    Our Happy Bygone Days

    By Israel Shamir

    - "We lived in a communist paradise and weren't aware of it." I have
    heard this sentence from many ex-citizens of the ex-USSR, from Russians
    and Tajiks, Ukrainians and Balts, and I agreed with them wholeheartedly:
    Soviet Russia was a land of spiritual and educated men who loved their
    work, were proud of their country, despised money, were hospitable and
    kind. Stephen Gowans (link) eloquently eulogised the
    lost paradise:

      Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so
      much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, the Soviet
      Union managed to create one of the great achievements of human history:
      a great industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of
      wealth, income, education and opportunity that plagued what preceded it,
      what came after it, and what competed with it; a society in which health
      care and education through university were free (and university students
      received living stipends); where rent, utilities and public
      transportation were subsidized, along with books, periodicals and
      cultural events; where inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous,
      and child care was subsidized. By 1933, with the capitalist world deeply
      mired in a devastating economic crisis, unemployment was declared
      abolished, and remained so for the next five and a half decades, until
      socialism, itself, was abolished. The Communists produced social
      security more robust than provided even by Scandinavian-style social
      democracy, but achieved with fewer resources and a lower level of
      development and in spite of the unflagging efforts of the capitalist
      world to see to it that socialism failed. Soviet socialism was, and
      remains, a model for humanity - of what can be achieved outside the
      confines and contradictions of capitalism.

    Over thirteen years ago the Soviet Communism was done in, and the
    Anglo-American Liberalism won its third great victory in one century.
    These were hard years for the Russians - life expectancy dropped
    drastically, industry collapsed, great achievements of the Soviet days
    were reversed. But life of an ordinary man became much worse in the
    victorious Western Europe and the US, as well, for the moneyed classes
    lost their great fear of workers' revolt and an alternative development.
    The social gains of the Western working class were obtained thanks to
    this fear, and were taken back as Russia was turned into a middle-size
    country of little importance.

    Stephen Gowans understood it; actually his essay is a complaint against
    'gleeful' Howard Zinn and other Western leftists who provided the left
    flank of anticommunist Cold War front. Howard Zinn is not alone at his
    refusal to admit collaboration with the enemy. A British Trotskyite Alan
    Woods published a verbose tripartite article (http://www.marxist.com/Theory/reply_shamir1.htm , a response to my Celia in the Woods, see on http://left.ru/inter/2004/shamir.html in English and on http://www.left.ru/2004/15/shamir114.html in Russian, on http://www.rebelion.org/ in Spanish)
    equally full of glee.

    Woods mentions that his guru Trotsky "always stood for the unconditional
    defence of the USSR against imperialism and capitalism". But Trotsky and his
    kin rejected his own advice. For Woods, Russian communists are 'Stalinists',
    and he gleefully asks:

      Let us begin with some awkward questions for our Stalinist opponents.
      The first question is: if we accept what you say, that the Soviet Union
      was a socialist paradise, then how come it collapsed?...
      The third question will be: if there was a genuine workers' democracy in
      the USSR, why did the Soviet workers not fight to defend the old regime?
      How does it happen that after over half a century of what Israel Shamir
      calls socialism, they could re-establish capitalism without a civil war?

    These are valid questions, and they should be answered.

    It is a sad truth that people's minds may be manipulated. Vast majority
    of men and women will act against their own best interests if convinced
    that 'this is right'. I witnessed it recently in an Israeli kibbutz;
    rich, stable, prosperous enterprise. The average kibbutz member's share
    of communal property was close to a million dollars. They went through
    privatization and 'income differentiation' scam and became paupers. Now
    many kibbutz members, yesterday's millionaires, survive by collecting
    leftovers in the fields. Their vast property went to a few well-placed
    families.

    I asked kibbutz members: "The privatization was not forced on you. You
    accepted it, you voted for it. Why did you raise your hand for the
    scheme that was sure to ruin you?"

    "We were told this is more progressive," they told me.

    If that was the case for a few thousand of well-educated and prosperous
    Israeli kibbutzniks, it was even easier to convince millions of innocent
    Russians that 'state ownership is detrimental to development' as this
    idea was broadcasted by million voices from the West. Trots played a
    prominent part in the ideological warfare as they glibly operated quotes
    from Marx convincing the Russians that what they have was anyway not a
    socialism or communism but 'nomenklatura rule'.

