Just as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance. Here’s where Klein’s catastrophism distorts the picture. Her controlling metaphor for the attack on Iraq is the initial “shock and awe” bombardment, designed to numb Saddam’s forces and the overall civilian population into instant surrender and long-term submission. But the “shock and awe” tactic was a bust. Having sensibly decided not to fight or die on an American timetable, many of Iraq’s soldiers regrouped to commence an effective resistance.
Capitalists try to use social and economic dislocation to advantage, but so do those they oppress. War has been the mother of many a positive social revolution, as have natural disasters. The incompetence of the Mexican police and emergency forces after the huge earthquake of 1985 prompted a huge popular upheaval. In Latin America there have been shock attacks and shock doctrines for 500 years. Right now, in Latin America, the pendulum is swinging away from the years of darkness, of the death squads and Friedman’s doctrines.
Klein’s outrage is admirable as are her specific accusations across six decades of infamy. But in her larger ambitions her metaphors betray her. From the anti-capitalist point of view she’s too gloomy by half. A capitalism that thrives best on the abnormal, on disasters, is by definition in decline. As Cassius put it, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
September 18
Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is in its most literal sense an act of collective memory, and the only quibble I have with the author’s tremendous achievement is that the homage to those he rightly calls “the heroes” of his book comes not at the beginning but at the end, in his “Afterword and Acknowledgements” where he scrupulously describes how The Whisperers came to be written.
The project really began as a series of interviews by Figes when he was a graduate student in Moscow in the mid-1980s. Ultimately, after Figes began work in earnest on this book in 2002, he had several teams in the former Soviet Union searching through previously closed archives (some of which have now gone back under lock and key) locating notebooks, albums, diaries—assembling the vast cast of characters, over a thousand of them, who contribute their memories. Masterfully composed and controlled as a narrative by Figes, this is a collective testimony in which you can hear voices through a doorway open at last, the hopes, fears, and numberless awful tragedies of the Soviet era. As Figes himself says of the families who gave him his book, “These people are the heroes of Whisperers. In a real sense this is their book. For us these are stories, for them it is their lives.”
As overture, we hear from the children of 1917 and memories of the idealism of those early years. Even then it had a sinisterly prophetic cast.
When Sonia Laskin was rejected by the Komsomol—the Communist youth organization—in 1927, the three girls in this Jewish family formed a reading circle with their cousin Mark and other little friends and would “discuss politics and hold ‘show trials’ of characters from literature. Once they held a trial of the Old Testament.” Even as the kids held their trials, the Bolsheviks were methodically destroying the livelihood of Sonia’s father, Samuil, who owned a herring stall on Botnaia Square, not far from the Kremlin.
Taking from the theories of the Montessoris, Soviet educators invented improving games such as “Search and Requisition,” with the boys playing the role of Red Army units looking for hidden grain in the countryside and the girls acting as the “bourgeois speculators” or “kulak” peasants hiding it. Fantasy melted into reality with horrible speed and Figes soon plunges us into the horrors of forced collectivization of the Russian peasantry, seen centrally through the experiences of the Golovin family.
We meet them amid pastoral contentment: “On 2 August 1930, the villagers of Obukhovo celebrated Ilin Day, an old religious holiday to mark the end of high summer when the Russian peasants held a feast and said their prayers for a good harvest.” They all went off to the house of the Golovins, the biggest family in the village, headed by Nikolai, an excellent farmer. The Golovins were not rich. Their net assets add up to two barns, several pieces of machinery, three horses, seven cows, a few dozen sheep and pigs, iron bedsteads and a samovar. Alas for the Golovins, such modest possessions doomed them as “kulaks,” a word originally used by peasants to designate usurers and wheeler dealers. The Bolsheviks transmuted it into the absurd designation—a death sentence to millions—of “peasant capitalist,” and ultimately a term dooming any peasant opposing forced collectivization.
