Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View 1. Paradigms and Paranoia The 1975 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states that during the quarter of a century before his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. As Generalissimo Stalin, commander-in-chief of the Soviet Army, Stalin forced the surrender of the German Army, the strongest and most technologically advanced conquering force in recorded history. Under orders from Stalin and his generals, Soviet soldiers could accurately claim credit for about eight of every ten German casualties or captures, leaving doubt about a 1944 American news magazine cover depicting the American General Eisenhower as the man who defeated Hitler. German Tiger tanks and Russian JS (Joseph Stalin ) heavy tanks engaged in what remain to this day the most colossal armored vehicle battles in history. At the gates of Moscow, invading Axis forces, specifically Hitler's Nazi forces, suffered their first major defeat. There, Russian fighters were aided by astonishingly ferocious troops from Siberia and the Urals - soldiers commonly, glibly, and incorrectly referred to in the West as Cossack troops. Most Cossacks were anti-Communist and many were Nazi collaborationists who fled when the Red Army won! (Cossack - Russian Kazaki - is not related to the name of the Ural-Altaic people called Kazakh.) As it turns out, Napoleon had actually surpassed Hitler in damage inflicted on Moscow. After the defeat of Napoleon's grand army in its failed effort to conquer Russia in the summer of 1812, Napoleon's defeated, starving soldiers broke into abandoned Moscow homes for food, causing a spectacular six day conflagration that rivals the Great Fire of London of 1666 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The first major defeat of Hitler's German forces at fortified Moscow demolished the incipient legends of the invincibility of Hitler's army and Aryan superiority. Before his suicide less than four years later, Hitler lost conviction in pseudo-scientific theories then prevalent among many German scientists and intellectuals who had believed in Slavic (East European and Siberian) Unterlegenheit (inferiority ). Stalin achieved this victory using battle tactics that to this day still shock and outrage Western civilians and military men who learn of them: he had Soviet troops followed across battlefields by the NKVD (his internal security police and intelligence service) which had orders to instantly shoot soldiers about to retreat or fall to enemy capture. Anyone appalled by this measure, however, should attempt to explain to the few living survivors of these battles that it was morally incumbent upon them to submit to conquest, genocide, or to what the Americans provocatively told Stalin was the Third Reich's aim to loot the Soviet Union's economic resources and enslave the Slavs, since there appears to have been no other path to avoid defeat. During this war, Stalin made little or no effort to repatriate prisoners of war - not even to negotiate for the return of his own captured son Yakov. Stalin resettled en masse inhabitants of Soviet territories that had been captured and controlled by the Germans, isolating them in remote parts of the vast Asiatic hinterlands of the Soviet Union. After the war, he often had the families of Soviet soldiers who had fallen into enemy hands apprehended, closing up and sealing off their apartments, a practice the Russians called opechatany. This practice - said to have been directed against foreign spies, wreckers, and other internal enemies of the people - was overseen by Stalin's loyal NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria. Beria was the successor of Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, who served Stalin as NKVD head only from 1936 until 1938. By l940, Yezhov was himself arrested and shot, the repressor repressed, as had been Yagoda, who had preceded Yezhov as Stalin's top cop. The years that Yezhov was NKVD head are commonly called the Great Terror, Great Purges, or YEZHOVSHCHINA. Most of these events are rather well known, though Yezhov himself is less familiar. He resembled the handsome actor Von Flores who plays the character Sandoval on Gene Roddenberry's posthumous (but recently aired) television series Earth - The Final Conflict, rather than the pudgy, prematurely balding nondescript actor who portrayed Yezhov in the HBO movie Stalin starring Robert Duvall. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 1 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View In the main, professional scholars, historians, and literary men in the West have tendered only three or four different theories for the causes of the alleged excess of deaths and cruelty in the Great Purges of the l930's and for Stalin's frightful but effective war tactics. The explanation most often heard finds the source of the arrests, brutality, and carnage in the mind of a deranged dictator (Stalin), a paranoid but otherwise mediocre - if not slow-witted - brute whose evil was rather like that which has been attributed to the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann due to the writings of Hannah Arendt: evil that is ordinary, boring, merely of this world - utterly, banally human. Another theory says that the NKVD got out of hand, especially under Yezhov. This explanation is closely tied to Stalin's personality too because of his involvement in, command of, and ultimate responsibility for NKVD operations. Ilya Ehrenburg, author of The Ninth Wave and winner of two Stalin Prizes, said Yezhov was commonly referred to as the Stalinist Commissar (quoted in Conquest, R., The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 63). Boris Pasternak, Nobel Prize-wining author of Doctor Zhivago, believed that Yezhov concealed the extent of the Great Purges from Stalin, making Yezhov guilty of a kind of NKVD malpractice. This is a more complex form of the loose cannon theory, which usually refers to Yezhov simply as Stalin's creation and even Stalin's puppet. A more nebulous yet subtle theory, represented primarily by the Nobel prize-winning Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (b. Dec. 11, l918), finds the explanation for the Great Terror in the Soviet governmental system itself, which is said to have taken on a cruel and insidious life of its own, like the nightmarish judicial system portrayed by Franz Kafka in his novel Der Prozess (The Trial). In this imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism, a vast, faceless, impersonal bureaucratic organization eerily acts as a sentient entity and spectral second protagonist in its own right, ensnaring and strangling the principal protagonist of the novel, the accused Joseph K., until finally, in the end, he accepts his own guilt and execution without protest. Solzhenitsyn-type theories are therefore more loosely tied to Stalin's personality and responsibility than are the deranged dictator and the NKVD (or Yezhov) loose cannon theories. Another theory arises from a deep knowledge of Marxist politics during the early days of Soviet power. It asserts that the Great Purges were a natural corollary of the nature of Leninism. Unlike the Mensheviks, who formed the non-Leninist wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, the Bolsheviks believed in the need for an elite core of leadership of professional revolutionaries in fighting capitalism and building socialist societies. Lenin proposed the need for this relatively small cadre of intellectuals and revolutionaries - a protected and rather conspiratorial inner party nucleus - to command and influence the large working masses of societies, as well as numerous non-party sympathizers, supporters, and other fringe types, in order to pull them forward on its periphery. This idea was carried forward by Stalin, and in this manner becomes integrated into theories and explanations of the Yezhovshchina that rely on Stalin's thinking and beliefs. That the repressors were themselves repressed, i.e. that NKVD chiefs Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria were arrested and shot in turn, is often considered evidence of Stalin's paranoia. Beria was arrested and shot under Khrushchev, but before this became clear, Stalin was rumored to have become dissatisfied with Beria and must have purged him. Sometimes Stalin's fears are credited with having some rational and objective basis by recognizing the reality of Germany's and Japan's joint pincer of belligerence and expansionism, crunching the Soviet Union along an east-west axis during the Stalin era. Limited validity is also sometimes recognized in Soviet leaders' persecution complexes due to the verity of the rather well known intervention of Japanese and Western troops - including U.S. troops - in the Russian Civil War. During this war, which immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution, these foreign armies attempted to assist a counter-revolutionary White (anti-Red or anti-Communist) Tsarist army that closed in on the Revolution's new capital of Moscow from Siberia, Poland, the Ukraine, and Estonia. This was a bloody, costly, and failed effort to overthrow the new proletarian Bolshevik government. Stalin's and Yezhov's fears of covert fascist infiltration of the Communist Party, however, are usually Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 2 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View discounted as mostly irrational or exaggerated, despite the fact that there were Nazi Fifth Columns in many European countries at the time - as well as in the United States ! Discrediting comparisons with McCarthyism are sometimes offered, and Stalin and Yezhov's fears are ridiculed as the spy-mania, which set the tone of the Stalin era. But questions as to the existence and extent of German and Japanese espionage and sabotage directed at toppling the Communist regime miss or conceal the real threat - a menace very well known to Stalin, Yezhov, and others! This threat is little known in - and very embarrassing for - the English-speaking world: In 1918, a master spy named Sidney Reilly, operating through the official British diplomatic channel in Moscow of Robert Bruce Lockhart (an alcoholic who wrestled with his problem all through his long and prestigious professional career in British government), came within an ace, as Reilly himself put it, of overthrowing the Bolshevik Revolution. Reilly was promoted in the highest echelons of British government by a manic-depressive (congenital or hereditary bipolar mood disorder) who admired him greatly: the future Prime Minister and author Winston Churchill. Churchill referred to his own lifelong mental illness as his Black Dog. It has been traced in his ancestry though his father, Lord Randolph, whose brain was destroyed in late stages of general paresis, as far back as John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (b. 1650). One of Winston's biographers, Lord Moran, recorded reminiscences in which Churchill related how he always made sure not to stand at the edge of an express train platform or near the side of a ship because, as Churchill himself put it, a second's action would end everything. Even though Churchill complained about them, it was probably not his low (depressive) moods that impaired his judgement on Reilly, a messianic anti-Bolshevik fanatic whose judgement and vision were also severely clouded, whose hobby was collecting Napoleoniana, and who saw himself as a new Napoleon (Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession, p. 60). In these low moods, Churchill's judgement was probably sound, though one could doubt his general outlook on life. Bipolar mood disorder acts in such a way that it was more likely that Churchill's over-confidence in an unstable and unreliable type like Reilly, and his exuberance for Reilly's scheme to overthrow the Bolsheviks, were the result of Churchill's periods of high (manic) moods. (See Molecules and Mental Illness by Samuel H. Barondes, Scientific American Library, New York, 1993, pp. 126 - 127 on the Churchills' mental diseases.) It is significant that the (also hereditary) mental illness of the post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh (b. 1853), his fear of persecution and disturbed perceptions due to what is now also suspected of being bipolar mood disorder, is rather well known, but that of the Churchills is not (or it is deliberately not mentioned, downplayed, and/or excused). The main cast of characters behind Reilly's intrigue to topple the Bolsheviks - namely, the new Napoleon Reilly, the depressed and fearful Churchill who stands behind pillars on train platforms lest he throw himself on the rails, and the alcoholic Lockhart - would strain credulity if written in a novel or scripted for a feature film. It might appear to be a Mel Brooks comedy were it not for the fact that Winston Churchill was the primary instigator of the English-speaking world's anti-Communist policies throughout this period. In 1946, Churchill visited the U.S. and made a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in which he continued to warn the West - in this case the U.S. - of the expansive policies of the USSR, favoring a close Anglo-American alliance to oppose it. At this time, he coined the famous, well-worn expression, the Iron Curtain. (We shall see in what follows that according to former British foreign secretary Sir Anthony Eton, Stalin consistently outwitted Churchill and U.S. President F.D. Roosevelt at the Big Three Conference during WWII. Stalin was approaching senescence himself at this time, but his brain-aging appears to have followed a very normal course.) Reilly's working plan had been to bribe Latvian mercenaries (ethnic Letts), who were bodyguards of Bolshevik leaders, to induce them to arrest Lenin and Trotsky when the two arrived together in Moscow. Meanwhile, 60,000 White Russian officers and soldiers on the city's outskirts were to await the signal to mobilize. Lenin and Trotsky were to be paraded in irons through the streets and the Revolution declared over. Simultaneously, Moisei Uritsky, Chairman of the Petrograd CheKa (the Revolution's earliest intelligence service), was to be arrested in a similar counter-revolutionary uprising in Petrograd. The plan fell through and went out of control, resulting in a fanatical socialist named Fanny Kaplan prematurely Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 3 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View shooting Lenin twice at point blank range the day after Uritsky was assassinated in his office. These assassinations had been planned only as contingencies. Lenin survived with one lung punctured, with the second bullet lodged near his main neck artery. He died six years later due to the chronic impairment of health that these wounds caused. Due to this plot, partly aborted and partly gone awry, English-speaking and British-financed saboteurs and counter-revolutionary agents were under as great - or greater - suspicion than Japanese and German operatives during the much derided spy-mania. The foiling of this plot - known as The Conspiracy of Ambassadors in the Soviet Union and, in the West, as the Lockhart or Lettish conspiracy (as if the Letts were to blame) - was one of the many superlative achievements of Felix Dzerzhinsky as the CheKa's early organizer. Reilly and his fellow conspirators did not fully appreciate, as Phillip Knightley put it in his book The Second Oldest Profession, the intelligence and resourcefulness of the Pole [Dzerzhinsky] who founded the modern Soviet intelligence service whom Reilly and his co-conspirators had been up against (Knightley, op. cit., p. 85). Here there is a major contradiction of the conventional view, which says that Stalinist society and its officials were completely dominated by unreasonable paranoia and xenophobic isolationism. By the time of the Yezhovshchina, many Old Bolsheviks had become high-ranking Soviet officials. They retained the quashing of the Lockhart conspiracy in their living memories. It therefore speaks of their extraordinary courage and complaisance that they and their younger proteges (such as Yezhov) invited any foreign solicitors and lawyers - especially British and American - to attend and audit the Show Trials of the 1930's at all! Reilly also had a hand in what Knightley called the greatest ‘communist scare' in British political history (Knightley, op. cit., p. 62). This was the circulation, just prior to Great Britain's general election of October 29, 1924, of a fraudulent letter purportedly from Zinoviev, who was one of Lenin's comrades and became - after Lenin's death - a central figure of leadership in the Communist Party during the 1920's. The letter called for members of the British Communist Party to intensify their work with sympathizers in Britain's Labor Party. The forgery successfully swung enough voters away from the Labor Party to defeat Britain's first Labor government and bring the Conservatives back into power. It poisoned all Anglo-Russian relations and trade treaties for almost three decades. The immediate need for the letter? According to Knightley, the Labour Party was considering the suspension of SIS [Secret Intelligence Service or M16 ] and opening its files - a proposal which would, if implemented, take effect in 1925. So SIS had every motive to sabotage [sic] Labour's election chances in order to make certain this did not happen (ibid., p. 63). This letter hardened attitudes and marked a definite turning-point in Russia's view of the West and the West's view of Russia. It forced Russia to become more isolationist and more suspicious of Western intentions... (ibid., pp. 75 - 76). According to Lockhart himself, in the early days of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks were surprisingly tolerant (ibid., p. 75). The conspiracy of ambassadors, the attempt on Lenin's life, other assassinations (as of Uritsky and later Kirov), the Zinoviev letter, and much more (detailed in what follows) poisoned the permissiveness and impartiality of the early Bolsheviks (also detailed in what follows), forcing them to take the more and more extreme measures which have been a favorite the subject of a great amount of anti- Soviet propaganda. 2. What is a Paradigm? Each of the aforementioned theories of the Stalinist terror pretends to be more or less scientific in the sense of being logical and having an empirical basis. They actually arise as paradigms of Soviet society. For readers unfamiliar with this important concept, a paradigm in this sense is not to be confused with paradigms in grammar. Students of Italian, for example, must memorize parlo, parli, parla (I speak, you speak, he speaks) as a model for conjugating the verb parlare (to speak), so that, on this pattern, they can conjugate many other verbs, like suonare (to play music): suono, suoni, suona (I play, you play, he plays). Paradigm has been a favorite term in linguistics, in which it has other meanings - slightly different from the idea of a grammatical paradigm exemplified here - that go back to the Genevan linguist Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 4 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857). Another technical use of the term paradigm is for grid-like tables that display classificatory systems, usually of kinship or lexical information, such as showing that an adult male chicken is a cock, an adult male turkey a tom, an adolescent female chicken a pullet, etc. These meanings of paradigm are all different from that which is relevant here, and are mentioned not for the sake of explaining them but rather in order to distinguish them from the use introduced by Thomas S. Kuhn in his influential little book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There is a common core of meaning to Kuhn's - and the other - uses of the term, however. In each use, a paradigm is a kind of model to be copied. In the sense used by Kuhn it is a model of scientific practice that draws adherents and launches a coherent scientific tradition of thought, research, rules, and experiment, such as Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian dynamics, or Einsteinian space-time physics. These are large, grandiose paradigms, but scientific - or any - paradigms may be more narrow and specialized than these, like the corpuscular theory of optics (due to Newton), or the wave-mechanical theory of matter (due to de Broglie). Students of history and science are often charmed to see illustrations from manuscripts hundreds of years old which show the human eye emanating rays which strike and thereby illuminate objects at which they are directed by the eye, thereby supposedly enabling humans to see. This defunct theory of vision is a type of specialized paradigm of sight. Just before the time of Ben Franklin, many electricians - as students of electricity in the English-speaking world then called themselves - began to think of electricity as some sort of fluid, because it was discovered that electrically charged bodies would not only attract and repel one another, but that electricity could also be conducted from one body to another by a plumbing connection, like Ben Franklin's famous kite wire. It was this paradigm of electricity as a fluid - now abandoned and superseded by a different paradigm of electricity as the motion of free electrons, which are normally bound to atoms and molecules - that led to the construction and experimentation with the famous Leyden jars used in the time of Franklin. These were canning-sized jars lined with metal that, it was discovered, could hold or store electricity. Jars are for fluids. The paradigm of electricity as a fluid had a lot to do with the original invention and construction of these jars. Modern science students are told that these jars were used by early experimentalists and survive only for their curious historical interest and for demonstrations. This is true, but this glib explanation conceals why anyone would have made them in the first place because such jars are thought about today only in terms of the modern paradigm for electricity in which the jar is viewed as a capacitor. This term still carries a remote echo of some kind of fluid measure, as do the terms leakage and saturation. Since modern students know that electrical capacitors do not pass water or any other liquids, the common explanations and construction of Leyden jars leaves students bewildered with an unsatisfied sense of incongruity. The study of paradigms is what prepares a student for membership in any particular scientific community in which he hopes to practice, in which he will be required to carry on his own practice within an accepted paradigm. Such a shared paradigm is a commitment by an entire profession to certain specific rules and standards of scientific practice with others who share the same view of the world or phenomena they are studying. A paradigm in this sense is more fundamental than scientific axioms, theories, or rules. The latter are all the result of seeing the world or a smaller group of phenomena in a certain (paradigmatic) way - not vice-versa. It is commonly thought that the history of science proceeds as Sir Francis Bacon thought: as time goes by, dedicated researchers just accumulate more and more data and, upon this ever-growing stockpile, more and more ingenious and rigorous modes of thought are applied, drawing out all implications and synthesizing everything by then known. This is the naive idea that Kuhn has shown to be wrong. According to Kuhn, science progresses by paradigm shifts, not by mere accumulation and analysis of data. Before a science reaches a certain level of advancement or maturity, any intelligent and literate layman Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 5 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View can read the seminal books, such as Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, in which a new theory of evolution was introduced. Yet, laymen find reading the most modern texts on evolutionary theory virtually impossible. They attribute this failure as being due to a lack of special training. This is certainly true, but it misses the real reason, which does not consist merely of a layman lacking the specialized vocabularies of developed or advanced sciences. Nor is it a lack of intelligence or fundamental scientific ability, as some of the perplexed usually think. What is really missing for them is lack of exposure to - and acceptance of - the shared paradigm implicit or tacitly assumed in this rather advanced scientific literature. Einstein's theory of general relativity is puzzling to many laymen because they do not share Einstein's view of the world in which space-time can be curved. What is more, space, to such laymen, is separate and different from time, and is just not the sort of thing that can be bent. When Einstein was a young man, it was not just laymen, but eminent professional physicists and astronomers who, according to Hyman Levy of the Imperial College of Science in London, stomped in incoherent rage during one of Einstein's earliest lectures on relativity at the thought of Space-Time. New paradigms replace old - but not without a fight: as explained below, even fights won't help. Old customs must die. The fight is to the death! The replacement of one paradigm by another does not usually happen when younger scientists persuade older ones to accept a new and better view. Copernicus's heliocentric theory that the Earth revolves around the sun (and not vice-versa) was not accepted until the Platonist and sun-worshiper cum mathematician Johannes Kepler took the Copernican system - which was still virtually Ptolemaic - and made it recognizably modern. Copernicus's own theory and writings still strike modern readers as completely medieval - and they are. Then, all of a sudden, Copernicus's system was accepted. Max Planck, co-discoverer with Einstein of the quantization of energy, said, A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. For Kremlinology, this means that totalitarian paradigms of Soviet society, exemplified by the theories of Stalinist terror sketched above (and described and examined in detail in what follows), will never be superseded and buried by new paradigms until they are interred alongside their chief purveyors - such as the now advanced-in-age Robert Conquest and David Joravksy - no matter what refuting evidence is forthcoming from Soviet archives newly opened since glasnost'. The transition to a new paradigm is abrupt, when suddenly specialist and layman alike seem to have their vision of the world transformed. After the Copernican revolution, for example, the universe was seen as much vaster, and people began to think that the wanderers (the planets) might be like the Earth in some way. In the wake of the acceptance of a new paradigm, a rash of new discoveries suddenly materializes as the new vision of the world seems to shape not only how people see things in it but also how they look for things in it. Within only fifty or sixty years after Copernicus's death, mountains on the moon were first noticed, the phases of Venus observed, and an immense number of previously unnoticed stars catalogued. The Chinese had observed sunspots (showing the sun changed which the pre-Copernican, Roman Church-endorsed Ptolemaic system denied) and new stars (nova, also impossible in the Ptolemaic universe) centuries before. However, Europeans never observed either until a paradigm shift into the Copernican had occurred. This demonstrates how a paradigm can operate as an invidious form of reality tunnel. 3. Lysenkoism as Paradigm War When a paradigm blinkers vision and exerts an iron embrace on thought, a communication gap exists between parties who do not share the same paradigms, as if communication and a meeting of the minds between them is impaired. An example of such a gap was the international furor that erupted during the Stalin era when an extraordinarily gifted Ukrainian botanist and agriculturalist named Trofim D. Lysenko (b. Sept. 29, 1898) battled the advocates of a new paradigm for heredity, which he called the Mendel- Weismann-Morganist theory. The latter theory stated - in Lysenko's time - that the whole of a species' heredity is exclusively contained in the chromosomes of its cells, and that the rest of the cell consists Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 6 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View merely of the structural material and humors of metabolism traditionally known as protoplasm (known today as the extra-nucleic contents of the cytoplasm). Lysenko argued that a correct, complete, and useful theory of heredity could only be based on the operation of the whole of the cell and all of its parts in their bodily, developmental, and environmental context - a theory unrealized to this day. He argued that the environment in particular influenced heredity in ways unacknowledged by the new genetic paradigmists, who recognized random gene mutation and natural selection as the sole modifiers of heredity. Lysenko's theory is often referred to as Lysenkoism, not to give credit to Lysenko as one might think - but to discredit Lysenko. (Lysenko himself called it Michurinism, in honor of I. V. Michurin; see below.) The details and an evaluation of the scientific debate between Lysenko and the Morganists, and the remarkable, ignored, and original insights by Lysenko that have since turned out to be true in botany, soil science, and other fields, will be examined in Part II of this essay for readers more interested in the scientific merits of Lysenkoism. The important suggestion here is that it is much more enlightening and productive to view the Lysenko affair as a clash of representatives of different paradigms of heredity, rather than to see it in conventional ways which flourish under the auspices of totalitarian paradigms of Stalinist society. Conventional views are shared as much by many European Marxists, such as the Khrushchevite Dominique LeCourt, as by outright enemies of Stalin, Lysenko, and the former Soviet Union. These views generally share the belief that the Lysenko controversy was a conflict between Lysenko, who upheld an archaic Lamarckian theory of evolution (which he did not), vs. the first geneticists, who were modern Darwinian geneticists (which they were not). The mainstream view incorrectly says that Lysenko attempted to make his paradigm of heredity - which he called Michurinist theory - fit into the grander Marxist paradigm of history and philosophical thought as a kind of Stalinist science. Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (b. Oct. 27 [date uncertain], 1855) was a Russian horticulturalist whose hybrid plants brought him praise from the new Soviet government and invitations by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to visit the United States. Lysenko considered himself an heir of what he called the Michurinist trend in plant sciences. Whatever the value of Michurin's actual achievements as a creator of new flower and fruit varieties (accomplishments belittled by Western writers like David Joravsky and others as much as former Soviet authorities lauded them), Michurin spoke to the world scientific community from a very marginal position. To the Western scientific world, his was a small, weak voice from somewhere in remote Western Asia. Then suddenly, with the rise of the Soviet Union, there was the voice of Lysenko - sharp, intense, powerful. This single difference between Lysenko and Michurin had an important consequence: In 1939, due to the rise of Lysenko's prestige and influence in the Soviet Union's learned academies, a group of important professors in genetics and biology from Leningrad University and Leningrad pedagogical institutes, who had been losing a number of open academic debates with Lysenko and his fellow scientists, petitioned Communist Party officials to intervene in their academic controversy with Lysenko. In an eight page letter submitted to Andrei Zhdanov, the head of Agitprop (the Administration of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), they claimed that Lysenko's theories had no scientific merit and that he rose to prominence solely due to his merits in the field of agriculture (Krementsov, N., Stalinist Science, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997, p. 66). Note that Lysenko's achievements in agriculture were recognized by his learned opponents as completely obvious, despite assertions by David Joravsky, Valery Soyfer, Zhores Medvedev, and many others that Lysenko's agricultural work was a bust or - worse - a fraud. By petitioning Party officials to intervene, the Leningraders thought to leapfrog the long process of organizing an open academic debate in a scientific congress on genetics. As Krementsov put it, the geneticists themselves recognized the power of the Party bureaucracy to adjudicate their arguments (ibid. p. 68) with the Lysenkoists. During the next decades, Party bosses did indeed intervene, much to the chagrin and regret of these scientists, who then cried out that Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov and other mere Party functionaries - such as Mark Mitin Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 7 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View and Marxist theoretician and jurist (and Lysenko's personal friend) Isaac Prezent - were pretending to understand sophisticated cytological experiments and the chemical reactions of very large molecules. Western writers who have expressed disgust and outrage that such governmental interference with the course of science occurred in the Soviet Union are unaware, or ignore the fact, that the very Soviet scientists whom Joravsky mischaracterized as repressed requested an adjudication themselves! Neither Lysenko nor the Lysenkoists pleaded for such interference. It shall be seen in what follows that archival evidence, newly available to Western scholars since perestroika and glasnost', shows that in many areas of life, the Moscow Party bureaucracy (contrary once again to the conventional view) was not in the habit of being a thought police - as one Orwellian form of the conventional totalitarian paradigms asserts - but was very responsive to petitions and complaints from all workers and professions in the Soviet Union - including the geneticists, who wanted the Politburo to be a paradigm patrol until they clearly saw that the Moscow Party bureaucracy and intellectuals did not completely share their new paradigm of heredity. The facts just adduced are in glaring contradiction with views generated by the totalitarian paradigm. The latter presents the Stalin era as one in which a monolithic, centralized scientific community run by Lysenko (with Stalin's blessing), dictated to - and persecuted - geneticists and other scientists. According to Krementsov and others who have examined the new Soviet archival evidence, there is no factual support for this view. Instead, the evidence coheres into a picture of fierce competition between Lysenko vs. N. Vavilov, Zhebrak, and others (like the Leningraders mentioned above) for favors and funds dispensed by the Party apparatus. According to Krementsov, the black-and-white picture... - the oppressive state versus the victimized scientific community, does not fit the archival documents I was unearthing (ibid., p. xi). A parallel exists between the above-mentioned efforts of Reilly, Lockhart, and others to sabotage and overthrow the new Bolshevik regime, with the repeated efforts made a generation later (ca. 1939 - 1948) to end Lysenko's vehement resistance to the new Mendelian paradigm of heredity and to unseat the rising dominance of his followers in the Soviet academies of higher learning. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Lloyd George, Admiral Blinker Hall, M. P. (Member of Parliament), and the British Foreign Office had seen to it that the greatest part of the British Intelligence Service's budget in the 1920's and 1930's was spent on spies and saboteurs in Moscow and Petrograd. The latter were given free hands - and deep pockets to put them in - to destroy the Revolution. They established and organized hydra-like networks of saboteurs and wreckers, incorporating into their networks such diverse types as common Muscovite thieves and vandals, intellectual anarchists, various anti-Lenin socialist counter-revolutionaries who disliked Lenin's refusal to fight Germany or have Russia participate in any more Western wars, former Okrana members (former members of the Tsar's secret police), and master spies like Reilly and Paul Dukes - one and all seeking to crush the infant Bolshevik menace. In similar fashion, little more than a generation later (ca. 1944 - 1948), a number of British and American geneticists, biologists, and physiologists, including Sir Julian Huxley, C. D. Darlington, Sir Henry Dale, H. J. Muller, L. Dunn, and others, including M. Demerec and Theodosius Dobzhansky, organized a broad publishing campaign against Lysenkoism: they established a parallel high brow international printing press network of scholars, scientists, and publishers in the West who ridiculed and misrepresented Lysenko's ideas. As with the foreign interventionists and saboteurs in the Revolution's aftermath, this new bookish conspiracy, consisting (as in the Lockhart conspiracy) primarily of British subjects and American citizens, had native contacts inside the Soviet Union with whom they networked, in this case scientists such as A. Zhebrak, Serebrovsky, Dubinin, and other students and former colleagues of the (by then) deceased N. Vavilov who personally and confidentially ask[ed] for support (Krementsov, op. cit., p. 121). Their purpose, as Huxley said in a letter to Dunn, was weakening Lysenko (ibid.). The immediate reason for organizing this plot was that the judgement of the Politburo requested by the geneticists in 1939, once delivered, was not satisfactory to them. According to Krementsov, a report on the controversy, probably written by Party functionary Kolbanovsky and edited by Mitin, was sent to the Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 8 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Politburo. The substance of this report became the official determination of the case. It characterized Lysenko's work, as advanced, progressive, and innovative, while the geneticists, it said, were conservative and acting against innovation in science. The judges pointed out also that much in academician Lysenko's work needs to be corrected and examined. They lauded the practicality and lack of dogmatism in Lysenko's theories. The report stated that the geneticists were a very self-enclosed group that...reacts to...criticism in a very negative way. At the same time, the report condemned the simplistic style of the Lysenkoists' criticisms of genetics, and the fact that the Lysenkoists often ignored the achievements of genetics and cytology, including the scientific meaning of the laws of heredity as discovered by Mendel, and Morgan's chromosomal theory, which the Party authors characterized as one of the greatest achievements of modern science (Krementsov, op. cit., pp. 74 - 76). This was not satisfactory to the geneticists, inasmuch as the report contained no proposals for any sanctions against the Lysenkoists or for radical institutional or police measures (against either side). Unassuaged, the geneticists then launched the aforesaid international protest and publishing campaign against Lysenko to cajole prestigious foreign authorities to turn screws on Soviet leaders and institutions, such as threatening to force esteemed and valuable foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences to resign. In light of the foregoing outline of the Lockhart conspiracy, the Zinoviev letter, etc., the geneticists' involvement of foreign powers and influences, especially from the English-speaking world - was clearly one of the most inept - even self-destructive - ploys they could have conceived, aside from its underhandedness and the fact that it bespeaks their inherent distaste for having strong professional and theoretical competitors in their own country. (It shall be shown in Part II that with few exceptions, the early, turn-of-the-century geneticists, especially Bateson, Vavilov's teacher and the foremost English-speaking proponent of Mendel, were abrasive, aggressive, and acted fanatically, as if delirious and intoxicated by a new dogma.) Lysenko was then tried in numerous Western books, journals, and newspapers in a manner similar to that imagined by the totalitarian paradigmists to have prevailed at the Moscow Show Trials. A group of American geneticists approached J. B. S. Haldane, one of the Twentieth Century's greatest scientists, a co-founder of modern mathematical and population genetics. At that time, Haldane was a member of the British Communist Party and one of the select foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The conspirators hoped to enlist his aid because, as several of them wrote in a joint letter to Haldane, he could not easily be attacked by Lysenko as a political enemy of Soviet Russia. They suggested in this letter that Haldane would not be suspected of using his prestige for the purpose of either a personal attack on Lysenko or of a campaign to defame Soviet science (letter quoted by Krementsov, op. cit., p. 123). Muller, Dunn, Demerec, and Dobzhansky were among the signatories of this barefaced, ignominious request. Haldane returned the letter to Muller, dignifiedly refusing to participate. This shocked the American geneticists. Muller, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, was outraged (ibid.). After Haldane's refusal, Dale (President of the Royal Society) and Huxley wrote, promoted, and otherwise participated in the production of articles and books (see Bibliography) containing multitudes of snide, defamatory personal remarks about Lysenko and his fellow scientists personally and about Soviet science in general. These were the very kinds of smears and this was the very kind of campaign that Huxley and his allies, through careful planning, plotting, and the (failed) enlistment of Haldane, claimed they wished to avoid being under suspicion of making! According to Krementsov, the geneticists adopted the same style of ‘name-calling' and ‘labeling' (op. cit., p. 66) that Conway Zirkle, David Joravsky, and other anti-Soviet Western writers and historians have alarmingly declared to be a new, dangerous, and pathological hallmark of the manner in which this new breed of Marxist biologists called Lysenkoists conduct political and ideological polemics under the guise of scientific debate. The most sarcastic and misinformed of the lot of these publications is Russia Puts the Clock Back by John Landgon-Davies, for which Dale wrote a Forward. This book discharges spleen directly at Haldane, casting numerous aspersions on his honesty, integrity, and forthrightness. The only real differences between the smears, slurs, innuendo, and other maledictions practiced by both sides is that those coming Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 9 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View from the geneticists, who had been rebuffed by a Politburo unwilling to end competition with the Lysenkoists and serve as the geneticists' thought police, were more bitter and self-destructive. While evidence of Red subversion in Britain has always been flimsy, it shall be shown in what follows that White subversion in the Soviet Union, masterminded from abroad, sometimes even by Soviet exiles (like Trotsky), successfully poisoned what Lockhart himself called the early Bolsheviks' surprising [!] tolerance and created a Terror. Anyone in Great Britain at the time who tried to keep a cool head and adhere to facts was summarily branded a traitor (as Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, said of the British Prime Minister). Dinner clubs were formed to liquidate the Red Menace. Rumors believed as fact circulated, saying that Britain's Labor Party was in possession of Tsarist diamonds handed over to them by Bolshevik looters so they could be used to finance their newspaper, the Daily Herald. If the full extent of these machinations, slanders, and frauds (such as the above-mentioned Zinoviev letter ) had been appreciated, there would be wonder about Stalin's rationality if he had not leaned toward isolationism and suspicion of Western intentions. Lockhart's wife had to warn him from London that his career was in jeopardy (Knightley, op. cit., p. 70). Why? Because of all the foreign spies and saboteurs that first and second generation Communists (such as Stalin and Yezhov, respectively) learned to despise, Lockhart, who knew Trotsky and shook hands with Stalin, was the only one who had an overall poor opinion of the intelligence the British were receiving from their agents in Russia. He found reports by Reilly particularly unreliable and warned of their danger. In Lockhart's view, Reilly's fanatical anti-Bolshevism clouded his vision, distorted his judgement and made him unduly optimistic about the chances of a counter-revolution (Knightley, op. cit., p. 60). Reilly deluded himself into the thinking the Soviets were about to be overthrown every autumn. For the following decades, misinformation like Reilly's became typical of espionage reports received and promulgated in the West about the Soviet Union. Around 1920, for example, the British SIS forwarded a series of documents to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, and to the British Foreign Office, claiming it had stolen them from offices of a Soviet representative in Berlin. These documents purportedly showed Bolshevik subversion on India's borders. According to Knightley, Curzon was furious at what he took to be evidence of Soviet duplicity, and sent a strong note to Moscow. But his indignation quickly turned to ignominy (op. cit., p. 74) because the documents turned out to be forgeries concocted from disinformation originally contained in Ostenformation, an anonymously published anti-Soviet news-sheet from Germany that was distributed to counter-revolutionary groups! This pattern of Western leaders being duped by anti-Bolshevik and anti-Soviet agents continued right into the early days of the Cold War. Many sources of disinformation were fanatical ideological Nazis who were undaunted by Hitler's defeat, sharing pathological and even sexually perverted (as well as unscientific) ideas about race, Jews, and Slavs. While Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy was spending American taxpayers' hard-earned dollars hunting for Communists in the U.S. State Department and among Jewish actors, writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood, the United States' CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) was infested with former Nazis who were providing the CIA with disinformation about the Soviet foe that had just defeated them and would have hanged them had they not escaped into the protective arms of the awaiting U.S. Office of Strategic Services. In 1946, the OSS, which was the CIA's predecessor organization, recruited the former head of Nazi intelligence operations for the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen. With funding from the OSS and U.S. protection, Gehlen virtually rebuilt the vanquished Nazi intelligence apparatus in the new Eastern bloc countries of the Soviet Union. He staffed it with former SD (Nazi Secret Police), Abwehr, and Gestapo officers. By 1949, Gehlen's renascent organization became a principal part of the newly formed CIA. As had happened before with Reilly and other rabid anti-Communists, Gehlen created a myth that the Soviets planned to overrun Western Europe and that war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was inevitable. Gehlen's group was the U. S.'s only official source of information on the inner workings of the Soviet Union's Eastern bloc countries. Indeed, as a source for the CIA, his information was considered outside the CIA as authoritative and from the inside. According to Ward Churchill and Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 10 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Jim Vander Wall, from 1946 to 1954, virtually all U.S. intelligence on the Eastern bloc countries was filtered through Gehlen's organization and slanted accordingly. This was, in all probability, the major contributing factor to the genesis of the Cold War. (Agents of Repression by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988, p. 391, n. 70. For even more details on this, see Higham, Charles, American Swastika, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, N. Y., 1985, pp. 241-301.) 