their allies in the Democratic Party decried America's support for South Vietnamese freedom, the Contras, the Mujahedin, an increase in military spending, the Star Wars program, and other Cold War tactics that even former Soviet leaders now admit helped bring them down.

The left will continue to churn out distorted Cold War "histories" in order to justify their earlier deceptions and to convince Americans that the "anointed" were right all along.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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