The pleasant supper in Obukhovo notwithstanding, the destruction of rural Russia had already begun. In two months at the start 1930 half the Soviet peasantry—sixty million people in 100,000 villages—were herded into collective farms. The specific ruin of the Golovins commenced, courtesy of Kolia Kuzmin, a loutish eighteen-year-old son of a failed farmer and local drunk. At the head of a posse of twelve armed teenagers, he becomes the local agent of the Komsomol.
By September Obukhovo, in existence since 1522, was gone. And the kolkhoz (i.e., collective farm) “New Life” was in its place. The peasants had lost their land. Kuzmin, drunk, violent, and incompetent, was chairman of the kolkhoz. The first winter saw half the horses dead and the peasants paid fifty grams of bread a day each. Nikolai Golovin was in a distant prison, with one son in the Gulag, working on the White Sea Canal. Nikolai’s wife Yevdokiia and two daughters were still in “New Life,” in a hovel with one cow, which Kuzmin a few months later confiscated along with everything else, leaving them one iron bedstead.
They were deported on May 4, 1931, given one hour to prepare. Kuzmin confiscated the eight-year-old Antonina’s shawl. “No one hugged us or said a parting word,” Antonina recalls. “They were afraid of the soldiers.”
Figes correctly calls his chapter on forced collectivization “The Great Break,” and writes that Stalin’s destruction of the kulaks was not only an appalling human tragedy, but “an economic catastrophe” for the Soviet Union, from which Soviet agriculture never recovered. In the ensuing famine of the early 1930s anywhere from four to eight million died.
The strength of The Whisperers is the range of the individual testimonies. On the one hand, “Dmitry Streleys who was 13 in 1930 remembers Serkov, chairman of his village Soviet in the Kurgan region of Siberia, telling his father that he’d been designated a kulak and was being sent into exile: ‘I formed a committee of the poor and we sat through the night to choose the families. There is no one in the village who is rich enough to qualify, and not many old people, so we simply chose the 17 families. You were chosen. Please don’t take it personally. What else could I do?’ ”
On the other, we also hear one of the requisitioning Red Army men, Lev Kopelev, a young Communist, remembering the screams of children and the glare of the peasants, and telling himself “I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity.”
The family sagas in this vast canvas are of scarcely believable tenacity and endurance. No novelist would dare invent such feats and such coincidences. Take the Ozemblovskys, a family of six, in the Minsk region. They were exiled to the north, 3,000 kilometers from their home. While Aleksandr stayed to look after the two boys, Serafima and the two girls, nine and five, escaped and hiked south through the forest. Serafima had several gold teeth and periodically would pull one of them to buy a lift in a cart.
They made it home, where Serafima left her daughters and hiked 3,000 km north again, only to find that her husband had been arrested and one of her sons was now working as a police informer. She herself is arrested, escapes again, returns south, where she finally collects her daughters and sets up a new home, where the whole family is finally united.
Terror is vivid on page after page, particularly in the dreadful year of 1937. Maria Drozdova, from a strictly religious peasant family, remembers how her mother Anna became demented with terror after her husband, a church warden, was arrested. “She would not leave the house. Sh
e became afraid of talking in the room, in case the neighbors overheard. In the evenings she was terrified of switching on the lamp, in case it drew the attention of the police. She was even afraid to go to the toilet, in case she wiped herself with a piece of newspaper which contained an article with Stalin’s name.”
Another girl got home late from a party in 1939 and found she had lost her key. She knocked on the door at 1 a.m. There was a long pause. Then her father opened it, dressed as if ready to leave on a journey. He had thought the knock heralded the NKVD. In his mind he had already been tortured and shot. He gazed at her as though in a trance and then, for the first and last time in her life, slapped her across the face.
From every walk of life, from high party people like the Stalinist writer Konstantin Simonov, to peasants like the Golovins, the Soviet tragedy offers itself up, unforgettable in its heroism, villainy, cowardices large and small, endurance.