4. Two Grandiose Paradigms: Marxist and Lockean Try to imagine the early Twentieth Century astronomers Hubble and Eddington sitting on a discussion panel with Aristotle and Ptolemy. This is a challenge to the imagination. Agreement between all of them can be visualized only if one accepts the oversimplified and probably false idea that Aristotle and Ptolemy - as reasonable men - could be induced to accept Newtonian dynamics (a paradigm of physical force different from theirs) due to some sort of inherently superior and apparent reasonableness of the Newtonian system. Such a fascinating encounter can never be witnessed, of course, but something like it has been seen over and over again through the centuries. Some of the more contemporary encounters of this type - rarely witnessed anymore - have been between Marxist intellectuals, like the biologist J. B. S. Haldane or the physicist and crystallographer J. D. Bernal, vs. non-Marxist scientists, historians, and economists. Agreement between them never reached fundamentals, such as how the price of a commodity is determined. This is not because one or both sides were in error, as may well have been the case, but rather because both sides viewed the world through the prisms of completely different paradigms. It can be said that one side viewed the world from the point of view of Marx, while the other saw it through the eyes of John Locke. The civilized world is still divided between followers of Marx and those of Locke, though the latter do not as readily admit that they are following anyone as the Marxists do. Adherents of Lockean paradigms in the West have vaingloriously insisted that they are objective and that truth - especially scientific truth - is not culturally relative. David Joravsky is one such author who has written extensively on Lysenko. There are many fallacies in this idea, such as the dubious notions that enculturation is the only significant determinant of thinking, and that the concepts of objective science are in some way like the real things they represent - not just metaphors of thought into which paradigms congeal and attain verbal representation. The Marxists, on the other hand, say these bourgeois thinkers are in the grip of what it calls ideologies and so lack a disinterested awareness of historical necessity. Marxist thinkers make the powerful claim that by following principles enunciated by Marx, they are stationed at an absolute moment in history which is outside all cultural, historical, and ideological subjectivity, so that their truth is not relative either. By 1905, Lenin was misusing Marx's concept of ideology by referring to Marxism and dialectical materialism as if they were ideologies too, as if they stood opposed to ideologies produced in capitalist societies. Lenin may have purposely made this error to sharpen war with capitalism, but philosophically it undermines one of Marxism's most powerful claims, albeit one of its most intriguing and difficult ideas. In the Lysenko controversy, a duel was joined between representatives of two broad paradigms of history and philosophy - that of Marx vs. that of Locke - as much as between the representatives of two narrower paradigms of heredity - that of Lysenko vs. that of Mendel, Weismann, and Morgan. Many Western observers of the Lysenko affair were offended that this acrimonious debate embroiled social philosophers and political thinkers, such as Communist Party functionary Mark Mitin and Marxist theoretician Isaac Prezent, in the same forums with specialists in plant breeding and genetics. The right and ability of these philosophers to contribute to - or even decide - this dispute received both ideological and institutional support in the USSR, and, as previously noted, was solicited and thereby endorsed by Soviet geneticists themselves. Stalin's involvement in the debate was viewed in the West as just more evidence that he wished to dictate new, revolutionary proletarian sciences based on Marxist philosophy - sciences like the new agrobiology espoused by Lysenko - to overthrow the bourgeois sciences that had been imported for centuries by Tsarist Russia from Western capitalist societies, as if Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 11 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Stalin had deluded himself into thinking that he too knew something about plant respiration and epithelial cells. Stalin himself finally, lately, and reluctantly entered the fray, editing and even writing parts of a speech for Lysenko delivered at the close of an important academic conference held in 1948, the type of conference and debate that the geneticists had conspired to avoid in 1939. When doing so, Stalin made humble admissions of his lack of erudition in the sciences, but emphatically asserted his knowledge and expertise in dialectical materialism (the grandiose Marxist paradigm). All of this was a consequence of the suspicion that some individual, incident, theory, or newly discovered fact threatened to throw a reigning or upcoming paradigm into a crisis. It shall be seen in Part II of this essay that Lysenko's humble discovery of the vernalization of flowering plants threatened to do this, but not until the implications of his discovery were perceived as real, and not merely marginal, threats to the new Mendelian paradigm for heredity. The threat was not clear until it was thought that the theoretical pre-suppositions and implications of vernalization - newly presented to the Western world - were the product of a vigorous new materialist science that capitalist ideologies had supposedly theretofore inhibited. Lysenko's discovery of vernalization set off a remarkable flurry of research into this obscure botanical phenomenon by biologists, geneticists, and other scientists East and West, forcing them to expand a narrow, idealized, and highly oversimplified paradigm of heredity based on Gregor Mendel's diffident research into only seven traits in a single species (the culinary pea). Mendel had formulated therefrom a theory involving factors of heredity that was implausible and lacked a known material basis or mechanism at that time. What should be noted in this and many other perennially unresolved disputes are all the terms which are rough-and-ready stand-ins for paradigm, as if this notion is always operating and at least unconsciously taken into account. Examples of such terms range from words readers barely notice, such as through the eyes of and perspectives (as in the title of a book discussed in what follows: Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives); to conspicuous, fancy, impressive-sounding terms like Weltanschauung (German for view of the world ) and root metaphor ; on to poetic words that evoke profound interest or acerbic skepticism, like prisms of consciousness ; all the way to terms that sound - and are often intended to be - invidiously negative, such as limited awareness, schemes, ideologies, -isms, spaghetti-thin reality tunnel, etc. An alien paradigm is usually seen from the outside by one who does not share it as a theoretical schematic to be applied to various facts (narrow paradigms) or to the world in general (broad paradigms) and thereby tested. The Twentieth Century philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, famous for his unrelenting logical analysis of traditional philosophical ideas and systems, said that the right attitude (sic) in studying a philosopher is to maintain a kind of hypothetical sympathy, he called it, until it is possible to know what it feels like [my emphasis] to believe his theories. This effort or exercise of historical and psychological imagination, he said, at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. (Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1945, p. 39.) Once again, scope of our thinking and temper of mind could be two loose stand-ins for paradigm. Confining discussion to what Kuhn has called paradigms allows one to avoid plunging into the realm of discussing more nebulous, complex, and obscure entities of the kind materialists and realists would rather avoid, entities such as states of consciousness, levels of awareness, analytical vs. dialectical thinking, etc. Agreement and progress rarely come when such ideal concepts are invoked. But paradigm consideration nonetheless easily spills over into discussions in which such terms dominate, at which point sweeping characterizations of very broad paradigms may arise, such as Anglo-Saxon business-as-usual, matter-of fact unimaginativeness, Latin hysterics, Nordic Romanticism, Oriental mysticism, etc. An example of this occurs in Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar, in which the author states that in ancient Athens, in the early Renaissance, and during the first years of the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution, intellectuals were mentally integrated and awake, having a ‘cosmic awareness' in which individual awareness and social reality were linked. Koestler appeared to be Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 12 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View groping to explain the historical and social settings in which new grandiose paradigms arise, and how salutary and even exhilarating it feels to live through and be part of such a paradigm transition. 5. The Totalitarian Paradigm of Stalinist Society An awareness that a paradigm is operating in one's thinking signals a more advanced and scientific stage of historical thought. This awareness was not present in those who introduced the theories for Stalinist society referred to above. These theories arose mainly in the 1950's due to opponents of the Soviet regime, such as Roy Medvedev, a Soviet reformer who was mainly addressing a Russian audience, and to professional historians who worked in quasi-governmental capacities as propagandists, like the very influential Robert Conquest, whose office at Harvard was largely an adjunct of the Pentagon. Conquest's status was acknowledged by McGeorge Bundy, designer of the foreign and national security policies for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Bundy euphemistically and somewhat obscurely called Conquest-type grafts of historical study with practical politics a high measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and information gathering agencies of the government of the U. S. (Cited in Ford, C., Donovan of OSS, Boston, Little, Brown and John, 1970, p. 111). Analytical, critical, self-conscious, scientific historical modeling is not the stock-in-trade of reformers, advocates, and propagandists, who purvey their paradigms unconsciously, working in smooth, tacit agreement with others sharing the same paradigm, whatever their language, nationality, profession, or professional status. A new breed of non-Marxist historians is emerging in the West to challenge the dominant (totalitarian) paradigm. They already stand wrongfully accused of being revisionist and of wishing to exculpate Stalin, Beria, Yezhov, and other former Soviet leaders of their crimes. But, in a little-noticed statement made by Conquest himself in the Preface to what has been considered his seminal masterpiece of Kremlinology for the era, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, he said, in 1990, The Great Terror [his book] still had to rely to a large extent on émigré, defector, and other unofficial [my emphasis] material. Conquest saw his role writing on this subject as one of balancing and assessing incomplete, partial, and uneven material (op. cit., p. viii). His method needs to be more ingenuously described as a finessing or smoothing out of the facts, many of which he here admits to be doubtful to begin with, coming from hostile sources! The tool he used to abrasively sandpaper these facts is the totalitarian paradigm of Stalinist society (to be defined below, in this section). Conquest noted, in the same Preface, that he was not working, as with the writing of modern Western history, by the deployment...of adequate and credible official archives (ibid.). The default method he used instead is usually only applied in historical work on ancient history, where the loss of artifacts, documentation, and archival material is accepted as par for the course. It is not acceptable for the writing of modern history. Now that many heretofore- closed USSR archives have been opened, this approach to the subject must be completely superseded. In the same Preface, Conquest acknowledged a pre-glasnost' Khrushchevite contribution to his facts. However, as will be detailed in what follows, it has justifiably been said that Khrushchev (like Trotsky) seduced the West into belief. Khrushchev, either out of a shrewd knack for testing Western gullibility or out of sheer idiocy, once claimed for a short time that he shot Beria himself. In what follows, the reader can judge for himself to what extent Conquest's own admissions, in The Great Terror, of chiseling one fact and flat-ironing another to correct unevenness produces books which are closer to fiction than to history (there is an in-between area too). The disturbing difference is that the characters and places referred to in Conquest's works are not the Karamazov brothers or Chekhov's black monk and demon wood, but rather bear the names of real Twentieth Century people and places and are presented as real events. This is not merely a matter of accidentally or intentionally omitting or glossing over facts that are inconsistent with a ruling paradigm, though this is certainly involved. This is, rather, a matter of molding and altering facts to better fit the paradigm, so that one perforce views a distant reality (e.g. the Stalin years ) through the paradigm because one has only such altered facts (thanks to Conquest's hard work ). Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 13 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View A significant example of simple omission to perpetuate a paradigm can be taken from Conquest's reputedly authoritative and exhaustive study The Great Terror. There is only a single clause (part of a sentence) in the entire book referring to the Lockhart/Ambassadors' Conspiracy. There is no suggestion whatsoever that this plot could have played any part at all in inspiring the Terror (the ostensible subject of the book) or in poisoning Anglo-Soviet relations (a secondary book theme). Quite the reverse: there is only Conquest's sardonic allusion to the hysteria of the first Soviet President Yakov Sverdlov, who, Conquest avers, commented after the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky that the assassins would turn out to be ‘hirelings of the English and the French' (Conquest, op. cit., p. 45). There is no indication as to whether or not Conquest is actually quoting Sverdlov or someone else here, or quoting the general sentiments of a Sverdlov-type, or whether he is quoting or paraphrasing anyone else. There is no footnote or reference (of which the book is full in other places) in the context of this potentially paradigm-threatening subject. Here the specific threat to the totalitarian paradigm is that the paradigm asserts an alleged excess of paranoia among Soviet leaders as the significant psychic generator of the Great Terror, whereas notice of the Lockhart conspiracy seems to ground Soviet xenophobia and suspicion of the West in tangible political and material reality. What Sverdlov actually appears to have known or heard about the shootings is what the brilliant first CheKa head Felix Dzerzhinsky discovered in foiling the Lockhart conspiracy, facts Dzerzhinsky uncovered about who was behind the plot. He had arranged that one of the Letts who met to conspire directly with Reilly was a CheKa man! There is some justification for Conquest's allusion to the French in this clause, since a little-known Soviet film produced in Moscow in 1966 (now available in the West through a Canadian publisher; see Bibliography) claims the involvement of a French ambassador in the Lockhart/Ambassadors' Plot. However, there is more to Conquest's reference to the French here than thoroughness or mere gratuity. This is a clear propaganda ploy. The French, in a great deal of bigoted popular thinking in the English-speaking world, have the unfortunate reputation of accusing and executing innocent victims throughout their history, from the Christian martyr and saint Joan of Arc, to the Jewish French general staff officer Captain Dreyfus, to Mata Hari, the beautiful exotic dancer shot as a spy. Everyone understands in a rough-and-ready way how propaganda controls the presentation of a subject by omission. This is tantamount to omission of facts in order to uphold a paradigm which they do not fit well or outright controvert. Over forty years ago, the now defunct Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a think tank once very unpopular with government agencies and especially with large private business corporations (who are heavy propaganda purveyors in their commercial advertising campaigns), listed this kind of omission technique as one of seven devices in common use in propaganda. The Institute named this device card stacking, which consists of selecting and using facts to give a false or misleading idea, attempting to make out the best case possible for one's own side and the worst for the opponent's by carefully using only those facts which back up the propagandist's point of view. This point of view upheld or broadcast in this way may be an artificially fabricated one temporarily concocted solely as a psy war tactic to weaken a belligerent enemy state, or it may be a fervently held belief, in which case it can be traced to a controlling, dominant paradigm. There is more of the latter in Conquest than the former, but there are some of both throughout his works. This results in his being a very natural propagandist - perhaps the most effective and convincing kind. The Zinoviev letter mentioned above is completely omitted from The Great Terror, but this can be justified as a being a subject more fit for studies in British political history, not of the Great Terror. This is clearly a weak argument and an artificial point of view. Yet Conquest was careful and thorough enough to mention rumors of the French in connection with the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky. This is a propaganda device the same Institute for Propaganda Analysis dubbed Transfer. Using this technique, the reputation of some other person or organization is expected to be carried over to some subject or program the propagandist is discussing or broadcasting. In this case, one is expected to connect Sverdlov's suspicions as to the identities of the shooters with pronounced French paranoia and injustice of bygone days, thereby exhibiting the first rumblings of early Bolshevik hysteria, inevitably leading (according to the totalitarian paradigm) to the Great Terror, Yezhovshchina, the Moscow Show Trials, etc. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 14 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View In the omission technique, a paradigm plays a passive role. The paradigm is what the omission upholds. In a later section on a little-known Communist Party functionary named Kovalev, a detailed examination will be made of the more complex situation in which a paradigm acts affirmatively and aggressively to actually alter facts, reshaping and remolding them to produce fiction rather than history. In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, a pair of relatively new and more scientific non-Marxist historians than the Cold War produced, J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, concisely delineate the most common or shared paradigm of the Stalinist era of Soviet history, one they label the totalitarian model. In order to challenge or test this model against the wealth of new facts about Soviet history now flowing from Soviet archives opened since glasnost', they summarize the totalitarian model as follows: The Soviet system under Stalin consisted of a nonpluralist, hierarchical dictatorship in which command authority existed only at the top of the pyramid of political power. Ideology and violence were monopolies of the ruling elite, which passed its orders down a pseudo-military chain of command whose discipline was the product of Leninist prescriptions on party organization and Stalinist enforcement of these norms. At the top of the ruling elite stood an autocratic Stalin whose personal control was virtually unlimited in all areas of life and culture, from art to zoology. Major policy articulation and implementation involved the actualization of Stalin's ideas, whims, and plans, which in turn flowed from his psychological condition. By definition, autonomous spheres of social and political activity did not exist at all in Soviet society... . ...the Soviet populace and rank- and-file party members remained outside the political process, objects to be acted upon or manipulated from above but never historical actors in their own right (op. cit., pp. 1 - 2). If this description of Soviet society sounds familiar or obvious to readers not directly acquainted with over forty years of scholarly monographs and books which affirm and use it, that demonstrates to what extent the totalitarian paradigm is shared even by intelligent laymen. From the 1960's on, many metropolitan U.S. high school and preparatory school teachers taught Soviet history and sociology in the same breaths with George Orwell's novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the same era, Nineteen Eighty-Four figured prominently in numerous undergraduate college discussions of Stalinism wherein one of the three warring totalitarian police states in Orwell's book was identified with the Soviet Union and Stalin was compared to Big Brother. The NKVD was likened to Orwell's Thought Police. Conway Zirkle, an American critic of Lysenko, complained of what he called Russian verbalism in official Soviet discourse, propaganda, and publications. He considered this to be an anomalous lexicon and use of language, which were immediately compared to Newspeak. Soviet distortions of truth matched to doublethink. The continuous rewriting of Soviet history, such as airbrushing purged commissars out of photographs or eliminating their names as entries in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was compared to the flushing of ideologically threatening historical facts down Orwell's memory hole. It is interesting to note that tampering with what is sometimes regarded as a privileged, inviolable, and even sacred record of history, the photographic record, which is discussed and fully illustrated in David King's popular The Commissar Vanishes, literally occurs without protest or even awareness right under the noses of Americans. King's book protests its use in Stalinist society. However, he seems to be unaware that U.S. government agencies that would seem to have little need for such tampering are constantly employing it. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, recently decided to issue a commemorative stamp honoring the seminal Black American blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who is credited by professional electric guitar players of wider appeal, such as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, as having been among their major inspirations and influences. After examining the only two extant photographs of the chain-smoking Johnson, both of which portrayed him with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, the Postal Service decided to airbrush the cigarette away, leaving what looks like an Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 15 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View inconspicuous scar on Johnson's mouth. (See Thank You for Smoking, by Peter Brimelow, American Smoker's Journal, Fall issue, 1994.) This might appear to be a trivial alteration of historical fact compared to effacing Yezhov from a photo in which he strides beside Stalin across a bridge, but, if it is so trivial, why were artists working for the Postal Service ordered to do it? The answer is that it was decidedly not trivial to somebody in authority. What is most remarkable is that alterations and adjustments of this kind are being done so freely and on so wide and thorough a scale throughout the U.S. today. The practice is now common for high governmental authorities, petty lower government agencies, news media of all kinds, textbooks, television programs, etc. Among the highest governmental authorities, such as the U.S. State Department or Department of Defense, there might be a reasonable expectation to change history in exceptionally important circumstances in order to protect national security secrets or to hide embarrassing, covert government operations (sometimes called black ops ). The fact that history needs changing on postage stamp art too is evidence that it is done on a rather casual and widespread basis. Here Orwell's model of totalitarian society, which is abstract and of general application, seems particularly appropriate. The previously mentioned comparisons between Stalinist and Orwellian societies have been committed to writing, both highbrow and low. However, it is actually false to say that in these discussions, comparisons were being made between what was known about Soviet society with the society in which the hero of Orwell's book, Winston Smith, lived, the details of which are known only by reading the novel. Instead, what was actually going on was that students and Kremlinologists alike were, in a coarse manner, using the model of a (fictitious) society given by Orwell to explain and understand a (real) society (the Soviet Union) about which little reliable historical and sociological information was available. This was not a case in which two societies about which details were known were being directly compared, but rather this is a situation in which a very strong variant of the totalitarian model (Orwell's) was being used to understand Soviet society and political life. This was done for a reason which is usually justified: one of the most important roles a paradigm has is to fill in the gaps in one's knowledge, which were - and to a large extent still are - very great in the West for Soviet society. Krementsov has referred to these blanks as a black box where it concerns the history and actual workings of the Politburo. For example: suppose one has no knowledge about how Stalin came to be called Generalissimo Stalin and the commander-in-chief of the Soviet army. Suppose one does not know whether or not, for example, the Politburo, which was an elite executive committee of about ten members who represented the Central Committee of the Communist Party, actually gave Stalin this title by appointing him to this post. Using one version of the standard, shared totalitarian paradigm outlined by Getty and Manning above, in which Stalin's power is supreme, all-encompassing, and brooks no opposition due to the pseudo-military chain of command and terror running from Stalin down the pyramid of power through the NKVD, one simply fills in the gap in one's knowledge and states that Stalin was self-appointed. This is in fact what was done for the 1975 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica's Macropaedia article on Stalin referred to above, i.e., the author of the article, Ronald Francis Hingley, a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, asserted Stalin's self- appointment without having any way of consulting the (at the time closed) Russian-language archival records of Politburo proceedings, or minutes of meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, of which Stalin was chairman at the time. Hingley did not even know when he wrote the article if such documentary historical records existed. He was not even sure if there was a black box ! In short, he had no evidence whatsoever for his authoritative statement on this subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica article. He had only the dominant paradigm and deductions that could be made from it. Stalin's self-appointment here is really more of a prediction (about the past ) made by Hingley using the totalitarian paradigm, a prediction that may or may not turn out to be correct as more and more material comes to light from the newly opened archives, of which the fraction now available is alone expected to keep historians busy for decades. If this self-appointment prediction turns out to be incorrect in the light of hard, new evidence, and if similar predictions of the totalitarian paradigm turn out Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 16 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View to be wrong, any specific versions or variants of models of Soviet society based on the totalitarian paradigm must be amended or abandoned. A suitable amendment in this case would be to downgrade the pre-eminent role of Stalin's power and of Stalin's caprice and vainglory in the general paradigm or in specific models based on it. A specific amendment already suggested by Soviet insiders is that Stalin mistakenly believed the Politburo was ready to have him step down (a fact which, if true, is more of a direct challenge than an amendment to the dominant paradigm), so they appointed him Generalissimo to strengthen his spirit by showing their complete confidence in him during the war crisis. Many readers will undoubtedly want to cut to the chase and simply know whether or not Stalin was self- appointed. This would seem to be a simple factual matter to which the subtleties of paradigm choice (and logical deductions from them) are irrelevant, just as choice of paradigms is irrelevant to how an automobile carburetor works or to a fuel's octane rating. But Stalin's self-appointment is a case in which a paradigm - or something! - must fill in a gap in one's knowledge (not so with a carburetor or fuel octane). The situation is more like ones in which faith determines belief. Which fact one accepts as to Stalin's self-appointment is determined by which paradigm one accepts. However, there is one very important difference between this and religious belief. Which paradigm best fits the other known facts about Stalinist society is not a matter of faith. It is an empirical matter, that is, a matter to be resolved by evaluating facts. Since this is so, fact-omission and ignorance are obviously relevant. Belief in a particular paradigm that is mainly a fiction may flourish for the same reason that many religious beliefs flourish: ignorance of nature, evolution, authorship and transmission of sacred texts, historical omissions, etc. When Kremlinologists ignore already known or newly surfacing facts which do not fit their accepted paradigm, their belief in the paradigm then shares many features of religious belief, or other basic belief systems in which children are reared. In this case, the next step is also taken, which is taken in the case of religious thinking too: paradigm choice begins to work tyrannically from the top down to enable one to sort out the facts which are true from ones which are spurious facts (e.g. don't accept anything Molotov says in Molotov Remembers about Stalin and Yezhov that contradicts what Khrushchev said in Khrushchev Remembers ). Adjustments of a theoretical model are made in order to fit new facts as they are discovered, as is done in theoretical modeling in the physical sciences. If no such tinkering or adjustments are possible, the facts must reign supreme and the paradigm itself may be in jeopardy. This is called a paradigm crisis. One is beginning to occur now in Kremlinology. A new paradigm of Stalinist society may emerge, one at least as well able to explain facts recognized by the dying paradigm and to incorporate the growing number of newly discovered ones, thereby showing superior strength. If one loses sight of the fact that what one regards as a fact is actually a prediction made by using a paradigm (as in the example given above of Hingsley's belief in Stalin's self-appointment ), one can then fall into circularity: mistaking the predictions of one's paradigm for facts, one can then confusedly use these facts - mistakenly believing them to be raw factual evidence now - to support the paradigm, when they are actually predictions and outcomes of belief in the paradigm. This has been done for decades by Western Kremlinologists in their discussions of Stalinism. It represents a degenerate stage of paradigm use and cries out for a paradigm crisis. In this kind of circular boondoggling, making a guess or inference using a paradigm is euphemistically referred to by historians as having made an educated guess, i.e., a guess which fraudulently passes muster and deviously seeks to validate itself as being informed, - which it is not. It is only paradigmatic. In the early 1960's, a dilemma arose for Western democracies. Many articles and lectures were presented both before and since that time on the inferiority or even depravity of the Soviet system. Yet certain superiorities were only thinly disguised by the most mendacious, repetitive propaganda. For example, the political economist Mancur Olson (whose ideas shall be discussed in greater detail further on), wrote and lectured extensively on the supposed economic inferiority of communist systems and on systems that do poorly economically, he said, after abandoning communism. (See, for example, his Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 17 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Why is Economic Performance Even Worse After Communism is Abandoned, Center for Study of Public Choice, Fairfax, VA, 1993.) In the essay referenced, Olson glibly and blandly referred to the Soviet Union's mere initiation of flight in space, which he calls a prestige coup (op. cit., p. 22). This conceals the real accomplishments of the Soviet Union in this field, achievements so awesome as to have inspired very grave concern at the time in the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department. The Soviet Union did not merely initiate space flight, it sent Sputnik One into Earth-orbit, making it recorded history's first artificial satellite. Two years later, the Soviets shocked and awed the world - especially scientists - with the first close-up images of the moon's surface taken from a lunar probe. Then, on April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. This was being done all the while American schoolchildren and young scientists watched television programs like Tales from Tomorrow and The Outer Limits, as well as late afternoon re-runs of episodes of Flash Gordon, on which their fathers and mothers had dreamed and wondered even before television. What was science fiction for Americans, was reality for many of the peoples of the Republics of the Soviet Union. Soviet officials did not hesitate to cite these accomplishments as evidence of the superiority of communism as a form of social and economic organization. As a result, on April 20, 1961, only eight days after the Gagarin flight, President John F. Kennedy inquired of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, Is there any...space program that promises dramatic [my emphasis] results in which we could win? ...Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? (Quoted in Was the Race to the Moon Real? by John M. Logsdon and Alain Dupas, Scientific American, vol. 270, no. 6, June, 1994, p. 37). As this memorandum shows, the truth was the opposite of what Mancur Olson claimed. While the Soviet Union consistently obtained prestigious results, it was not the Soviet Union that sought prestige coups or propaganda showpieces, as Olson said, but rather the United States of America. Pursuant to Kennedy's suggestions, Lyndon Johnson consulted Werner von Braun, who had been the leading rocket expert of a team of Nazi scientists from another kind of socialist system which, as Bertrand Russell observed, was more different philosophically from the Western democracies and the Soviet Union than they were from each other: the National Socialist system of the Third Reich. These rocket engineers, had they been captured by the Soviets, would probably have been tried as war criminals. The Soviets may have tolerated no use of them. However, Von Braun proved of singular worth to the U.S. He gave the remarkably accurate and prophetic advice that the U.S. did not have a good chance of beating the Soviets to a manned laboratory in space, but we [sic!] have a sporting chance of sending a three-man crew around the moon ahead of the Soviets. (To a gambler, a sporting chance usually means somewhere between one-in-five and one-in-three odds, though it is not clear exactly what odds von Braun was giving the U.S. here.) He went on to say that despite this dim forecast, the U. S., oddly enough, had an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the landing of a crew on the moon (ibid.), which would appear to the layman to be the most difficult, sensational, and advanced of all of Kennedy's suggested feats of space flight. Von Braun said that an all-out crash effort would be needed. Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's secretary of defense, then stated that this flight to the moon would be a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own, a part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war (ibid.). There was no science about it. The NASA objective of a manned lunar expedition was conceived, organized, and indeed delivered (the American Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969) as the purest of propaganda ploys (and the most expensive ever seen), the very thing each and every Soviet scientific achievement has been labeled as being. (Further implications of this space race that are pertinent to Soviet science and Lysenkoism will be discussed in Part II of this essay.) Thus a social system condemned as Orwellian and a slave state in which intellectuals and free thought were repressed, supposedly motivated and held together by police terror, had gained capabilities clearly superior to anything the world had ever recorded. It was understandable how a slave society like dynastic Egypt could accomplish an engineering marvel like the building and rebuilding of Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 18 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View the Great Pyramid. Slaves can be whipped into breaking their backs pulling and hauling great stones. But how can engineers, scientists, and creative men be flogged into laying the golden eggs of original invention? Can threatening a man and his loved ones with arrest, torture, and death induce a fecund and ingenious imagination? If so, many ambitious artists in the West would have long since submitted to such threats and blackmail if only to hear the voices of the Muses. Or was this the diabolical outcome of the Soviet Union's new and officially endorsed Pavlovian psychology of the type sensationally portrayed in film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a remarkable new way to make scientists creative and productive drones? As pointed out at the outset of this essay, the U.S. claimed to have clearly proven at least one kind of superiority for their social system by defeating the fascist systems of Germany and Italy, which had really been crushed by the Soviet system, the Red Army, and Soviet weaponry. With all eyes on the remarkable photographs Soviet scientists had taken of the lunar landscape, the U.S. was desperate for an American flag to be planted on the moon first. A society that the Western world had sought to belittle and undermine since its inception, aiding and abetting its internal enemies, as well as sending equally dangerous new ones of its own training into its midst, a society ravaged and torn in World War II far beyond anything all of the Western nations together had suffered, had made a strong case for itself. 6. The Moral Elements of Historical Paradigms A complicating factor is that a very important and unspoken feature of many historical paradigms, like the totalitarian paradigm, is a tacitly accepted moral system that, at first, may seem to be only a component or adjunct of these paradigms that is separable from them and can be eliminated or ignored in the interest of objectivity if necessary. But in fact, such moral systems that seem like only background material actually hold sway over historical paradigms. They deeply influence selection and conscious use of historical models, but are rarely ever relevant to these processes in the modern physical sciences. This suggests that moral paradigms are more important to professional historians than their own historical paradigms, their ostensible areas of study, since there is no reason that the historical sciences - even though quantization as in the physical sciences does not seem feasible for them - cannot follow methods used in the descriptive physical sciences, such as taxonomy, meteorology, etc. These sciences are paradigm-based and lack quantization, but are moral-free. If moral paradigms are more important to historians than historical ones, there is little fundamental difference between historians, sophisticated layman, fictionists, and propagandists. The influence of a moral system, which usually exists independently of - having pre-existed - a specialized historical paradigm that incorporates elements of it, is a subject ignored and avoided by even the better-grade, more empirical and scientific post-Cold War historians, despite their attempts to emulate, in historical and sociological studies, the processes of paradigm analysis and model selection that exists in the physical sciences. These historians are reluctant to cast doubt upon the implicit moral components of a reigning historical paradigm because they above all wish to remain respectable to peers in an academic and publishing world wherein little challenge to all but the most fundamentalist Christian moral ideas is offered or permitted even when political correctness is thrown to the winds. Allowable or even popular discussion of the Biblical correctness of a moral act is a big red herring: a more pervasive and deeply entrenched moral system based on both Judaism and Christianity still tacitly holds sway over historical discussions. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the view arose, especially in the English-speaking world, that a man disqualified himself from a role as leader or statesman if he achieved political success through treachery, cruelty, or murder. He thereby became illegitimate. This was not always the view of intelligent and enlightened men before then, and there is no guarantee that it will be the opinion of enlightened thinkers in the distant future. This view holds sway more than ever in this century, despite - and perhaps because of - the notable successes in this century of methods as base as any used in ancient Rome or Renaissance Italy, eras which literate Europeans have studied for centuries. To challenge this view of legitimacy at all is considered ipso facto atavistic, unenlightened, or even monstrous. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 19 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View The ramifications of a shared moral system subliminally determining the rightness or acceptability of an historical paradigm will be dealt with at the end of this part (Part I) of the essay, where the Soviet social critic and reformer Roy Medvedev is taken up on the plea contained in the title of his influential book, Let History Judge!, a paraphrase of which is a leitmotif of the disenchanted Communist Arthur Koestler's well-read 1940 novel about the era of the Stalinist purge trials in the 1930's, Darkness At Noon. One cannot know what the future will say about Stalin or Yezhov, despite the implied confidence Medvedev and others seem to have had that the verdict will turn out their way, because the future is unknown, and because humans have always been very, very poor at predicting it despite all they have to say about it. There may come a time, centuries from now, when children will hear in school that: Once, once upon a time, and for a brief period, there were parts of the world in which slavery was abolished and one human being could not own another as property. Nevertheless, we can let the past speak. For this purpose, four jurors have been selected for the end of this part - all enlightened and educated men from Europe's past (no Marxists or cultured Asians past or present) - to pass judgement on Stalin: Plato, Machiavelli, Sir James Frazer (an educated Englishman from the Nineteenth Century, author of The Golden Bough), and Friedrich Nietzsche. Medvedev and his cohort will not like the verdict delivered there, which is unanimous in Stalin's favor. This discussion follows a more detailed discussion now of the totalitarian paradigm of Soviet society as described by Getty and Manning above, and how new archival evidence casts strong doubt upon the validity of the totalitarian paradigm and upon most of what has been written about Stalinist society for the past half-century. 7. One of Two Studies That Challenge the Totalitarian Paradigm During the past fifty or so years, incredible as it may sound, only two Western, non-Marxist writers who were not defenders or advocates of Communism or the former Soviet system have produced studies of Stalinist society based on empirical evidence rather than being guided solely by the totalitarian paradigm and the memoirs and agendas of refusniks, propagandists, and glamorous, talented Russian intellectuals who had found a home and a rapt audience in the West. The two deserving credit were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Merle Fainsod. (Note that whether or not one agrees with their conclusions, or whether or not Brzezinski and Fainsod agree with each other, is irrelevant as to whether or not they based their conclusions on empirical evidence rather than being guided by the totalitarian paradigm.) Brzezinski drew upon information gathered in an émigré interview project at Harvard. Fainsod carefully studied the Smolensk Archive, which had been available to Western scholars long before glasnost' due to having been captured by the Germans in World War II and having subsequently fallen into American hands by the end of the war. This archive is now kept in the U.S. National Archive and has been available for some time on microfilm from the U.S. Government Printing Office. Studying it, however, is something an historian would rather avoid because the archive consists of files that appear to be remnants randomly saved from a fire by German occupation authorities. Much of the material is charred and otherwise difficult to decipher. It is far easier for an historian to speak and write ex cathedra, using the totalitarian model and unverified claims that fit the model, such as was done by the expert Timothy J. Naftali, a Research Fellow from the University of Virginia, on a recent CNN broadcast. Sitting on an expert panel on this program, Mr. Naftali re-iterated conventional notions that during the Show Trials in Moscow in the late l930's, Stalin was eliminating Old Bolsheviks that he couldn't work with any more, as Mr. Naftali confidently put it. We shall see in what follows in this section that a careful and statistical analysis of new archival material does not bear this out. As a result of his own scrupulous research into only one (damaged) archive, Fainsod was forced to conclude that in the Smolensk region of the Soviet Union, the political system could only be characterized as inefficient totalitarianism. He did not thereby mean that the economic or political system was inefficient - whether or not that was the case. What he meant was that the totalitarian model just did not fit what he learned from the Smolensk archive about what was going on in that region. If one wants to know what Fainsod did not find in this region, the totalitarian paradigm proves of great service: all one has to do is go back to the outline of the paradigm given by Getty and Manning above, and put an Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 20 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View appropriately inflected negative of the verb given in each phrase. E.g.: Ideology and violence were [not] monopolies of the ruling elite, which [did not] pass its orders down a pseudo-military chain of command, etc. By concluding inefficient totalitarianism, Fainsod was being empirically honest yet still aiming to uphold the reigning paradigm. As already mentioned, paradigms are never easily abandoned by anyone trained to practice within them. Model tinkering - not scrapping - seems to be nearer the limit of a previously trained individual adult practitioner's capabilities during his own lifetime, which is one reason Arthur Koestler described humans as sleepwalkers. If Koestler is right, training into a professional paradigm gives someone new and desirable capabilities, but it blinds as much as it enlightens. 