Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  A good way of understanding any society is to look at how it treats dissent. Under Lenin and Stalin dissent simply had no place, and dissidents of any sort were ruthlessly eradicated. After Stalin’s death a few radical voices started to emerge. Intellectuals, writers and artists wrote open letters, circulated clandestine literature (samizdat) and occasionally staged demonstrations. They were joined by nationalists in various parts of the empire and by Christians, Jews and Muslims whose beliefs had survived nearly four decades of state atheism. Fundamentally, however, the repression inherent in autocracy continued, and the initial thaw of Khruschev’s ‘de-Stalinisation’ did not last long – especially after the tanks rolled into Prague in the spring of 1968. The gulags continued, and thousands of dissidents were imprisoned there or in mental institutions. The names of most of these men and women have already been forgotten and their stories remain untold. Only a few of the more famous were able to make their voices heard. One such celebrity was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had seen active service in the Second World War and had twice been decorated. Towards the end of the war Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticising Stalin to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the gulags after which he was permanently exiled to Kazakhstan, where he became a schoolteacher. He would have remained in Kazakh obscurity had he not written to a well-connected magazine editor, who approached Khrushchev with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a searing indictment of the gulag system. Khrushchev approved publication, and the book caused a sensation inside the Soviet Union as much as outside. The hardliners in the Kremlin were horrified. Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent efforts were banned, and after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature he was exiled from his own country.

  The nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov was another Nobel laureate who achieved fame in the west as a dissident. Sakharov had played a key role in developing Russia’s nuclear arsenal but started to have qualms about the moral implications of his work. He tried to express his reservations within the system, but this only resulted in his being banned from military-related research. In 1970 he was one of the founders of the Moscow Human Rights Committee. Because of his distinguished scientific reputation he managed to escape reprisal, but when he denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan he was banished to Nizhny Novgorod, out of bounds to foreigners. When Gorbachev came to power he was allowed to return and in 1989 was elected to Parliament, but he died a few months later.

  To compare Stalin’s extermination of dissent, or even his successors’ more limited repression, with the treatment of dissent in the United States is problematic, but once again American history is Russian history writ small. From the earliest days of the republic dissidents, both religious and political, had on occasion been liable to retribution. In the middle of the nineteenth century a sixth of the US army was dedicated to destroying the Mormons, who were spared extermination only by the outbreak of the civil war. In the twentieth century the focus moved from religious dissent to political.

  After the Second World War the Russian secret police were given formal guidelines on who they could seize. Among the crimes which warranted arrest was ‘praising American democracy’. The FBI were given parallel guidelines in the form of the Smith Act. The suppression of dissent in modern America is primarily associated with the name of Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator whose grotesque fantasies of communist conspiracies temporarily rescued his faltering political career and permanently destroyed the careers of many men and women of far greater integrity, but a more significant name was Howard Smith. A Virginia congressman, in 1940 he introduced the Alien Registration Act, the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the mere advocacy of ideas a federal crime. The Act was used to control dissent during the Second World War and had some surprising supporters, including the Communist party, which was happy to see it used against the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party.

  In 1948 the Act was turned against the communists. Eleven defendants were charged in New York with conspiracy to ‘organize as the Communist party and wilfully to advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism’, and to ‘publish and circulate … books, articles, magazines, and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism’. After a nine month trial all eleven were convicted and jailed. One of them, who had received a Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in the war, had his skull crushed by a group of Yugoslav fascists while in prison. For good measure each of the defence attorneys was imprisoned for contempt. The convicted communists appealed to the Supreme Court and, although they lost, the dissenting opinions of the two Supreme Court justices who supported their case are some of the most eloquent defences of free speech since Thomas Paine. Twenty-three more left-wingers, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, were imprisoned in Chicago on similar charges. Eventually in 1957 the Supreme Court stopped the Smith Act trials, but by that time 140 Communist party leaders had been indicted and the party effectively crushed.

  The voices being suppressed as ‘un-American’ in this period were not limited to those supporting the Soviet Union. The economist Paul Sweezy (described by Paul Samuelson, America’s most famous economist, as ‘among the most promising economists of his generation’) was one of those sent to jail. At Harvard Sweezy had developed the theory of the ‘kinked’ demand curve in cases of oligopoly, and became a leading theoretician of monopolies, working closely with conservative guru Joseph Schumpeter. After serving with the OSS during the war Sweezy made the mistake of founding a left-wing (but decidedly non-communist) journal, the Monthly Review, which published articles from people like Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre.