Take Ignatii Maksimov, from the Novgorod region. He is arrested and sentenced to work in the Gulag, on the murderous White Sea Canal where 25,000 workers died—in the first winter, many simply froze to death. Ignatii’s wife Maria gets a job as a cook on the Leningrad to Murmansk railway that ran at one point along the northern sector of the Canal. She wrote notes to her husband on scraps of paper which she threw out the window of the train. Eventually she got an answer from her husband. One of the scraps has reached him, though he was working fifty miles north of where she thought he was. They were finally reunited in Archangelsk.
Here is the whole arc of Soviet history. In its amazing testimonies to the strength of the Russian family in the Soviet Union, as well as the awful fissures the system imposed on those families, The Whisperers is like a rainbow over a graveyard.
October 26
In America awareness never sleeps and has been on particularly active duty this October, designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Domestic Violence Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Energy Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency); and—we speak here specifically of October 22–29—Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (proclamation of David Horowitz, a fat and hairy ex-Trot living in Los Angeles).
When I first saw Horowitz he was neither fat nor hairy nor apparently aware of Islamo-Fascism. This was in the late 1960s in London and he was working for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, studying at the feet of Isaac Deutscher and Ralph Miliband. About a decade later I saw him again, this time in Washington, DC, presiding over a well-publicized “Second Thoughts” conference, announcing his departure from the left. He spoke harshly of his parents’ decision to make him watch uplifting features about the Soviet Union and to forbid any Doris Day movies, a common blunder in child-brain-washing techniques among the comrades at that time.
Since then, like other Trotskyist vets, such as Christopher Hitchens, Horowitz has thrown his energies into crusading on behalf of the American right, fuelled in his efforts by copious annual disbursements from the richer denizens of that well-populated sector. Richard Mellon Scaife—apex demon in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” identified by Hillary Clinton amid the Lewinsky scandal—has poured millions into Horowitz’s organizations, as have other well-heeled conservative foundations. Every now and again Horowitz will raise some spectacularly nutty alarum, like the Los Angeles Times being taken over by pinkos, and I always assume that Horowitz must be filling out his annual grant applications, and reminding Scaife that others may snooze and idle, but he, Horowitz, is unceasing in his vigilance against sedition.
In Horowitz’s bestiary, sedition comes in all the traditional forms, from Commies on campus to Commies in the press, and he’s churned out endless bulletins charting their insidious reach. Some of his specific accusations have no doubt been useful to fearful school administrations eager to harry and expel the few radical teachers able to find employment in these bleak times.
But the problem for Horowitz is one of supply. The left in America is really in very poor shape: near zero Commies, and really only a sprinkling of radical black profs, militant lesbians, and kindred antinomians to beat up on. The notion of pinkos in the media is laughable to all except the fearful imaginations of millionaires like Scaife. Hence the spotlight on Islamo-Fascism, a gloriously vague term whose origin is the topic of a tussle between Malise Ruthven, who used the term in 1980 to describe all authoritarian Islamic governments, and Stephen Schwartz, yet another fat, bearded former Trotskyist who says he was the first to use it in its specific application in 2000, eventually receiving a tap on the shoulder for so doing from Christopher Hitchens and John Sullivan. Arise, Sir Stephen!
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week has been featuring Horowitz and big-name ranters of the right like Anne Coulter and Fox’s Sean Hannity, plus former US Senator Rick Santorum, and noted Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. They descended on various college campuses to be received by Christian-Fascists and the curious while they hurled imprecations at the left for being soft on sons of the Prophet stoning women to death for adultery.
The reaction of the left has been mixed. In some ways it always takes Horowitz’s antics far too seriously, though the latter’s effect on timid college administrations cannot be entirely gainsaid. On the other hand, Awareness Week is having a galvanizing effect. Coalitions have formed to combat Horowitz’s version of Awareness with a superior Progressive Awareness about what is good or not so good about Islam. Since Santorum and others have ripe records of intolerance for women, the air is usefully thick with shouts of “hypocrite.” Horowitz is probably the best organizer the left has these days.