8. The Totalitarian Paradigm and Stalin's Personality The central role played by Stalin in the totalitarian paradigm makes Stalin's psychology, mental traits, and intelligence very important features of it. A variant of this basic model in which Stalin is seen as gifted or keenly intelligent is stronger in some ways, but weaker in others, when compared to alternate models in which he is said to be mediocre or a dim-wit, depending on what facts one has to confront these variants. A bumbler or political groper at the top of the pyramid of power, for example, can better explain chronic problems of Soviet society that were never successfully solved, or geographic regions like the one Fainsod studied in which there is no evidence of a successful penetration of the type of totalitarianism that the basic paradigm predicates. However, a bumbler variant model is strained in explaining Stalin's long tenure, and the formerly great level of cohesiveness of Soviet society, both of which could easily be explained as flowing from the mind of a Stalin with special control talents and a consummate ability to utilize NKVD terror to that end. Demanding that scholars and historians remain ever-conscious of what basic paradigm or which variant of it they are tendering, and requiring that they remain consistent in working out details in their application of it to Soviet society, would serve to keep them honest, preventing them from having it both ways when it suits their purposes, something characteristic of Kremlinology for over a half century. The motivation to lose objectivity and condemn Stalin morally is so overwhelming in the Western world, whose ethics are built on the Semitic Decalogue (Ten Commandments) of the Old Testament (most often with Jesus Christ's purported new commandment Love thy neighbor as thyself added), that Western thinkers are reluctant to attribute any positive characteristics to Stalin's personality at all - even when a paradigm-version they are using would be stronger if they did so. (Of course, since Stalin doesn't politically fit an appropriate image of a neighbor [more literally: someone just like yourself...], he is reviled!) In the waffling heretofore permitted to Kremlinologists, concessions were sometimes made to Stalin's abilities as a statesman or master manipulator, crediting him with some, or even enormous, cleverness and resourcefulness. However, these abilities were only reluctantly invoked when a deus ex machina was needed due to a theoretical model being stressed, or beginning to break down, in the face of contradicting empirical evidence. Most Western thinkers simply find it impossible to believe that someone capable of murder and cruelty on such a grand scale could be very intelligent, rational, or normal, so what has proven to be a useful tenet of the basic totalitarian paradigm is the view of Stalin as a superlatively cunning and crafty personality, with few or no other positive mental gifts, poisoned by extreme moral depravity. This character combination is an imported paradigmatic feature. It is incorporated into some versions of the totalitarian paradigm by tacitly assuming a general knowledge and consensus about some of the complex modern theories of human nature, abilities, behavior, and psychology, such as studies of the mental development of abused children. These versions sometimes underline the fact that Stalin was beaten by his father, though the exact extent and nature of these beatings, and the circumstances in which they were administered, which would be of paramount importance for their results on Stalin's future behaviors according to these theories, is left on the vaguest of levels. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 21 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View The dilemma arises due to upholding the reigning paradigm involving Stalin's successful, enduring, and supreme control, while insisting on Stalin's irrationality or abnormality. Biographies of sociopathic murderers' unusual mental abilities, such as photographic memories or total recall, like that possessed by the necrophiliac, arsonist, and serial murderer Peter Kuerten (b. 1883), or the special literary gifts and high general intellect of individuals of extreme sexual depravity, such as those possessed by the writer and French revolutionary the Marquis de Sade (b. 1740), have been discussed side-by-side in accounts of Stalin (and Beria and Yezhov, too). Readers and students of the subject are ominously invited to make their own comparisons between Stalin's ruthless and relentless human and social engineering projects and how the Marquis de Sade spent the last years of his life in a lunatic asylum persuading and forcing other inmates to perform his plays. Except, these students are cautioned to remember, Stalin did it in the real world - or so they are told. They are invited to extend the totalitarian paradigm so that it coincides almost completely with the society depicted in Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which portrays a society held together not so much by the police terror that the standard totalitarian paradigm demands as by brainwashing. The invitation is made to apply Orwell's extreme version of the totalitarian model because it is insinuated that this was Stalin's goal anyway: use of home-grown Pavlovian behaviorist psychology to train people to think only thoughts consistent with Marxism-Leninism - even two plus two equals five if dialectical materialism or a Five Year Plan demanded it. Many typical examples of the confusion that has prevailed in regards to Stalin's character and mental abilities can be found in photojournalist David King's new book The Commissar Vanishes, the Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalinist Russia. This rather beautifully designed album with a wealth of individually captioned photos has a separate, accompanying text that is pretentious, biased, and - in the light of new archival evidence - already obsolete. In the section of text dealing with Stalin's incarceration in a Siberian prison camp in the summer of 1915 prior to the Revolution of 1917, King mentions that deputy revolutionaries held conferences in the gulag. King contrasts Stalin's participation in these meetings with that of an Armenian revolutionary Suren Spandarian, whose speeches King characterizes as eloquent, spirited, and combative. With only guesses by King - the all too familiar fill- in-the-blank technique using the shared paradigm -, including the assumption that Spandarian's wife's memoirs exaggerate Stalin's importance to the revolution while exiled in Siberia, King contrasts Spandarian's scintillating rhetorical brilliance with Stalin's gruff monosyllables which, King says, contributed little to these conferences. This account, demeaning as it is intended to be of Stalin's intelligence and idealism, should be contrasted with to an eye-witness evaluation of Stalin's performances at the high level meetings of the Big Three during WWII: the meetings of Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt. Anthony Eton, then British foreign secretary, acclaimed Stalin's formidable and superior skill as a negotiator, saying Stalin completely outwitted the other two illustrious senior statesmen. If one uses the doctrine of evidence against interest, i.e., the rule that to decide between conflicting claims (here Stalin's intelligence and vivacity vs. his mediocrity and dullness) when one has no other way to do so, ones opts for the claim from the source who gives evidence against his own interests, then one has to choose Eton's assessment and reject King's disparaging caricature. The point of King's entire photo album is to show that Stalin had to rely mainly on bogus photo montages, which were in widespread use in the Soviet Union then, to generate esteem, not his real abilities or achievements. However, one need not use the evidence against interest method to decide any more. Now new archival evidence is available to support a paradigm or model variant in which Stalin is keenly intelligent. The historian Nikolai Krementsov recently found, for example, in a newly opened party archive, a stenographic record by Mark Mitin of a visit Stalin made to the Soviet Union's Institute of Red Professors in Philosophy and Natural Sciences in the 1930's. One of the participants at the meeting asked Stalin, What are our theoretical tasks in the field of natural sciences? Stalin answered: I am not a specialist in natural sciences. I did, however, many times read Lamarck and Weismann when I was young. ...Weismann contains a lot of mysticism. (Stalinist Science, Nikolai Krementsov, p. 167.) This is an answer far above the level of gruff monosyllables. It shows, instead, an ability for careful reading, a Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 22 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View very strong memory, a penetrating mind, and deep sensibility. It is difficult to imagine Churchill, F. D. Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Al Gore, or even the intellectual Woodrow Wilson giving an answer this informed, sophisticated, and intelligent. Try to imagine Rhodes Scholar cum U.S. President Bill Clinton off-handedly referring to Eldredge and Gould (authors of the Punctuated Equilibrium theory of evolution) in answering any similar question put to him at the United States' Academy of Sciences today. Clinton was involved in a situation like this (televised on C-SPAN) when he met Professor Stephen Hawking, an internationally famous physicist and cosmologist. Hawking is the author of A Brief History of Time, which he said he wrote in an attempt to produce a popular book about space and time which would address questions such as Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how? (Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, New York, 1990, p. vi.) Clinton admitted that in his conversation with Hawking he did not understand what Hawking was talking about, implying also that Hawking's book - which he claimed to have read - was also obscure to him. While David Joravsky, Valery Soyfer, and other writers on Stalin's role in the Soviet science establishment believe they have cause to deride Stalin for his known attraction to the discredited evolutionary theory of Lamarck and to the Creative Darwinism of Lysenko (which was different from Lamarckism), Stalin's characterization of Weismann as writing mysticism is agreed on today by every knowledgeable authority in biology and genetics, such as Geoffrey H. Beale, formerly a Royal Society Professor of Genetics, University of Edinburgh, author of The Genetics of Paramecium Aurelia. In the entry article on Weismann in the Macropaedia of the 1975 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Beale wrote that Weismann filled in the details of his theory with wide-ranging speculation that became at times somewhat mystical (vol. 19, p. 736). It is interesting to note in regards to Stalin's intelligence that he made his debut in the sciences, as one historian half-cynically put it, with a paper on linguistics. Linguistics is a technical and scientific field in which talented amateurs have frequently out-performed professionals. It was the amateur Champollion who first deciphered the defiant Rosetta Stone, enabling the world to read hieroglyphics for the first time. This linguistic tour-de-force opened up for view rich hitherto locked millennia of Egyptian civilization. In 1952, another amateur, the architect Michael Ventris, succeeded where professionals had repeatedly failed by deciphering the mysterious Mycenaean Linear B script. Nothing as stellar can be claimed for Stalin's linguistics paper, which one Western linguist described as trite but competent. The same evaluation could be made of most books and papers on linguistics, as well as of most of the literary output and teaching performances of most university professors most of the time. 9. The Totalitarian Paradigm and NKVD Terror Second in importance to Stalin's personality in the basic totalitarian paradigm is the role of terror. NKVD-inflicted terror is literally the glue that the paradigm avers that Stalin used to hold his vast Communist State together. Hence the paramount importance to this paradigm of NKVD chiefs Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Beria, and especially Yezhov, who headed the NKVD at the peak of these purges in 1937, the climax of the 1936-1938 Yezhovshchina period. The actual quantity of excess mortality due to the NKVD has a special importance when one is clear and consistent as to what the totalitarian paradigm requires to be the case in Stalinist society apart from any moral considerations. If one adopts a moral point of view, it does not matter whether 40 million people prematurely died due to these purges (the astronomical figure given by Roy Medvedev) or whether the victims numbered only in the hundreds of thousands, as some of the smallest estimates have claimed. Either number would clearly be equally immoral. But such a difference in numbers does matter to the paradigm's plausibility, because a society as vast as the Soviet Union, comprising over 160 million people (according to a suppressed but now available 1937 census), spanning eleven time zones, would require a number of victims falling in the order of magnitude given by Medvedev to hold it together if terror is indeed the glue, as the paradigm asserts. In other words, only a few hundred thousand murdered by the NKVD is just as immoral as 40 million, but a society in which 40 million are victims is one in which the role of police terror must be Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 23 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View quite different from what it would be in a society in which only a few hundred thousand die as a result of police arrests and executions. This crucial point is invariably missed because the moral shock and outrage felt by modern Americans and Europeans when such staggering numbers of victims are announced - or their inability to conceive of such enormous numbers of the dead being bandied about - grinds critical thinking to a halt just when it is most needed. Here the previously mentioned unconscious and unuttered moral input to the paradigm rises up to submerge the rest of it. The sheer numbers of the dead become a towering, stout flagpole on which the rest of the paradigm flutters like a small, bloodstained banner. The fact that at least an order of magnitude greater than 40 million (at least ten times that number, or 400 million) perished due to capitalist exploitation and expansion in only a few generations is easily forgotten. When thinkers live and breathe a paradigm, they seldom make insightful and compelling comparisons between the evils of other social systems and their own good society. They do not even realize there are enlightening comparisons to be made. Based on recently declassified Soviet archival data, the estimate of the number of excess deaths due to terror for the entire period from 1927-1937 (10 years) ranges anywhere from 4 to 11 million, most likely in the range of 4 to 5 million, figures Getty and Manning state are much lower than those of Robert Conquest, who maintains that abnormal deaths ran as high as 20 million, not to mention those of Roy Medvedev and the new Soviet high school textbooks that claim that over 40 million victims perished under Stalin (op. cit., p. 13). Even historians who are not conscious in their choice and use of paradigms, like Conquest, implicitly understand that the standard totalitarian paradigm requires very large numbers of deaths at the NKVD's hands to really make sense, and that there is a moral requirement (imported into the paradigm) of assuring that the NKVD surpass the Gestapo by being responsible for deaths exceeding the 6 million of the Holocaust. S. Maksudov is reported to have pointed out that if Conquest were right in his estimate of 12 million political and 3 million non-political criminals in detention in 1937-1938, then from what is now known from the new census and other newly available demographic figures, this would mean that half or more of the men of the age group (30 to 60) were behind bars... . If Conquest's estimates for the number of deaths and incarcerated during the Great Terror had been correct, Stalinist society would truly have been a society held together, run, and ruled by NKVD terror. But the figures now known empirically do not bear this out. The glue that held the society together must have been something else: it was not the Terror. Some of the figuring methods formerly used to arrive at mortality, detention, and famine estimates for the Stalin years can only be described as so barnyard that reputable authors who desired to maintain at least a patina of scholarly respectability and credibility did not even discuss them, yet consistently used their results as facts and points of reference. One such method was used by the historian Dana Dalrymple in an article The Soviet Famine 1932-1932, which appeared in Soviet Studies, Jan. 1964, Oxford. pp. 259-260. Haresh Kirpalani and Douglas Tottle report that Dalrymple estimated mortality figures for this famine simply by averaging figures of ‘reliable sources'...such as Thomas Walker [a convicted pornographer and White slaver employed by the very strongly anti-Soviet Hearst Press as a correspondent ], open fascists, the pro-fascist Archbishop of Canterbury (who had publicly proclaimed his ‘greatest sympathy' with Herr Hitler's remarkable revolution in every facet of German life), the Austrian Cardinal Innitzer (who struck a deal with Hitler, and instructed Catholics to vote for the ‘man whose struggle against Bolshevism corresponds to the voice of Divine Providence') and so on. In Dalrymple's method, objectivity was completely consumed by passion and hatred, but this failure is readily ignored - and Dalrymple gets away with it - because the result of the calculation fits the reigning paradigm. 10. A Rubbery Paradigm that Cannot Break The authors of Stalinist Terror state that prior to the availability of the new archival evidence, the totalitarian paradigm withstood powerful critiques and counter-examples. The supremacy of the reigning consensus had never really been threatened - until now. However, historians who have now begun to Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 24 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View depart from this paradigm are indiscriminately labeled revisionist and denounced as perverse or, as previously mentioned, seeking to absolve Stalin of his crimes. The use here of the epithet crimes to uphold and enforce a paradigm in crisis demonstrates the overarching importance of the implicit, undiscussed moral component to the paradigm. In discussions of the murders, enslavements, and other cruelties practiced on non-Whites by American Whites in U.S. history, for example, the same historians who morally denounce a new generation of historians as revisionists merely for departing from the standard paradigm do not react as strongly to these atrocious acts, which they consider to be products of the traditions of the times. Suddenly cultural relativity is invoked, which they have already disallowed for Stalinist society and culture. The influential Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper pointed out that an hypothesis, theory, or belief does not have to be true to be scientific, but it has to be falsifiable. This was the point of view of an important Twentieth Century school of philosophical thought called Critical Rationalism. Their test of falsifiability has now become a mainstream idea. The test consists of asking whether or not one can imagine facts, information, or a state of affairs that could come to light which would be inconsistent with the belief or idea that is being tested. This test can and has been applied to paradigms to answer the same question: are they scientific? For example: if evidence is unearthed that multi-candidate elections were held in rural districts of the Soviet Union after the passage of Stalin's 1936 Constitution, a Constitution Communists hailed as the most democratic in world history, and if Stalin had been elected as an overwhelmingly popular people's choice, the totalitarian model could survive this ostensibly falsifying challenge by labeling his participation in the election - and his victory - the result of mass mobilization of the electorate through propaganda by the ruling elite, a tool for control from the top down that the paradigm asserts this elite exercises on behalf of Stalin. Alternatively, the universal glue -terror - could be invoked once again saying, People were afraid of reprisals from the NKVD if they voted against Stalin. Even if Stalin had called for open elections, had run himself against an allowed capitalist minority party candidate, had agreed to step down if outvoted, and had then won the election, this would not falsify the standard paradigm either. Once again, the paradigm's defenders could say that the voters were the manipulated objects of terror. It would seem there is only one possible fact or situation which the totalitarian paradigmists might admit would falsify their model: a real break in Stalin's power due to loss of office by submitting to popular election defeat or some sort of grass-roots impeachment or guaranteed, legitimate judicial process. A paradigm, which is really falsifiable by only one fact or situation, is, technically speaking, falsifiable, and therefore marginally scientific. However, when a paradigm is capable of accepting heaps of amendments to cover almost any hostile evidence and can thereby be made consistent with almost anything, it begins to smell fishy. As the authors of Stalinist Terror put it, it becomes suspiciously accommodating. Testimony exists which says that Stalin did in fact attempt to resign on more than one occasion, but such claims are ignored by some of the paradigm's upholders as spurious, or, by other defenders, as credible testimony that should be accepted as fact but incorporated into the paradigm as more of Stalin's deep-laid power ploys to flush out personal enemies, etc. As will be seen in Part II, Lysenko's famous request to resign is regarded by Valery Soyfer and others as a fiendishly clever power gambit. The totalitarian paradigm is monotonously consistent and satisfyingly simplistic. One of its specific principles, exemplified here, is: All resignations submitted by powerful Soviet officials of sound mind and body are insincere power or prestige maneuvers unless Stalin wants them gone; then they are more or less coerced. The totalitarian paradigm's resilience is comparable to that of many deistic cosmic paradigms in which every event is the direct or indirect result of God's will. These paradigms are also highly adaptable to ostensibly refuting data, and likewise virtually impervious to fatal criticism. They are not regarded as scientific. It irritates many atheistic foes of deism that when they point out the existence of evil and suffering in the world, a condition that they believe seriously undermines deism, a Christian apologist easily absorbs this criticism into his belief system. He does so by utilizing the fallen angel amendment to his paradigm. This is the attractive, dramatic tale of the proud, rebellious Lucifer, the tempter and Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 25 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View purveyor of evil in the world, who roams it at God's sufferance to test man's free will and love of God. A perfect parallel to this kind of strengthening of a paradigm has been practiced for decades by the totalitarian modelers of Stalinist society, replacing God with Stalin. Any evidence of liberalizing influences, especially if they appear to emanate from Stalin himself who, new archival evidence shows, sometimes actually provoked public dissent, official controversy, and criticism of his own and the government's policies, is seen as Stalin testing the waters or the devious Stalin promoting an expendable straw-man opponent or devil's advocate to draw out enemies, unmasking and sorting out those who are with him vs. those against - the chosen vs. the damned. What really seems to be at the root of this entire elaborate system of apologetics is a view of Stalinist society as a microcosmic version of the medieval Christian's Great Chain of Being cosmic paradigm (explained below) - but with a malicious demi-god or God-pretender as Lord (Stalin). Different paradigms may be analogous, and a larger, more grandiose or cosmic paradigm may strongly support a narrower, more mundane one simply by being analogous to it. To this day, the Great Chain of Being paradigm explains the cosmos for many, many Westerners at the same time that the comparable totalitarian one serves them to understand Stalinist and other alien societies. The notion of a paradigm may seem sophisticated or over-subtle, but paradigms are what really make sense to people - not bare, unattached facts or specific explanations. Scholars enjoy working within a paradigm, which provides an intriguing pre-established field and rules of play. Ambitious physicists seek a theory of everything. Thinking or working outside a paradigm is considered more appropriate for novelists, artists, poets, and laymen. Religionists possess the broadest paradigms, and cling to them tenaciously. It is not a coincidence that the totalitarian paradigm has made the most sense all along to Western Christians and Jews. It is also not a coincidence that the rhetoric of totalitarian paradigm operators in regards to the Soviet Union teeters toward the apocalyptic. It is an ominous fact that schizophrenics resemble religionists in that they also cling pertinaciously to very broad, overly simple, highly flexible yet ultimately uncompromising paradigms! 11. The Great Chain of Being Paradigm The Great Chain of Being, a grandiose paradigm for the cosmos, also known as the scala naturae, originated in the writings of ancient neo-Platonists, who had much common intellectual currency with Christians. It reigned supreme throughout the Middle Ages in Europe as that period's signature paradigm, and continued its domination right through the European Renaissance and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It is discussed, for example, in the first epistle of Alexander Pope's An Essay On Man. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species threatened to bury this paradigm, to put the idea of natural evolution ahead of it, but it was resurrected and clung to, especially by seminarians in the Twentieth Century after publication in 1936 of Arthur Oncken Lovejoy's book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. The Great Chain paradigm asserts that all things in the universe are arranged on a ladder or in an hierarchy from lowest to highest, the latter being the ens perfectissimum or perfect existence of God. All things in between have an ordained place and are graded continuously, but all are to a greater or lesser extent still full of God, just as all spheres of life in Stalinist society are thought by totalitarian paradigmists to be more or less suffused - or under imperative of suffusion by the NKVD - with Stalin's version of Marxism-Leninism. This suffusion principle, in the Chain paradigm, is called the principle of plenitude. In Stalinist society, it would be called something else, such as absence of pluralism, but three basic Chain principles of plenitude, gradation, and continuity operate in both paradigms, making the paradigms analogous. When Stalin appears lenient or liberal, for example, the totalitarian paradigm says he is merely practicing a principle parallel to that of the Chain's principle of plenitude: providing a maximum diversity of existences or spheres of life which are still really all one. It is significant that while many American civic leaders, educators, and publishers have bitterly battled Darwin's theory of evolution right up to the present day, attempting to block teachers from instructing youth in a paradigm of Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 26 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View nature that threatened to bury the Chain idea, the official government publishing houses in the Soviet Union constantly strove to provide bowdlerized versions of Darwin's theory at streetcorner kiosks in readable magazine form for all laymen, and made the theory a requirement of all elementary educations. The irony is that Western societies, in which the Chain paradigm has held the longest and deepest sway, myopically viewed the Soviet society, which sought to replace the Chain with a paradigm naturally inimical to it, as being run along Chain principles. Kremlinology thus has been an exercise in intense navel-gazing. The Great Chain paradigm - obscure, difficult, and nonsensical though it may be - occurs quite naturally, makes good sense, and even seems simple and clear to a certain kind of man who has dominated European history and its telling. In the case of Stalinist society, the Chain idea was projected onto a barely comprehended society about which little was known. Lest these points be considered purely abstract, it can be demonstrated that entire societies - including some of those most admired by the West - have in actual fact been run along strict Chain paradigm lines. The most familiar example is the Tudor ideal of government under Queen Elizabeth. In setting her house in order, Elizabeth followed strict Chain rules, placing herself as godhead, with the Privy Council, Parliament, Landed Gentry, and the Poor under her forming a divinely ordained descending ladder or hierarchy in which every Englishman of every social status was expected to understand his place. Thus the Elizabethan English could brag that they required no standing army like the volatile French, because they had no potential rebellions to put down: God's will prevailed over all and men obeyed for their own spiritual well-being - not material. If one knew in advance that the Tudors utilized this quintessentially medieval Chain paradigm as a model for society, one could predict that they would oppose capitalists and usurers as factors who tend to upset such an order. The Tudors in fact did so. This model is what Kremlinologists have had in mind all along in discussing Stalinist society, with the dubious benevolence of the Tudor system subtracted out - or substituted for - by what Stalin's critics believe to have been a callous, perverse, and ruthless Marxist idealism. The sway a paradigm exerts can be so invasive and all-encompassing, even - or perhaps especially - at the unconscious level, that mute artifacts begin to take on voices and speak for themselves to men who consider themselves paragons of sanity, sobriety, and rationality. A good example of this is Grigory Tsitriniak, author of Yezhov's Execution, originally published in Russian in 1992 in Literaturnaia gazeta (no. 7, Feb. 12, p. 15). Tsitriniak was given permission to examine an investigative file on Yezhov that had been declassified for the first time. Under the watchful eye of Viacheslav Nikonov, a newcomer to the Russian state security system after the now famous August putsch, Tsitriniak sat in the Lubyanka examining four flattened bullets used to shoot Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Smirnov in the backs of their heads after their conviction at the Moscow Show Trials during the Yezhovshchina. Part of the conversation, as reported by Tsitriniak in this article, went as follows: Tsitriniak: And why are there two (bullets) in the paper marked Smirnov? Nikonov: Evidently, they needed two for him. Tsitriniak: But how so? It is impossible to miss. They shot people in the back of the head! Nikonov: Evidently, they did miss nevertheless: See? Two. Yezhov was very meticulous. He would not have added a bullet belonging to someone else. Pathology, of course... . Tsitriniak considers the mere number and appearance of these bare physical artifacts, once sealed off from all but the most highly privileged NKVD eyes, to be prima facie evidence of Yezhov's misguided iniquity (of course... ). To him they speak volumes on Yezhov's smug Bolshevik hatred, pathologically punctilious malice, and outright deviltry. But a less preconceived, more objective deconstructionist view would be that these flattened slugs and other such material artifacts by themselves are quite mute or, if eloquent, highly ambiguous - until the totalitarian (or some other) paradigm steps in and toils to fill in the gaps, providing a coherent and structured historical, political, or moral Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 27 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View interpretation. The totalitarian paradigm has engulfed Tsitriniak to an extent he does not realize. He refers to it half-consciously as today's perspective. His trip to the Lubyanka was wasted. He did not use the opportunity to examine afresh the physical evidence set before him. He looked at it but saw only the shared paradigm, which he could have viewed from his armchair. Tsitriniak's article contains rants against what he avers were the low to mediocre levels of intelligence and education of Soviet leaders like Yezhov, Stalin, and others they surrounded themselves with. Tsitriniak claims they attempted to underline (emphasize) their own false superiority in this manner, but were actually dull-witted, phenomenally ignorant, and impatient with clever people. Yezhov is referred to as a miserable...semi-literate sadist. But the article does not speak highly for Tsitriniak's intelligence and education any more than it does for his objectivity. It never occurred to him, for example, that saving spent, skull-deformed slugs would be typical for someone like Yezhov, who had a real and deep proletarian background in factory work since his youth. Before recycling became an economic and social imperative, factories commonly had large bins or offset areas in which old damaged tools and aborted product assemblies were saved (sometimes just dumped) for... ? Employees and managers did not bring them home, any more than did Yezhov the slugs. He left them in the evidence room of the Lubyanka. If Yezhov had been in the practice of imitating the leaders of many of his remote Tatar- Mongolian cousins, who were members of Tibetan Buddhist cults and practiced drinking from cups made from the skulls of defeated enemies, he would most certainly have to be considered pathological because he was enculturated more like a modern American than a horseman warrior of the Tien Shan. If he had been pathological in this way, he would once again have been most likely to have kept the slugs in his personal possession. In depositing the slugs in the evidence room, however, he seems prima facie to have been acting completely professionally. Whether or not he made the slugs his personal property is indifferent to Tsitriniak, when it should be crucial. It is indifferent to him because the paradigm, which (as usual) can accommodate either state of affairs, has dissolved the priorities of his thinking. Nor did it leave him thoughtful enough to consider that a rather normal kind of persistent factory mentality could account for what he regards as one of Yezhov's pathological behaviors. There are many, many strokes missing to his superficial portrait of Yezhov. If testimony about Yezhov is not grisly, Tsitriniak presents it as dubious or as Yezhov's mask. The paradigm has blinded him to how much of what he says about Yezhov and Stalin would not cohere at all were it not for gobs of the paradigm glue. At one point, he falls just short of a real insight related to the factory mentality idea when, in a final round of sarcasm, he mentions a conveyer, alluding to a printing mill that existed in the Soviet Union at this time which made certificates available to officials with the words ...order that [‘so-and-so'] be shot [my emphasis] was carried out... already printed on them (unlike a death certificate, on which the cause of death is not pre-printed but left in blank). It occurs to him to mention all of this only for its sardonic grimness. The totalitarian paradigm can be spotted at work at the unconscious level when historians who otherwise write in the flat and sober style often disparagingly referred to as Academese suddenly and briefly switch to writing in a style that is impassioned and vivid, offering colorful impressions on matters to which they were neither privy nor eyewitnesses. This license to switch to gushy rhetoric is felt to be justified because the dominant paradigm (and its accompanying moral baggage) is experienced as their only real certainty. What is actually going on, however, is pure interpretative structuring according to the dominant paradigm, expressing emotions that completely conform to it. A good example of this is can be found in Isaac Deutscher's The Great Purges. Deutscher is sometimes credited with being more objective than other Western historians because he is willing to allow some input into his fact-hoard of events alluded to by Trotsky, which has earned Deutscher the criticism of being a Trotskyite. This criticism is well-deserved because while Deutscher finds much that Trotsky says about the revolution and the early years of building socialism in the Soviet Union to be credible and reasonable, he completely ignores - or is excessively skeptical about - accounts or declarations of anyone else who was involved, such as Felix Dzerzhinsky, Molotov, Yezhov, Stalin himself, or the multitude of Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 28 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View minor figures who wrote about and represented the Soviet Union abroad, such as Glushchenko, a botanist of the Lysenko school, who vigorously and officially campaigned against the racism and genocide practiced in the Third Reich, colonial regimes, and even in the U.S. South. The important exception to this believe only Trotsky rule is Khrushchev: Deutscher is no more eager to doubt most of what Khrushchev said than other Kremlinologists have been. One commentator truly observed that Khrushchev seduced the West. This has led the more skeptical to mockingly disparage Khrushchev's recollections, when enshrined as a primary source of historical fact, as The Khrushchev Memory. Western historians and writers revealed the juvenile nature of their egos when, after a long, cold freeze- out by Stalin, Molotov, and others, whose recollections and memoirs of Soviet history would appear to be just as accurate and important as Khrushchev's, the latter extended what appeared to be an embrace of friendship so eagerly awaited in certain circles in the West that they jumped at it - and everything Khrushchev said - like children finally allowed to join their playmates after being quarantined for weeks. Without having attended the Show Trials himself, and having no empirical evidence for support, Deutscher wrote of the somber irrationality of these trials, of their having the reality of a nightmare. These impressions are in stark disagreement with those of D. N. Pritt, a British Member of Parliament and the King's Counsel who actually attended the trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. Pritt wrote a short essay on this contained in a pamphlet called The Moscow Trial Was Fair mentioned in Deutscher's book, which contains a reproduction of the cover of Pritt's original pamphlet. The caption to this reproduction reads, Right: a pamphlet defending the purges by a British Member of Parliament. But Pritt did not defend the purges in his little tract: he defended only the courtroom procedures used during the trials. These distinctions were lost on Deutscher and David King, who provided the design for the book and may be responsible for this caption. Are Deutscher and King just intellectually clumsy, or are they liars, or both? If none of the foregoing, what is the difference between a liar and someone who eagerly embraces falsehoods which conform to a paradigm? If this caption is not just attributable to block-headedness, one must then charge Deutscher and King of at least substantial habitual dishonesty. It is not an accident that Deutscher and King omitted from the caption that Pritt was an eyewitness to the trial, a position they must have found highly enviable. Mentioning this would enormously boost Pritt's credibility. His impression of the trial - as eyewitness - was completely at odds with Deutscher's idea. Far from the trial being pervaded with a somber irrationality or having the reality of a nightmare, Pritt was astonished, as an English lawyer, at the freedom and vivacity with which all prisoners were allowed to converse with co-defendants during the trial without objection from the Court or prosecutor. At times, according to Pritt, quick and vivid debates occurred between the prosecutor and up to three prisoners, all talking together, which would have been forbidden by rules of procedure in England and the U. S., which allow only one witness to speak at a time in direct answer to a single question put by counsel or the court. Pritt found this a striking novelty, and described the Public Prosecutor Vishinsky's speeches as having vigor and clarity. Pritt says Vishinsky rarely looked at the public or played for effect. This is in contrast, once again, to Deutscher's transparently snide characterization of Vishinsky's speeches as chameleon-like. Vishinsky said strong things, according to Pritt, recommending the defendants be exterminated. But, Pritt points out - as Deutscher and King could or would not (another omission) - that in many cases less grave many English prosecuting counsels have used much harder words. It is conceivable that this kind of Russian (and English) courtroom rhetoric is unknown to Deutscher and King, which would be stunningly naive for historians (King is basically a photo- journalist), perhaps evidencing some sort of academic or professional isolation, but nonetheless contributing heavily to their mistaken characterization of Vishinsky's conduct of the trial as unfair. But is it conceivable that King and Deutscher are not aware that even in modern American courtrooms, the nouns and rhetoric used by prosecutors in referring to defendants in alimony or traffic violations cases are not the same as that used by prosecution in cases of high treason in time of war, serial sex crimes against women, hate crimes against minorities, etc.? Individuals of ordinary sense would naturally expect the lexicon of apt, permitted prosecutorial epithets to be widely divergent in these different kinds of cases Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 29 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View even without having witnessed actual criminal cases of each degree (misdemeanor, felony, and high treason). The best that can be said of King and Deutscher is that they suffer from all-too-typical paradigm blindness. It is not believable that they could have forgotten that Kamenev and Zinoviev were not on trial for motorcar violations. 