    Communism in Russia lost the Cold War, as it lost the war for discourse;
    anticommunism became an integral part of every political or
    philosophical movement in Europe and the North America. Our Trotskyite
    friends formed the left wing of the anticommunist front, next to
    Euro-communists of Berlinguer and deconstructionist followers of
    Derrida. Eventually this united anticommunist front succeeded to
    undermine the Soviet morale.

    Anti-Stalinist campaign was a powerful ideological weapon in the war for
    discourse, for images of Lenin and Stalin were sacred to the Soviet
    people. Myopic Khrushchev thought he fights a war for Stalin's legacy
    against other Stalin's ministers; but he undermined the sacral structure
    of Soviet Communism and damaged it irreparably.

    Looking back, we understand that major share of the Western leftists'
    complaints against Stalin and against the USSR were without merit.

    - 'Russian cruelty' and 'GULAG horrors' were Euro-centric racist slurs.
    Indeed, the US has bigger jail population than Russia ever did. In a
    recent article (The Colonial Precedent by Mark Curtis, The Guardian,
    Tuesday October 26, 2004) Woods can read about your average British
    brutality:

      British forces killed around 10,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau
      campaign, compared with the 600 deaths among the colonial forces and
      European civilians. Some British battalions kept scoreboards recording
      kills, and gave rewards for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent,
      whose hands were often chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. "Free
      fire zones" were set up, where any African could be shot on sight. As
      opposition to British rule intensified, brutal "resettlement"
      operations, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands, forced around
      90,000 into detention camps. In this 1950s version of Abu Ghraib prison
      in Iraq, forced labour and beatings were systematic and disease
      rampant." Indeed, peoples of the Soviet-led world never experienced
      anything similar to the devastation meted by the Anglo-American forces
      within confines of their empire.

    GULAG positively pales in comparison with Israeli concentration camps
    for Palestinians; the biggest of them being the whole of Gaza Strip with
    one million strong prisoner population. 'Stalin's atrocities' could
    never compete with the US atrocities in occupied Germany, with nuclear
    bombardment of Hiroshima and firebombing of Tokyo, with millions of
    killed Vietnamese or Algerians.

    - Soviet troops had foiled the attempted coup d'etat in Hungary, East
    Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Left bewailed it, but in the same
    period, the Americans fought pro-Communist insurgencies in Greece and
    Malaya, Nicaragua and Cuba, Indonesia and Cambodia. Mea culpa, I have to
    admit that as a young dissident I supported the Prague Spring when it
    was unfolding, but now I regret the Soviet Communists did not dare to do
    Tiananmen in Moscow and arrest pro-American 'velvet putschists' in 1990s.

    - The 'Afghanistan invasion' of 1980 was denounced by the West, from
    Trots of Woods to the American President. But was this justifiable? The
    Soviet troops came into Afghanistan at express request of the Afghani
    president in order to stop the CIA-led insurgency. Here is a short
    except from an interview given by Zbigniev Brzezinski alluringly called
    "How the US provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and
    starting the whole mess" (Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21,
    1998):

      Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his
      memoirs [From the Shadows], that American intelligence services began to
      aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet
      intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to
      President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that
      correct?

      Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid
      to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet
      army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, closely guarded
      until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that
      President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
      opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote
      a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion
      this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

      Question: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert
      action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and
      looked to provoke it?

      Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to
      intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

      Question: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting
      that they intended to fight against secret involvement of the United
      States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a
      basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

      Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea.
      It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you
      want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the
      border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the
      opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10
      years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a
      conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup
      of the Soviet empire.

    - Practically every 'anti-Stalinist' and anti-Soviet claim can be
    countered. People who denounced 'Russian cruelty' expressed in downing
    of the Korean airliner spent no tears over the fate of the Iranian
    Airbus gunned down by the Yanks. They regretted Sacharov's exile but
    ignored Vanunu's sentence.

    In the Good Man from Sezuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) by Bertolt
    Brecht, a good-natured whore is fleeced by her greedy acquaintances. In
    order to survive she invents a hard-nosed 'brother' who stops
    embezzlement and allows her to continue with good deeds. The USSR had
    this duality, too: its soft humanism was well protected by Stalin-built
    hard shell. The Western Left attacked the hard shell of Soviet Russia
    until the country was bereft of protection and collapsed.

