FACES AND PLACES: Remembering Koba: tolerating the intolerable (09/22/02)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Remembering Koba: tolerating the intolerable

The recent publication of "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" by Martin Amis is a reason to rejoice. Although not on a par with Robert Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine," the volume is a welcome contribution to a slowly expanding library of English-language publications on Soviet crimes.

A red-diaper baby at birth, Martin Amis eventually shed his father's early devotion to Stalinism, largely as a result of his personal acquaintance with Dr. Conquest in England.

As an aside, it should be remembered that Dr. Conquest may never have written his now classic tome without the financial assistance of the Ukrainian National Association.

Dr. Conquest unmasked the gruesome brutality of Joseph Stalin (called "Koba" in his early days) at a time when many Western intellectuals were shilling for the Soviet Union. It "was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union," writes Mr. Amis.

Acknowledging his debt to the renowned historian, Mr. Amis begins his treatise with the following quote from Dr. Conquest's book: "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter in this book". The book, as we know, is 411 pages long.

By any standard one wishes to use, the Terror-Famine was genocide. "And yet," writes Martin Amis, "the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted the indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry and slave labor." Positioning themselves as cheer leaders for Moscow, western intellectuals adopted and nurtured a mind-set that allowed them to tolerate the intolerable, to postpone the truth by looking the other way.

There was a kind of snickering among intellectuals presented with the Soviet reality, often accompanied by a variation of the following litany: "Come, come, my dear fellow, you don't really believe that do you?"

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a palpable reticence, a kind of "let sleeping dogs lie" mentality to revisit the Soviet Union, both here and in Ukraine. Why? The decision to bury the past in Ukraine is based on the increasingly apparent, albeit disconcerting reality that practically every Ukrainian family had someone, somewhere, somehow, who was complicit in the debasement of other Ukrainians. While indifference to past horrors is regrettable, it is at least somewhat understandable.

There is no excuse for continuing to ignore Soviet crimes in the West, however. At the end of the second world war, Nazi and Japanese war criminals were tried in an open court. Some were executed, others were imprisoned. Nazism and Japanese militarism were universally outlawed. Holocaust studies produced thousands of books, articles and museums. Neither Nazism nor militarism were laughing matters.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the incredible ineptness and buffoonery of such addled leaders as Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko became obvious. They were all clowns. Western Sovietologists had been hopelessly wrong. The truth could no longer be postponed. Everyone had a good laugh, sighed, and moved on.

In comparing Hitler (little mustache) with Stalin (big mustache), Mr. Amis argues that one "elicits spontaneous fury, and the other spontaneous laughter. And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting."

It's the kind of laughter that goes along with a belated realization, an "oops, we really goofed on that one" sort of response.

This facile dismissal of Soviet crimes has consequences. "Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen," writes Mr. Amis. "Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the 6 million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the 6 million of the terror famine."

Time and time again Mr. Amis reminds us that Stalin planned to de-Ukrainianize Ukraine. If Stalin didn't want to eradicate Ukrainian consciousness, asks Mr. Amis, why did he invite blind kobzars, who "reminded the Ukrainian peasants that they once had a country," to a conference and then proceeded to annihilate them. Stalin "had two reasons for assaulting the Ukrainian peasants" concludes Mr. Amis: "they were peasants and they were Ukrainian." As Nikita Khrushchev noted in his secret speech of 1956, Stalin would have liked to ship all Ukrainians to the Gulag, but there were just too many of them, even after 1932-1933. When the 20th Party Congress heard this, they laughed. Too many Ukrainians, get it?

The Soviet Union, Lenin, Stalin, the Terror Famine were never laughing matters for Ukrainians. It was for Christopher Hitchens, however. Once a Trotskyite famine-denier (food shortages, my good fellow, food shortages) he reviewed the Kingsley book in the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Hitchens argues at one point that "Amis's newly acquired zeal forbids him to see a joke even when it is handed to him on a skewer with bernaise sauce." Earlier, he writes: "Those who were killed in Ukraine by a state-sponsored famine were not killed as Ukrainians in quite the same way as the Ukrainian Jews of Babi Yar were later killed as Jews."

Right. And that's why we still don't have Terror-Famine studies centers or Terror Famine museums, or countless books about the Terror-Famine anywhere, not even in Ukraine. That is why there have been no trials of former Soviet leaders and apparatchiks for crimes against humanity. That is why the Communist Party in Ukraine still finds considerable support among the people.

And yet, we can't give up. Plans are currently under way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Great Famine in a special way by a group of individuals associated with St. Andrew's Orthodox Church in Illinois. They believe it's time to stop tolerating the intolerable. Do you?

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

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