12. The Fabled Purge of Old Bolsheviks It was pointed out above that communication between adherents of different major paradigms seems to take place across a nearly unbridgeable gulf. There is not likely to be much agreement between adherents of different paradigms of Soviet society as to the credibility of an Old Bolshevik's memoirs, say the book Molotov Remembers, nor between a backer of the totalitarian paradigm and an adherent of a Marxist- Leninist paradigm who defends Stalin, so there is little point in arguing paradigms. However, it is not impossible to examine facts outside a paradigm. This is what actually takes place among investigators before a dominant paradigm emerges in a mature science or discipline. If one can attempt this here, what do the glasnost' revelations reveal? What they show is quite embarrassing to the conventional wisdom of the totalitarian paradigmists, and looks nearly impossible for them to accommodate. Specific examples of these upsetting revelations now follow, after an example of what the totalitarian paradigm would require to have been instead. It is an accepted fact among purveyors of the totalitarian paradigm that Stalin cast Yezhov in his role in the Great Terror primarily to purge Old Bolsheviks, i.e., to eliminate comrades who came up with Stalin during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As Tim Naftali was quoted above as saying on a CNN expert panel, Stalin was getting rid of Old Bolsheviks that he couldn't work with any more. This view is echoed repeatedly, as in The Great Purges by Deutscher. This book presents an elaborate historical comparison, originating with Trotsky, between the Purges and other attempts by victorious factions to repress political rivals and opponents. According to Deutscher, at the root of the struggle lies the insecurity of the revolutionary party - its fear of counter-revolutionary contradiction, controversy and opposition. Having crushed all other parties, the new rulers find that they have not yet eliminated contradiction and opposition. Such an unbalanced or mad fanaticism, attributed by Deutscher to other victorious revolutionaries of the past, such as Robespierre, Cromwell, and Luther, is imputed to Stalin. The original idea, as set forth by Trotsky, is that the Russian Revolution, as early as 1923, entered a conservative phase of Thermidor. This is a comparison to the stages of the French Revolution, which were deeply studied and discussed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other Old Bolsheviks, as well as every intellectual in the Soviet bureaucratic elite. Thermidor corresponded to the month of July in the new calendar instituted during the French Revolution, replacing the Church of Rome's Gregorian calendar. On 8 Thermidor Year II (July 26, 1794 a. D.), the radical Jacobin clubs, which had risen during the revolution to become the ruling powers, led by Robespierre, Danton, Carnot, and others on the Committee of Public Safety, were overthrown, ending the radical or revolutionary phase of the upheaval. This Committee had led the revolution through its most terrible stage, the Reign of Terror, or reign of the guillotine, actually taking over the rule of France. During this time, Parisians had become accustomed to the sound of lorries lumbering through their streets each day, carrying scores of the Committee's enemies to the guillotine. The comparison by Trotsky and Deutscher is that, at first, only the aristocrats were beheaded, such as Marie Antionette, Queen of France. But then the Jacobins carried their arrests to the provinces, arresting and executing members of the more moderate revolutionary factions, such as the Girondists. The Reign of Terror did not stop there, but proceeded further along, next with the Jacobins arresting each other, beginning a struggle for power amongst themselves which Trotsky and Deutscher compare to Stalin's faction using the Great Purges to completely eliminate any factions which might form - or had already formed - around Trotsky, Kirov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatikov, and other Old Bolsheviks who had already been eliminated. In the (supposedly) comparable phase of the French Revolution, Robespierre succeeded in having Danton condemned, believing that France and the Revolution were not safe until all enemies within the country were rooted out. The comparison here is Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 30 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View with Yezhov's efforts to eliminate all spies and fascists operating in secret in the Soviet Union and within the Communist Party to undo the Bolshevik Revolution. Like the Great Purges, according to Trotsky and Deutscher, the Reign of Terror in France was not carried out for its own sake, but as an extreme method of political control in which not only rival parties but contradiction, controversy and opposition itself (in Deutscher's words) are rooted out. The French national convention finally turned on Robespierre himself, declaring him an outlaw. When Robespierre struggled during his arrest, half of his jaw was shot away, and in this horrible condition, with his head bleeding and bandaged, he was dragged about for trial and execution. His brilliant, stirring oratorical ability, honed through fine education, a law practice, and an abundance of pre-Revolutionary activity as an enthusiastic exponent of Jean Jacques Rousseau, were useless to him. The parallel to this dramatic climax in the Stalin purges is supposed to be the eventual execution of Yezhov himself, the repressor repressed. A further likeness is drawn: in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of moderates (from Trotsky's point of view) eventually took over, led by Stalin, who, according to Deutscher, Conquest, Naftali, et. al., rather successfully eliminated all opposition. Trotsky believed that Stalin had thereby succeeded in dissolving the Bolshevik Revolution, much as Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the French Revolution after he returned from Egypt to make himself emperor of France and provide it with a stronger central government. It is significant that from the non-Communist West's point of view, these comparisons originated with Trotsky, who was in exile during the Great Purges and was no more of an eyewitness than Conquest, King, or Deutscher. Many historians have suspected Trotsky himself of having had a Napoleonic complex. These historical comparisons have great appeal for students of history, men of letters, and intelligent readers of all sorts. But are they good? One could point out flaws, but protracted logical quibbling eventually runs right back into a conflict of paradigms. The scenario given by Trotsky and Deutscher of the Thermidor phase of the French Revolution is basically correct, though the evil and bloody reputation imputed in typical, paradigmatic knee-jerk fashion to Robespierre - which is supposed to cast its malign shadow over Yezhov and Stalin - is undeserved. Just before his own arrest, Robespierre delivered a brilliant address to the French national convention about stopping wholesale executions. The timing is important: it was this speech that seems to have gotten him arrested, because he called for the punishment of several unnamed convention deputies, arousing their fear of him. Also, there would be better historical parallelism if the Girondists (a more moderate faction in the French Revolution than Robespierre's Jacobins) had carried out the Reign of Terror on the more extreme Jacobins, because it is the point of Trotsky's comparison that Stalin and his faction had abandoned and betrayed the revolutionary fervor of Trotsky's own left wing. More exactitude in comparison would also exist if Napoleon had come along earlier in the French Revolution and had orchestrated the execution of the victims of the Reign of Terror himself, using a Yezhov/Robespierre puppet. But the problem is not a failure to satisfy close parallelism. Historical comparisons are never really exact, and they are usually made in the first place in order to uphold a favored paradigm. The problem is that these comparisons are empirical failures because they are based on the totalitarian paradigm and not on new factual evidence available since glasnost' as to who was purged during the Yezhovshchina. It shall be seen in what follows that it was not Old Bolsheviks who were targeted by the Purges at all, as the paradigm and conventional wisdom of Kremlinologists requires. The comparison's appeal has a lot to do with Trotsky's popularity among Western intellectuals - and Stalin's lack of it. Trotsky's writings - and sometimes his mere book titles - are often described as eloquent. (Contrast King's above-mentioned characterization of Stalin's gruff monosyllables. ) The West's fascination with Trotsky has a lot to do with its impression of him as a tragic hero, ultimately destroyed by the consequences of steps that he accepts have to be taken in pursuit of ideals or greatness (like Rubashov in Koestler's Darkness at Noon). Trotsky's intellectual indecision, both during and after the 1917 revolution, likewise strikes a chord in many literate Westerners as being Hamlet-like. Trotsky Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 31 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View remained undecided for many weeks, reluctant to attack the Provisional Government, unlike the dynamic and aggressive Lenin. Again, in 1927, Trotsky bided his time a bit too long when he could have openly attacked his rival Stalin, i.e. when he could have been seeking to form a strong alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin. Stalin is often held up as Trotsky's nemesis, when actually the greatest personal animosity existed not between Trotsky and Stalin, but between Trotsky and Zinoviev. The animosity with Stalin is sometimes viewed as Trotsky's tragic flaw. On January 21, 1924, Lenin, the Party's leader and founder passed away. The open enemies of the Soviet Union took advantage of Lenin's illness and then of his death to try to deflect the Party from the path laid out by Lenin and thus pave the way for the restoration of capitalism. Foremost in these attacks was Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein). Leon Trotsky, while claiming to be a Marxist revolutionary, enjoyed the support of prominent Western banking families. Chiefly through Trotsky and his agents, Wall Street businesses poured money into Russia for the purpose of funding future counter-revolutionary uprisings and encouraging dissidents. The capitalist elites also hoped that Trotsky's ultra-Leftism would so wreck the Soviet Union from within, that capitalism could be easily restored. The biographer of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, J.C. Wise, wrote: Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport. Trotsky was never popular with Bolshevik Party members, who saw him as an opportunist. The collapse of the Tsar's regime in March 1917 found Trotsky in New York City. On his return to Russia, he was detained by Canadian authorities, and only allowed to continue his journey after the intervention of the British Government! Bruce Lockhart, in his memoirs, said the British Intelligence Service believed Trotsky would be more useful to them in Russia. Trotsky, at first, tried to set up a revolutionary group of his own, but realizing Lenin's Bolshevik Party had strong mass support, Trotsky made a sensational political somersault. After years of opposition to Lenin, Trotsky applied for membership in the Bolshevik Party! After his exile from Soviet Russia in 1929, a myth was woven by anti-Soviet elements throughout the world around the name and personality of Leon Trotsky. According to this fairy tale, Trotsky was the outstanding Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution and Lenin's inspirer, closest co-worker and logical successor. Now in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western establishment historians no longer need to promote this fiction. They now openly admit Trotsky was an opportunist who actually opposed Lenin. We are now told how Trotsky concocted all kinds of lies and half-truths about his and Stalin's relationship with Lenin. His version of events was reinforced by Deutscher's three-volume adulatory biography of Trotsky which rests on shaky documentary evidence. There are strong indications, however, that, except for the last four months of Lenin's conscious life, prior to March 1923, when he had the final debilitating stroke and lost the power of speech, Lenin was close to Stalin, relied on his judgement, and entrusted him with ever greater responsibilities. At the same time, there are no indications in the sources that he ever cared personally for Trotsky. (Three Whys of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes) Throughout the 1930s, the Western capitalist countries accelerated their operations, both secret and open, against the Soviet Union. The Great Depression, along with growing mass support for communist and workers' movements in the nations of Europe, prompted Western governments to back numerous covert attempts to wreak havoc in the Soviet Union. In addition, in this secret war they relied on the networks established by Leon Trotsky, who had been deported from the U.S.S.R. in 1929 for his activities. Setting up his headquarters outside Russia, Trotsky enjoyed the patronage of capitalist governments, agents of several Intelligence Services, as well as all manner of anti-Soviet elements. Winston Churchill, a spokesman for the Anglo-American ruling circles, immediately realized the value of Trotsky to the worldwide anti-Soviet crusade. Summing up the whole purpose of Trotsky's actions from the moment he left the Soviet Union, Churchill wrote in Great Contemporaries: Trotsky strives to Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 32 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View rally the underworld of Europe for the overthrow of the Russian Army, a necessary prelude to a Western military attack on the U.S.S.R. Twentieth Century Western intellectuals, especially academic professionals, have shown far more respect for the bookish, bespectacled, dyspeptic, Hamlet-avatar Trotsky than for the abrek Stalin, that is, for a mountain strong-man who had been reared on a diet of mutton and wine, who had been half-plunderer, half-patriot - a kind of Georgian anti-Tsarist Robin Hood in his youth. These intellectuals feel reluctant to trust government to someone who had once robbed the Tsar's caravans and divided the booty among his countrymen. They do not feel such a man can rise to run a truly rational and just government, especially if his political methods continue to resemble his redoubtable former deeds in any way. Many regard deeds of this kind as justifiable or legitimate only during revolutionary periods, not in an ongoing regime - if they find them justifiable at all. Ultimately, they feel uncomfortable with someone who was not appointed by God, as the Tsar proclaimed he was. Many would probably never regard any acts of open rebellion against any established government's rule of law as ever being justified had it not been for the considerable success they believe the United States has attained since its own American Revolution. They recognize that the U.S. has succeeded in partly realizing many desirable democratic ideals during the two centuries that followed what had begun as an illegal rebellion against the King of England by members of a Masonic Lodge. (This involves an end justifies the means idea of the kind they usually eschew.) Stalin himself was conscious of the difference between himself and Trotsky, and liked to contrast himself with his fellow revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov, whom he characterized as an intellectual anarchist, while he saw himself as a peasant by birth. According to Stalin's numerous Georgian relatives, he did not believe that someone like Sverdlov (or Trotsky) ever really knew what it was to be a free man who could not tolerate slavery or serfdom. At the law school in St. Petersburg, it is known that the Georgians were among the most radical. How does the alleged Great Purge of the Old Bolsheviks stand up to empirical evidence? The answer is simple: it falls! Based on newly available archival material, J. Arch Getty, William Chase, Roberta Manning, and other historians performed interpretative statistical analyses of victims of the Yezhovshchina, such as Getty's and Chase's analysis of 898 members of the Soviet bureaucratic elite who held positions of power in 1936 (the start of Yezhovshchina), and Manning's study of the numbers of Party members expelled in the Belyi Raion (Belyi district) of the Soviet Union. Modern scientific statistical methods were used to avoid, or at least minimize, bias and accession to preconceived ideas. In other words, the new wealth of evidence on the Purge's victims was examined outside a paradigm as much as possible. The statistical methods used were the formation of contingency tables, multicellular analysis, and logit modeling. This writer worked professionally in statistics, and recalls a disparaging joke that a statistician is someone who can put his right hand in a bucket of ice, his left in a pot of boiling water, and declare, On the average, I feel quite okay. This is, of course, a misuse of the idea of an (arithmetical) average, since the average or arithmetical mean of the two temperatures in this case has no real physical meaning for what the tortured statistician experiences. But the joke gives voice to a healthy distrust of statistics, which are all too easily abused. Some abuses take greater depth of insight or mathematical knowledge to expose, but, on the whole, a statistical survey carried out by modern methods, such as those used by Getty and Chase, is much to be preferred to the rampant impressionism and citation of protrusive exceptions to the rule that has prevailed in Kremlinology. Francis Galton (b. 1822), a cousin of Charles Darwin, who practiced in the earliest days of the application of statistics, wrote that ...those who are not accustomed to original inquiry entertain a hatred and a horror of statistics. They cannot endure the idea of submitting their sacred impressions to cold- blooded verification. But it is the triumph of scientific men to rise superior to such superstitions, to devise tests by which the value of beliefs may be ascertained, and to feel sufficiently masters of themselves to discard contemptuously whatever may be found untrue. Why contemptuously ? Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 33 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Because a scientific character reacts much differently from most others when it encounters error. The scientific individual actually takes umbrage at error and falsehood. This feeling is a ruling passion in him. A good example can be found in The Quark and the Jaguar by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He says therein that when he encounters an error on the first page of a book he has begun reading, he is ready to abandon the book right there, read it no further, wondering whether or not there is anything he can learn from that particular author. Anyone who imagines himself to be a rational and sober scholar with a balanced approach to intellectual matters who does not react as strongly as Gell-Mann does may really be as sober and balanced as he believes, but cannot rightly count himself among the truly scientifically spirited. What sacred impressions must now be discard[ed] contemptuously after attempts at cold-blooded verification? Getty and Chase found that taking the above-mentioned 898 members of the Soviet elite as their sample group, 427 or 47.6% were purged. According to the totalitarian paradigm, the majority (at least 50.1%) of these 427 should have been Old Bolsheviks, i.e., former revolutionaries who came up through the 1917 Revolution with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. al. Here the paradigm is utterly defeated, for neither Getty and Chase's study, nor Manning's, showed this. To quote Manning: Contrary to popular belief, Old Bolsheviks of pre-Revolutionary vintage did not appear to be the main target of the Great Purges... . Who was primarily expelled from the Party or purged? Manning's results show they were local party members who joined (the Party) during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 - 1927... . (The New Economic Policy was the Communist Party's 1921 withdrawal from its previous policy of doctrinaire centralized socialism, which had been set forth in Lenin's 21 conditions at the Third International or Comintern. The NEP permitted freedom of trading, encouragement to foreign capitalists, ownership of private property, and other economic features that had just been abolished by the Revolution, permitting what may be called Lenin's program of allowable private enterprise or private business under the control of the Proletarian Government.) Manning continues: But the brunt of the purges fell most heavily on Communists who joined the party during the Civil War. This fact had already been pointed out by Khrushchev decades ago in his much attended to secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, but has been completely ignored, since it does not conform well to the dominant paradigm. This is a good example of how an entrenched shared paradigm takes precedence over something everyone should have noticed before. According to Getty and Chase, there is little support for Conquest's assertion that there was a ‘plan to destroy the Old Bolsheviks,' or for Armstrong's claim that the ‘Great Purge almost eliminated from the apparatus the Old Bolsheviks, who entered the Party before the Revolution.' Who, then, according to these more scientific analyses of a greater amount of empirical evidence, was at risk to be purged? The statistically arrived at profile for a member of the risk group turns out to be someone who was village born, as opposed to urban born; not highly educated, but educated enough to have risen to some bureaucratic position or high rank in a certain field, especially a technical or military field; a Party member, as opposed to a non-Party member (many ardent Bolsheviks and Stalin-supporters, like the agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko, were non-Party); and who participated in the revolution in some way but later joined the opposition. To narrow it further, the most likely to be purged was a peasant who had joined the Party in 1912 - 1920; who was a military specialist and an opposition member. According to Getty and Chase, the most striking finding (of their study) is that elite members of the intelligentsia working in intellectual/artistic/scientific activities in 1936 were safest [my emphasis] from arrest. This controverts the claim of Roy Medvedev, for example, that the diplomatic profession and especially the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs were savagely purged. Also controverted by this study are the histories written by Roy's brother Zhores and by Harvard's indefatigable David Joravsky, both of whom have presented extensive studies on alleged purges of the intelligenty in artistic and scientific fields, such as genetics under Lysenko. Contrary to Zh. Medvedev and Joravsky, a member of this group - a poet, playwright, cosmologist, chemist - was safest from arrest. This fact clashes with the Orwellian version of the totalitarian paradigm for Stalinist society in which all scientific and artistic creation is Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 34 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View minutely scrutinized and censored by Big Brother's thought police, the NKVD. There is no doubt that there were many Old Bolsheviks among those purged in Getty's and Chase's sampling of members of the Soviet elite. As noted above, of the 898 sampled, 47.6% overall were purged. But only about 31% of all Old Bolsheviks perished. Statistically, being an Old Bolshevik was not related to one's vulnerability in the terror (Getty and Chase, op. cit., p. 237). According to these analysts, Old Bolsheviks in the present group suffered not because they were Old Bolsheviks, but because they held prominent positions within the Party, economic, and military elite, positions to which they no doubt rose in part because they had been Old Bolsheviks. This is quite different from what the totalitarian paradigmists have been asserting. Getty and Chase go on to say, Old Bolsheviks were among the victims because of where [my emphasis] they worked rather than because they were Old Bolsheviks. If one wanted to be safe during the Yezhovshchina then, it helped to be an apolitical urban- born intellectual from the middle or upper class who received a higher education before the revolution and who avoided political or economic administrative work. ... Statistically, it was a purge of politicians - oppositionist or otherwise. 13. A Specific Example of How Conquest Conquered the Facts Why otherwise, i.e. who were the non-oppositionist politicians who were purged? Old Bolsheviks is the wrong answer. Stalin's personal enemies is the wrong answer. Expert Tim Naftali's answer on CNN was wrong. The right answer is finally available. It controverts the totalitarian paradigm and speaks highly of the Stalin era. A specific example is given by Roberta Manning in Stalinist Terror. This is the case of long-time Belyi Raion (Belyi rural district) Party Secretary T. I. Kovalev, whose case is typical. Moscow officials had received many complaints against him for his abusive treatment of subordinates in the workplace. This treatment was typical behavior of those who had been brought up in Civil War methods of leadership (i.e., bully-type management). Kovalev belonged to the above- mentioned group that had the highest incidence among those purged, a group that may be called the class of 1912 - 1920. He was not an Old Bolshevik, nor was he one of Stalin's personal enemies. Less than one year after the Bolshevik Revolution, anti-Communists from the old army, called the Whites, led by former Tsarist officers, seized control of most of Russia from the Volga River to the Pacific and attempted an assault on Moscow to undo the Revolution. The Civil War had begun. This army had international financial backing and support troops deployed from the U. S., France, Great Britain, and Japan, as previously noted. The leadership of this army became known for its authoritarian and abusive treatment of military underlings, for its tendency to deprive peasants of their land, and for harsh treatment of non-Russian minorities, especially of Jews. Kovalev was a typical graduate of this school, which may be called the Old Civil War Opponent School or Old Whites who, with other internal opposition allies, became numerically the real targets of the later Yezhovshchina. Once the Whites had been defeated, Kovalev and others of his ilk entered mainstream Soviet political life posturing as Reds, many achieving high Party and economic rank, such as Kovalev did in Belyi. Soviet rural bureaucracies were teeming with such individuals in positions of leadership, who had surrendered to the Reds in word only, masquerading as Reds - Whites with Red faces. One of the most serious complaints against Kovalev was that he forced subordinates to falsify harvest statistics by threatening them with Party expulsion. He had the support and patronage of high ranking oblast (a larger political region than Raion) Party bosses, so a grass-roots movement by aggrieved subordinates did little to touch him. Complaints against him finally reached the All-Union Party Control Commission, attracting the attention of Lenin's surviving sister, Mariya Ulyanova. (This took place ca. 1936, during the Stalin era.) She dispatched letters to Kovalev's superiors who ignored them because, like Kovalev, they were part of a vast network of corruption, rackets, and mutual protection involving numerous former Whites who frustrated any corrective action. Finally, the Party Control Commission sent one Golovashchenko as an emissary to Belyi to investigate by seeking out Kovalev's critics. This democratically spirited effort by Moscow's bureaucracy is a far cry from the oft repeated but Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 35 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View insupportable claim that Moscow, the Party, and the chiefs of agriculture, like Trofim Lysenko, were only interested in bogus, favorable-looking harvest statistics, which Western writers like David Joravsky state were among the chief concerns of Stalin's regime, a claim repeated by virtually all Western writers and Soviet reformers throughout the Khrushchev era. When Golovashchenko arrived in Belyi, he organized a frank and freewheeling discussion and debate, which, at long last, resulted in Kovalev's ouster. (For more details, see Manning, Roberta T., The Great Purges in a rural district: Belyi Raion revisited, in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, pp. 168 - 197. This essay is by a non-Marxist Western historian, who bases it on newly available as well as underexplored archival source material. Note the unconscious use of the word perspectives in the book title, as if hinting that a new vista has arisen - a new paradigm.) This account, based on a close review of both old and newly available archival evidence, should be compared directly to Conquest's brief report on the Kovalev affair in The Great Terror. Conquest, who was familiar at the time with some of the Smolensk archive, which is one of the sources Manning dubbed underexplored, but none of the post-glasnost' material, presents a strictly top down totalitarian paradigmatic construction of what happened in this provincial area. Omitting and ignoring some facts, lacking access to others, and above all using the paradigm to shave down other uneven facts, he presents a straightforward, satisfyingly simple, yet vivid (albeit fictional) picture. According to Conquest, Kovalev was a victim of the Great Terror as it swept through remote rural areas, a hysteria of arrest and accusation seizing Belyi (Conquest, op. cit., p. 221). Calls of terror from above [sic] had now filtered from the top of the pyramid of power in Moscow down to Belyi, inducing this hysterical lynching mood of what now became a dominant section of the lowest Party organization (op. cit., pp. 221 - 222). Note Conquest's clear, categorical, graphic, and even shrill choices of words, such as hysterical and lynching mood. One knows exactly what he is talking about: in Kafkaesque fashion, the grisly, grappling, omnisciently guided, unprincipled arm of the Terror reached deep into Belyi to find, sweep up, and liquidate Kovalev and others. As previously stated, much of what the paradigm produces is simple, dramatic, and memorable. Conquest naturally does not refer to Golovashchenko by name, but he vaguely refers to Moscow's envoys, whose purpose in coming to Belyi, he says, was to find denouncers and give them ‘evidence' against those they wished to destroy (op. cit., p. 222). The amount of factual, documentable, or primary source evidence for the latter statement by Conquest as to the role and modus operandi of these so-called envoys of the Terror equals zero. It is pure paradigm and pure fiction. Ignoring certain facts, remolding others, and making further deductions from the paradigm alone, Conquest has it that it was easy for these ruthless missionaries from Moscow to terrorize peasants and others into making ridiculous and unsupportable accusations against Kovalev, such as that he was a Trotskyite. Conquest makes no mention of the real, documentable, muzzled accusations that had been made against Kovalev for years, complaints of abuse of power (such as threatening to revoke the privilege of having a Communist Party card from underlings who did not toe the line), falsifying production reports, etc. Yet Conquest goes out of his way to mention wild and difficult-to-support accusations, which were predictably also made by peasants who learned to hate him for leaning on them for so long or worse, such as accusations that he was a Trotskyite or a deserter from the Red Army. So strongly and strictly does Conquest work from the paradigm alone, shaving and evening out the few facts about the affair with which he was familiar, that he finds it astonishing that one of Kovalev's more sophisticated accusers claimed that he had been silent because Kovalev had, for four years, forbidden him to speak! (op. cit., p 222). The explanation point inside the final quotation mark of the last sentence is Conquest's own, expressing his supposed amazement at the ludicrousness of this claim. The black box in all of this is Kovalev's character, his own past deeds during the Civil War and its aftermath, and his documentable abuses as a Stalin era Party leader in Belyi. Conquest makes no mention of the all-important role of Lenin's sister in the final purging of Kovalev. His use of the paradigm to smooth out the facts amounts to a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation of Kovalev from a cruel, offensive, Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 36 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View abusive gangster and determined thwarter (wrecker ) of government programs into a helpless, wretched victim of a whirlwind of paranoid ideologues. Is this the writing of history or fiction or pure propaganda? Or is it a deceptive mixture of all three? Is this Gibbon or Robert Louis Stevenson? How much respect and credibility should be accorded to the English-speaking world's most widely read and highly regarded scholar of the Stalin era if his historical methods can transform a Mr. Hyde - evil and barely human - into a Dr. Jekyll - a paragon of rationality and humanity? A close reading of Conquest's account of the Kovalev affair by itself should have aroused suspicion about its veracity. After such a reading, one might legitimately wonder, What was Kovalev the man really like? Conquest provides absolutely no information here. This would ordinarily appear as a glaring omission to a critical, thoroughness- demanding reader, except that the totalitarian paradigm is assumed and invoked to fill this gap : Kovalev was a cardboard cutout victim. He was any victim you know, any dehumanized mark of unjust accusation and undeserved punishment, anyone martyred by evil thugs and tyrants. The very abstract formulaicness of this kind of historical presentation and writing is often a telltale sign that some ruling paradigm has trampled over real facts and information. Far from seeking to uncover Old Bolsheviks that Stalin could not work with anymore, the Great Purges conducted by Yezhov involved noble and daunting efforts such as these attempts, as Manning puts it, to allow more citizen involvement in the Soviet political system, clean up official corruption, combat alcoholism, encourage citizen complaints against government, and improve operation of the Soviet economy. Most contemporary Americans would agree these are admirable goals, but a great many American government officials tremble at the idea of a serious pursuit of such reforms, though not as much as Stalin and Yezhov taught people like Kovalev and his fellow conspirators to. 14. The Yezhovshchina and Crimes Against Underlings Co-option and suppression of criticism of authority has increasingly become a professionally and artfully pursued goal of all levels of government in the U.S. (such as spin-doctoring ). The old American labor unions, since the 1950's, have been re-organized to become more pro-company and pro-government, so that American workers now have few alternatives, when abused by management, to hiring an expensive lawyer; and even if they do, they face challenges, and more expenses. American workers still have no labor rights in right to work states such as Florida where they can be fired without cause. There are even counseling services available that boast of the number of employee-organized trade unions they have dissolved. Employers that intimidate their employees often call on such services to prevent employees from unionizing. By elimination of job descriptions, these workers can be forced to take on excess work and double as a second or third employee. Many acts that were crimes in the workplace in the USSR during the Stalin era, such as rudeness to toilers, have never been illegal anywhere in the U.S. Only recently have harassment, racial defamation, and various insult injuries been recognized and established as criminal offenses with a firm history of precedent to guide judges, but few people are aware of these new rights or know how to avail themselves of appropriate legal remedies. It can be expensive to do so because not many attorneys will take such cases on a contingency fee arrangement. Suppression of criticism, which is not the same as infringement of the right of free speech, is not yet on the books as a crime anywhere in the U.S. Traditionally, private U.S. businesses have been left free of government interference, allowing discretion to officers, upper management, and controlling stockholders alone in releasing offending supervisors and lower managers from their employ, though it takes a lot of complaining and proof on the part of employees to induce them to do so, and usually more than one individual has to file a complaint. Needless to say, few employees complain due to fear of losing their jobs and/or a conditioned fear of authority in general. Those offending supervisors or lower managers that are dismissed then seek a similar niche in another company or profession. In the Stalinist system, a trail of abuse of underlings such as this was nipped in the bud - or sought to be: the offender's sentence was to work for a term when and where he was told - and it might be in a remote gulag. His freedom or personal liberty to abuse employees, associates, or subordinates - even verbally - was immediately Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 37 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View curtailed. Americans have difficulty understanding the Soviet crime of vreditel'stvo or wrecking. This was an extraordinary crime for novel circumstances, but paradigmists and propagandists have confused almost everyone by promulgating the misleading idea that wrecking is a fake crime or trump charge used during the Great Purges as an excuse by the NKVD to arrest Stalin's personal and political enemies. The Soviet system had an entire branch of its court system dedicated to jurisdiction over this and related crimes. Wrecking was chronic business mismanagement or economic malpractice, often involving behaviors demoralizing to underlings (of the kind alluded to in the previous paragraph). The crime was accompanied by what Western jurisprudence calls the mens rea or mental state of intention to do it. That someone consciously allowed abuses was a lesser charge. However, in all degrees of this crime, the accused was held to a higher degree of responsibility and care than many Westerners might consider reasonable. Such reasonableness is a cultural artifact, however, and is therefore relative, not objective, as writers like David Joravsky think. (Compare what were reasonable working conditions during the heyday of the American sweatshop to what employees expect as reasonable today.) When a grain supply in the Soviet Union was contaminated with mud and filth, a Soviet official's desire to investigate to find out if someone was to blame, and to what extent blame could be apportioned, has almost invariably been caricatured in the West as scapegoating for an economic and social system that could not work anyway. This requires one to believe that Soviet bureaucrats already expected or suspected immanent failure of their system, as if they did not believe in their own ideals, and were aware of a need to keep a step ahead of impending doom by a kind of dishonest hedging and irrational ritualistic exorcism of bogeymen blamed for ruining projects. Totalitarian paradigmists are reluctant to concede that the Great Terror had any legitimate aims at all, or that it actually carried out any, despite cases like Kovalev's that have now come to light. If the allegedly painful and repressive means used by Stalin and Yezhov were so obviously and egregiously immoral, as Western critics assert, that should be immorality enough for plenty of negative propaganda. What need is there, then, to also misrepresent the ends or goals they pursued as irrational or evil? (When those that adhere to a paradigm know [on some level] that they're wrong, their resistance to counter-evidence that would refute their paradigm is the fiercest.) Why? Because the paradigm is threatened by almost any good intention existing among high-level Soviet bureaucrats. Good deeds and gestures must be presented as anomalies or cynical power ploys. The idea that a provincial Soviet official like Kovalev would find himself in very serious or even mortal trouble with Moscow if he ignored a report of rape in his jurisdiction, for example, and especially if he did so and was carrying a Communist Party card, is the kind of event that new archival evidence and the statistics show to be typical, however. The evidence shows that lax officials and covert saboteurs were specifically targeted by Yezhov, especially if they had been opposition members, such as a White during the post-revolution Civil War, or had joined the Party during or after the Civil War. Such late-joining bogus Reds were rightly suspect. Defeated former White leaders needed a hideout and a refuge - those who could not just disappear into the bowels of Manchuria, as many did in the Soviet Union's Far East at the very end of the Civil War in 1923. These stowaways in the Communist Party sought Party jobs and positions in rural areas a thousand miles from Moscow. Only the foolhardy dared to seek employment in that city of watchful eyes or its immediate environs. American readers may be familiar with the bitter feelings that prevailed in the former Confederate States of America after the defeat of the Confederate Army in the U.S. Civil War. The defeated Southern states, which had seceded from the Union, not only had to surrender - to which many of their citizens, after a great deal of bloodshed, were at long last agreeable - but also had to acquiesce to re-admittance to the Union state by state. Some states were not re-admitted until five years after the war ended, and this only after the Union had established military governments to supervise and reconstruct them according to the plans of the North's Radical Republicans. These reconstructed state governments were generally run by Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 38 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View newly emancipated Black appointees, by carpetbaggers (Northerners who had gone to the South for this purpose), and by scalawags (collaborators with these others). As is well known, a majority of the populace of the South and many of their organizations opposed this system, covertly destabilizing, frustrating, and sabotaging it, like the defeated Whites (not to be confused with the racial Whites of the U.S. South) did after the Russian Civil War ended, becoming Yezhov's chief suspects for the wrecking of collectivization and other Communist programs. The most notorious of these organizations in the U.S. South were the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of White Camellia. They used any means available to them: fraud, intimidation, covert violence, and the little discussed but highly effective day-to-day thwarting of the Freedmen's Bureau - most analogous to the wrecking of Soviet economic plans. During the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the U. S., a bitter issue arose in the U.S. Congress as to the degree of force that should be used to compel the uncooperative defeated States to obey. Terror was avoided. Thwarting was not nominated as a crime. President Lincoln demurred on all but the mildest of measures, and has been criticized for it to this day. As a result, the Reconstruction of the South was a failure for the very people whose rights were supposed to have been at stake - the former Black slaves of the South. Within a decade of the end of the war, the Democratic Party, which had been the pro-slavery party of the Old South, was back in power in each of the former Confederate states, having thrown appointed Blacks out of their offices. Things would have been entirely different if someone like Yezhov and an NKVD-like police organization had existed then and there with a free hand to compel obedience to Force Laws (as they were called in the U.S. at the time) and to the contemptuously ignored dictates of the Freedmen's Bureau. While, as pointed out above, historical comparisons are never exact, there was little difference in attitude and behavior between the attitude and actions of a former White army officer in the Soviet Union who joined the Communist Party in 1921 - with his concealed contempt for, disregard of, and opposition to Moscow and the Communists Party's economic plans - and a Confederate Army lieutenant ordered to obey and show respect for a Black mayor newly appointed by the Freedmen's Bureau to run the lieutenant's home town and care for his family. Many would consider Lincoln's indulgence, mercy, and leniency praiseworthy, as opposed to Yezhov's ruthless thoroughness, but the suspicion remains that if the rights of an esteemed or valued European Christian group had been at stake in the U.S. South, instead of the rights of former Black slaves, Lincoln would have supported more vehement action. The obviously troublesome moral issue here is whether or not, and how far, one can compel human obedience, and at what cost. The cost is assessed in the currency of what is otherwise valued. The value or esteem enjoyed by groups whose interests would be lost, compromised, or sacrificed by such draconian measures is something Lincoln must have - at least unconsciously - weighed in all of this. This is what opened the door for charges of racism against him. This criticism has focused on Lincoln's openly avowed greater concern to preserve the Union than to free Blacks or safeguard their human rights. Lincoln is known to have emancipated Blacks primarily as a war measure, i.e. to produce more soldiers for the Union, but this fact is not highly publicized. When Stalin did something similar, on the other hand, it is underlined with the greatest cynicism. The problems Yezhov encountered in ferreting out former Whites were due in part to Moscow's great leniency in the early Stalin years toward former opposition members, greater leniency than was shown by the U.S. Congress toward former Confederate leaders. During the early Stalin years, a former White army officer (like Kovalev in the example given above) was allowed to rise to any high position in government or Party apparatuses that his performance merited. This was not so in the post-Civil War U.S. in which, under President Andrew Johnson (who replaced the assassinated Lincoln just after the South's surrender), the U.S. Congress passed legislation prohibiting former Confederate leaders from holding any offices in Southern states that were said to be under reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed but was unable to stop such legislation, was regarded, like Lincoln, as an intractable frustrater of the Radical Republicans' strong measures - the Force Laws. Johnson was impeached but was acquitted by a margin of only one vote. The same Congress that forbade former Confederate leaders Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 39 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View from holding any offices also dismantled Lincoln's early Reconstruction work, putting the former Confederate states back under military control. The Soviets never went as far as the U.S. Congress in this shameful and little discussed chapter in American history. Perhaps if Lenin and Stalin had been as illiberal and vindictive as this majority of U.S. Congressmen, and had continued this policy, instead of being so permissive toward former White leaders, there would have never been a need for Show Trials, a Great Terror, or a Yezhov, who was said, using a pun on the meaning of his name in Russian, to hold his writhing enemies in an Iron Gauntlet (Yezhovye rukavitsy after derzhat v yezhovykh rukavitsakh ). 15. Happiness and Human Obedience What has been said thus far can be made clear to most professionals and laymen, despite disagreements. But when the issue is raised of compelling human obedience as part of what has been disparagingly called human engineering (a phrase coined by Roscoe Pound, an American botanist cum sociologist), obfuscation and mystification predominate. This is especially so when the target obedience is not the behavior of a liberal, republican, equalitarian, humanitarian, good Christian, etc. Archaic moral codes and tenets, originating over 3,500 years ago among pastoral and agricultural peoples of the Semitic world, combat clear thinking and usurp the field of discussion. There arises in many people an uncontrollable denial of what the advancement of the physical sciences has made increasing obvious empirically: that human beings can not only be compelled to obey, they can be trained or compelled to believe, remember, and feel happy and free, both individually and collectively, to a much greater extent than traditional thinking based on these codes will admit. In fact, it appears that engineering humans to be these things is less of a puzzle than, for example, figuring out how to make them more intelligent or adaptively fit. This thought discomforts Western intellectuals of the Judean and Christian traditions, who readily acknowledge only the ease with which humans can be made significantly better educated and healthier. The inhibiting traditions referred to in the preceding paragraph found continuity through mediaeval Christians and rabbinical Aristotelians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and the Talmudists, through Christian clerics and philosophers such as Descartes, down through the Enlightenment - which was the mainstream of thought in Eighteenth Century Europe - and into this century. In contrast, one of the main thrusts of the materialist and scientific point of view - a point of view which existed in, but barely survived, the classical world until the Renaissance resurrected and safeguarded it - is that human thinking and behavior are the results of interactions between heredity and neurological development influenced by impacting environmental situations. This idea is now being boycotted or rabidly combated once again by a new wave of Christianity in America and by the thought police of political correctness who hold moral sway at centers of higher learning. The subject of influencing human behavior - hotly contested and surrounded by confusion though it may be - is further addressed at the end of this part of this part of the essay (Part I). Rather than giving a final answer satisfactory to everyone, a rather provocative offering will be made there of the widely divergent views of four well-known non- or pre-Marxist Western thinkers who addressed this subject and gave answers completely at odds with the conventional wisdom of Christianity, Judaism, and today's Humanism, which will regard their answers as virtually taboo. Some readers may already know that the most influential of all pre-Christian thinkers in the West, Plato, already answered that it is not only possible to compel humans to obey and to believe, but that they can be compelled to be good, an idea diametrically at odds with Christian ideas of soul, free will, and what a good man is. 16. Yezhov's Patrol Yezhov was suspected of going too far in the purges not only by Western critics but also by his own comrades A. Zhdanov, Molotov, by Stalin himself and by many others in the Party elite at the time. This was especially so when he instituted regional quotas for purges and conviction of entire lists of people who had been arrested and had been liable to verdict by military tribunal. These lists were sometimes Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 40 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View signed for approval - convicting everyone on the list at once - by Molotov with Stalin's approval. Yezhov was determined to completely liquidate what he believed to be a vast underground network of opposition: wreckers, Trotskyists, Zinovievists, German and other foreign spies and saboteurs, et. al. He openly and frankly said he would get rid of all that scum which the revolution and the Civil War [my emphasis] had sent sloshing into the organs of state security. This statement accords completely with the new archival evidence as well as with the statistical analyses outlined above as to whom Yezhov actually targeted, refuting the fictional view of the totalitarian paradigmists that the targets were Stalin's personal enemies, Old Bolsheviks, hopelessly uncooperative comrades, et. al. This open, truthful, and clear statement by Yezhov has been disregarded because it does not fit the dominant paradigm well. In another paradigmatically disregarded statement, Stalin said, we will destroy such enemies, even if [my emphasis] he is an old Bolshevik. Note the even if, which takes on a new, clear, and sensible meaning in light of the new evidence. This is an instance in which the application and use of hair-splitting interpretative semantics and sociolinguistics would have been salutary. Kremlinologists have always employed these methods to make up for a painfully felt dearth of hard facts about what was really going on behind the Iron Curtain. Every word in statements by Soviet leaders - even seemingly insignificant adverbs, conjunctions, and function words, like even if - was literally squeezed for every possible nuance in the hope that some hard facts would drip out. Yet, in the case of this statement by Stalin, Kremlinologists were remiss. The even if was elided or ignored because accounting for it would generate facts that run counter to the dominant paradigm. The even if could lead to the anti- paradigmatic inference that Stalin may have been hesitant to accept evidence against an Old Bolshevik. Read it again with emphasis on the even if and see. The totalitarian paradigm gives a coherent but simple (and again fictional) account as to why Stalin selected Yezhov to head the NKVD, though much of it is very general. Yezhov is said to have been the perfect puppet, the ideal Stalin-sycophant who was granted his big chance to prove what he had always craved and worked so hard for: recognition for loyalty. Or else Yezhov is caricatured as by Tsitriniak: as a homicidal, pathologically compulsive and fastidious trigger-man, a folklore caricature briefly but vividly acted out in the film Stalin, mentioned on page one of this essay. These are believable personalities, of course, but the new evidence yields a much different, equally coherent, and more detailed picture: Stalin selected Yezhov not for his excellence as a hit man, but because it was known that during many years of Yezhov's work in the Party, as Manning puts it, he tended to heed worker complaints against managers and regard economic troubles as manifestations of wrecking (op. cit., p. 139). This was so because Yezhov had been a metalworker for eight years, starting at age fourteen. This industry was considered the most radically Bolshevik and Stakhanovite. Complaints from the factory floor had, as historian Robert Thurston puts it, particular resonance with Yezhov (Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, p. 159). Yezhov knew, by experience, what it meant to be a worker - something that cannot be said for most Western theorists discussing the working class. The Stakhanovites were a Soviet workers' elite emulating the example set by Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov, who had broken norms for coal production in a single shift (102 tons mined). But there was much more to Stakhanovism than setting brute production records. Stakhanovites experimented with new ways of using machinery and new methods of expediting production. A Stakhanovite worker might recommend to a manager or foreman that a colored flag or other signaling device be set up at each work station in a factory so that if a worker's tool broke or he needed other assistance, he could set off an alarm that told the manager to report immediately to the