Klavan On The Culture

May 17th, 2009 5:45 pm

Stalin on my Mind

I recently had a chance to read one of last year’s big bestselling thrillers, Child 44. The first novel by Cambridge grad Tom Rob Smith is a gripping serial killer beach read with an extra dollop of gravitas provided by its depiction of Stalinist Russia. The Soviet Union in the fifties was, as we know, a slave state, its occupants kept in submission by perpetual terror, arrests, execution and torture – real torture, not the make-believe kind. And what kept occurring to me as I read the novel was that this – this abomination in which millions were slaughtered that the all-powerful state might live in perpetual incompetence – this was the atrocity for which Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs spied. You know Hiss and the Rosenbergs? They became heroes and martyrs of the left and anyone who stood against them – including the courageous and brilliant Whittaker Chambers – was savaged by a media dedicated to the socialist values the USSR represented. I suppose they could argue, “We didn’t know!” But if they didn’t, it was, at least in part, because the New York Times covered up the truth about what was going on by printing the dishonest pro-Stalin reporting of Walter Duranty.

The left and its media – which is just about all our news media – have never apologized for this. The Times still has the Pulitzer Prize it won for Duranty’s work. That wouldn’t be so bad if, without apologizing, the Times and the rest of the leftist media had reformed. But they haven’t even done that. In fact, they have simply moved on to savaging others who oppose their agenda and to worshipping other mortals who implement it.

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3 Comments

1. lyle:

There is a well-known artist here in Brooklyn whose father was prominent in the American Communist Party. We had dinner one night and he waxed eloquent about his Dad’s unwavering moral courage.

When Nikita Kruschev revealed Stalin’s crimes and the Party’s rank-and-file became disaffected, his father remained staunchly committed to Stalin’s legacy and the moral superiority of communism. The artist’s voice thrummed with pride when he told me this.

But his father had made himself a willing accomplice in untold human suffering and mass murder. He was a moral imbecile worthy of contempt and eternal damnation.

I didn’t say anything, and we haven’t spoken in the ten years since. But if I had said what was on my mind, I’m pretty sure it would have been the first time he heard it.

What worries me is that we may have the same mindset in the White House now, a president who was born, bred, nurtured, mentored, and educated in Marxist apologetics. Our news media knows or suspects this, which is why they seem so uninterested in his moral and philosophical history.

But every time I hear him talk, I hear the self-infatuated rapture of my ex-friend’s voice.

May 19, 2009 - 9:20 pm 2. Oscar:

A must read is Tim Tzouliadis’ “The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia,” which shows how the realities of Stalinist Russia were concealed by those who knew, the American Ambassador for one. Americans were in the Gulag, and “nobody knew” because no one wanted to know. People could have found out, and there were plenty of whistleblowers, but the American didn’t want to hear, and didn’t let the rest of America hear.

Jun 1, 2009 - 9:18 am 3. ronnor:

Walter Duranty and the New York Times hid the atrocities/the killings and even a genocide in the Ukraine of 10 million people. Why is it so hard to believe that these very smart people didn’t do this on purpose to further what they themselves believed in? They have been propagandists for decades of enlightened ’socialism’ and Uncle Joe was their darling; a few eggs had to be broken to make the omelet but it was for the cause. They are still at by covering for the disciple of Alinsky.

Jun 4, 2009 - 8:32 am