  As in Russia, America’s dissidents were swelled by at least one Nobel laureate, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s case is a better illustration of the American approach to dissent than the victims of the Palmer Raids after the First World War and the Smith Act after the Second World War. The legal persecution of dissent is a feature of American history, but the examples are startling in part because of their comparative rarity. More typical is informal censorship. In the late 1970s Chomsky and fellow-dissident Edward Herman contracted with a subsidiary of the Warner corporation to write a monograph describing the active support the US government was providing to some of the most bloodthirsty regimes in the third world. Twenty thousand copies were printed, and the book was advertised in the New York Review of Books. At this point Warner’s senior management learnt of its existence and effectively stopped its distribution, so that, like Solzhenitsyn, Chomsky’s work was more widely read abroad than at home. The French edition even had an introduction by Jean-Pierre Faye comparing the US treatment of the book with the Russian suppression of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

  In Russia the international fame of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov afforded them a degree of protection that in America comes not from a Nobel prize but from Hollywood. The actress and activist Susan Sarandon commented that only celebrities are able to dissent in America. She was asked to appear on CNN to talk about first amendment issues and suggested that Noam Chomsky or Edward Said should go on with her; the network ‘declined’.

  In both Russia and America the issue of imperial wars abroad provoked particular dissent. Andrei Sakharov’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Jane Fonda’s opposition to the war in Vietnam gained international attention. William Buwalda, the American soldier imprisoned in 1909 for attending an anarchist rally, campaigned vociferously against American imperialism when he was released from prison. Drawing on his experiences as part of the American army of occupation in the Philippines, he wrote (in terms eerily similar to later Vietnam War protests) of ‘men, women, and children hunted like wild beasts, and all this in the name of Liberty, Humanity, and Civilization’. The natives’ only crime, he said, was to be ‘fighting for their homes and loved ones’, while the United States was inflicting ‘legalized murder’ on ‘a weak and defenceless people. We have not even the excuse of self-defence.’ Those
attacking the dissidents also used the same language from one war to another. ‘Mr President, reluctantly and only from a sense of duty am I forced to say that American opposition to the war has been the chief factor in prolonging it,’ said one senator, who could have been talking about Vietnam or Iraq (or, had he been Russian, about Afghanistan or Chechnya). In fact Senator Beveridge was talking about dissidents like Buwalda, whom he claimed were prolonging the ‘insurrection’ in the Philippines.

  Hollywood star Gregory Peck financed the film The Trial of the Catsonville Nine about the persecution of nine Jesuit priests, artists and intellectuals who burnt their draft cards to oppose Vietnam and CIA subversion in Latin America. The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, but even Peck could get only limited release in America. Nor did his celebrity status, or that of fellow dissident Jane Fonda, stop them being bugged by the Nixon administration. Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator was banned in Russia; Peck’s film was simply not shown in America.

  Whereas tsarist and communist Russia had simply suppressed debate, over centuries the United States had evolved mechanisms for ensuring that open debate was managed in ways that ensured the continuity of the status quo. Contemporary dissidents like investigative journalist Greg Palast are permitted to openly express their views. Dissidents can gain fame but not influence. Dissident composer Stephen Sondheim was awarded the National Medal of Arts, but his musical Pacific Overtures, with its damning depiction of US imperialism in Asia, might as well have remained unwritten. Perhaps the clearest example of the American celebrity dissident was John Kenneth Galbraith – heaped in honours and totally ignored. Galbraith penned the classic study of corporatism, The New Industrial State, in the mid-1960s and from then on was an outspoken critic of corporatist imperialism. In 2005 the ninety-six-year-old former Harvard University professor, US ambassador and adviser to presidents from Roosevelt II to Lyndon Johnson was still campaigning, insisting that without the power of the corporations America would never have invaded Iraq. Almost universally acknowledged as one of the greatest intellects of the twentieth century, there are hardly any aspects of American public life on which Galbraith did not wax eloquent to no effect.

  The American approach to opposition is epitomised by the case of Juan Bosch. In 1963 the elected government of the Dominican Republic was overthrown in a US-approved military coup. Two years later supporters of the ousted president, Juan Bosch, tried to stage a counter coup and US marines, commanded by John S. McCain II, father of 2008 presidential candidate John S. McCain III, intervened. Government forces, protected by 20,000 US troops, butchered hundreds of rebel troops and civilians. In the Russian empire no more would have been heard of the deposed president, but Bosch sat down to write a book, published in New York, attacking what he called ‘Pentagonism’. (He argued that for America old-style military conquests – designed to allow colonisation and economic exploitation – had been replaced by military adventures designed to reinforce the Pentagon’s control of its own country.) As a dissident statesman Bosch could not be tolerated; as a dissident writer he could be safely ignored.

  In the twenty-first century the new Russian leadership started to learn the more subtle methods of suppressing dissent that the United States had pioneered. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia a national hero, although he found himself effectively sidelined politically. But in introducing glasnost in the 1980s Gorbachev had jumped from no debate to open debate with no such mechanisms. To him glasnost was just a way of oiling perestroika, but it turned out to be far more than this. He failed to anticipate its impact on the role of the Communist party, on the functioning of the economy, on the media, on almost every aspect of Soviet society. Above all, he did not understand the imperial implications of what he had unleashed.

  The End of the Russian Empire?

  At a very simplistic level, letting people speak out meant letting people speak out in their own language, and that in itself uncorked the genies of nationalism. The old Soviet Union had 149 distinct languages. Almost half the population had a language other than Russian as their native tongue, and a quarter did not speak Russian at all.