worker's impaired work bench for corrective action. Many managers who had been officers of the White army in the Civil War were affronted at the idea that an underling could make them jump and run. The negative effects of Stakhanovism on other ordinary workers due to the supposedly deleterious tension it created has been commented upon endlessly by writers who marshal every ounce of imagination to compile negatives about the former Soviet system. But the tensions Stakhanovism Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 41 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View actually did create between workers and managers, experienced and well-understood by Yezhov, have been given little attention. Deserving Stakhanovites, based purely on merit, rose to replace numerous inefficient and suspect factory, farm, mine, and industrial managers during this era. In the Harvard émigré interview project commended above for having at least the merit of being empirical, there appeared only one case of a Stakhanovite being arrested for wrecking: he spent funds foolishly. When these fresh facts are adduced, the totalitarian paradigmists rise up from their usual trough of credulity on a wave of newfound skepticism. This is because the new evidence, impartially examined, begets the belief that Yezhov was the right choice for NKVD head, and was chosen for reasons that conflict with the dominant paradigm. The new evidence seems to point to the idea that the NKVD entered industrial and other economic situations whenever complaints arose from below, i.e. when protests of wrecking or other trouble were voiced by workers experiencing frustration, opposition, and sabotage by middle managers. The NKVD's primary role was therefore economic police work, not political police work, which would have been a secondary role. The totalitarian paradigmists have inflated the latter role, eclipsing and excluding the former. This implies that national leaders in the Soviet Union, such as Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, and others were highly responsive to workers' interests, demands, and criticisms. (As the Kovalev case previously described shows, local - especially rural - officials often were not, especially, and not surprisingly, if they had been Whites during the Civil War and formerly - or presently - members of the opposition.) This is a coherent and factually supported construction of the Terror that the totalitarian paradigmists seek to side step. As mentioned early in this part of the essay, the paradigm that one accepts and views the world through largely determines what one notices and does not notice. In this case, it is the NKVD's previously unnoticed original and primary role in industrial and economic situations. How this alternate construction of the Terror (and of the role of the NKVD in it) leads to conclusions contrary to widely held opinions that lean heavily on the dominant paradigm for support can be illustrated by using the suspicions propagated by Valery Soyfer, Martin Gardner, and others regarding agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko. They charged him with responsibility as villain and virtual executioner for the death during confinement of world-renowned ethnobotanist and geneticist N. Vavilov. Their surmise was that although Lysenko was not a Party member, he was known to have been a loyal Stalinist who hobnobbed with Party elite. The suspicion is that he was a covert NKVD operative or informant. This makes sense in the folklore of the dominant paradigm. But outside the paradigm, in the light of the new evidence, a different speculation makes more sense. It is known that Vavilov was Lysenko's chief rival for pre- eminence in Soviet agriculture and genetics. Lysenko was an admired and favorite advocate of common peasants and workers, while Vavilov pulled in tow a known entourage of worshipful cosmopolitan intellectuals and petit-bourgeois aspirants for international scientific and scholarly renown. Complaints from the factory floor would have flowed more often and more freely to Lysenko than to Vavilov. This would cast Lysenko in a new, legitimate social role unique to its time and place, unfamiliar in the West, as privy advocate for many more such complaints than Vavilov could ever have been, rather than starring him as an Stalin-marionette, impostor scientist who, because he had a real and documentable background in botany, was a highly convincing NKVD informant planted (no pun intended) high up in prestigious Soviet science organizations. It is now known that, during this period, the NKVD was set to pounce upon such complaints. It is not likely for the NKVD to have ignored grievances reiterated by Lysenko himself, including complaints he received about Vavilov or his students. Without the dominant paradigm, and in light of the new evidence, reasonable historical construction of these events concerning Lysenko builds upon a different foundation. Speculation still reigns, with or without the dominant paradigm, until concrete facts come to light which can prove who Lysenko really was. It would be easier, as a matter of logical principle, to prove that Lysenko was an NKVD spy (which has yet to be done) than to prove that he was not, because the former could be accomplished by producing a single piece of hard, written evidence (if it existed and could be found). It would be much more difficult or impossible, on the other hand, to prove the negative, i.e. that Lysenko was not a spy. For Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 42 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View example, what kind of document could there be which would certify that a particular Soviet citizen was not a covert NKVD operative? (Lysenko and his scientific work will be discussed in detail in Part II of this essay. For comments on the Lysenko-as- NKVD-agent theory, accompanied by much of the available incriminating evidence and documentable facts in brief, along with copious references, see Incriminating Circumstantial ‘Evidence' Cited by Critics that Use This to Discredit the Scientist Lysenko's Scientific Work by Jantsang [or Jan sang]; see appended Bibliography). It is not likely that Lysenko was both an NKVD spy and a social conduit for complaints from below, or what might be thought of as a kind of quasi-governmental, grass-roots functionary of a type absent in contemporaneous Western social systems, new in this heyday of Stakhanovism. A spy is not likely to blow his cover by simultaneously acting as a combination covert operative, whistle blower, and workers' advocate. If Lysenko really filled the latter two roles, he appears less like a mole in the science academies and more like a proletarian's Ralph Nader implicitly backed by the most powerful sanctions of the Soviet government. Keep in mind that powerful interests that wished Ralph Nader would disappear when he vigorously and courageously advocated consumer interests did not refer to him as an advocate but rather as a snitch, a common epithet used for Lysenko by his enemies. The timing of the appointment of Yezhov makes more sense without the dominant paradigm. The assassination of Stalin's purported apparent successor, S. M. Kirov, on December 1, 1934 is usually cited as the event which triggered the appointment of Yezhov as NKVD head and the start of the Great Terror, as if an alarm had then gone out that do-or-die assassins and saboteurs were abroad and that Marshall Yezhov was needed to hold the line. To repeat, there is almost invariably something trite, melodramatic, and simplistic about the totalitarian paradigm's explanations, an important reason for their widespread appeal and the ease with which they are retained in memory. (In these respects, they resemble much folklore.) Yezhov, at first enjoying the complete confidence of Stalin, is known to have been appointed at Stalin's personal request to head a government commission controlling the course of the investigation of Kirov's murder in the name of the Politburo. However, Yezhov was not appointed to the lofty post of General Commissar of State Security of the USSR (NKVD head) until shortly after September 25, 1936. This is a long interval of about 21 months after Kirov's death, surely too long to be an emergency response to Kirov's assassination. The more immediate incidents, which explain Yezhov's appointment at this late date, were two major mine accidents that occurred in the spring and fall of 1936. In the spring accident in May, a mine collapsed, and men of the best Stakhanovite brigade were buried alive. Six managers were convicted of wrecking, and the assistant technical director of the mine was held responsible and was shot. The hunt for wreckers was not only already on before Yezhov's appointment, but had reached its zenith in the national press at almost the same moment he received his post. A former Stakhanovite like Yezhov was the logical and best choice, not a paranoid triggerman, obsessive super-cop, or malefic Marxist equivalent to a McCarthyite, which would have been more likely choices if the murder of Kirov had really been the reason for his appointment. The murder of Kirov would certainly have reminded Stalin and Yezhov of the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky and who had been behind them. But the minds of adherents of the totalitarian paradigm appear to be completely overwhelmed and obscured by more extravagant and publicly discussed events, like Kirov's assassination, as if that had been an isolated event. The totalitarian paradigm examines facts in isolation with self-serving caprice. As noted repeatedly before, it relies for much of its force and conviction on melodrama and simplicity. Successful paradigms in the physical sciences have their own unique kind of simplicity and drama, most often perceptible and appreciated only by trained experts and specialists in the field over which the paradigm prevails. Adepts trained in these fields refer to these features, not obvious to the untrained, as being aesthetically pleasing aspects of a theory. (See, for example, the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, Chapter I, in which he refers to the aesthetically appealing dominant paradigm in cosmology as the widely accepted standard model. ) On the other hand, the simplicity and drama - or lack of them - inherent in historical paradigms is often immediately apparent to any intelligent layman, who may or may not consider them Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 43 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View aesthetically satisfying, depending, as always, on his taste, which is also relevant for assessing the beauty of physical science paradigms. The mismanagement and sabotage in the aforementioned mine incidents weighed almost as heavily upon Old Bolsheviks and their younger comrades as had the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky. This was so because the mine wreckage - both economic and human - reminded them of an entire chapter of events that historical accounts of the Bolshevik Revolution framed under the totalitarian paradigm consistently omit, gloss over, or minimize. As early as November of 1917, only weeks after the Bolsheviks prevailed, office workers, who had been members of the Tsar's civil service, boycotted the new regime. They also affirmatively and deliberately altered accounts in order to conceal food. This was an effort to starve out the new government, cruelly victimizing women and children as much as Red Army soldiers. These civil servants refused to act on the new regime's orders. Employees of the Food Ministry refused to recognize the power and authority of the Soviets and the Peoples' Commissars. They refused to hand over business records and correspondence. This was not sabotage, but boycott, which may be called sabotage in the open. As the new government and early CheKa gained strength, disarming common looters and arresting the middle-class (bourgeois ) boycotters in the former civil service whose services and expertise the new regime sorely needed, members of the latter group who had already been convicted by Revolutionary Tribunals, or were under suspicion or being held under formal charges, were forced to flee abroad or go underground. In the minds of Stalin and Yezhov, these enemies never really disappeared, as the ignored mine incidents and many other events unknown to - or omitted by - the totalitarian paradigm suggest. Those who escaped arrest abroad opened uninhibited and garishly exaggerated defamation campaigns against officials of the government they left behind. From their newfound safe havens, lavished with foreign patronage and subsidies, they directed their bitter calumnies, exaggerations, and lies against many new leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg whose rationality and good will were never in doubt for many Russians and foreign observers, even if their goals and methods had been debated - leaders such as Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. The new regime's enemies who were forced or, on principle, chose to remain behind, went into hiding and became resigned to acting against the new regime covertly and cautiously. Some just bided their time, appearing to cooperate with the Soviets. Some, after bitterly having fought for their overthrow in the Civil War, pretended to surrender at last. The above-mentioned leniency of the early Bolsheviks, noted by Lockhart himself, allowed many of these former enemies to rise to high positions under Stalin, as the case of Kovalev shows. 17. Yezhov's Thesis On the Role of Police It is possible that Yezhov had a secondary purge agenda of his own - one apart from rooting out the economic wreckers whom he and Stalin believed were still attempting to thwart and behead the revolution. Such wreckers were the Stalin-era equivalents of the above-mentioned former Tsarist civil service employees who had pitilessly attempted to kill the Revolution by starving its subjects. In 1935, Yezhov began work on a large theoretical manuscript which Stalin agreed to review entitled, From Factionalism to Open Counter-revolution. The thesis contained therein was that political opposition invariably becomes counter-revolutionary terrorism and must therefore be pre-emptively suppressed. Historians who are otherwise parsimonious and empirical in their ready assumptions (which, as explained above, are dictated by the usually unconscious dominant paradigm), such as J. Arch Getty, have leapt to the idea that this manuscript's contents were no doubt grisly without having seen any or all of it (op. cit., p. 59). Getty's important and valid point, however, is that the possession of a personal purge agenda by Yezhov alongside his role as eliminator of wreckers and other economic saboteurs is not a contradiction. Yezhov is known to have been in possession of one of Trotsky's personal archives found and confiscated during the arrest of I. M. Trusov, an employee of the Communist Academy. Yezhov's possession may hint that his interests went beyond merely employing the NKVD as an economic patrol. This is more like using the NKVD as a political police, which better fits the totalitarian paradigm. (As Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 44 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View previously noted, the totalitarian paradigm completely ignores what now appears to have been the NKVD's primary economic function as an economic patrol, and is silent as to whom its targets would actually be if that had been its main function.) The thesis of Yezhov's manuscript seems to have been akin to the theory of King and Deutscher mentioned above on the need of victorious revolutionaries to suppress not only all opposition parties, but all opposition and criticism itself. This is clearly different from campaigning for the arrest of factory directors for mismanagement or for failure to fulfill economic plans when they could have done so, or for their injury and abuse of workers. Mistreatment of workers is a category of crimes that are different from crimes of economic negligence. Many Westerners find that worker abuse crimes involve degrees of culpability and care that are too high or otherwise invidious, distasteful, or unreasonable, especially if the managers charged are political dissidents. The strength of this negative reaction depends on exactly who target critic and dissident groups are suspected of being. But there is a nebulous zone here too, in which wrecking and other cut-and-dry, provable, seemingly non-political economic crimes overlap with acts and abstainments that amount to covert sabotage - or conspiracy to commit it - engaged in as political thrusts by enemies of the state to undermine it indirectly by attacking its economic programs. In modern Western jurisprudence and its actual conduct of criminal trials, different and distinct charges against an accused are laid out and addressed separately. The distinctions between one crime and another, however, no matter how clear they are made at trial, are, in any criminal justice system, always of less significance in the preliminary investigative phase of law that precedes trial. In this earlier stage, a factory director might find that he is apprehended by authorities due to having been negligent with regard to what had been only a single act, but is nonetheless an act which has both economic and political implications. So the act is actually of dual significance, such as a failure to discover that arrested project wreckers who worked under him had been purloining valuable ore to finance a cell of Trotskyist conspirators. The thesis that disagreement gradually and invariably turns into opposition and then into counter- revolutionary terror seems wrong both factually and morally - and this is King's and Deutscher's point. King and Deutscher may not be mistaken in thinking this, but, as pointed out previously, they are factually incorrect in thinking that the need to police politics was the main reason for the Great Terror and the Show Trials. It shall now be shown that Yezhov's thesis was far from unreasonable in the context of the Soviet Union's history and social system. King and Deutscher (strict totalitarian paradigmists), as well as J. Arch Getty and others who have abandoned - or have held only weakly to - the totalitarian paradigm, are unaware (or are pretending to be unaware) of the fact that some of the most pre-eminent and respected police authorities in the modern world have also believed in Yezhov's thesis, which they applied using even stronger measures in ostensibly pluralistic, liberal democracies than Yezhov utilized in the Soviet system, e.g. J. Edgar Hoover and his SAC's (Special Agents in Charge of field offices) of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 18. Unacknowledged Believers in Yezhov's Ideas Why would Yezhov think this, i.e. that factionalism becomes counter-revolution? Is this a reasonable idea at all? Once again the dominant paradigm provides its overly simple and dramatic answer: it says that it is not reasonable, and that Yezhov's belief in it is evidence that he was a paranoid sadist of limited intellect or was, at least, as Getty said, grisly. This explanation, however, misses the fact that there is an important difference between the Soviet system in which Yezhov lived and served, and Western capitalist systems. When this difference is not appreciated, only then does Yezhov's thesis seem excessive and unreasonable. The difference is that in a Soviet-type workers' state, which is a dictatorship of the worker class or proletariat, the supremely politically empowered workers may lose confidence in certain leaders. When this occurs, the discredited ex-leaders have no separate capitalist (or other) class with any power that can privately employ them or finance them in political careers or campaigns against Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 45 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View the new leaders or representatives who have purportedly supplanted them in the proletarians' favor. Rejected leaders have to submit both politically and professionally to those who replace them in office. There are no professional politicians in such a system, and no politically empowered non-proletarian class or classes to support them. A discredited worker in such a system, on the other hand, who has advocated some defeated cause, can grudgingly work in some minor position given to him as punishment. However, the discredited intellectual or politician has only two recourses besides submission: emigrate, or stay and work - fighting in secret. He does not have a Fourth Estate (the press) to use as a platform to promote his views. He cannot make six or seven figure profits selling his memoirs. Pat Sloan seems to have been one of the few Western writers to really understand and appreciate the significance of this difference between the two societies, which has as much bearing on Yezhov's thesis as Sloan realized it had on the Show Trials. One can say that were no safety valves in the Soviet system for intellectuals and ex-leaders who lost their support or constituency, and that this was a flaw in that system. But saying this is to state a criticism of a particular social system: it is not a criticism of Yezhov's thesis. Yezhov worked within a particular social system: Stalin's unabashed dictatorship of those who ruled in the name of the proletariat. Yezhov's thesis that criticism necessarily becomes or begets counter- revolutionary terrorism was meant by him to apply to the social system in which he lived and about which he theorized and wrote. He was not making any sort of universal world-historical claims of the type in which Deutscher and King show interest. Their observed historical pattern in which victorious revolutions shortly swing toward repression of all opposition is a miniature historical paradigm in its own right, but one having great claims of generality. Yezhov's thesis does not appear to be the outcome of observing or working within so general a paradigm. Yezhov was not an academic. He was writing about real problems he had worked and dealt with in the society in which he lived. The intellectual framework within which he wrote his thesis was not even a Marxist-Leninist paradigm, but rather the accepted social givens and tacit assumptions believed by almost any of the second generation Communists and common workers from whose ranks he rose to a position of leadership within the Communist social system that had only recently been established by his elders. That Yezhov had such an uncritical point of view should be compared with the psychology of Mancur Olson's beliefs. Olson is a distinguished and highly respected Western sociologist and political economist, having been a former Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has written disparagingly on the economic performance of Communist countries, saying that this performance is yet worse after Communism is abandoned. He related that in his student days his democratic convictions were jarred by reading Edward Banfield's account of the beliefs of poor Southern Italian villagers in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). Olson read Banfield quoting one villager as saying, Monarchy is the best kind of government because the King is then the owner of the country. Like the owner of a house, when the wiring is wrong, he fixes it. The naive Olson spent years afterward trying to reconcile (what he eventually conceded to be) a germ of truth in this villager's remark with his own democratic convictions and the case for democracy, which he nonetheless still continued to hold to be stronger overall (Olson, Mancur, Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, American Political Science Review, vol. 87, No. 3, Sept. 1993). Olson was a Rhodes Scholar with a Ph. D. in Economics from Harvard, was vice-chairman of the Health Services Review Commission of the State of Maryland, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He received numerous professional honors, and held many past-presidencies of many organizations, such as in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Despite this impressive (partial!) resume and educational training, he spent many of his adult professional years lecturing and writing about his struggle with Long live the King!, a simple and common sentiment that he was surprised to find was shared by many contemporaries he said he would have to consider reasonable men. This was a problem for Olson because what he glibly refers to as the case of democracy and his own democratic convictions were actually the uncritically accepted beliefs that had Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 46 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View been deeply inculcated in him by his own education, upbringing, and background in the English-speaking Western world. This makes him no different from the run of most of his professional and academic peers. (That he spent any time at all attempting to legitimize and show some sort of reasonableness to the Italian village monarchist's beliefs is commendable and makes him somewhat unusual.) He is a Western counterpart of Yezhov in that the only real difference for the psychology of their beliefs is that the society in which Yezhov lived, had been reared, and received his education (second generation Communist) was very different from Olson's. Olson wrote freely of what he believed to be the widespread moral appeal of democracy. By democracy he meant societies in which there are competitive elections, social pluralism, and the absence of autocracy. (He did not include universal suffrage. See article cited, p. 575, note 12.) As with Yezhov, Olson had, all his life, done his thinking within a loosely held and vaguely defined belief system too inchoate and implicitly accepted to qualify as a conscious paradigm. Olson, like Yezhov, was very orthodox, putting faith, trust, and confidence in ideas widely held by his teachers. These ideas had great psychological, moral, and intellectual force for him, primarily through early (juvenile) familiarity and repetition, rather than through experience (empiricism) or critical thinking (logic and analysis). It is difficult to see a real difference between Yezhov and Olson here. They were both forced to swallow a lot of ideas as youth. Given the religious basis of much of Western belief systems (recall the Chain paradigm described above), it would not be surprising if a closer and more critical comparison of Yezhov's and Olson's thinking would reveal that Yezhov's was freer of presuppositions, cant, and shibboleths than the young Olson. It is here that purveyors of the totalitarian paradigm (like King, Conquest, Deutscher, and Tsitriniak) create and then exaggerate a difference where there is none, except as to the content of the two subjects' beliefs (Yezhov and Olson). It is confusing to make the issue of the evaluation or reasonableness of Yezhov's thesis hinge on what form of government is better. This is the kind of confused thinking that has been eagerly embraced by anti-Soviet Kremlinologists for decades. Sloan fully appreciated a social fact that has escaped King, Deutscher, and others who have been blinded by admiration for various Western systems and for Trotsky's criticisms of the Stalinist system. Trotsky opposed Lenin on vital issues as early as July, 1917, winning fame and popularity with his speeches. When Lenin died, Trotsky laid to rest all of his old quarrels with Lenin, no longer leveling his worn accusations of bureaucratic and reactionary against him and his party. Trotsky now introduced these very same accusations against Stalin and those Stalin represented claiming, in order to emphasize the forceful and righteous-sounding accusation of betraying the revolution, that Stalin broke policy with Lenin at some point. As Sloan put it, unlike former leaders of the British Labor Movement whom workers have rejected, Trotsky and other Stalin antagonists had no means of advertising their personalities since they did not live in a capitalist system. Such publication was not a legitimate or allowed occupation or business in the Soviet Union. Many Westerners today also find such occupations repulsively vain, vulgar, and self-indulgent, wondering what kind of real work or contribution its practitioners are making to society. In many Western social systems, as Sloan pointed out, rejected politicians actually have a choice as to whether they want to advertise themselves in politics or capitalist business, and either way it is all within the framework of capitalism. If they lived in the former Soviet Union, they would have been barred from raising private funds to finance themselves in new political careers, which many savvy American voters, for example, know are most often just more of the same. In the Soviet system, this was automatically regarded as action against the workers' class interests. The interests of no other class (bourgeois, aristocrat, etc.) had any political standing. One can criticize this system or defend it, but only by highlighting this difference can one see why Yezhov's idea that opposition turns into terror is not unreasonable or extremist for the social context in which he lived in the first few decades after the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, as mentioned above, there are American and British police and justice agencies today that are staffed with policy makers who are unpopular with liberals because they believe that something similar to Yezhov's thesis holds even for liberal democracies, in which alternate safe ways or safety valves do exist for such professional Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 47 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View dissidents. In short, if an opposition member in the Soviet system did not actively seek to overthrow that system, he had only to submit, leave, or pipe dream. There is a logical next step which Yezhov took which is missed by anyone who has never had any real contact with oppositionist or other social undergrounds, even if it is the adversarial contact which police authorities have with them. When a critic or dissident turns from mere verbal opposition to serious secret fighting, he is bound to come into contact with other such secret fighters. In the Soviet Union at the time under discussion, he would have come into contact with agents of German fascism, Japanese imperialism, and other determined, professional, foreign-trained and financed anti-Communists sworn to the eradication of Bolshevism, conspirators of the type previously described (Reilly et. al.) This reasoning was not peculiar to Yezhov, but can be found among many of the most adept law enforcement figures in history. J. Edgar Hoover, for example, former head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (from 1924 until his death in 1972), thought the very same way when, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, he established programs known by the acronym COINTELPROs, which stands for Counterintelligence Program(s). In fact, these went far beyond anything the NKVD did under Yezhov. The FBI's COINTELPROs were domestic counterintelligence programs designed to destroy individuals and organizations that FBI chiefs considered politically objectionable. COINTELPRO tactics went very far beyond mere surveillance procedures like wire taps and electronic eavesdropping of the politically suspect or dangerous, such as the now well-known wire-taps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s offices and accommodations. Many Americans find such surveillance in itself objectionable. COINTELPRO activities included such observation, but its more insidious tactics utilized inflammatory and provocative bogus mail designed to create irreconcilable or even deadly divisions among the leaders of target organizations; harassment arrests on minor charges or charges for which there was no real hope of conviction in order to tie up radicals and drain their finances; negative public propaganda; negative disinformation leaked to members of target organizations to defame fellow members or to create suspicions about their own leaders and associates (known among COINTELPRO operatives as bad- jacketing ); infiltration agents provocateurs who attempted to force shoot-outs with police or produce other clearly criminal activity for which targets could be arrested; use of professional perjurers and fabricated evidence to obtain convictions; extra-judicial pre-dawn executions disguised as police defending themselves while making arrests or conducting legal searches and seizures, and many other techniques which, according to Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, became an integral aspect not only of the COINTELPROs, but FBI procedure ever after (Agents of Repression by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1990, p. 390, note 27). What was probably the COINTELPROs' most effective tactic was using bona fide, apolitical ex-convicts to carry on the bulk of the work of disruption and repression of political opposition groups and individuals in their own manner, by means that may be left to the imagination, as Noam Chomsky put it in his introduction to the book COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (Cathy Perkus, ed., Monad Press, New York, 1976). COINTELPROs were launched against the Black Panther Party and its individual leaders, the American Indian Movement, Venceremos, Dick Gregory (the comedic monologist better known for his hunger-strikes), the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican street gang ), Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Mohammed, the Vice Lords, the Berrigan brothers (sibling anti-Vietnam Catholic priests), the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the Weathermen, numerous California-based radical groups, and a very large number other groups and individuals. In its COINTELPROs against the Black Panther Party and its leaders, the FBI went far beyond anything the NKVD had ever done under Yezhov or Beria. There were so many FBI-placed infiltrators and agents provocateurs in the Black Panther Party during one period, that there were actually two Black Panther Parties: one the authentic Black Panther Party of Self-Defense, as it was originally called, the other a virtual COINTELPRO Black Panther Party staffed by Black ex-cons and their associates working under FBI direction, as well as by leaders and members of the authentic Panthers whose confidence and favor they had secured. The original Panthers had set up free breakfast programs serving food to hungry inner- Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 48 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View city school children each morning so they would not have to sit in class with empty stomachs. They established free health clinics in ghettos where no other medical services were available or affordable. They opened reading rooms where there was no available transportation to libraries and no bookmobile services. They set up free legal clinics, sometimes staffed only by law students and paralegal workers, to counsel people in trouble with the law, landlords, employers, or government agencies. During the COINTELPROs against the Panthers, SAC Marlin Johnson (Special Agent in Charge, the official designation of an FBI agent heading a field office; Johnson ran a Racial Matters Squad at the time) received repeated directives marked to his personal attention from J. Edgar Hoover, demanding that he instruct his COINTELPRO personnel to ‘destroy what the [BPP] stands for' and eradicate its ‘serve the people' programs (op. cit., p. 68). In May and June of 1969, the Director [Hoover] specifically and repeatedly instructed Johnson to destroy the Panthers' broadly acclaimed Free Breakfast for Children Program in the city (ibid.). COINTELPRO activities were also geared up against the BPP Liberation School and community political education classes, as well as against distributors of the Party newspaper, The Black Panther... infiltrators were ordered to steal BPP financial records, books, literature, tapes, films and other materials at every opportunity (ibid.), in effect annulling the Panthers' pro bono programs and clinics by depriving them of their property, equipment, premises, and other necessary paraphernalia. Perhaps even more despicable were the FBI's hard won efforts to provoke BPP members - especially its leaders - into shoot-outs and other criminal activity for which they could be incarcerated. Though ultimately successful, this did not prove an easy task for the FBI because Panther leadership, contrary to the image of the Panthers fostered by COINTELPRO propaganda intended for the public at large, showed a particular distaste for violence and exercised extraordinary restraint. In one instance, the Chicago Panther leadership repeatedly rejected proposals by a Black FBI infiltrator, ex-con, and agent provocateur named William O'Neal to stockpile weapons and nerve gas in their headquarters, to bomb city hall, and to torture disobedient members using electricity. Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush repeatedly rejected these proposals. All O'Neal could get to listen to him were two wayward BPP members Robert Bruce and Nathaniel Junior, whom he encouraged to engage in burglary and armed robbery as fundraising. Even among these two, however, only Bruce eventually took up O'Neal's suggestions, becoming a fugitive of the law. O'Neal was also responsible for the enormous cache of weapons police discovered in a raid on the BPP's Monroe St. office while searching for a fugitive named George Sams. The nature and size of this arsenal shocked the American public, successfully contributing to the extremely dangerous hate group image of the BPP the FBI sought to create and convey. Sams himself, the supposed fugitive the FBI was pursuing at the time, was an FBI infiltrator too! This is only the tip of the iceberg. Why did the FBI go to these lengths not only to behead the BPP, but to gut it of its members as well, and to employ the same tactics against many of the other above- mentioned opposition groups? A poll at the time showed that 25% of the American Black population had a great respect for the BPP, as did 43% of Blacks under 21. This is a case where Hoover emphatically agreed with Yezhov: political factionalism and opposition turns to acts of terror, and must be pre- emptively struck down before it can grow. The idea was to nip growing Panther popularity in the bud. So deeply did Hoover believe Yezhov's thesis, that he went a step beyond him: he affirmatively employed every resource the FBI could muster to force the (Panther) opposition to perform the prophesied acts of terror that the thesis predicts any opposition will perform in time anyway. Because the COINTELPROs directed at the Panthers brought the latter to an early end, the serious crimes for which prominent Panthers were arrested, such as murder and kidnapping, were all almost exclusively originated and committed by FBI agents themselves. The Panthers were never given a chance to reach a stage where they would - on their own - empirically confirm or refute Yezhov's thesis. (Keep in mind that Hoover never read Yezhov's thesis. The point is that he believed the same things.) Hoover and his colleagues felt they were protecting the American way of life, ignoring Jefferson's characterization of the democratic way of life as one that permits open opposition. Interestingly, less than Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 49 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View a generation prior to this time, The Collected Works of Thomas Jefferson were removed from the overseas libraries of the Voice of America, which is the U.S. State Department's foreign information program. The FBI never apologized for any of their disgraceful COINTELPROs. In one instance, two slugs retrieved at a police shoot-out, which killed the unarmed Panther Fred Hampton only a few feet from his bed, were put into evidence at trial. Two police ballistics experts boldly lied and said that the slugs matched Panther weapons when they really matched police guns. These perjurers were never prosecuted for this. The only satisfaction received by families of Panthers who were actually murdered were judgements and awards in civil suits against various police authorities involved in these shoot-outs. There have never been subsequent criminal prosecutions of the police operatives involved. Hoover, like Yezhov, emphasized the devious cunning of his targets, and encouraged Americans in popular books (like in his Masters of Deceit) to report suspicious politically subversive activity. It is not likely that J. Arch Getty would so glibly characterize Masters of Deceit (Hoover's book) as grisly. Yet others have characterized Hoover's COINTELPROs as the capstone[s] of ugliness to his career (Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, op. cit., p. 99). Neither Messrs. Hoover nor Yezhov are being criticized here in this essay: both were doing things they believed right to protect their way of life and all that they believed is good and sacred. There is one great difference, however, between what Yezhov did and what Hoover did: the BPP, for example, never had plans to sabotage wheat harvests, bomb hydroelectric plants, burn bridges, ruin mining operations, derail freight trains, poison the water supply, or even stockpile weapons and bomb city hall. One might say that the BPP and AIM (American Indian Movement, another target of vigorous COINTELPROs) did not think big enough or were not smart enough. However, the people Yezhov was up against did think big and were smart. They had been involved in open boycott, covert resistance, and internationally supported counter-revolutionary sabotage and terror a lot longer. Because the FBI COINTELPRO operatives had such great difficulty encouraging and provoking criminal acts among these American dissidents, so much so that in many cases the FBI agents had to commit the criminal acts themselves, it is evident that the target dissidents had no plans for doing these things. It is safe to say that one cannot now know if these target organizations would eventually have resorted to such means, which would be evidence that Yezhov's thesis is correct in its strong form: for liberal democracies. One cannot now know because FBI chiefs during this period firmly believed Yezhov was right, and therefore utilized COINTELPROs to nip these opposition groups in the bud - Yezhov's own recommendation to Stalin. However, Yezhov never got his real chance to cut off anti-Soviet organizations as they began to overwhelm his mentors' empire. 19. Yezhov's Opposition The inevitable question is whether or not there really existed, during Yezhov's tenure, a subversive underground in the Soviet Union with an undiscovered Trotskyist center...which had to be found and liquidated, in the words of a former Assistant People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Ya. S. Agronov, who received direct instructions from Yezhov. One of the first difficulties in answering this is that the center, as Agronov put it, that Yezhov was seeking is alternately described by other NKVD officials who were involved in these manhunts. For example, G. E. Prokofiev, a Deputy Peoples' Commissar of Internal Affairs (like Agronov, another NKVD official), said the investigation Yezhov was conducting was directed towards the discovery of underground revolutionary formations and perhaps of all the organizational links of the Trotskyists and the Zinovievists and to the discovery of terrorist groups. Prokofiev's description of the targets of the Yezhovshchina is clearly more general and nebulous: it includes a search for saboteurs or provocateurs only peripherally connected to Trotsky and his close agents. The diversity of the descriptions of the objects of Yezhov's dragnet has only served to confuse and to play into the hands of those who seek to prove Yezhov was a villain, demented, pathological, or vice-ridden from the beginning. His own statement, quoted earlier, on Civil War confederates posing as loyal Communists after their defeat ca. 1921, who thereafter entered the state, Party, and security apparatuses - especially in rural areas far from Moscow's scrutinizing eyes - as being his target is the clearest, most accurate, and most productive avenue of approach, especially in view of the statistical Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 50 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View confirmation this has received. Having been a member of the class of 1921 is the common thread that links all the varied descriptions of Yezhov's targets, from wrecker to Old Bolshevik, from Zinovievist to Menshevizing idealist, from Japanese to German spy, descriptions that differed to conform to the context of the instructions containing them - many times ad hoc - that Yezhov and other police authorities issued. In the Great Terror, Yezhov was veritably continuing the Civil War because the Whites had only appeared to surrender: they had never really conceded, nor had they really given up the assistance they had received during the actual Civil War hostilities from the new-born Bolshevik regime's foreign enemies, especially Germany, Japan, and Great Britain. (Recall, again, the above analogy with the American Civil War and what may be called the mock-surrender of the war-weary Confederates.) In June of 1936, Stalin interrupted Yezhov at a Central Committee Plenum with what has come to be known as Stalin's inaudible remark. Stalin complained to Yezhov about his having expelled too many Party members: Yezhov: Comrades, as a result of the verification of party documents, we expelled more than 200,000 members of the party. Stalin: [Interrupting:] Very many. [Stalin was criticizing Yezhov.] Yezhov: Yes, very many. I will speak about this... Stalin: [Interrupting again:] If we expelled 30,000 [inaudible remark], and 600 former Trotskyists and Zinovievists it would be a bigger victory. At a time during which he enjoyed the full trust of Stalin, Yezhov debated him for nearly two years on the need for a severe repression or liquidation of his predecessor NKVD head, Genrikh G. Yagoda. In the fall of 1936, at the height of the Yezhovshchina, Stalin observed that the NKVD was about four years behind in uncovering the oppositionist underground. The blame for this was laid at Yagoda's door, his non-feasance suspected of being due to complicity with counter-revolutionaries. Yagoda was suspected of being not a mere bungler, but an at best passive conspirator who consciously looked the other way to protect the old, enduring, resistant former White Guard that had once sought to defeat the Soviet system right out in the open. That Yagoda was indeed at the critical center of such a network is borne out by detailed studies that pertain to the NKVD's predecessor and successor organizations, such as The Soviet Secret Police, the Uses of Terror by Borys Lewytzkyj (Boris Levitsky), Soviet Secret Police by Simon Wolin and Robert Slusser, and Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant by Amy Knight. From these and other sources, the most reasonable extra-paradigmatic construction of events is as follows: 1. There existed a domestic underground counter-revolutionary network with strong foreign connections seeking the overthrow of the USSR. Yagoda was its (possibly passive) internal functional center. This network had a lineage that can be traced back to early counter- revolutionary factions (some even socialist) that had been assisted by foreign spy-rings, as documented by the CheKa for the earliest years of the Soviet State. Trotsky and other notable exiles were involved. The patience of this underground was uncommon (for the West). 2. Yezhov was keener than Stalin in perceiving the threat this underground posed, and wanted to put his foot in a revolving door of tolerance for saboteurs that, in many cases, Stalin just kept allowing to turn. This was due to Yezhov's unique background, and to brain-aging on Stalin's part (to be described in what follows). 3. Yezhov's rock-ribbed efforts failed to reach the key personages in this underground. 4. This underground finally prevailed at the time of the curtailment and reduction of the NKVD when the new NKGB (KGB ) was formed, which backed Khrushchev. 5. Khrushchev did not believe in Communism and began the dismantling of the Soviet system. 6. Khrushchev's efforts culminated with Gorbachev and finally Yeltsen: Bolshevism was destroyed. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 51 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View It is known that Yagoda and the OGPU (the Soviet Union's State Political Administration, which had been reorganized from the Bolshevik's original, multi-party secret police or CheKa) were opposed to peasant collectivization. Stalin was aware of this, resulting in personal friction between him and Yagoda right up to Yagoda's very end when Stalin once threatened to punch him in the kisser. In July of 1934, the OGPU was abolished and its functions transferred to the all new NKVD or Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which, unknown to most, existed from the start. (Dzerzhinsky was, at one time, head of both the multi-party CheKa and the exclusively Bolshevik NKVD. At one point the NKVD was suspicious of - and opposed to - the CheKa.) In May of 1934, Yagoda was appointed the new organization's head. It is frequently and glibly stated that the NKVD was the successor organization of the OGPU, and that the better known KGB was the successor of the NKVD. Neither is correct. When the NKVD was formed, a central core of former agents of OGPU reappeared as functionaries in the NKVD's Main Administration of State Security: the GUGB. In February of 1941, a separate agency called the NKGB (later KGB) was formed from this same core of people from the GUGB. The KGB, or Committee of State Security (as it existed after Khrushchev empowered it), resembled the American CIA, FBI, and Secret Intelligence Service all rolled into one, involving itself in intelligence, counter- intelligence, and internal security. In this, it was unusual for its time and unlike its incorrectly nominated parent organizations: the CheKa, OGPU, and NKVD. The NKVD became the MVD, an authority not even a faint shadow of the old NKVD. In September of 1953, six months after Stalin's death, two months after the arrest of the staunch Stalinist Beria (Yezhov's successor as NKVD chief), Khrushchev began to consolidate his power. He replaced the Old Bolshevik Malenkov, who had been First Party Secretary, and stripped the NKVD of most of the economic sections that had been under its control - ending the system established by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. Khrushchev turned these economic functions over to other agencies. Suffering the same fate as Beria, but with less publicity involving less well known personalities, many old NKVD agents were executed - or forced to flee abroad. The NKVD was reduced to the MVD, a mere traffic cop operation by comparison. When the dust settled, the KGB had extraordinary powers, both internally and in foreign affairs, consisting of the same old GUGB core from the former OGPU. (Consult Bibliography for NKVD-INFO. See Felix Dzerzhinsky by A. Tishkov for information about the NKVD and other NK's [ Narkomats or People's Commissariats], which were organizations regulating the Soviet economy.) These were the people Yezhov's Iron Gauntlet failed to reach. They became Khrushchev's chief backers. The NKVD, which existed simultaneously with the CheKa in 1917, had consisted only of Bolsheviks. The CheKa and OGPU core referred to above had been multi-party, as were the sympathies of many of Khrushchev's supporters in what had officially by then become a one party state. Khrushchev declared against a Beria gang. He showed marked prejudice toward any former Stalinist or old-style Marxist-Leninist, even if such stalwart Communists represented only technical programs or science affairs. He distrusted Trofim Lysenko for having been Stalin's favorite agricultural expert. It was not Stalin, but rather the liberalizing anti-Stalinist Khrushchev (who hated to be contradicted) who determined all ousters, appointments, and liquidations based on the simple rule of whom he (and his patrons) could or could not work with - to once again use the phrase historian Tim Naftali incorrectly applied to Stalin's modus operandi of governing. Anyone who had been loyal to Stalin had insurmountable hurdles to leap to gain Khrushchev's confidence. This was so even if he had spent time in a forced labor camp under Stalin, such as Sergei P. Korolev, the Russian von Braun, known anonymously as the Chief Designer due to the secrecy surrounding his work, who engineered the Soviet Union's huge N-1 rockets and all rockets used for launches that put the Soviet Union clearly ahead of the U.S. in the space race until the U.S. launched an aggressive, well-funded, successful effort to place a human on the moon. It was not Stalin and Yezhov who purged remaining Old Bolsheviks, but rather Khrushchev who, having both time on his side as well as the old Yagoda gang now holding together in the newly organized KGB, eventually ousted the very last of them, all great heroes of Bolshevism: Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, General Zhukov, et. al. The latter group made a last Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 52 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View unsuccessful effort to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957. Anyone who has seen the newsreel of Khrushchev personally congratulating the world's first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, for successfully orbiting the Earth (April 12, l961), who has heard the simple, uncomprehending, awkward words that Khrushchev stumblingly delivered as he shook Gagarin's hand, will not be convinced that Khrushchev had much intelligence. This was certainly not true of his backers, who made fools of almost every historian in the West. These were people who had Darwin's theory of evolution taught to children at elementary school levels (instead of pap like And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind... . And the evening and the morning were the sixth day ). They created institutes with formal courses of study for optimal chess play, schools which still have had no likeness in the world (except for a few academies in Japan where a more difficult and profound Chinese game called Wei-ch'i or Go is studied in an elaborate dan [competitive] system admired to this day by 8 to 10 million Japanese Go players). These were the people who really ran the government of the USSR, directing the lofting of the Earth's first artificial satellite (Sputnik I), exhibiting to the world the first close-up photos of the moon's surface (including its never before seen dark side) from a lunar probe (Luna Three in October, 1959), and then putting the first human in space. These three feats of engineering alone make the construction of the pyramids of Egypt seem rudimentary. Western historians - like Naftali - find Khrushchev's ostensible statements and acts easy to understand. However, the real Stalin is a puzzle to them. They need to dumb him and his comrades down, as in Tsitriniak's portrait of Yezhov given above. The dominant paradigm played a key role in this kind of anti-Soviet propaganda by doing what Western historians, steeped in the Great Chain of Being paradigm, have been very good at doing: cretinizing the representatives and beliefs of Stalinism. The most egregious recent example of this is an article by David Joravsky in The Russian Review (57, January 1998, p. 1 - 9) in which he sententiously counsels against Alexei Kojevnikov's novel and high-brow interdisciplinary recommendation to apply chaos theory and Wittgenstein's epistemology toward understanding Stalinist society - a structuralist approach. Joravsky states that Soviet ideology, in which Marxism is thought to have distinctive principles useful for all branches of knowledge, is undeserving of philosophical dignity, since it was overwhelmingly inane [Joravsky's emphasis] and was simply a facet of the pathological thought-control that was the most obvious [!] feature of Russian cultural history in the Stalin era (p. 8). (Here paradigmatic features have become, in Joravsky's mind, what is obvious about Stalinist society.) The reference to pathological thought-control is the contribution to understanding Soviet society that Joravsky fallaciously believes the totalitarian paradigm gives. He obviously thinks the paradigm yields more that is true than Kojevnikov's suggestion ever could. (Joravsky's scientific errors and pretensions with regard to Lysenko's theories and ideas will be dealt with in Part II, showing the need for scientists to take the history of science away from historians until the latter can show they have done some real work in a physical science first.) A common core of sympathy united brash, notorious personalities like Khrushchev with the surreptitious, intelligent, patient conspirators who came to back him: they believed in Russia (they were nationalists), but not in Communism. Stalin had known them as a Right Opposition. They not only opposed and resisted agricultural collectivization, they favored a capitalist system of the type Lenin had provisionally instituted after the Civil War under the rubric of the NEP (National Economic Policy), which he regarded as a necessary but only temporary retreat from socialism. This opposition group, unreachable by Yezhov, linked together both the Trotskyites of the left and the Bukharinites of the right. They approved of one of Khrushchev's most important steps in dismantling the Soviet system: the privatization of the machine-tractor stations that supplied farms with heavy machinery for planting, harvesting, and processing. They secretly applauded Khrushchev's not-so-secret secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956. The false impression given by utilizers of the dominant paradigm is that the rise and fall of Stalinism, ending with Khrushchev, was either some kind of natural historical decay process involving a flawed Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 53 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Marxist ideal, or that the Khrushchevites prevailed by dint of Khrushchev's quaint peasant charm - missing in the intellectual Lenin and the thuggish Stalin - coupled with Khrushchev's stolid Russian strength and undogmatic, un-Marxian flexibility. These personal qualities, the paradigmists assert, enabled him to do many things impossible for Lenin and Stalin who, it is implied, needed heavy-handed persuasion or outright force where the liberal Khrushchev did not. Khrushchev could make unguaranteeable - or even demagogic, they often concede - promises of stimulating the Soviet economy by infusing it with Western-style consumer goods. Lenin or Stalin could not or would not do this. When Khrushchev could not secure the vote of the Politburo against remaining Old Bolsheviks he could not work with any more, he did not appoint a Yezhov to liquidate them as Stalin supposedly did: he went to the Party Central Committee for a full vote and victory. These moderate and legitimate maneuvers - worthy of a true parliamentarian (by Western standards) - leave out of the picture, however, Khrushchev's powerful but little known behind-the-scenes backers, such as Ignatiev, Ryumin, and many others even lesser known. These men had for decades looked upon the Old Bolsheviks much as Westerners do: as fanatical Marxist purists and idealists, like Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky and Molotov, as well as the multitude of unknowns who attempted to make Marx and Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat work, such early CheKa men and Stakhanovites whose names are lost to history. The formula dictatorship of the proletariat was learned by rote at an early age by Khrushchev and many of his age cohorts. It had no more real meaning for them than it does for Westerners, and seemed equally unworkable to them. This is one of the reasons many contemporary American, British, and French Marxist intellectuals were so enamored with Khrushchev: they did not think the formula could work - or be made to work - either. Khrushchev's renowned expression of belief in many roads to socialism spoke to the Western Communist intellectuals' agnosticism and to its psychic sister: eclecticism. At the same time, the Chinese Maoists denounced Khrushchev because they remained doctrinaire Stalinists and collectivists: they still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Marxist and non-Marxist Westerners regarded actions by Khrushchev that were traitorous in the eyes of Old Bolsheviks like Molotov and Kaganovich as being part of a salutary thawing of Communism's frozen rigor. This had been the thinking of Yagoda's group since the Civil War. It is not the purpose of this part of the essay to set forth either a detailed critique of Khrushchev or his policies (or those of Stalin, Gorbachev, et. al.). To return to the main subject: Yezhov was clearly more convinced about - and aggressive toward - this oppositionist underground than Stalin was. Stalin seems to have taken it - or parts of it - rather seriously, however, because, as several historians have pointed out, though he showed a great deal of skepticism about - and a need for close scrutiny of - Yezhov's official actions, he approved of and took full responsibility for the Yezhovshchina. Stalin read through Yezhov's manuscript on counter-revolution, making underlines and marks in the margins. Yet, as J. Arch Getty put it, not only with Yagoda, but even in the cases of Piatakov and Bukharin, Ezhov [Yezhov] and others were ahead of Stalin in pushing for the need for severity (op. cit., pp. 59 - 60). Why was this so? 20. Stalin was Brain-Aged Once again, the dominant, favored explanation is a vague one in which the factual gap on Stalin's caution vis-a-vis Yezhov's aggressiveness is sketchily and turbidly plugged by a paradigmatic deduction which asserts that Yezhov was not as intelligent as Stalin and was inherently more repressive. Yezhov is depicted like a neophyte farmer who discovers a vast underground network of gophers chewing his crop's roots, so he sets a dynamite charge wherever he thinks he sees a depression in the ground and blows off all the charges, leaving the topsoil in dry and eroded ruins, while the gophers have dug down even deeper and escaped harm. Stalin is supposed to have been too smart, experienced, politic, or conniving - or less pathologically paranoid - to have done this. He is likened instead to the farmer who is highly skilled in fumigating the gophers' burrows, forcing the gophers to come out and fatally expose themselves. When in full view, he traps and kills them. (This view of Stalin vs. Yezhov - without the gopher parable - is repeated in many places, such as in the 1975 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Once again, the dominant paradigm has great intuitive force precisely in these areas where it fills gaps. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 54 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View It is much more probable, however, that Yezhov was more perceptive and intelligent than Stalin in this particular disagreement, due to Stalin's having suffered brain-aging. This is not to be confused with an assertion that Stalin was senile at the time: that is a different matter and certainly could not have been the case because, as mentioned previously, Eton stated that Stalin proved to be a more astute diplomat than Churchill and Roosevelt, having outwitted them at the Big Three conferences, which took place as late as seven years after the Yezhovshchina ended. The difference in age between Stalin and Yezhov was the same as the difference in age between Stalin and Khrushchev. Yezhov and Khrushchev were born in the same year: 1898. The difference is fifteen years. At the height of the Yezhovshchina, ca. 1937, Stalin was about 58 years old, Yezhov 43. A difference of fifteen years is not so great between, say, a man of 22 and a man of 37. Athletes of these two ages often compete against one another in professional sports. But the difference in age between a man of 43 and a man of 58 is much greater in terms of what biologists call senescence (not to be confused, once again, with senility, which is full-blown mental incompetence due to advanced age). Senescence refers to progressive deterioration during adult years of a biological organism's viability. These changes are gradual, but do not follow a straight-line graph or chart with a downward slope. Instead, the rate of deterioration is not the same during, for example, every succeeding eight-year period. In each succeeding eight year period, a person ages at a greater rate than he did in the preceding period of equal length, following a formula known to statistical actuaries as the Gompertz formula. This formula was named after the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz who, in 1825, first described how the mortality rate in humans follows an exponential curve as a function of age. This law or curve is often used by biologists as a measure of senescence. The curve plots the survival rates of individuals (an inverse proxy for senescence) as a function of age, and looks like a waterfall as one proceeds from left to right along the abscissa or (horizontal) x-axis. The curve is very flat or horizontal until one hits about 40 or so years of age, then falls off very sharply, curving downward to the right, showing an extreme downward turn as it nears 50 years or so. The shape of this curve is due to its exponential nature. It does not look like a flat incline, that is, it does not look like a board set up at one end on a stone, which is how it would look if humans aged by the same amount every year, which would be the case if the rate of aging or senescence was a constant. Why this is not so is not known, but what it means in real terms is that there is a much bigger difference in age or senescence between a man of 58 vs. one of 43, than there is when comparing a man of 37 with one of 22, even though the difference in chronological age (birth dates) between the two men in both cases is the same: 15 years. This is an embarrassing, little discussed, emotionally charged, and deliberately ignored subject in patriarchal cultures because these cultures are also gerontological, i.e. elderly men are held up for highest esteem therein as able, wise, and most worthy to rule, while younger men of superlative ability and knowledge are regarded at best as phenoms, at worst as threats to the existing order. The conventional wisdom in these cultures would have one believe what a second century Talmudic scholar once wrote: Scholars grow wiser as they age, but the non-educated become foolish. Similarly, art connoisseurs the world over have seen Albrecht Duerer's famous drawing of a 93 year old subject male who, Duerer is known to have said, was nonetheless healthy and cheerful to talk to. Nothing is said in these edifying yarns about the embarrassing subject of a wise scholar's or healthy, cheerful conversationalist's brain-aging, which is not apparent like wrinkles and wheezing, is subtle in effect, and is especially difficult to spot in early stages in someone's behavior. It is not something that a personal physician tracks from year to year on his charts, as he does a patient's blood pressure, crackles in his lung expansions, or lumps in women's breasts. Its early effects are usually not regarded as pathological at all. A statesman or former revolutionary may merely seem to have mellowed. This would be self-servingly interpreted in gerontological patriarchies as having attained the wisdom that comes with age, rather than as brain- aging. Becoming wise is commendable in an individual's development, but wisdom which comes late on the Gompertz curve should be suspect. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 55 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View What really does come with age are what are known as the dementias of aging and the progressive loss of the ability to remember or merely a reduction of the ability to reason and evaluate things afresh. These dementias and deficiencies impair the performance and improvement of myriad activities in daily life, but even the well-known Alzheimer type of dementia, unless very acute, often goes unnoticed. Former President Ronald Reagan testified before a congressional subcommittee (and the entire American public) investigating the Iran-Contra affair, yet almost no one noticed he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease at the time. Anyone who noticed it remained discreetly silent - perhaps sheepishly and incredulously amazed or confused. Reagan's performance appeared normal to almost all auditors because he answered singly each question put to him, with little or no recall of the sequence and context of the questions and answers that led up to each new question. As he answered each question, he had little or no recollection of the previous questions he had already answered. Answering questions individually in this manner - severed from all contexts - is actually considered good and direct form in legal proceedings and inquiries of this kind. Such answers under oath are exactly the kind that judges and lawyers seek. Therefore, Reagan's performance was not just passing, but very good. It was apparent to auditors of these hearings that Reagan performed better than the much healthier, sharper, wittier Oliver North, whose intelligence and memory were more than the inquisitive Congressional investigators bargained for due to the fact that his full-functioning memory and ability to reason on his feet rather than merely regurgitate rehearsed syllogisms (like the Talmudist's wise old scholars do) enabled him to see the gist of the questions. He could usually see where they were leading. This made him less malleable than Reagan, and therefore - ironically - a poorer performer in stating what happened. Reagan's brain was diseased and impaired. North's was fully functioning, active, and interdictive. The wise old scholar's brain may be characterized as redundantly rehearsed. It is a newfound discovery of neurology, reported at a recent annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, that oldsters compensate for brain senescence, and therefore often function as well as younger people when performing many mental tasks, by using the separate specialized modules of the human brain in concert, engaging them to function together redundantly when performing tasks for which more youthful individuals need to use only a single brain area in isolation. For example, older people can - and do - match many youngsters in memorizing lists of words due to having learned to recruit brain areas that previously in their lives had not participated in such a task. But in experiments actually performed by cognitive neurologists, oldsters fail to match younger people in such word memory contests if required to memorize a list of words while simultaneously walking a crooked maze. Navigating such a maze requires the simultaneous and independent use of a different and separate part of the brain than the one young people can use by itself to memorize words. While walking the maze, this specialized word region can then no longer be engaged in assisting an oldster in any word memory (or other) task. This is why many of the elderly complain about having to do too many things at once and appear to slow down overall. In such situations, their compensating widespread neural activity gets them confused. (See Science News, April 17, 1999, vol. 155, No. 16, p. 247, Neural teamwork may compensate for aging. ) As the brain ages to 60 years or so, small patches of its tissues die off due to lack of blood caused by the poor, deteriorated conditions of local arteries and capillaries that feed these tissues. These small, dead regions are known as infarcts. At this age, masses of gluey extracellular material called senile plaques begin to accumulate near brain cells. (These are suspected of being tau and beta-amyloid proteins.) Within the tapering nerve extensions of brain cells that connect them with each other in a functioning whole like wires or the tracings on a printed circuit board (but more complexly), will be found more and more dense bundles of fibrous tangles as the years progress. Ever greater numbers of plaques, tangles, and infarcts are the increasing natural and common risks for brains approaching sixty years, whereas brains of about forty are still relatively free of them. The actual effects on behavior, cognition, mood, and motivation - or even one's beliefs - of the progressive build-up of these hostile proteins in the brain is still not a subject represented in medical science. Whatever these effects are, they certainly could not be as acute and dramatic as those of Alzheimer's disease. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 56 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Cognitive neuroscience, an outgrowth of neurophysiology and behaviorism, is one of the youngest, least developed sciences. It is not a part of standard medical education, training, or practice. What makes its application particularly difficult is that any subjective (like mood) or behavioral (like memory) effects caused by changes in the brain with age are not likely to be recognized as being the result of brain physiology unless these changes result in an acute impairment of at least one easily recognized and separable mental ability, such as short term memory. When the effects of brain-aging are more global or generalized, such as affecting motivation, character, feelings, morals, beliefs, judgement, or creativity, explanations for them that are forthcoming in the West are not sought in physiology but rather in Cartesian or outright spiritual terms. (For an explanation of the meaning of Cartesian here, see neurologist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1994.) Descartes, b. 1596, established a dominant, grandiose paradigm in the West for religion, philosophy, and science. It asserts a dualistic separation of the realm of mind from the realm of matter. For the latter realm, Descartes revived the approach of the ancient, pre-Christian materialists who said that mechanical force is the key to understanding material nature, to which Descartes added the language of mathematics. Due to this, this part of the paradigm encouraged rapid progress in the material sciences, like chemistry, optics, physics, etc. This is called the Cartesian Revolution. The paradigm had the opposite effect in areas of thought involving beings believed to have souls, as in studies of humans and human behavior, from human biology and evolution to sociology and ethics, because these studies, the paradigm says, are not studies of matter, force, and Nature, but involve instead inspections of the wholly separate mental realm. Descartes concluded that the obvious interaction of tangible material things with intangible mental things - their mutual influence - was a miracle effected only by the omnipotence of God. Since Descartes' time, efforts to liberate and extricate studies, disciplines, and areas of thought where souls are involved from religion, mysticism, and obscurantism by applying the mechanistic and mathematical ideas so successful in the material sciences has only earned thinkers the calumnies of being heretics, atheists, etc. In 1863, just after the discovery that there is electrical activity in the brain, I. M. Sechenov published the world science classic Reflexes of the Brain. Sechenov founded the Russian school of reflexology that eventually led to the work of the most famous (and in the West still considered by some the most sinister and threatening) Soviet scientist, the pride of the Soviet Union, neurophysiologist I. P. Pavlov. His work on the modification of reflex activity by learning is now world famous. Pavlov's research required vivisection, i.e. experimentation on live animals. He is credited with having founded special recovery domiciles paid for by the Soviet Union for the rehabilitation and happiness of his former experimental subject animals. This is more than present-day private American pharmaceutical companies do for their former experimental animals - it is just too expensive for them as a big cut into profits. These companies all but throw the animals away. But due to vivisection work like Pavlov's, many advances have been made in the study of the neurology of animals, the results of which can be extended to all mammals, including humans. However, many researchers know that experimental mice and even larger common experimental mammals often poorly reflect human biology. Hence, the need in scientific research for ever larger numbers of man's closest genetic relatives - apes. The inability of scientists to work freely with human subjects (except to interview them, wherein social scientists possess rather wide latitude) inhibits developing a non-Cartesian approach to understanding how physical brain conditions pertain to uniquely human behaviors involving higher cognition - the individual and collective behaviors with which the social sciences deal. Apes lack these behaviors, or show only rudimentary forms of them. For the study of these more advanced behaviors, the Cartesian approach is still favored, i.e. examination of the ‘mind' by ‘introspection.' This tradition has its Twentieth Century representatives too, such as the German school of phenomenologists, whose methods of investigating anything proceed by examining the contents of consciousness. This method is certainly Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 57 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View less harmful to animals (and humans) than vivisection. But because the Cartesian method is still mistakenly thought to be revealing, the study of uniquely human behaviors is still held in the grip of sociologists, historians, ethicists, and priests. There is no lack of religionists and other misguided humanitarians and ethicists ready to block or delay the advance of cognitive neuroscience, heedless of how much its advance might really benefit humanity. There is a prospect that new non-invasive brain- imaging techniques can compensate for the retarded state of this science. So far it has not, especially when compared to the advanced stages other new sciences rapidly entered, such as genetics, which is less than a century old and yet has already entered the engineering stage. In many cultures, age dementias are considered bad, i.e. as having a negative moral import. On the other hand, heart attacks or strokes in these same cultures are regarded as some of the normal or natural outcomes of aging. In the Western world, few heart attack victims suffer embarrassment, except perhaps due to some untoward circumstances surrounding an occurrence. It is not considered shameful or debasing to have had one. But age dementias, especially in men who are or had been in positions of leadership or authority, are considered an embarrassment or even a disgrace. In societies in which aged men occupy the pre-eminent positions, there is a great deal of self-serving motivation to avoid talk that brain aging is as normal and common as increases of blood pressure and hardening of the arteries with age. Since it is the brain that is aging, since the primary effects are not understood yet are clearly known to have momentous consequences, and since so much religious and Cartesian mystification already prevails in many of these cultures on the subject, the suggestion of brain senescence as an explanation for a course, change, or lapse in a statesman's judgement or behavior, or for his choice of official policies, is regarded more as an accusation rather than an explanation. In these cultures, age dementias affecting women are regarded with much less concern, as problems for personal or family attention, or even to be ignored, It is frequently observed that U.S. Presidents age very rapidly once they serve in that office, and especially if they have served two terms. This is thought to be due to having been worn down by the indisputably intense responsibilities and stresses of that office. This misses the truth. Stress hastens senescence, including brain aging, but the real difference in appearance of before and after U.S. Presidents that the public regards as very conspicuous is that most of these presidents are elected at an age when they fall on the part of the Gompertz curve where it begins to drop off very sharply. In other words, they take office when the roller coaster car of aging has just left the mildly inclined, almost horizontal start-up ramp of the track of aging and begins to accelerate down the exponentially curved, sharply inclined part of the Gompertz slope. Many movie-goers have noticed that when male actors (whose appearance is subject to much closer scrutiny than presidents') just pass the forty year mark, they still obtain many leading performing roles as vigorous young men. But as they enter their late fifties, suddenly screen aficionados are surprised to see the same actors cast as doddering graybeards, wheezing geezers, bent codgers, and fumbling gaffers. Popular entertainment buffs in their early twenties might see a young man perform in a young stand-up comedian program. This same fan then enters his mid- thirties and his own appearance and viability have changed very little. But he is surprised to see the same young comedian he formerly saw perform only a little over a decade ago now cast as a cranky old coot. Again, this is because the performer, not the fan, was on the steep part of the Gompertz slope during the time elapsed. (Their positions could just as well have been the reverse, of course.) The Gompertz curve bends and falls just as steeply downward for brain aging as it does for the dreaded deterioration of cosmetic physical appearance, if not more so. In keeping with the Talmudic commentator quoted above, young people are constantly exposed to portraits of the geniuses, wise men, role models, and leaders of Western civilization. One of the most universally recognized of these savants is Albert Einstein. He is invariably exhibited in photos and cartoons depicting him as an unkempt, whitened, wrinkled ancient in his sixties or seventies wearing a bowling shirt, indistinguishable - were it not for a mustache - from an elderly woman due to his advanced years. The public rarely if ever sees photos (which exist) of the well-groomed, handsome, virile, suited, Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 58 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View youthful Einstein who published four research papers in a single year near his mid-twenties, containing four of the greatest discoveries in physical science of all time: the special theory of relativity; the equivalence of mass and energy (the well-recognized E = m/c[squared] formula); the photon theory of light; and the theory of the Brownian motion of molecules. Instead, the public recognizes only portraits of someone who produced almost nothing of value to science for the three decades that preceded the photographing of these widespread portrayals, who struggled in vain during that time to teach himself tensor analysis to unify the laws of physics, and later cursed himself for his erroneous use of a cosmological constant in his equations, which he called the greatest mistake of my life. During this long period, he spent the remainder of his time, when not sailing and playing the concert violin - and vainly and erroneously disputing a new generation of quantum physicists he disagreed with - to teaching and publishing for the assistance of other scientists (and laymen) struggling to understand his theories. In 1979, a celebration was held in Jerusalem of the one-hundredth anniversary of Einstein's birth. (Einstein had been dead for 24 years by then.) Israelis struck a special commemorative coin with equations on the reverse side that Einstein had published near the end of his life purporting to unify his general relativistic theory of gravity with Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. This is what Einstein pursued the whole rest of his life after his productive twenties. Attending these festivities was Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel laureate in physics and inventor of the theory of quarks as the building blocks from which all subatomic particles are formed. Gell-Mann was embarrassed to see these equations on this coin. According to him, the equations do not describe any plausible interactions. Einstein had lost his powers, as Gell-Mann actually put it, but no one had noticed it - or wanted to mention it. Einstein had been too admired, regarded as too much of an icon of wisdom in science and philosophy, for too long. Likewise, Ronald Reagan was too esteemed and popular. Both Reagan and Einstein still performed very well, despite clear evidence here of types of brain aging. What actual evidence is there that Stalin was brain aged in 1937 while Yezhov (and Khrushchev) were not? There is nothing known of there having been a post-mortem under-microscope examination of tissues from Stalin's brain after he died in March of 1953. In cultures in which the dementias of aging are considered a type of disgrace, such as most Western cultures and many cultural regions governed by the former Soviet system, the cause of death cited on death certificates can be very misleading - and not just in the case of prominent personalities on whose behalf the U.S. Secret Service or Soviet KGB carried out security functions. In these cultures, examination of the brain of a cadaver is never routine. Even detailed post-mortems are far more likely to cite failures of cardiovascular or other organic systems than, for example, known multiple small strokes resulting in multiple dementias as the cause of death. Citations of dementias on death certificates would not only be considered humiliating by many survivors, but also puzzling due to the ignorance, confusion, and mystique surrounding the human brain and its afflictions. Dissections of the brains of great scientists or statesmen who have passed on is still a virtual taboo having no apparent point or value, traditionalists say. But there never will be a point to performing them unless the practice is begun and the first steps toward knowledge gained, so any value it may have can become evident. This taboo was actually much less strong among government leaders in the Soviet Union in Stalin and even Lenin's times than it is among Americans today. Americans are much better informed than they were a couple of decades ago regarding hardening plaques accumulating inside the arteries, and the burdens these place on the heart, kidneys, and other vital organs. However, they have never heard of the plaques and tangles inevitably accumulating in their brains with age. Such infarcts are not dreaded like heart palpitations. The knowledge, concern, and monitoring of a patient's brain by a physician are not part of anyone's health check up unless there has been a serious complaint or accident. There is no actual physical evidence of Stalin being brain-aged in 1937. This should not be surprising. As pointed out previously, few people - professional or lay - look for or even notice what lies outside dominant paradigms. Given the primitive state of neuroscience at the time of Stalin's death, a detailed post-mortem brain autopsy, if one had actually been performed, could only have projected backward in Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 59 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View time and hazarded a guess as to the age of onset of any discovered pathologies. Hypothetical brain-aging for Stalin could thus only be inferred from a detailed examination of his behavior and observed changes or lapses in it - not easily or reliably done by anyone not actually present with Stalin at the time. What is more, there are no agreed upon parameters for such an infant science as to what changes or anomalies of speech, habit, character, or conduct will validate an inference that one or more types of brain-aging have occurred. The most easily observable dementias of brain aging involve problems affecting motor abilities or the performance of ordinary daily activities. Likewise, impairments of the ability to remember can be conspicuous, even subjectively obvious to the afflicted and annoyed individual himself. To assess changes like these, much anecdotal material by Stalin's immediate associates - like Molotov and others - would need to be carefully evaluated. Less noticeable and sometimes almost completely hidden is the loss of the power to think anew, to reason afresh - loss of novel cognition, of the powers Gell-Mann was talking about, whether originally extraordinary or mundane. As Stalin aged, he very likely suffered progressive failure of a masterful ability credited to him in his prime by allies, enemies, and the totalitarian paradigmists alike: a consummate ability to subtly outmaneuver his opponents diplomatically (as in the cases of Churchill and Roosevelt), politically (as with Trotsky), and militarily (as against Hitler). The questions are: (1) was Stalin working with a decline of this acumen at the time of Hitler's invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) when he was a few months shy of 60 years old; and (2) was this the result of brain senescence? Almost any reasonable person, if he did not know that the subject was Stalin, and without knowing any pertinent medical facts, would answer the first question, Oh, most likely yes - if you are pushing sixty. If fervently held convictions about Stalin, Communism, and the totalitarian paradigm, as well as the gerontological biases of patriarchal cultures in general, were not at stake, anyone answering the first question in the negative would ordinarily be expected to carry the burden of proof of producing some good medical facts or circumstantial reasons that led him to think Stalin was an exception to the rule. This is a gaping bunghole in the dominant paradigm that its advocates do not even attempt to plug, since it is blatantly extra-paradigmatic. Stalin had ignored incoming intelligence reports that predicted an immanent Nazi military attack on the Soviet Union. His newfound trust in Hitler's promises of non-aggression in August of 1939 were out of character for someone who had been acutely aware of the intentions of Germany's Fuehrer. Hitler had openly declared that Bolshevism was rivaled only by Jews as the greatest evil in need of fervent, speedy, and permanent eradication from the world. Many excuses can be made as to why Stalin ignored his intelligence reports: they might have been British or American provocations designed to incite the USSR to attack the Nazis first. On the other hand, Stalin may have wanted to prolong the peace, stalling actual war. Or the procrastination may have been one of Stalin's subtle traps to lead the Germany armies deep into Asia where they would be most vulnerable to counterattack. However, the Nazis blockaded Leningrad and were almost in Moscow by the time a stunned and dazed Stalin realized that war had become a reality. It was left to Molotov to make the announcement to the Soviet public. The totalitarian paradigm portrays Stalin as a great paranoid, but these are not the actions and reactions of someone a clinical psychologist or forensic specialist would profile as a paranoid, but more like the behaviors expected of a cautious, deeply disappointed, or otherwise somewhat mentally afflicted person who could still evaluate and act logically. Stalin's grand error of trusting Hitler and thereby actually encouraging him to invade is accounted for by adherents of a Marxist-Leninist paradigm as evidence of Stalin's love of peace. The most plausible Marxist-Leninist explanations of this type avoid psychological analyses of Stalin's character - a favorite subject of the totalitarian paradigmists -, confining themselves instead to Stalin's ideological repugnance of war. This is said to have been Stalin's continuation of the thinking of Lenin, who regarded war as Marx did: as Western nations' chief means of enforcing their imperialist business interests, and as a desperate fix that a flawed economic system (capitalist) needs every two decades or so to uphold prosperity, avoid depression, and avert crashing financial collapse. Old Bolsheviks had been exiled to Siberia by the Tsar as often for pacifism and opposition to Russia's entrance into European wars as they Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 60 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View had been for revolutionary activity. Stalin believed that war is the antagonist of building socialist systems, but is the life's blood of capitalism. It is natural for the dominant paradigmists to steer clear or outright dismiss this explanation, especially since its empirical basis is very strong. They dwell instead on Stalin's personality, finding fault, blame, and causation all at once. Western economists pretend that capitalist systems can sustain prosperity and even enjoy unlimited growth potential during continued peacetime - though no-one has ever seen this (note the words during continued peacetime ) any more than anyone has yet seen an industrial nation embodying Marx's ideal of a truly classless society in which the wholeness of each human life is being realized. The error Stalin made was not so much one of gullibility prompted by a character flaw or runaway idealism, since he actually did at first consider an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western nations. He still acted logically. He seems instead to have made an error of judgement in a very complex situation, an error easy to criticize or excuse with 20/20 hindsight. But it is clear that without the assistance of General Zhukov, who was 17 years Stalin's junior and only two years older than Yezhov, Hitler might have prevailed. Once again, as with Yezhov, but this time in war, Stalin availed himself of the aid of a remarkable, gifted, qualified man in his early forties who was not yet accelerating rapidly into senescence down the Gompertz curve like he was. Unlike Yezhov, Zhukov was allowed to accomplish his professional goal. Even the opposition needed him. Stalin gave Zhukov the green light, rather than repeatedly flashing in his eyes a cautionary amber light, as he had done with Yezhov, or a parade of alternating stop and go signals. It is well known that Zhukov found himself under a great burden of debating Stalin to convince him that Stalin's (and many other of his military advisors') war tactics had become dated, and would not defeat Hitler's army. A patient, intelligent, foreign-assisted underground that had been around since Russia's Civil War eluded Yezhov - and eventually triumphed in the 1990's. Even with his humble manuscript, he could never fully convince Stalin to pull out all stops on liquidating it. Why he wrote it is no puzzle: to convince Stalin. The angst Yezhov suffered in his last days as NKVD head - before his own arrest - was not so much the fear paradigmatic historians believe he had of coming up face down in front of his superiors when he presented them with lists of purported members of the oppositionist underground ready to spout confessions and testimony that he may have tortured them into rehearsing. If there ever was an explanation that smacks of subjective bourgeois projection by comfortable armchair analysts, who rarely see little more than their own fears and egos in others - a favorite counter-criticism of Marxists - this is it. It does not occur to them that Yezhov's travail and final demise could have been induced by his inability to really convince Stalin to hunt down the Civil War scum who had already initiated and promoted a new generation of oppositionists from his own age cohort. Once infused with this new blood, with Yezhov sufficiently constrained (to a degree that, for example, J. Edgar Hoover had never been) by a hesitant and seasoned Stalin, the opposition's star finally began to rise. Beria was also about twenty years younger than Stalin, and in the same age cohort once again as Yezhov and Zhukov - which is also the age cohort of Khrushchev and the others who inherited and fronted for the cause of the Old Civil War Opposition. The battle for Communism and the Soviet Union's future was taking place amongst this generation. Beria may have been convinced that Yezhov was right because, during his brief tenure succeeding him as NKVD head, he continued the purges, but primarily within the Soviet Union's security apparatuses, until he was eliminated in turn by the same oppositionist gang with Khrushchev at its front. Yezhov suffered a much commented on decline in mental and physical health, as well as a severe deterioration in work and personal habits, near the end of his service in the NKVD. Some of Stalinism's apologists state that he suffered deliberate, chronic, low-level metal poisoning, perhaps by mercury. Such poisoning does not kill right away, but results in many of the ailments Yezhov actually complained about, symptoms noticed by those with whom he had personal contact. These symptoms - coinciding with Yezhov's professional frustrations - include teeth falling out, a mangy appearance, fatigue and flu-like symptoms, body aches, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, paranoia, and possibly delirium. (Consult Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 61 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View sci.med. See Bibliography.) All of these symptoms can be induced by old-fashioned substances - not implausible in a world capital famous for Byzantine intrigue. Some critics say if Yezhov was so afflicted, it was self-induced, but it is difficult to see why he would subject himself to protracted, non-fatal doses. It cannot be overlooked that Yezhov's health problems began around 1937 when he was appointed General Commissar for State Security Forces of the NKVD. This made him head of the NKVD and General Commissar of the GUGB, which existed within the NKVD. As pointed out above, the network of conspirators against whom his hunt was directed had a patient, snail-like foothold in the GUGB. There is another kind of excruciating experience that Yezhov is known for a fact to have endured, one which could not have been self-inflicted. During Yezhov's conduct of the purges, Stalin not only flashed a cautionary amber warning light in his eyes, as stated above. Stalin alternately told Yezhov stop, and then go, stop, and then go, stop and... . Behaviorists have found such a strobe treatment tantamount to torture in the severe physiological toll it takes on both humans and lower mammals, such as experimental mice. The chronological reconstruction of what is known to have transpired between Stalin and Yezhov clearly shows Stalin did this. Such behavior by Stalin is consistent with what is discreetly and euphemistically referred to as the confusion that is reported of people suffering various age dementias. Though it is not certain, it is far more probable, realistic, and scientific to operate on the assumption that Stalin failed to see as clearly as Yezhov the threat posed by a patient, abiding counter-revolutionary underground that subsequent history shows eventually did prevail, and that this was due to Stalin's advanced brain age (compared to Yezhov), than to frame the discussion in terms of the usual plethora of psychological and moral traits imputed to Stalin and Yezhov with less than a probable basis, but only on the basis of a particular historian's or writer's own selections and impressions of testimony. The entire field of discussion has been smothered by impressions and projections about two people the writers never met. Many such discussions, as pointed out above, purvey pure caricature, hastily and sketchily drawn up according to the logic of the totalitarian paradigm and the sucking needs of gaping, looming holes in accounts that are only scantily factual. Other discussions and analyses are just projections of a particular historian's or writer's own worst fears and fascinations. Accounts of what was going on between Stalin and Yezhov that assert, for example, that Stalin was more cautious than Yezhov, or that Stalin was more appeasing of the liberals on the Politburo than Yezhov (who wanted to arrest many of them as agents of the opposition), when not just plain historically doubtful (as the appeasement theory), are mere behavioral descriptions (e.g., Stalin was more cautious ) that purport to be saying something more as to the actual causes of what Stalin was doing. This is a fraudulent explanation in which the adjective cautious ambiguously denotes both a description of a behavior and a cause. If the latter, one is expected to understand this to be due to a more mature intelligence on Stalin's part (compared to Yezhov), or else due to a kind of character mellowing with age. These are Cartesian explanations once again. They do not address material causes. Even if these descriptions of Stalin's cognitive abilities and character ca. 1937 were completely correct, they would still have most likely been a result of what laymen call - in an effort to highlight the disgrace involved in age dementias - softening of the brain, which is actually the plaque-hardening described above. The important point is that an historian would be on much firmer ground as to what was really going on ca. 1937 - 1938 if he wrung all documentable evidence for changes in Stalin's behavior that point to age dementias, instead of discoursing on Cartesian changes that are the stock-in-trade of the kind of moral, psychological, and character-development explanations which have been the slanderous and dramatic favorite of anti-Stalinists. Historians need to stop pretending that moral, spiritual, and psychological characterizations (e.g. Stalin was ruthless, atheistic, and paranoid or, at another time, cautious ) are causes, when they are really only verbal descriptions of patterns of behavior that do have material and physiological causes. The crux of the matter is that historians lack scientific training. Even if not tied up in political apologies for the West, they are immersed in Cartesian spiritual, philosophical, and psychological wrangling. They need to come back to the real world of matter and flesh. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 62 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View It is a certainty that historians will resist these suggestions as interdisciplinary intrusions into their jealously guarded narrow domain, or ridicule them as the absurdity that history is controlled by the Gompertz curve. Far be it from them to use these proposals to frame a new and better paradigm in which age dementias are key factors. As pointed out above, this will be avoided because it necessitates deep criticism of patriarchal and gerontological cultures. If the dominant paradigm had called for it, however, such a program of criticism would have already been drawn up in the minutest detail. Historians and social scientists have repeatedly shown their reluctance for the hard sciences to invade their fields, such as the hue and cry put out by military historians when the late Isaac Asimov and others suggested that the sinking of the Spanish Armada had more to do with the possession by the English of technologically superior lighter-weight cannon in their gunwales than to superior battle tactics, more inspiring officers, greater valor, or favorable weather conditions. Historians suffered another such trespass on the sanctity of their domains when it was suggested that ergot poisoning of wheat harvests was a principal cause of the witch-hunting mania in Europe rather than, for example, doctrinal intolerance of witches demanded of the pious by Scripture. The latter is, once again, a Cartesian explanation because it seeks for the cause of the hysteria involved (persecutory behavior) by finding a rational means toward a desired end - salvation - according to a Scriptural injunction believed to call for the execution of witches. (That the injunction itself, or belief in it, is irrational is irrelevant to characterizing the explanation as Cartesian because the issue is whether or not the behavior is a realistic and workable means toward a given and accepted end, not whether or not the ends or belief in them are rational.) If Stalin did indeed suffer an age dementia curtailing one or more of his remarkable abilities during the Yezhovshchina, putting him at a disadvantage due to senescence - unlike Yezhov - against the machinations of the Old White Opposition, would not the symptoms have been observed at the time or disclosed by now? The surprising answer is no. Even if he had been the victim of a well-developed case of a prevalent and (now) well-known age dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, which affects commonly used abilities observed daily by others, like memory of names and places, it would have gone unnoticed, being mistaken for other things. This is in part due to the embarrassment surrounding the subject - the compelling cultural and moral taboos previously noted-, in part to Judeo-Christian-nourished ignorance, silence, and repugnance concerning the frailties of the flesh, and in part to the dominance of the Cartesian paradigm. After Ronald Reagan completed his second term of office as U.S. President, when his Alzheimer's disease was full-blown, he attempted to introduce Margaret Thatcher on her birthday at the new Ronald Reagan Museum and Library in Simi Valley, California. He held three-by- five prompting cards in front of him (not unusual for any president). As he began to introduce her, the audience applauded one of the most popular U.S. Presidents and Cold Warriors of all time, who had once referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire. He had been the only president since Teddy Roosevelt who seemed to enjoy the office. He was, it was said, Teflon-coated. His support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the greatest peacetime arms build-up in the recorded history of the world - by which he seriously jeopardized the U.S. economy - had once-and-for-all proved the superior wealth and economic might of the U. S., finally breaking the Soviet Union's financial backbone, helping to lead, only a few years later, to its collapse. After a few introductory remarks at the museum festivity, he stopped, seemingly unable to move a card. He then went back and redid the introduction. As he did so, the audience applauded a second time, as if nothing had happened. Only those present who were his intimates knew there was some kind of problem, such as his son Michael who, at the time, knew only that he's getting a little slow (sic) because of his advanced age (Reagan, The Man and His Presidency by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald Strober, p. 581). During his presidency, when his disease was in its much milder, incipient stage, a report by a presidential commission, released in Feb. 1987, depicted Reagan as confused and uninformed, working with a relaxed personal management style which had prevented him, the report said, from controlling subordinates during the Iran-contra affair. These are Cartesian explanations once again, attributing Reagan's professional performance to a style of management which is explained by his mental state. C. Everett Koop, the then Surgeon General of Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 63 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View the U. S., the nation's top doctor, a born-again Christian who taught the people of the U.S. the evils of tobacco, said only that Reagan had a very winsome, hesitant way of speaking in a lowered voice. When addressing the question as to whether this style, which had earned Reagan the epithet The Great Communicator, had been connected to incipient Alzheimer's disease, Koop said, Somebody could buy that. But I don't believe it for one moment. (ibid., p. 585 - 586). A final and little known note of interest on the subject of paradigms is that Trotsky used the Communist Academy as a forum to lead a group of Marxist theorists who contended that excessive study and use of Pavlov's materialist theories would deter efforts to formulate what Trotsky thought would be a fruitful synthesis of Marxism with Freudianism. Once again, Trotsky's ideas, in this case anti-scientific and anti- materialist, struck a deep chord in the West. Such a synthesis was actually taught by Herbert Marcuse to Angela Davis and other student radicals in the 1960's at the University of California at San Diego. Pavlov's ideas were discounted by both Trotsky and Marcuse as not having political importance. Despite their residual appeal in the West, scientific progress is gradually consigning Trotsky and Marcuse to the trash bins of obsolete thinkers because, while Freud's hypotheses contain very powerful theoretical ideas applicable to the sexually repressed - a common type in the West -, the poor empirical basis possessed by Freud has come under such virulent attack by many science writers lately as to leave Freud branded a pseudo-scientist. (See A. K. Dewdney's Yes, We Have No Neutrons.) 21. Stalin on Trial As a final extra-paradigmatic way of taking another view of the Stalin era, an attempt will now be made to assess it through the eyes of four superb, highly influential non-Marxist Western thinkers of the past: Plato, Machiavelli, Sir James Frazer, and Nietzsche - as if submitting Stalin to them for judgement by a four-man jury. Imagine that these four jurors have been selected by counsel for Stalin because they shared few or none of the elements of contemporary dominant paradigms. None of the four ever knew of Stalin or the Soviet Union. It is impossible to really see through their eyes, of course, especially through those of Plato and Machiavelli, who are temporally and culturally more remote than Frazer and Nietzsche. It may be supposed that it is easier to bridge the paradigm-gulf - what is commonly and simply referred to as the culture clash - with the modern Europeans Frazer and Nietzsche. The verdict by all four, it will be seen in what follows, is overwhelmingly in Stalin's favor. Many readers will find the collateral conclusions reached in the course of this brief trial anomalous or even absurd due to their failure to fulfill expectations that even strange, outlandish, and counter-intuitive ideas should at least produce conclusions that in some way make sense in terms of contemporary paradigms, even if older models of reality and inference procedures seem alien. Contemporary rogue paradigms (e.g. Wilhelm Reich's theory of the orgone) at least do that much. Those held to by these jurors may not. Bucking a paradigm, as suggested earlier, is more threatening than cogent, reasoned counter-argument, and is likely to cause far more consternation, especially if the challenged paradigm has moral or emotional features. The first juror selected by counsel for Stalin in the voir dire is the pre-Christian Athenian philosopher Plato (ca. 427 b. C. e.). Though there is much confusion in reading his dialogues as to whether he used Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas, or whether he disagreed with him and was acting instead as Socrates' biographer, Plato actually did both in his early dialogues. Plato scholars show a great deal of agreement as to exactly where Plato takes over completely. This occurs in the Meno at Section 81 A (75). Therefore, in his later dialogue in the First Book of The Laws, it is a fair certainty that Plato speaks for himself in suggesting a particular simple test for selecting and educating men who can be trusted as statesmen, a test that has subsequently come to be known as Plato's wine test. In that dialogue, Plato asserts that drunkenness loosens a man's tongue, which can give educators an idea what he is really like. It is not enough that a statesman qualify by having been a wise ex-soldier, which is the correct answer most university professors seek from their students in Platonism as to whom Plato believed is most qualified to govern. It may seem trivial and facetious to adherents of contemporary paradigms, but by this simple test one can quickly decide that Stalin, Churchill, and Khrushchev were Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 64 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View eminently qualified as statesmen, since they were known to drink everyone else under the table. Hitler rates as completely unqualified, having been a dedicated, lifelong teetotaler. F. D. Roosevelt barely passes with an asterisk because he seems to have enjoyed some social drinking in his youth, but then fell to ill health at about 39 years of age, having contracted polio, after which his drinking was on regimen or non-existent. One can as readily infer that of all five persons rated, Stalin scores highest not only due to his superior ability to imbibe, but by the facts that he took pride, as a Georgian, that his people were raised on a diet of mutton and wine, and that he was himself an amateur vintner. It is also known that Stalin did not find wine strong enough, preferring vodka. He belittled wine as juice. Stalin's detractors have shown how much they eschew the entire point of view embodied in Plato's test by hastening to point out that Stalin seems to have thought of it himself and actually applied it at social functions to unsuspecting aspirants for Communist Party leadership - using much stronger spirits. These traducers of Stalin's methods do not present the test as an ancient, highly respectable idea, however, nor do they mention Plato. These omissions are in part due to ignorance, and in part to the fact that Stalin's defamers themselves belong to a cult of sobriety, devotion to which they consider virtually essential in qualifying for statesman, general, or even just discussant. (The example of a very important early modern teetotaler Immanuel Kant, will be given in a moment). The cheapeners of what Stalin did, averring that he cheated in these drinking bouts, pouring vodka liberally for those he wished to observe and possibly later purge, while riding the water wagon himself, say he did this the better to keep his own wits. This claim that Stalin cheated is a self-serving way of upholding paradigms in which sobriety is obviously very important. The implication is that when Stalin was rational and working at his peak, he (of course!) remained secretly sober - as all sensible men do - even when others did not. As a rational but morally reprobate man, the paradigmists believe, Stalin made certain of this. For these reasons, any claims that Stalin really cozened others in this way should have their factual basis closely examined. These claims may be, once again, just worn and torn inferences from the dominant paradigm falsely taking on the repute of fact, like the previously discussed fact that Generalissimo Stalin appointed himself (which turns out to be a factually incorrect inference from the totalitarian paradigm). Plato's test is simple and easily elaborated, enabling one to extend it to rank qualified imbibers by their graded capacities. Immanual Kant (b. 1724) was the greatest and most influential modern European philosopher, the foremost thinker of the Enlightenment, credited (with Laplace) with being the founder of the nebular theory of the origin of the solar system (which only lately is suspected of being incorrect: the solar system - or at least some of its planets - is now suspected of having originated in a catastrophic stellar collision). Kant believed that the aim of Plato's most famous dialogue on statecraft, The Republic, was Kant's own general law of liberty, as he called it in his Theory of Right. This was Kant's very modern idea that a just constitution is one that achieves the greatest possible freedom for human individuals by framing laws in such a way that the freedom of each can co-exist as much as possible with the freedom of all others. This is the doctrine Kant espouses in his Critique of Pure Reason. It sounds inimical to the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat such as Lenin and Stalin espoused, because such a dictatorship involves stripping away many liberties enjoyed by capitalist exploiters. If Kant were right about Plato, this would mean the latter would not approve of Stalin very much, despite Stalin scoring highest on the wine test. This shows how much Plato is capable of varied interpretations. However, the matter can be settled in favor of the wine test and Platonic approval of Stalin because, according to Karl Popper, one of this century's best philosophical interpreters, Kant and many others were deceived into attributing their own ardent liberal and humanitarian ideas to a philosopher (Plato) the entire Western world idealized so much. Kant forced and deformed Plato to fit into his own paradigms, rather than reach conclusions about him inconsistent with his own reasoning, which would have found the wine test anomalous or frivolous if he ever even considered it seriously for one moment. Kant himself would have failed the test miserably, having been an undersized Pietist Christian born and bent his life long with a chest deformity, suffering a frail nature and chronic ill health. His abstemious habits and severe regimen were performed so regularly without break that townspeople use to set their clocks by his daily walk Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 65 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View down a street that was named for him The Philosopher's Walk. Today he might be diagnosed as suffering from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), for which he may have received Prozac. A serious challenge for Plato's wine test is to estimate how many savants of statecraft it would erroneously bar who are otherwise known to be qualified. In other words, does the test unfairly discriminate against qualified men and women just because they have Kant's undersized and sickly physique, or were born with smaller or gracile bodies, such as many women, and therefore hold liquor less well? It would not surprise anyone that a test from Plato would discriminate against women. It is difficult, however, to envision Stalin using it in this invidious way since the government established by the Bolsheviks was about seventy-five years ahead of the U.S. in women's participation in high level government. (In the U.S. throughout this entire period, women participated at these levels only as wives.) Raising these questions is testing the test, requiring some outside way (other than the wine test itself) to determine who is qualified. Rejection of the wine test is based on such outside criteria originating from other paradigms. There is no intrinsic problem with the wine test itself: a scaled test could be conceived rating candidates according to Plato's test based on applying wine as a percentage of body weight. The object of the test is not the same as that of the traditional drinking bout, with which its antagonists blindly and stupidly lump it together. The purpose is not to see how much liquor can be consumed before the partaker is under the table. The purpose is to loosen the tongue. A scaled test is therefore feasible and fair. There is an interesting, probative question about the wine test that is made light of by those in the cult of sobriety: what is going on when someone is (otherwise) considered ideally suited for statesman (when sober), but fails the wine test by saying many stupid and invidious things while inebriated, speaking and acting contrary to the espoused principles and better judgement for which he is esteemed? The superficial, exculpatory answer frequently heard is, Oh, it doesn't mean anything. That's the liquor ‘talking.' As long as drinking doesn't affect his job performance. He can be held to abstinence only while on the job. What he does or says on his vacation is his business. Those inclined to accept Plato's wine test, however, say the test has exposed such an individual as a kind of liar, that the liquor has dissolved his inhibitions, allowing his true feelings to come to expression, and that he is a phony. This is the sharp point at which the two paradigms diverge and thereafter cannot be bridged, the point beyond which the wine test vs. other tests, and the paradigms of which they are a part, are saying profoundly different things about the mind, behavior, human nature, how a society should be run, and who should run it. The idea that the wine test is irrelevant because teetotalers only need apply is no answer for a believer in the wine test because there is a deeper supposition behind what at first seems like a trivial or irrelevant criterion for statesman. This is the supposition that a qualified when sober, flunk when drunk type possesses less than obvious unsatisfactory psychological and character traits that will affect his behavior and judgement even when sober, such as being less than fully trustworthy, unreliable in a crisis, etc. The wine test is only a short cut to finding this out. The issue of avoidance of strong spirits while in office is irrelevant to the purpose of the wine test. It is not unreasonable to assume that Stalin thought that failing the test could mean someone was an unconscious wrecker - or just less than aggressive enough in executing Party plans and reforms. This would be a much clearer concept to people (like Stalin) who had an idea of wrecking in the first place, an idea sharp enough to make wrecking a legitimately triable criminal offense having its own requisite mens rea (mental state, like the requirement of intent to kill for a first degree murder conviction in Western jurisprudence). The second extra-paradigmatic thinker placed in judgement over Stalin is one who never loses his ability to shock and outrage readers in the West: the Renaissance Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli (b. 1469). Much of the rage he provokes, however, is the indignation of hypocrites. It was mentioned earlier that the view arose in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English-speaking worlds that practicing certain cruelties and treacheries automatically disqualified a ruler from holding power legitimately. His domains and rule were thought to be subject to forfeiture. Machiavelli's outlook is completely free of this idea. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 66 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Admiration of skill was very high in the Renaissance. Machiavelli and his contemporaries in Florence were infused with a connoisseur-like aesthetic appreciation of dexterity, including that in government. For Machiavelli, political theorizing was a scientific endeavor in that it should be based only on an empirical study of history, not abstract ideas. Political writers before him and well after him, especially those of Northern and Western Europe, including many moderns like John Locke, made a common practice of beginning their political discourses - or discussing in them - with some aspect of the Biblical Garden of Eden story, as if they could derive proofs or convincing arguments as to what powers of government are or are not legitimate from the behavior and fate of Adam and Eve. This kind of thinking and writing is also completely absent in Machiavelli. One of his most famous observations is that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed. Even modern Twentieth Century readers are so accustomed to political and historical writing being infused with high-flown moral talk, doctrines of human rights, and so forth, that they automatically read this observation by Machiavelli as a perverse or cynical advocacy of war and preparedness for war. He was making no such thing: he was simply being observational and empirical. As an unarmed prophet whose own downfall he witnessed himself, he mentioned Savanarola, the terrifyingly severe Dominican of Ferrara who trained his followers to spy out the vices of the clergy, sent Florence into riots, was excommunicated, tortured, and hanged. On the other side, as armed prophets who prevailed, Machiavelli mentions Moses, Theseus, Cyrus, and Romulus. Twentieth Century students often find it curious that in this account he does not evaluate so prominent a case as Jesus Christ. The omission of Christ, as if his historical existence was doubtful or his example of no real consequence, was not only typical of Machiavelli, but of all Renaissance thinkers. Rare is the Twentieth Century historian or political theorist - even the purely secular one - who does not bring up the Galilean in some context or discussion. This exhibits the greater extent to which Machiavelli was free of religious cant and humbug compared to even this century's political, social, and moral thinkers and writers. If the Stalin presented by today's shared paradigm really did exist and did all the things it claims he did, Machiavelli would have applauded him and said of him what he said of Caesar Borgia, his contemporary and son of Alexander VI: Reviewing thus all the actions... I find nothing to blame [but] hold him as an example to be imitated. Borgia manipulated the College of Cardinals (Politburo?), conquered by force of arms territories claimed by the Papal States (the Axis and Western powers?), and became the sole beneficiary of his father's ambition (Stalin purges Trotsky and succeeds Lenin?). Men like the Stalin portrayed by the dominant paradigm were the common run in Renaissance Italy. Even popes secured election by corrupt means. Machiavelli believed that by an empirical review of history, it is possible to formulate a kind of science of success in that area, drawing conclusions not from abstract ideas about what ought to succeed, but from what one observes actually works, treating the question of suitable means (toward an end) in a purely scientific manner without regard to the goodness or badness of the ends. In other words, if there is such a science, it can be studied just as well in the successes of the wicked as in those of the good. It is even better to devote oneself to the study of successful sinners than saints, Machiavelli said, because there are so much more of the former. Interesting to note is that on the question as to whether or not such a science exists or can exist, the otherwise forthright and candid Twentieth Century philosopher of science Karl Popper rather faint- heartedly stated he remained an agnostic. Most teachers, writers, and leaders in the West today, as well as most Christians in general, who are or wish to remain respectable among peers, will not agree with Machiavelli, but remain hidebound Kantians. They believe - or pretend to believe - the dictum espoused by Kant in his Practical Reason that says, never regard humanity as a means to something else, but always as a final end. Kant believed the rules set forth in the Decalogue (Ten Commandments ) were specific rules for carrying this out. This is the opposite of what Machiavelli thought, because Kant's dictum says (to quote him once again), a life lived according to principle is good, regardless of material success or failure. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 67 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Machiavelli's historical study arrived at qualifications for rulers measured against which the conventional image of Stalin receives very high marks. A ruler, Machiavelli said, must be cunning as a fox and fierce as a lion. He must not be bound by truth or virtue, but only when it pays to do so. However, it is supremely important for him to appear to be virtuous at all times (Show Trials?). Being an accomplished feigner, dissembler, and actor is a great asset, Machiavelli said. He thought it is best of all to appear religious. Here the totalitarian paradigm's Stalin may get a minus, since not everyone agrees that Marxism is a religion (as Bertrand Russell thought). A prince (ruler ), according to Machiavelli, must be on guard against literary men, who are subverters of republics and kingdoms (cf. Stalin saying that writers are engineers of the human soul ). Contra Dante, Machiavelli considered Julius Caesar wicked and Brutus good because Machiavelli did not consider tyranny a good way to run a government, and Caesar was a tyrant. Machiavelli observed that belief in infallible prophecies, auguries (uttered by Marx and Lenin?) and doctrines (Marxism-Leninism?) are a strong social cement. The French and the Spanish (powerful Western Europeans with colonial and imperialistic aims) he considered backward (not progressive ?), saying they stink (capitalist pigs ?). He maintained that a ruler should at all times use a system of checks and balances by means of a constitution (the Stalin Constitution of 1936?), to keep other powers (in Machiavelli's time other princes, the nobles, the clergy, and the people) in check. The finest princes, he held, maintain domestic tranquillity by maximizing liberty for their citizens. Machiavelli argued that most classical writers are wrong, such as the Roman Livy. Contra Livy, he said that the people are wiser than princes are. Popular government is the most preferred, he held, having the backing of the masses, not because these governments are most likely to fulfill some religious or abstract political doctrine of human rights that is correct, but because popular governments are the least cruel, least unscrupulous, and the most stable. Tyrannies are the opposite in each of these regards. Therefore, Machiavelli thought it wisest for a ruler, in his apportionment and balancing of power, to give the most power to the people. He knew that a strong constitution also keeps successful revolutions at bay. (This appears prophetic to many American readers in 1999 due to the length of time the U. S., a nation with a strong constitution, has had the same duly established government without a revolutionary overthrow.) Power, Machiavelli observed, does not depend on armies, but on opinion, and opinion depends on propaganda. It is easier to establish a republic among peasants or mountaineers, he noticed, than among denizens of large cities because the latter are already corrupted. (This sounds Rousseauian.) He recommended that politicians depend for support and power upon the virtuous non-urbanite. (In the U.S. today, this would typically be the mid-Western rural Christian. It is this constituency that accounts for the strong showing in presidential elections of many philosophically shallow and politically inane figureheads, such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.) Politicians will behave better in any community, the Florentine said, in which their crimes can be made widely known, rather than in a community in which there is censorship, especially if the censorship is under their control. (Machiavelli wrote this before there was a Fifth Estate, as the press has come to be known). It is interesting that it has taken Europeans almost 500 years to understand what Machiavelli understood in Fifteenth Century Florence: all statecraft boils down to questions of power, no matter how concealed by fine, edifying slogans like right will out or the triumph of evil is not long lived. Mottoes like these are still heard today from supposedly educated and historically enlightened men when they heap calumnies upon the former Soviet Union. So not everyone wishes to learn Machiavelli's truth. Machiavelli sometimes appears archaic to Twentieth Century history sophisticates because he seems to be writing about creating whole communities in one piece, as the semi-mythological lawgivers of the ancient world - Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, et. al. - are credited with having done. There is little in Machiavelli on the modern concept of a community or republic and its laws having an organic birth, development, and evolution from antecedents, or of the supposed superiority and practicality of fixing social problems piecemeal - claims ceaselessly thrown at Communist and Socialist bureaucrats as well as Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 68 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View at many other social planners. However, it must be admitted that Lenin, in the dominant paradigm, is a more like the semi-mythological lawgiver Lycurgus, who is supposed to have created by fiat the Spartan polity, than like George Washington, who, as the father of our country, a founding father, was not a lawgiver but rather a land surveyor from an affluent family who gradually rose through triumphant military leadership to become the most important White man in America, then reluctantly and rather wearily found himself in the office of chief executive of the new United Sates of America. Lenin and Stalin were not ancient myths, but terrifying modern realities for those in the West who lived off accumulated wealth or by exploiting the labor of others, or for those who claim to put Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible at the spiritual center of their lives. Scholars in the early part of the Twentieth Century who had regarded Solon, Moses, and Lycurgus and their feats as pure myth had to do a lot of rethinking when Lenin appeared, even while they criticized the party of Lenin (the Bolsheviks) for doing whatever it needed to gain, add, or consolidate power in its time. The jurors sworn in thus far have been Stalin's philosophical peers, since both Plato and Machiavelli considered political subjects the most important for men to pursue. Their remoteness in time from Stalin does not make them temporal peers, however. The next juror was almost Stalin's contemporary: Sir James George Frazer (b. 1854), a Scottish (usually vaguely and incorrectly said to be British ) anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar, author of a very influential book among men of letters, The Golden Bough; a study in Magic and Religion. He was a fellow at Trinity college in Cambridge, where he later became full professor. The Golden Bough is still avidly read by many occultists and practitioners of magic. Frazer held to ideas many maintain were also the real opinions of Dr. Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder in the 1960's of the Church of Satan. Frazer believed that a sorcerer is most often a knave and impostor, and that supreme worldly power most often falls into the hands of those possessing the keenest intelligence and most unscrupulous character. In earlier stages of social development, men of this type claimed to be sorcerers. It was Frazer's educated, reasoned inclination to say that such men, especially in these early stages, did far, far more good than harm. As he put it in The Golden Bough, If we could balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the good greatly outweighed the evil. For ruler, Frazer preferred types like the wily intriguer and ruthless prince Machiavelli esteemed, Caesar Borgia, rather than someone most modern liberal democrats would prefer over Borgia, such as the dullard George III of England, for example, whose intellectual deficiencies cost him control of the American colonies. Stalin and Lenin both accomplished the very things Frazer enumerated in The Golden Bough as salutary for humanity. The Tsarist society that preceded the Bolsheviks conformed exactly to the kind of stagnant, leveled, lifeless society that Frazer said existed in many places before the rise of magic and the keen wits who practiced it to gain power. Frazer said that this dead and stagnant kind of life has been falsely idealized as a Golden Age of humanity, but was actually more gray and leaden in color. He believed that the rise to power of the crafty characters he described opened up careers to talent previously closed by feudal social systems, like the one in which the Tsars and their European allies held Russians, Ukrainians, and others in Eastern Europe in a kind of human bondage. (These forlorn, hopeless, entombed peoples and cultures are hyper-realistically portrayed in Anton Chekhov's superb short stories.) Frazer believed that all people who have the real good of their fellows at heart would welcome such wily characters, who use their intellect, energy, and ruthlessness to drive their formerly stagnant societies to comparatively rapid progress. As Frazer put it, The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect... . Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which ties so heavy... . And as soon as [the society] ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders [elsewhere referred to by Frazer as an oligarchy of old men ], and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbors and enters on a career of aggrandizement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favorable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress [The Soviet Union?]. ...[This, by] relieving some classes [members of the Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 69 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View proletariat?] from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford[s] them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of men. This (imputed) justification of Stalin (the totalitarian paradigm's despot ) to Frazer exceeds that of Machiavelli, who disapproved of tyrants and despots. Even if Stalin had been a despot, and Machiavelli therefore gave him a minus in this department, Stalin would still receive an A+ from Frazer on this score, given the primitive, medieval conditions that prevailed prior to the rise of Bolshevism in an expanse of Asian territory covering what is now eleven time zones that came under Soviet influence. Russian society - the most modern of its time in this entire great region of the Earth - was itself hidebound by tradition, a slave both to the visible masters of church and state, and to its past, to long dead forefathers and saints. Frazer's evaluation flies in the face of Karl Popper's elaborate critique of what Roscoe Pound named social engineering, which is the attempt to execute a single blueprint for an entire society rather than correct its social problems on a spot or piecemeal basis, which Popper considered better and more practical. The rapid progress of Soviet society exceeded anything history has ever known, considering it advanced in only a half-century from a society in which a bicycle was a futuristic piece of technology to the only society in recorded history to put an inhabited artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth: Mir, perhaps the greatest engineering marvel in history. Frazer, then, regarded what might be called early epoch despotism as the best friend humanity ever had, before which the stern injunctions of the Ten Commandments, such as Thou shalt not kill, steal, etc. are of little consequence. He said, For after all there is more liberty in the best sense - liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies - under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom [my emphasis] of savage life, where the individual's lot is cast from cradle to grave in the iron mould [mold] of hereditary custom. Frazer wrote, if we are forced to admit that the black art has done much evil, it has also been the source of much good; that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth. It should be noted that the Marxists of Lenin's generation consciously espoused a similar view, unappreciated in the then already advanced industrial nations of the West. These Marxists, a la Frazer, openly adhered to and taught their youth the positivistic social ideas of Auguste Comte, maintaining that the future of man lies in complete emancipation from metaphysical and religious thought. This runs contrary to a view becoming increasingly popular among intellectuals today that science, philosophy, and religion satisfy different fundamental human needs, and are therefore equally valid. Karl Popper stated, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, that Marxism is only an episode - one of many mistakes we have made in the perennial and dangerous struggle for building a better and freer world. Popper insinuates here that the West has profited nothing from the Bolsheviks' mistake. It is not possible to support this assertion if one is specific and argues concrete cases, as if the project of the emancipation, happiness, technological advance, and general improvement of human life learned and received nothing of value from the Soviet Union's experience, as if the Soviet Union did nothing for its subject citizens. The judgement of Frazer is that Stalin did no small service for humanity. Even if Stalin had been a child of error, as Popper would have it, Frazer would have said that he has yet been the mother of freedom and truth. So far, all three jurors find for Stalin. The final juror is one that is most often associated with National Socialist and other reactionary and right wing movements, Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844). This association has been shown by Princeton's Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann to be incorrect. (See Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, Vintage Books, New York, 1968.) Nietzsche's judgement on Stalin might seem to hinge on whether or not Stalin qualifies as an Uebermensch or superman. The problem with this approach is that it calls for a concise definition or way to identify who is or is not a superman, regardless of political persuasion or other attributes that would be considered unimportant once one has such a definition or criteria. Nietzsche never gave such a definition. What is more, this line of approach presupposes that even if Nietzsche would have considered Stalin an Uebermensch, he would necessarily rule (as juror here) for Stalin. In other words, Stalin's Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 70 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View possibly being a superman may be necessary for Nietzsche to rule for Stalin, but not sufficient. There is another way to approach the question of Nietzsche's judgement on Stalin using notes from Nietzsche's Will to Power translated by Kaufmann. With brilliant originality, Nietzsche therein outlined a new kind of martyr. Martyrs are they who give up their own lives, loves, freedom, or material possessions for the sake of promoting some good only others may enjoy. Nietzsche invented a new kind of martyrdom possible only for an Uebermensch: a martyr who gives up his own virtue to make others virtuous. It was mentioned earlier that Plato believed men could be made virtuous, and that materialist science, with its increasing control over heredity, environment, and organic growth and development, increasingly delivers into humanity's hands the real means to make men into anything it wants to make them. Nietzsche implicitly believed men could be made virtuous. In his notes, he broached the original idea that men who take upon themselves the power to do so may have to give up or sacrifice their own virtue. This would be a kind of self-denial and hence martyrdom. To an Untermensch (the inferior man ), who has endured lifelong, painful restraint by moral shackles, this would not seem like a sacrifice at all, but a great catharsis or release. For example: the Untermensch may feel now at last I can kill those I despise, the enemies of mankind. In contrast, Nietzsche implied that it would pain an Uebermensch to kill (to continue the example) to stop others from killing. According to Nietzsche, the Uebermensch does not lie about what he has done by imagining there is a kind of moral hierarchy in which, by killing to stop killing or exploiting to stop exploitation, he graduates and rises to a higher moral level than someone who merely scrupulously obeys the commandment, Thou Shalt not Kill. Instead, the Uebermensch realizes he has given up his own ethics to make others good. Nietzsche said this kind of man seeks to realize virtue in others in order to dominate them, and this is his own peculiar will to power. He renounces virtue for himself to bring this about. According to Nietzsche, a person preoccupied with morals in this way is a complete immoralist in practice. He does not even seek to justify the means he uses by holding up for admiration his espoused, highly moral ends. Nietzsche criticized those who do so as Machiavellians. Nietzsche solved the old conundrum of means vs. ends simply by saying that if the means are immoral, so is their practitioner. There is no higher level of morality he has advanced to by showing that his means had only the best ends in view, or had brought about only good. Echoing Machiavelli, Nietzsche said that in politics it is imperative that this kind of immoralist does not appear to be immoral. He must not only be free of morals, but free of truth also, for the sake of success in achieving his goals. He needs only gestures of virtue and truth. Like Machiavelli's prince, he must be a great actor. If he proceeds along this path, and ever once thinks he is still virtuous or more virtuous, as many Westerners imagine Lenin and Stalin thought themselves, Nietzsche said they have fallen into error and will fail. If they waver for one moment, and once again aspire for virtue for themselves, Nietzsche said they have grown old and weary, and paid their tribute to human weakness and frailty. The idea of Machiavelli's prince, the consummate artiste of political success, is an ideal too superhuman, ...never achieved by man, at most approximated. ...Plato barely touched it, according to Nietzsche. With a standard as high as this, it is clear that though Nietzsche would have found in favor of Stalin, he would probably not have given him an A+. According to Nietzsche's original and bold analysis, the kind of immoralist for the sake of morals described here has domination or power over virtue - he is not dominated by it, as are those who will condemn him. Taking his idea to its logical limit - a characteristic of Nietzsche - he stated that this dissimulating martyr for virtue is imitating no less a model than God himself: God, the greatest of all immoralists in practice, who nonetheless knows how to remain what he is... . According to Nietzsche, someone who knows precisely what actions must be performed to prevent others from performing them first, depriving others of the chance to perform them on him first, holds the Principe (Machiavelli's work The Prince) in his hands. Getting one's shot in first internationally, however, was not one of Stalin's own practices (as was exampled above vis-a-vis Hitler). This was a legacy left to the Soviet Union by Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 71 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Kosygin. Here Nietzsche may give Stalin a demerit. It is clear, however, that Yezhov and J. Edgar Hoover would have both received better grades than Stalin in this category. Yezhov's thesis was precisely to get in the first shot (literally) against the opposition. Hoover's approach was to do so by framing the opposition and lying in wait for it after deliberate provocations. Hoover's approach receives a higher grade than Yezhov's from both Machiavelli and Nietzsche because it makes the police authorities come out looking a lot cleaner than if they had just adopted the means of arresting and executing opposition threats. Stalin's prosecutors in this trial can easily select four jurors that will rule against Stalin. But they will not compare to the acknowledged greatest philosopher of all time: Plato. According to the Twentieth Century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, all Western philosophy after Plato has consisted merely of footnotes to Plato. Machiavelli too is of such supreme eminence that educated Englishmen, who admired the Renaissance and hoped to live up to it, once reckoned the year of Machiavelli's death as the year ending the Renaissance. (This was the same year in which Charles V's troops sacked Rome.) Frazer can be bettered, but Allan Bloom, a Plato scholar and author of the popular The Closing of the American Mind, stated therein that Nietzsche is possibly one of the three most influential thinkers in the Twentieth Century. The verdict has come in. 22. Some Final Notes to Part I For a closer look at reports of first-hand, eye-witness information that is ignored by the purveyors of the dominant totalitarian paradigm, consult Felix Dzerzhinsky by A. Tishkov, and chapters 7 and 9 of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Biography, translated by Natalia Belskaya. Chapter 7 of Belskaya's book, At the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), explains that the NKVD existed in October, 1917, much earlier than most Westerners think, existing simultaneously alongside the CheKa. The CheKa and later the GPU (the State Political Administration of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation) were merged into the already existing NKVD. The CheKa was not the parent organization of the NKVD, nor was the NKVD the CheKa's successor organization, any more than this was later the case, as many believe, between the NKVD and the better known KGB. Chapter 9 of Belskaya's book, Guarding the Security of the Soviet State, deals with events following the Civil War. During this conflict, the Western powers joined with White Tsarist forces to attempt to destroy the nascent Soviet State. The entirety of both books is of great value for understanding the economic situation in the Soviet Union for the period starting from the strife preceding and continuing through the Civil War, up to the Yezhovshchina, and how economics and politics are uniquely blended in a state seeking to build socialism. Incredibly, both rarely read books are readily available through interlibrary loan systems participated in by almost every U.S. library, no matter how provincial. As mentioned in NKVD-INFO, which, like Part I of this essay, relies almost exclusively non-Marxist sources, the VeCheKa (CheKa) was a multiparty organization. A great deal of sabotage, first fomented openly and merely vocally, but later conducted violently and secretly, was perpetrated by both Right and Left Social Revolutionaries along with the Mensheviks and anyone else willing to assist, including little known agents working on the payrolls of Western powers wishing to restore the plumed and palsied institution of Tsardom, which had acted as the pivot of their economic interests in the East. Many details of the mischief directed at the newly organized socialist institutions in the early Bolshevik State are outlined in the Dzerzhinsky-related books mentioned above. The machinations of better known individual Western spies against the Soviets can be found in many sources. Master spies from Great Britain are among the best known of such would-be spoilers of the fledgling Bolshevik state, such as the colorful master of disguises Sir Paul Dukes, K. B. E., who was wanted by the CheKa at one time as five separate saboteurs until meticulous spy-diagramming by early CheKa think-tankers identified all of them as one and the same agent of the British Intelligence Service. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 72 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Photographs of Dukes and a number of his convincing alter egos can be seen on formerly rare film excerpts from the Film Archives of the Soviet Union now available to the public on the video Dzerzhinsky, a film by Simeon Zenin and Alexander Novodgrudsky (see Bibliography). The above-mentioned sources bring to the foreground of attention the ultra-leniency of the original NKVD-CheKa, whose agents were prohibited from physically striking any criminal suspect - or even being rude to him. Their code of conduct was so humane and novel for its time that if students of Kremlinology were not so severely blinded by the repeated, purportedly authoritative asseverations of the dominant paradigmists of Lenin's vehemence and Stalin's cruelty, these restrictions on the behavior of NKVD-CheKa agents would be held up as the landmarks of humaneness they really were, as significant in their time as the abolition of human slavery had been three generations earlier. This was in a world in which incarcerated American felons were still routinely whipped, and English school children still subjected to sometimes permanently scarring and disabling physical punishments for minor infractions of school order. The NKVD-CheKa code stands in stark contrast to the tormenting physical and verbal abuse routinely applied by the anti-Bolshevik White officers to soldiers and civilians with whom they came into contact, both during the Civil War and later in the workplace, wherein former Whites had assumed many important managerial and administrative positions, as previously noted. Their social aggrandizement was made possible - once again - only by the extreme leniency of the new Bolshevik rulers toward former Civil War enemies. Parole and other forms of grace were regular responses of early Soviet power even for former White generals such as Gen. Krasnov and former Provisional Government Members who had vehemently plotted against and battled the new regime. Dzerzhinsky's reasons for such temperance? Some of them are of a kind that only sincere apostles of tolerance would think to offer. He said that arrested people are people deprived of freedom who cannot defend themselves and are in our power. He also stated that prison maims people. He knew this very well because he spent a great deal of his own life in the Tsar's penal institutions prior to the Revolution's victory. These institutions were so filled and bursting to overflowing, more so than over- burdened American prisons are now, even with the more expedient and inexpensive Russian gulag system of imprisonment/exile to supplement actual incarceration, that the Tsar's ministers were at a loss what to do. Few students of history or other interested parties are aware of this because most books and studies on the era have been written by authors who fear to be mistaken for Stalin apologists or Communist fellow-travelers. Therefore, these writers lecture instead on the ruthlessness of Stalin, Yezhov, and even Yagoda, Yezhov's predecessor as NKVD chief. The failure of this generous consideration and humane treatment accorded to common criminals and former White enemies is reminiscent of today's well-aired complaints of law and order types about the failures of the current American criminal justice system's revolving door policy wherein contrite, rehabilitated, and reformed murderers, armed robbers, and rapists are repeatedly set free by judges (censured for being bleeding heart liberals ) to inflict the same crimes on the public again and again. The neglected information in the above-mentioned sources is crucial for seeing the overall picture of the daily struggle faced by the victorious Bolsheviks against both internal and external enemies of the new Soviet regime. This battle involved encounters with ever more original and subtle variations of subversion created by oppositionists in their effort to overcome the wide, ever growing popular support for the new regime, as well as its increasing police strength (due to Dzerzhinsky). The new leaders dealt intelligently and humanely - at first - with wreckers of economic plans. Many Westerners think the wreckers later so doggedly hunted down by Stalin and especially Yezhov were primarily figments of their paranoiac imaginations. They think this due to ignorance of the early years of the new proletarian government under Lenin. As mentioned previously, only days after the new government was set up, numerous government officials and ministers did the most direct and open form of wrecking possible: they openly and brazenly declared a boycott of their posts, refusing any work or assistance for the new Soviet state. This cost them nothing because their salaries were paid for months in advance by counter- Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 73 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View revolutionary organizations subsidized by foreign powers (Tishkov, p. 31). These defiant officials are known to have gathered at the Contessa Panina's mansion, using it as headquarters. There appears to be only one existing photograph of her in company, and it is a fair bet that this is a photo that David King, who is reputed to have the world's largest private library of rare photos from this period and of the Stalin era, does not have. The new government had already tried many of these officials for subversive acts that went well beyond the withholding of their expert services. The most powerful and best organized among them had been involved in cruelly derailing the routing and supplying of food and other provisions sorely needed by the people living under the new regime in an effort to stall the government and bring it down. Starvation became their opening gambit, their first plot of resistance. They acted in concert and open company with former Tsarist generals and monarchists, many of whom had formerly organized massacres against liberalizing influences under the Tsarist autocracy. Life was cheap to them. Their efforts to bring down the new regime were shameless and open. They deliberately altered accounts, concealed food, and refused to act on orders of the Soviet Government, such as employees of the Food Ministry, many of whom refused to hand over business records and correspondence to the People's Commissariats. (Imagine if, in the parallel situation of an audit by the present day U.S. Internal Revenue Service or the Office of Economic Opportunity, a self-employed businessman under tax investigation, or who had been accused of not hiring enough minority group members, defiantly refused to hand over records of his accounts.) The CheKa was set up by the Council of People's Commissars (SOVNARKOM) to be the All-Russian Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Such sabotage was not yet done in secret. It was explicit and transparent because these boycotters and spoilers did not believe Lenin or any of the Soviets could organize any kind of organized police strength or sanctions against them. They believed that the new government would fail in a week or so. There were no names that would later strike fear in their hearts, no Dzerzhinsky, no Stalin, no Yezhov, not even a Beria. There were as yet only positive words: the proper names of the new, well-loved heroes of the revolution. Whiteguard terrorists, in advance of the force of the White Army that surrounded Moscow at this time, fearlessly rode into Moscow on Ku-Klux-Klan-like expeditions to burn and lynch anyone or anything they believed cooperated with - or would be useful to - the worker, peasant, and soldier Soviets. For these reasons, Lenin created the CheKa and appointed Dzerzhinsky as its first head. Dzerzhinsky became known as the Champion of the Revolution. Lenin referred to him as a Proletarian Jacobin. Under Dzerzhinsky, robbers, White terrorists, and other saboteurs were routed and disarmed by the early CheKa men, refuting the views in Russia and abroad that the Soviets had no law and order. As Dzerzhinsky put it, We shattered the current illusion abroad that we stood on the brink of collapse. This work of the CheKa in the new Soviet capital of Moscow freed the Red Army to devote its energies to engaging the Whites on battlegrounds on the city's outskirts where the Whites were blowing up warehouses and trainloads of provisions as they closed in for what they believed would be the end of a short-lived revolution. Due to the starvation and famine the Whites were inflicting on Moscow, as time passed, the CheKa and Dzerzhinsky became less and less lenient. As the CheKa's measures became more and more harsh, slander in the West of Dzerzhinsky, the CheKa, and the Soviet state became more and more shrill, hysterical, and monstrous, ignoring that these were once the men who - with the consent of Lenin - had abolished the death penalty as inhumane long before the penalty was even the subject of serious debate in Western parliaments. Atrocities by Whiteguard generals and Americans who committed mass killings of Communists in Archangel were never mentioned. The first Draconian measures the Bolsheviks employed did not rise to the level of what might be called terror against terrorists but may be identified as the confiscation of grain to avoid the starvation and famine the Whites conspired to create to overthrow the new regime. Such confiscatory measures finally led, with the inevitability of a Sophoclean drama, a generation later to the foredoomed Yezhovshchina, which could more aptly and insightfully be called The Great Climax, rather than The Great Purge. This early era of Soviet history is so poorly documented and studied due to the chaos and the fighting, Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 74 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View that the names of people in the Food Detachments of the CheKa who sought to combat starvation and round up homeless children on the streets of Moscow to feed them are lost to history. A few photos remain. The history of the early CheKa personnel comes from Dzerzhinsky's recommendation that commanding officers write down the history of their units. To this end, Dzerzhinsky promoted literacy among them. At the height of all this, Lenin was shot, Uritsky assassinated, and Dzerzhinsky kidnapped. In the forefront of much of this were dissident counter-revolutionary Socialist Revolutionaries and a ring of English and French foreign ambassadors who operated outside Moscow to overthrow the Soviets in what has come to be variously known as the Conspiracy of Ambassadors or the Lockhart or Lettish conspiracy (previously described). Each of these groups - foreign agents, right socialists, wreckers, former Whites, et. al. - are the same types said to have been imagined by Stalin and Yezhov a generation later. However, they were not new to them, as they were - and still are - to most Westerners. In fact, the Show Trials were not even a novelty - except to the ignorant and puzzled Western public and their leaders - because numerous counter-revolutionary socialists were tried during this earlier period, and, just as in the later, better known Show Trials, foreign solicitors were invited to attend, as did the former Prime Minister of Belgium, to witness the proceedings. There was nothing really new about the Yezhovshchina. As pointed out above, it was, in the first place, a continuation of the Civil War. The phenomenon that so shocked Westerners not in attendance at the Show Trials themselves, the notorious open confessions to the court of acts of sabotage by the perpetrators themselves being used as the primary evidence to convict them, was not new either. In the earlier trials, Savinkov, after detention by the CheKa, wrote a bitter confession and report of his own - and the counter-revolution's - moral bankruptcy. There is every reason to believe it was sincere. The CheKa did not torture, hit, smack or threaten him - or anyone - at this time. Most CheKa men had not as yet thought of doing these things. There are records of those who did having criminal charges leveled against them - under Dzerzhinsky's direction. The charges brought against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the Show Trials did not come out of the blue. Lenin, himself a notorious international operator, had said all along that the counter-revolution in Russia operates chiefly abroad. Remnants of the Civil War's defeated White armies and its former officers were sought after and recruited by the intelligence networks of many capitalist countries, including ones which had granted formal diplomatic recognition to the victorious Soviet government, such as Great Britain. The accusations of the Show Trials were made against those accused of being part of the New Opposition, but the claim was made all along in the West that the accused were simply Old Bolsheviks. These opponents were in fact part of the aforesaid ongoing conflict that reached back to the Civil War and its Western (imperialist) intruders, such as the above mentioned intrigue organized by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, head of the British ambassadorial mission in Moscow, and to continuing disagreements within the various Socialist-semi-capitalist type parties who favored perpetuation of the NEP. Important is the rarely mentioned fact that many of Lenin's original supporters, who were enemies of the Tsar, had connections with large Western banks. These supporters were not poor peasants or outlaws of the Tsar like Stalin, nor were they working class people like Yezhov. When they later disagreed with and opposed Lenin, they were roundly criticized for it by his most loyal supporters. Many apologized, but these apologies by Europeans to Russians, Jews, Slavs, and Tatars were not made in the same spirit, nor did they carry the same moral weight, as an apology given, say, by a Ukrainian peasant or a Moscow worker. They apologized and then continued to repeat their offenses, but using more stealth. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov and others accused of being Trotskyites did in fact support Trotsky's open opposition during Party debates as late as 1925, when Trotsky was still a member of the Supreme Economic Council. At this time Dzerzhinsky and others who opposed importing metallurgical manufactures accused Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov (a Trotskyite People's Commissar of Finance) of not even being aware that much of what they wished to import and pay for in Russian rubles was rubbish sold to them instead of good engines, motorcars, and heavy metal spare parts needed for the Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 75 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View restoration of production. (The suspicion that they did know this exists. This implies there were capable of a very subtle and ingenious form of sabotage.) In the early USSR, sabotaging social programs that were created for the benefit of the people was considered a far more grievous offense than it has ever been regarded in the West, where, to begin with, few such programs existed at that time having heavy sanctions behind them. Obstructers of affirmative action programs, or health care programs in the U.S. today, though certainly regarded as morally derelict or uncaring, are not considered anywhere near so heinous, much to the detriment of the designated beneficiaries of these programs. In the USSR, underminers of social and economic programs were considered enemies of the people. The possession of knowledge that an oppositionist was working underground, establishing links with other active enemies, was also considered criminal. This offense is similar to misprision of felony in Anglo-Saxon legal codes, wherein a felony is committed merely by concealing a felony another has committed when one had no previous concert with the felon or provided no subsequent assistance as to qualify the concealer as an accessory before or after the fact. This accounts for often disparaged Soviet prosecution of family members of oppositionists and saboteurs. There were almost always protecting members in a wrecker's family. Students of current affairs might be aware of the recent case in Florida in which an automobile driver ran over a married pair of elderly bicyclists. He fled the scene of the accident, leaving his victims to die on the hot pavement, wallowing in their own pain and blood. He made no effort to make even an anonymous 911 (emergency) telephone call to bring help. Instead, he drove directly home and telephoned his sister, requesting her to allow him to conceal his damaged vehicle in her nearby rented storage facility. After secreting his vehicle there, he left the state to live with other relatives for a while. From this much alone, it is clear that he had some sort of plan for which he needed the involvement of these relatives. It is probable that at least one of those who helped him knew what he was doing, especially since an interstate hunt for the mystery hit- and-run driver was well publicized, especially in local news. No family members were prosecuted after he was finally apprehended. Even if all of them could honestly deny any knowledge of his crime, they could still have been held to a legal standard of awareness in which they are required, as a matter of law, to have been apprised of his doings. This is a matter of public policy, not an idea to be ridiculed and stigmatized as totalitarian. Everything depends on how strongly policy makers wish to discover and apprehend hit-and-run drivers, drunk drivers, wreckers, or, say, unqualified physicians. Yezhov's thesis was that opposition to the Soviet State turned by degrees into terror and counter- revolution. He realistically confronted a fact readily acknowledged by many police authorities but ignored by most academics and idealists: this is the fact that adversaries of the Soviet system easily found - or were found by - other opponents of the Stalinist regime, who were eager to enlist their aid, as in the case of the bicycle killer and his family members. Due to the prevalence of such acts of wrecking and sabotage, and the seriousness with which they were regarded, acts which were suffocating efforts to build socialism, the CheKa resorted to increasingly severe methods. Stalin openly announced the new severity to the world, which then later claimed it was shocked, the same world which took so very long to be shocked by the Nazi's brutal treatment of Jews and Communists. Nor was the same world as hot tempered toward the treatment of inmates of the worst U.S. prisons, like Alcatraz, wherein beatings and other abuse of prisoners continued unabated well after World War II. One cannot walk into a theater during the middle act of a long stage drama and expect at a glance to understand the plot development or the character motivation. The play has to be seen from the beginning and antecedents of the climax comprehended - all of what went before. It would be just as unreasonable to walk onto the scene of the recent Los Angeles Riots, or the Watts Riots of the 1960's, and claim to know from what one observes then and there that one comprehends what is going on among Blacks and non-Whites of crowded U.S. cities. This could not be done until what transpired for several generations before these events is known. Only then can reasons, motives, and actions of involved parties be understood. Coming suddenly upon a man beating another half to death in the street, is it sensible to assume that the beaten man is the victim and the beater morally reprehensible? Only a pacifist has a Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 76 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View rational and consistent - albeit absolutist - standpoint from which he can claim these things. What if, 30 minutes prior to the beating, the ostensible victim had murdered the other's wife, children, and parents in cold blood? And then, further back, what had transpired before which led to this multiple homicide? Was the killer a victim of severe physical and mental abuse by his own father? The blame gets more and more diffuse as one traces the train of events backward in time, and more and more avenues for the moral exculpation of one or the other party open up, at the same time that understanding deepens. In other words, the moral issues get foggier, while the real causation and generation of events becomes more complex yet clearer. The pacifist's point of view is consistent, but its absolutism bars real understanding. He eschews being a scientist in these matters. He immediately puts his foot down in the sand, circumscribing a moral field, the only one in which he is willing to think about and discuss the hypothetical beating. He needs to know no more. The analytical historian should do the opposite. He should draw no absolute lines in the sand, and for this reason will be accused of moral indifference. Somewhere in between these outlooks, but closer to the pacifist's, is the conventional totalitarian paradigmist. His judgements are almost as easy and ready-made for him. But, unlike the pacifist, whose moral concentration is evident, these paradigmists fraudulently misrepresent their analyses as results having little or no moral input, as being factual, empirical, and historical, when they are quite the opposite. They are often pure propaganda. Likewise, it is impossible to understand the Yezhovshchina without knowing what occurred immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and under Dzerzhinsky after the Civil War. Did Yezhov consider it significant, when there were reports of explosions or failures to meet production requirements in the principal coal-producing region in Donbas, that the administration there was almost completely staffed by former Whites? Most certainly. Then those events would seem more likely a result of infiltration. Did Yezhov think it important to note that Kirov, who replaced Zinoviev as one of the heads of the Leningrad Party organization, was later assassinated, just as Uritsky had been and nearly Lenin himself? He must have. Does this sound like paranoia or a perspicacity that challenged even Stalin's view of what was going on? For reasons suggested previously, the brain-aged Stalin began to behave as if the good fight was over, and vigilance could be somewhat relaxed. What had happened openly in Stalin's youth then continued to happen in secret, until finally, under Khrushchev, the Old Opposition prevailed at last. The totalitarian paradigm demands that students of history do the equivalent of walking in on rioting inner city Blacks in the 1960's and concluding from what they see only then and there that Blacks are villainous, violence-prone criminals, inclined to riot and tear up their own domiciles when they do not get their way. If one reached this conclusion, what would one then make of the volumes of scientific literature published prior to such outbreaks of urban violence that scientifically studied American Negroes and adjudged them to be a passive, docile, non-violent people, warm-natured, with close family bonds, and easily governed? Walk in on the common scenes of another era, during the hey-day of slavery in the U.S. South and massive American Indian relocation. What did the apropos standard, shared paradigm of the era say about these things? It said that Black Africans were born to be slaves. It said that American Indians, who, in comparison with the denizens of filthy, overcrowded English cities, only very thinly populated a vast and rich continent, and were meant to be cleared out of the way, which could be done easily. It said that Christian Anglo-Saxons had a Manifest Destiny to own and populate the American continents. Such ideas may be deplored or ridiculed today, or even considered lunatic. But the dominant paradigmists of the era (that is, the Robert Conquest's and David King's of that time) said this was so, and all men of reason agreed. It was all self-evident to all of them. There must be a rule of human cognition that makes it difficult to frame a paradigm against one's own interests, such as a paradigm which would have viewed Manifest Destiny as really Patent Genocide, or a paradigm in which White men are killer sapiens - exploitive, imperialistic, brutal monsters - while Blacks and American Indians (or 95% of the Slavic and Turanian peoples living in what became the USSR, Polynesian peoples, and any others) are pacific, overpowered docile sapiens. When the Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 77 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View conquered dared to stage a rebellion, the world was shocked. The world here refers to White Christendom's Empires, demographically a tiny minority of the world. Alternate paradigms to these widely held exculpatory paradigms were framed and shared by reasonable men on the American continents only later, too late, i.e. well after most practitioners of slavery and genocide and their victims had passed away, just as Max Planck pointed out above in regard to the final passing of scientific paradigms. However, the Bolsheviks, half a world away from the Americas at the time, already had such an alternate paradigm - as these events were happening. Marx, Engels, and Lenin initiated the paradigm war alluded to previously: the followers of Marx vs. the followers of Locke. It was a grievous insult to any of the good, Christian citizens of Europe and America who sanctioned slavery and believed in Manifest Destiny that anyone could view them as exploiters and killers who invented elaborate systems of ideas to exculpate themselves. It is a tenet of Marxist theory that those who treat others in these ways frame such paradigms (which Marx called ideologies ) in order to consolidate and strengthen their rule. Marx did not dwell on what individual psychological needs would be satisfied when individuals formulate and contemplate such paradigms. That subject was pursued by Freudians and others later. A psychological role for these paradigms seems just as important as their utility for social control and seems necessary for them to function socially. There are more reasons now than ever before for the generally more tamed and tempered contemporary capitalist ideologues to distort fact and strain reason to further the defamation of Stalinism. Today these ideologues are less reluctant to admit that socialism has humane intent and communism humane ends. The new apologists for rulers of regions formerly governed by Moscow are defending a kind of Wild West capitalism that now prevails in what was once the Soviet Union, (this refers to the Yeltsin period after USSR fell) expecting cold, hungry people who have not received a paycheck for a year to believe that the misery in which they now find themselves is still better than Stalin because they are now part of an open society with the promises of a free market. The new rulers of these fiefdoms have turned formerly developing regions of the Soviet Union back into Third World countries. The well-publicized persecution of the kulaks by the NKVD under Stalin is difficult for Westerners to understand. The totalitarian paradigmists have led them to think that the kulaks were regarded as criminals merely for practicing capitalism. They do not hear that kulak means fist, not wealthy landowner, for which there is a different Russian word. They do not hear about the unconscionable extremes to which kulaks practiced usury and the collection of rents. An accurate and informative comparison of kulaks and the muzhik victims who worked their land, with plantation owners in the ante- bellum South and their cotton-picking Negro boys, is never made. When kulak crimes are mentioned, corporate policy makers desperate to uphold profits by inflicting similar treatment of valued employees (increasingly referred to in the industry today as associates ) are obliged to remain silent. While it may be claimed that the governments of nations organizing socialist economies frequently act without restraint, trampling people and folkways in their paths, capitalist apologists can find little objection to anything that can make a profit and thereby turn a faltering business around. It is no revelation to many that great profits can be made from disease; a practice considered heinous behavior by Soviet officials. In communist societies, such physicians are apt to be put on trial, treated like war criminals or industrial saboteurs, charged with wrecking the public hygiene. From the start, Dzerzhinsky set about the task of organizing the NarKoms or NK's. These were economic and social in nature, and were veritably of, by, and for The People. In its early days, the NKVD can clearly be seen as an economic police force, not a KGB, CIA, or Gestapo-type political patrol. Virtually all economic bureaus or management operations were set up under its aegis - all connected to the NK of Internal Affairs - i.e. to the NKVD. Think of any economic practice and it had its NK - a People's Commissariat. It is not a surprise that this is so little publicized and recognized when the concept of a Soviet is even unfamiliar and puzzling to Westerners, most of whom appear to think it means something like United States of... or some such. The word means a counsel - of workers, peasants, and soldiers. These organizations spearheaded the actual fighting in the Bolshevik Revolution, so the newborn society became fundamentally organized around them. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 78 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Hence Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The New Economic Policy, which was a retreat from socialism, as stated above, gave new life, hope, impetus, and strength to the opposition that Yezhov later ruthlessly hunted down. Lenin instituted NEP as a temporary recovery act from the ravages of the Civil War. It was capitalism all over again. Under NEP, the kulaks seized opportunities to hold onto grain for higher profit at a time when urban factory workers were malnourished and starving. Kulaks thereby did not violate the letter of the new NEP laws, and it is good capitalism to hold for higher a sale price. However, they violated the spirit of NEP, which was to reconstruct a social system severely damaged by Civil War. Therefore, Stalin used what the totalitarian paradigmists present as illegal, naked, and even arbitrary force to seize and distribute the kulak-held grain. Comparisons are never invited with military dictatorships set up in Third World countries in which produce and harvests need to be seized to uphold profits (not feed starving factory workers) or even just to cut losses when a natural disaster occurs. There is a real difference between this and what Stalin did, however: Stalin did not enrich himself by seizing crops. Greed was not his motive, but rather the very idealism impugned by David King, an idealism especially strong in Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, and many in the NKVD. By 1937, the Soviet people's great success in rapidly industrializing a backward country was widely praised by enthusiastic foreign witnesses such as well-known writers H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. These achievements could not even be ignored by the bourgeois press of the time: in France, La Temps, January 1932, said: the Soviet Union has won the first round by industrializing itself without the aid of foreign capital. Actually, it was the second round. The first round was the CheKa's conquest of vandals and spoilers of the early Bolshevik Revolutionary Government. Not even the most severe critics or enemies of Communism can deny that under the guidance of Josef Stalin and the other Soviet leaders, the Soviet people achieved incredible successes. When Stalin emerged as the central leader of the Soviet Union in 1926, the country was backward, practically without industry, and militarily weak. Agriculture was primitive. In most places there was no electricity and most of the people were unable to read or write. Large areas of Siberia, on the far side of the Urals, were still untamed country whose hinterlands belonged to tribes run by Shamans. Wind-driven snow smashed straight on the eyeballs and froze in cakes to eyelashes and cheeks so that in five or ten minutes one was blind... (British historian Christopher Dobson, quoted in America's Adventure in Siberia, V.F.W., Feb. 1991, p. 14). Members of the French Colonial Battalion who were part of the Allied expedition (to assist Czech and Cossack troops in their war with the Red Army) dubbed Siberia the land of the Devil (op. cit., p.15. See also Turania. See Bibliography). The Bolsheviks were still at the mercy of the Western capitalist nations who openly hated the Bolshevik Revolutionary Government. Their society was at least a hundred or more years behind the advanced countries and, as Arthur Koestler noted in Darkness at Noon, in some areas their vast country was even more primitive, on the level of New Guinea savages. They either had to make good this lag or they would be crushed. Not one person who saw it or lived during those times, neither friend nor enemy, could deny or would deny now that from a primitive agrarian society the Soviet Union had become a World Power with a space program. From a country of small, individually farmed, hand-and-sickle crops, it had become a country of collective, large-scale mechanized agriculture. From an ignorant, illiterate and uncultured country, it had become a literate and cultured country covered by a vast network of higher, secondary and elementary schools teaching in the languages of the many nationalities of the Soviet Union. The capitalist world was not idle in the face of the colossal achievements of the Soviet people. END - PART I It is a fact that in the Ancient World there was belief in, and tales of, gods and goddesses. There where beautiful shrines and statues of all of them and they were revered and honored in every city. Then they Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 79 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View all became Devils when the New Rulers, Christians and Moslems, took over. The ancient shrines were defaced and the statues were destroyed. It would seem to me that a legend was created for Stalin, one of almost a living god. Shrines and statues were built in his honor and streets and cities were named after him. Then, after his death, another legend was created for Stalin, namely, that he was Satan. In my opinion, Stalin was neither God nor Satan; he was merely a strong and determined, very practical man of politics. It is a fact that when Stalin became the head of the Soviet State, they had only the plow; but when Stalin left the Soviet State, they had the atomic bomb. What is amazing to me, is that all of this was achieved by the sheer power of an IDEA. It doesn't matter what we think of it. The past happened. History is just someone's version of it. --The Editor Primary References: Bibliography (annotated) Barondes, Samuel H. Molecules and Mental Illness. New York: Scientific American Library (1993). Belskaya, Natalia (translator). Felix Dzerzhinsky: A Biography. Moscow: Progress Publishers (1988). Brimelow, Peter. Thank You for Smoking, American Smoker's Journal (Fall, 1994). Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression. Boston: South End Press (1990). Churchill, Winston: Great Contemporaries. N.Y.: Norton, W. W. and Co. (1991). Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford Univ. Press (1990). Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons (1994). Deutscher, Isaac. The Great Purges. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1989). Ford, C. Donovan of OSS. Boston: Little, Brown & John (1970). Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Collier Books (1963). Gardner, Martin. The Sad Story of Professor Haldane, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 16 (Spring, 1992), pp. 244 - 248. [This article, contrary to its ostensible title, is a sarcastic attack on J. B. S. Haldane by a self- professed fringe-watcher who neither is informed nor fair. Gardner was a long-time Scientific American columnist on recreational mathematical puzzles. The article includes a cartoon of Haldane drawn by Gardner himself depicting Haldane with a hammer and sickle tattooed on his forehead. The caption contemptuously refers to Haldane as a Hindu, with his caste mark, referring to Haldane's 1957 emigration to India and his taking of Indian citizenship in protest against British policy, conduct viewed by Gardner as inherently pathological or - at least - uncalled for in any case.] Getty, J. Arch, and Roberta T. Manning, Eds. Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press (1993). Helmuth, L. Neural teamwork may compensate for aging, Science News, Vol. 155, No. 16 (April 17, 1999), p. 247. Higham, Charles. American Swastika. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc. (1985). Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 80 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Huxley, Julian. Heredity East and West : Lysenko and World Science. New York: Henry Schuman (1949). Joravksy, David. 1. The Perpetual Province: ‘Ever Climbing Up the Climbing Wave,' The Russian Review 57 (Jan. 1998), p. 1 - 9. 2. The Lysenko Affair, Scientific American, Vol. 207, No. 5 (Nov. 1962), pp. 41 - 49. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. New York: Vintage Books (1968). King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalinist Russia. New York: Henry Holt & Co. (1997). Kirpalani, Haresh. Lysenko, Views of Nature and Society: Reductionist Biology as a Khrushchevite Revisionist Weapon. Unpublished draft (Sept. 1993). [A pro-Stalinist view, which presents the mistaken idea that Lysenko, was a reductionist. Lysenko consistently opposed the reduction of the phenomena of heredity to the rearrangement of nuclear chromosomal material. He advocated instead a holistic view of heredity of the kind that has been the bane of reductionist science because such holistic approaches involve compexity of an order with which reductionist approaches are as yet unable to deal mathematically. Kirpalani also presents the mistaken idea that Lysenko - a staunch Stalinist - was one of the new Khrushchevites. The aging, reluctant, and helpless Lysenko seems instead to have arrived at a modus vivendi with Khrushchev, who disliked and opposed him from the outset, due not only to Lysenko being one of Stalin's proteges, but also due to Lysenko's opposition to agricultural programs favored by Khrushchev involving the mass planting of American double-cross hybrid corn (see Part II).] (Also see: TDL-NKVD & 3 MAINS.) Knightley, Phillip. The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (1986). Kojevnikov, Alexei. 1. Rituals of Stalinist Culture at work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948, The Russian Review 57 (Jan. 1998), pp. 25 - 52. 2. Toward a Post-Cold War Historiography (A Reply to David Joravsky). Kolb, Richard K. America's Adventure in Siberia. V.F.W., February 1991, pp. 14-17. Krementsov, Nikolai. Stalinist Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1997). Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press (1996). Langdon-Davies, John. Russia Puts the Clock Back. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. (1949). Logsdon, John M., and Alain Dupas. Was the Race to the Moon Real? Scientific American, Vol. 270, No. 6 (June 1994), pp. 36 - 43. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books (1968). Olson, Mancur. 1. Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, American Political Science Review, vol. 87, no. 3 (Sept. 1993). 2. Why Is Economic Performance Even Worse After Communism Is Abandoned? Fairfax, Va.: Center for Study of Public Choice (1993). Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 81 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View Perkus, Cathy, Ed. COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom. New York: Monad Press (1976). Pritt, D. N. The Moscow Trial was Fair. London: Russia Today (1937). Pipes, Richard. Three Whys of the Russian Revolution. N.Y.: Random House (1997). Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster (1945). Strober, Deborah Hart, and Gerald S. Strober. Reagan, The Man and His Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (1998). Tishkov, Arseny. Felix Dzerzhinsky. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House (1977). Tsitriniak, Grigorii. Yezhov's Execution: Strokes to the Portrait of an Executioner From the Archives of the KGB, Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 7 (Feb., 1992), p. 15 & ff. Weinberg, Stephen. The First Three Minutes. New York: Basic Books, Inc., (1988). Wise, J. C. Woodrow Wilson, Desciple of Revolution. N. Y.: Gordon Press (1972). Other References: Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York (1951). Banfield, Edward: The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. [A contemporary American view that intellectuals are presently divided between followers of Locke versus followers of Marx.] Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. 1. The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: (1958). 2. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: (1956). Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Dewdney, A. K. Yes, We Have No Neutrons. Ehrenburg, Ilya. The Ninth Wave. Fainsod, Merle. 1. How Russia is Ruled. Cambridge, MA: (1963). 2. Smolensk Under Soviet Rule. Cambridge, MA: (1958). Gell-Mann, Murry. The Quark and the Jaguar. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit. Kafka, Franz. Der Prozess (The Trial). Kant, Immanuel. 1. Critique of Practical Reason. 2. Critique of Pure Reason. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich. 1. Khrushchev Remembers. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 82 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View 2. The Secret Speech Delivered to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Introduction by Zhores and Roy Medvedev. London: (1956), pp. 35 - 36. Knight, Amy. Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant. Koestler, Arthur. 1. Darkness at Noon. 2. The Yogi and the Commissar. LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. Levitsky, Boris. The Soviet Secret Police: the Uses of Terror. Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Medvedev, Zhores. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: (1971). Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Molotov Remembers (1993). Orwell, George. 1. Animal Farm. 2. Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. Plato. 1. Laws. 2. Meno. 3. The Republic. Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Sechenov, I. M. Reflexes of the Brain. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. New York: Harper & Row (1973). Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. New York: Merit (l965). Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: Norton (1990). [This is a treatment of Stalin's suspiciousness and paranoia. ] Wolin, Simon, and Robert Slusser. The Soviet Secret Police. Film Sources: Dzerzhinsky [sic]. Directed by Leonid Makhnach. Script by Simeon Zenin and Alexander Novogrudsky. S. S. Dzerzhinskaya and A. Tishkov, consultants. Moscow: Canadian Inter-film (1966). [This film contains rare excerpts from film and photograph archives of the former Soviet Union, including elaborate diagrams of spy rings made by the early CheKa.] Mail Order and/or Internet References: TDL-NKVD & 3 MAINS. Send $5.00 US dollars, check or money order, made out to P. Marsh and Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 83 of 84 Part I - Stalin and Yezhov - an Extra-Paradigmatic View mail to: P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA requesting paper. Or view: http://www.tiac.net/users/hcunn/rus/lyse-nkvd.html - view also the post Lysenko vs. Genetics, 3 Main Things by Comrade TL. These are two interrelated papers. Turania: Part I - Turanians and Interactions with Chinese Dynasties; Part II - Turania or the Soviet Union. Part I shows interrelations of Turanian (Ural-Altaic) people and Khanates with China. A very good historical pointer. Part II gives a descriptive, accurate picture of the alien land on which the Soviet people lived. Available by mail only. Send $7.00 US dollars, check or money order, made out to P. Marsh and mail to: P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA requesting paper. NKVD-INFO & YEZHOV Send $4.00 US dollars, check or money order, made out to P. Marsh and mail to: P.O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA requesting paper. Or view: http://www.tiac.net/users/hcunn/rus/tl-nkvd.html - view also the related post on Nikolai Yezhov by Comrade TL. This paper was also e-mailed to J. Arch Getty who thanked the author for the information. Sci.med a Usenet newsgroup on the Internet. Or one may contact any Poison Control Center in their State or any toxicology book. Newspaper article: La Temps, January 1932 Acknowledgements: I wish to give thanks to Brendan Barnett for extensive research at the University of Virginia Library and on the World Wide Web, as well as to Angela Ortiz of the Lehigh Acres Public Library for patient and professional Inter-Library Loan assistance. Especial thanks go to my wife, the editor, for making my overly-long sentences readable, for clarifying many of my concepts and presentations and for advice on finding the impossible middle-ground of writing for both scholars and laymen. Part II was going to be about Trofim Lysenko, but too much newer genetic information was coming forth, a deluge of it including cytoplasmic inheritance investigations and epigenetics, all of it justifying his ideas, which hard core geneticists just ridiculed. Nobody was ridiculing all this new information. I could not keep up with it. Copyright 1999 by Philip Marsh - Page 84 of 84