    The Western Left felt its belonging to the West more than its solidarity
    with the Left in the East. Alan Woods and his Trots were committed to
    the Western supremacy. This is not by chance his essay 16 times
    described Russia as 'backward'. He wrote: "Russia, an extremely backward
    country,.. frightful backwardness, .. backward, semi-feudal country like
    Russia, a backward, Asiatic, peasant country like Russia, backward
    agrarian Russia, terrible backwardness", etc. What is it if not typical
    Western arrogance, Euro-centrism of most brutal kind?

    Russia, the country of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of Lenin and Florensky
    was one of the most spiritually advanced countries. And communism is -
    if anything - victory of spirit. Woods and other Trots despised spirit
    and worshipped material progress, for only from this point of view
    Russia could be perceived as 'backward'.

    Success and failure of communism in the East could not be explained
    within the confines of the vulgar-Marxist dogma. [Marx would be able to
    understand it - author of the Jewish Question, of Critique of Hegel's
    Philosophy, of the Ode to the Virgin, he understood that Spirit is the
    alpha and omega of human development and he was quite disgusted with
    vulgar-materialist 'Marxists'.]

    Communism won in the East - not because the East was backward, but
    because the East was the most spiritual part of the planet, less ruined
    by modernity and alienation. Communism was not successful in the West
    because the West was spiritually impoverished and subdued by latter-day
    Hobbesians.

    In two words, the difference between the West and the East was not in
    amount of steel and electricity produced. The difference was
    philosophical and metaphysical. Carl Schmitt wrote that "all of the most
    pregnant concepts of modern doctrine are secularized theological
    concepts." And the doctrinal differences of the East and the West fit
    this description to the jot.

    In the Anglo-American West, Hobbes who based his vision of society on
    'Man-to-Man-is-Wolf' approach, won the day. Men are united only by
    common enemy, he wrote. In a way, he was right: Enemy is the only thing
    that unites men, unless they are united by Christ, or better: unless you
    are united in Christ, you will be united in the Enemy. And this is not a
    mortal enemy, but Enemy, that unites people who accepted that
    'Man-to-Man-is Wolf'.

    The East preserved its traditional spirituality, and that is why
    Communism won in Russia and China. Communism made little progress in
    caste-ridden India, for Chairman Mao was right: caste structure is as
    evil as imperialism, for it prevents unification of people in God.

    The Russian Communists eventually solved their material problems and
    created care-free society, where everyone's livelihood was assured. But
    in order to advance materially, they accepted some of the Modernist
    ideas; uprooting and alienation struck home. The USSR did not pay heed
    to Simone Weil's critique and to her call for reversal of uprooting.
    Extreme materialists, the Soviet post-Stalinist leaders were convinced
    that as long as they produce enough material goods they can manage. The
    Church was suppressed; the Communists imported Christian morals in form
    of 'the Communist moral codex' but it was not sufficiently inspiring.
    New sacrality of Lenin and Stalin was demolished by Khrushchov; and
    desacralised society couldn't survive for long.

    Practically, Soviet Russia collapsed because its elites betrayed the
    people. Uprooting created a chasm between the people and the elites;
    uprooted and alienated elites were ready to take their money and shift
    to Riviera. They sold the wealth of Russia to the US companies,
    impoverished the ordinary folks and ruined the country. This collapse
    should be a lesson for all of us: the communists should fight alienation
    and uprooting as their greatest enemy; they should not allow the enemy
    to de-sacralise their universe; they should not be ashamed of the
    hard-nosed brother of the good man of Sezuan.

    II

    The Jewish question played an important role in rise and collapse of the
    Russian communism. The Western Left had very strong Jewish connections.
    Some of them were tainted with Jewish nationalism and turned their pens
    and efforts against communism when they perceived that the Russian
    communism eventually became predominantly Russian. In order to justify
    their betrayal they had spread the black lie of 'Russian antisemitism'.

    This false narrative is carried out by the Trotskyite writer Alan Woods.
    I wrote in my article: "Were Jews persecuted as racial group under
    Stalin? Obviously not, for Stalin's daughter was married to a Jew; some
    of his best comrades and party leaders had Jewish wives (Molotov,
    Voroshilov) - or Jewish sons and daughters-in-law (Malenkov,
    Khrushchev). So much for racism. Were Jews discriminated against under
    Stalin? In 1936, at the pinnacle of Stalin's power, his government
    included nine Jews".