  Glasnost would make visible the frailty of those bonds – military, economic and ideological – that the world believed were holding the empire together, and which perestroika was designed to re-invigorate. Perestroika could not work without glasnost but glasnost would destroy what perestroika was intended to save. Once it became plain that the Russian emperor had no clothes his capacity to instil fear evaporated.

  The unravelling of the Russian empire happened with astonishing speed. In 1979 the Soviet Union launched its last imperial adventure when it occupied Afghanistan, and the mighty Red Army found itself bogged down in a fruitless war with American-armed Muslim tribesmen. At the same time the western colonies started to smoulder again. After Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 it was now the turn of Poland. Striking shipyard workers and their union Solidarity were suppressed in 1981, but by the time Gorbachev came to power it was clear that something had to give.

  Russia was spending 18 per cent of its GDP on the military. Not only were its troops massed on the troubled frontier with China, policing its southern and western colonies and fighting a full-scale war in Afghanistan, but massive sums were being spent in an unwinnable arms race with America. Gorbachev tried to end this contest by offering to scrap all his nuclear weapons if the United States would do the same – an offer that the US, from its position of strength, contemptuously refused. In signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the United States agreed under Article VI to work in ‘good faith’ towards the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, but once US nuclear supremacy became overwhelming this article was ignored. (When in November 2004 the UN voted to ban the production of more fissile material – the essential ingredient of nuclear bombs – 147 nations voted for; only the US voted against.)

  The openness of glasnost made ever more obvious the weakness not just of the economy but of the whole apparatus of the state. Under perestroika more and more power was being devolved, and for the first time since the civil war power centres began to emerge outside Moscow. Gorbachev pushed colonial leaders in eastern Europe into reform, replacing men like Gomulka in Poland who were unwilling to change, but this process was a double-edged sword – capable of both slashing bureaucracy and severing ties with Moscow. Nationalist pressures in the western colonies boiled over again, and with Gorbachev unwilling to intervene militarily East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria gained their independence. Gorbachev was given a categorical assurance by the US that if he would agree to a reunited Germany remaining in NATO the US would not expand its empire eastward by admitting former Warsaw Pact nations to NATO, but as the American natives had long before, Russians learnt that US assurances were meaningless.

  Yugoslavia and Romania had already achieved political independence, and they joined the others in throwing off the ideological chains of communist rule. Afghanistan was abandoned. The Baltic colonies incorporated into the Soviet Union after the Second World War took advantage of Gorbachev’s political freedoms to demand independence. Despite brutal ‘interventions’ by interior ministry troops in Lithuania and Latvia in 1991, it was clear that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was coming apart at the seams.

  The dismantling of empire was not smooth, and one reason is that Gorbachev was not trying to dismantle the empire. Troops were brought home from Afghanistan, where 50,000 of them had died, but attempts to hold the empire together by force continued in the Baltic colonies and especially in the south, where Azerbaijan and Armenia were almost at war with each other. In Georgia Soviet troops murdered twenty protesters, the majority women and girls, in a futile attempt to roll back the tides of nationalism. In the Caucasus and in the Asian republics ethnic tensions erupted into violence, and the Red Army brutally suppressed riots in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Nevertheless Belarus, Kirgizstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and U
zbekistan all proclaimed their sovereignty. Only a few of the smaller southern colonies, like Chechnya, remained, while the likes of Georgia and Armenia broke away, leaving a tangled mess of viciously feuding remnants. Not only did Russia’s newest colonies in eastern Europe declare their independence, but so too did states that many in the west had long forgotten were imperial possessions, like Belarus and Ukraine.

  In a 1954 press conference President Eisenhower had employed a metaphor that would become a linchpin of American foreign policy: the nations of the world, he said, were like a ‘row of dominos’; let the communists knock over one and they would all fall one after the other. The theory was right; he just got the wrong dominos.

  At the beginning of 1991 Gorbachev turned to the tools of democracy to hold the empire together. He called a referendum in which more than three-quarters of those taking part voted to preserve the USSR. But the poll was boycotted in those regions where independence movements were strongest – the Baltic, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Increasingly isolated Gorbachev was caught between hard-line party bosses, reformers inside Russia and nationalists elsewhere. By the end of 1991 he had resigned and the USSR had been dissolved. The Russian empire, it seemed, was no more. It had disappeared so quickly because those on the fringes had retained their psychological independence, and as soon as the forces holding the empire together weakened they asserted their physical independence. The contrast with the way that America had grown was stark. The people in most of the territories conquered by the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became psychologically committed to the American empire, usually because the original inhabitants were replaced by American settlers. But even where significant local populations survived, as in California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and – in the twentieth century – the Danish West Indies, independence movements, although occasionally grabbing headlines, have been virtually irrelevant. (The two significant conquered territories that retained their psychological independence – Cuba and the Philippines – were granted their independence with little argument.) Neither tsars nor commissars ever achieved this degree of what might be called psychological imperialism.