November 7
Paris in Brumaire—late October and early November in the French revolutionary calendar devised by d’Eglantine—should be mellow and the vegetable stalls full of bolete mushrooms. But this Brumaire has been inhospitable, with a wind as sharp as the knife that sliced through d’Eglantine’s neck—though conditions are tolerable when the sun is up.
The plus side held gloriously clear skies and beautiful light, filling Suger’s great cathedral at St. Denis. At the Pompidou there is an immense exhibition of Giacometti, in which profusion has a reverse effect. Two or three Giacometti sculptures by themselves look great, but hundreds tell you the guy ran out of steam some time in the late ’30s. His studio became a mecca for top level photographers doing “the sculptor at work.” Cartier Bresson, Brassai, Arnold Newman, and Irving Penn were all in attendance. Giacometti was a manly looking Swiss-Italian, and played the “artist at work” part well. Annette G. looked less happy as the decades passed and there are odd times when he spends three or four years sculpting and drawing a couple of Japanese men, at least one of whom was Annette’s lover. Giacometti chose his fans well too. Genet did a big essay on him and Sartre wrote the catalogue intro for his first New York show.
The Modern Art collection at the Pompidou is really good and reminds one—if reminders are necessary—just how awful “modern art” collections are in US. There was room after room of great and interesting things: ravishing Kandinskys, a fantastic room of Picabias, one with two naked women in ’40s movie poster style with a bulldog, plus a really frightening Golden Calf. Then on the next floor a whole late-modern collection with excellent acquisitions from 1950s, 1960s, and on.
Among them was “Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971,” the series by Hans Haacke that got his one-man show axed at the last minute by the Guggenheim in the 1970s. The work consists of 146 photographs of buildings, many of them slums, acquired between 1951 and 1971 by Harry Shapolsky, named at the time as the city’s top slumlord. Haacke included in each photo the info given in the Real Estate Directory of Manhattan. They make ironic reading now. Back then, to take a couple of examples, Shapolsky had 219 E. 94th, a five-story building with an assessed land value of $25,000 and a total value of $47,000. A six-story walk-up, 346 East 13th St., had an assessed land value of $22,000 and a total value of $57,000.
The best pieces on this floor of the Pompidou were an immense robe made from bottle tinfoil and bottle caps, maybe fifty feet by fifty feet, looking like a Klimt, by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui; and a fifty-foot sperm whale or plane, depending on one’s point of view, made from bamboo, with about 10,000 scissors, knives, etc., confiscated by security at Sao Paulo airport. The artist is Cai Guo Qiang, about whom one story I found begins with the promising words that he is best known “for his magnanimous works using gunpowder.”
The greatest delight of the Pompidou’s modern collection is that not one Warhol—as profuse in American institutions of culture as dinosaurs—was on display.
December 11
Overheard by the SF cab driver:
Twenty-something female passenger: How are you feeling?
Twenty-something male passenger: Like I’m about to pass out.
Female passenger: Awesome. Passing out is awesome.
2008
January 2
It’s time to take stock of the landscape. The American political system, as conditioned by corporate cash, legal obstructions to independent candidacies, and the corporate press, is designed to eliminate any substantive threat to business as usual. In the case of the Democrats, the winnowing process is working well. Mike Gravel, by far the most vivacious and radical of the party’s candidates on the substantive matters of the war and empire, was swiftly marginalized. I’ve seen very few Gravel buttons.
Dennis Kucinich seems to have a lock on those Democrats prepared to stay true to a hopeless outsider. I don’t understand this loyalty to the Ohio congressman. The point of hopeless outsiders is to give us hope. It’s a dialectical thing. They convince us that their cause is not hopeless, but his signs and buttons and tickers already look as though they’re collectibles on eBay.
A Colossal Wreck Page 42