    The best reply Woods could think of is "This is absolutely incredible.
    It is common knowledge today that Stalin was a rabid anti-Semite." A
    reference to 'common knowledge' is not considered to be an argument.
    Indeed, it was a common knowledge in England that women do witchcraft
    and that the nobles have blue blood. Today it is common knowledge that
    da Vinci code tells us that the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene.

    Woods is strong on common knowledge (read: western prejudice) but weak
    on facts. He writes: "The Bolshevik revolution gave freedom to the
    Jews". As a matter of fact, Jews were always free - even when the vast
    majority of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians were serfs. All limitations on
    Jewish rights were removed - not by Bolsheviks, but by the bourgeois
    February revolution. Woods writes: "After 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
    even granted those Jews who wished to live in their own autonomous
    region, the area known as Birobidjan". Wrong again: this was done by
    'rabid anti-Semite' Stalin in 1934.

    He writes: "In 1930 Stalin closed Yevslektsia, an official Soviet entity
    meant to expose anti-Semitic incidents". Other way around - Yevsektsia
    fought Jewish nationalism and was much hated by many Jews.

    He writes: "On February 28, 1953 there were deportations to Siberia of a
    large number of Jews from Moscow. Plans were being made to commence mass
    deportations from other parts of the Soviet Union." This is another
    Jewish story of 'eternal persecution of Eternal People'. There were no
    deportations neither plans of deportation. A Russian historian
    Kostyrchenko proved in a research paper called Deportation or
    Mystification < http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/125/kost.htm > (link) that it is an
    urban legend promoted by a Jewish nationalist, professor Jacob Etinger
    of Hebrew University, a man who admitted his "deep hatred of Communism".

    Woods writes: "Members of JAFC (Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee] were
    accused of being part of a Zionist-U.S. conspiracy against the Soviet
    Union: all accused of espionage, nationalist propaganda, and of
    seeking to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea as a "bridgehead"
    for American imperialism".

    Does Woods know of a reason to doubt that they sought to establish a
    Jewish Crimea on the ruins of Tatar villages, a sister state to Israel
    established on the ruins of Palestinian villages? Publications in the
    Russian post-Soviet and in Israeli media indicate that the Jewish
    activists of JAFC supported expulsion of Tatars and envisaged creation
    of a Jewish Crimean Republic. Mass immigration of Russian Jews to Israel
    in 1990s furnishes an additional proof that Jewish nationalist
    propaganda was quite successful.

    Woods writes: "[In 1953], Stalin ordered the arrest of all Jewish
    colonels and generals in the MGB, and a total of some 50 senior officers
    and generals were taken in to custody." Apparently, 'a rabid
    anti-Semite' Stalin still had so many Jews in the top echelon of the
    feared State Security after 30 years of his rule! Woods admits that the
    State Security carried out severe repressions, and immediately he
    objects to Stalin's campaign against chiefs of the State Security.

    For Woods, Jews are always innocent. Whether they are involved in
    excesses of the State Security or promote mass deportation of Tatars,
    whether they bend towards Zionism or ally with the US - they can't be
    touched. He writes: "Molotov's wife was Jewish. Stalin forced Molotov to
    separate from his Jewish wife, and she was exiled in 1949 by a direct
    vote of the Politburo, Molotov abstaining."

    If he would read memoirs of Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador in
    Moscow, he would learn that Polina Molotov embraced Golda, and tearfully
    called out: "Ich bin ein Yiddische tochter" (I am a Jewish daughter).
    Such Jewish nationalist feelings were indeed dangerous for the Soviet
    state and made Mme Molotov quite unsuitable for her position of Deputy
    Member of Politburo. As I said previously, Woods is too tolerant to
    Jewish nationalism and too intolerant to nationalism of 'backward'
    Russia. Stalin's Russia treated Jews as equals - not as superiors like
    the US. If Jewish nationalism were to be treated in England and the US
    as it was in Moscow in the days of Stalin, the citizens of Baghdad and
    Teheran, Basra and Ramallah would be able to sleep peacefully in their
    own homes.