To the editors:

This we know: history is not subject to the same natural laws as physics, despite the best efforts of Joseph Stalin to make it so.¹ Nor is historical truth able to be verified by experimental evidence, like the physical sciences. Nor is “evil” a useful concept for historical analysis. Having surveyed some of the darkest chapters in Soviet history, Mikhail Shifman concludes that “[c]ommunist regimes have a clear and discernible history. If they failed in achieving social justice, they have succeeded in exterminating human dignity. As a physicist, I must conclude that the solutions proposed were wrong.” Shifman justifies his bleak conclusion about the history of the Soviet Union and the prospect for human emancipation by appealing to the so-called experimental data of unrelenting brutality from the Soviet era. The data Shifman cites, along with the data he neglects, reflect a naive, Cold War empiricism that rips the Soviet experiment completely out of the context of the violent twentieth century in which it was born and ultimately died.

Pace Shifman, not even the physical sciences are value-free. The human sciences even less so.² Historical data depend on the paradigm adopted by the historian. Soviet history is no more unambiguous than any other, although it is more contentious. Shifman’s pessimistic analysis springs from a crude empiricism that erroneously equates the human sciences with the physical sciences. In doing so, he erases historical nuance. The result is a polemic that not only depicts the Soviet Union as worse than Nazi Germany but, on that basis, concludes that any aspirations for social justice and human emancipation are doomed to failure. It is a dangerous conclusion.

The fate of German quantum chemist Hans Hellman is indeed painfully tragic. Like so many other refugees from Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Hellman fled to the Soviet Union and fell victim to Stalin’s Great Purge. But what does this outcome tell us? If we follow Shifman’s narrative and logic, it is but one more example of the inevitable descent into relentless brutality that characterized the Soviet Union from beginning to end: the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917, the Red Terror that took place during the civil war between 1918 and 1920, mass starvation due to forced agricultural collectivization, mass killings unleashed by terror, and executions in post-war Soviet-occupied East-Central Europe. Hitler’s genocidal regime gets a mention, but only in passing. Shifman misleadingly blames the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) alone for Hitler’s unimpeded ascent to power because it rejected the alleged “overtures of the Social Democrats [SPD] to form a political alliance against the Nazis.” This is a half-truth that ignores the mutual unwillingness of the SPD leadership, fearful of stoking revolution, to ally with the KPD. The communists were at least willing to resist Nazism, not capitulate.³

In this vein, Shifman’s eye is firmly fixed on what he sees as communist barbarism. No historian worthy of the title denies the ruthlessness of the Soviet state, above all in the Stalin years. But most historians, sympathetic or otherwise, recognize two defining achievements of the Soviet Union. First, it underwent an extraordinary transformation from a semi-feudal, agrarian society into the world’s second largest nuclear–industrial power, after the United States.⁴ Second, due to its crash industrialization, it was the formidable military–industrial power of the Soviet state and its capacity to mobilize millions of Soviet citizens that ultimately vanquished Nazi Germany, a much more industrialized capitalist power geared for genocidal conquest.⁵ Both of these world historical achievements came at a terrible price. At least 3.5 million Soviets starved in the course of forced-march industrialization, which Shifman refers to as the Holodomor, thereby implicitly endorsing the contested Ukrainian nationalist argument that this was genocide.⁶ An additional 27 million died in the fight to defeat Nazism, amounting to nearly half the total dead in the Second World War. Shifman completely omits these titanic events from his cautionary tale, thereby depriving him of any context that might help to explain, which is not to excuse, the anguish of Soviet history.

Shifman equates Nazism and Stalinism, presenting them as twin evils. He is not the first to do this. Numerous scholars have done so, usually under the rubric of “totalitarianism” that seemingly defined these two mobilized states.⁷ But not only does he suggest the two states were mirror images of one another, he implies a causal connection between them. The cloud that descended on Germany with Nazism’s ascent to power in 1933, he tells us, first cast its shadow with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Shifman is not the first to do this either. During the 1980s Historikerstreit over German responsibility for the Holocaust, the conservative philosopher-historian Ernst Nolte infamously argued that Nazism was a legitimate reaction to the threat of what he termed Bolshevik class genocide, thereby offering scholarly succor to Hitler’s own justification for his war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.⁸

Causality is fundamental in traditional historical analysis. Shifman’s implied suggestion that Bolshevism was the root cause and precursor to Nazism ignores the fact that fascist movements, along with revolutionary socialism, were, in the first instance, an expression of the political crises that had been racking Europe since the beginning of the twentieth century.⁹ The most notorious example was Russia’s ferociously antisemitic Black Hundreds. Total warfare retched up the violently anti-Bolshevik Italian Fascisti and German Freikorps, precursors to mass fascism. In short, fascism was not simply caused by Bolshevism. Under the banner of anti-Bolshevism, fascism waged war on communism, socialist democracy, and the organized labor movement as a whole. The entire Left, revolutionary and reformist, fell victim to Hitler when he first came to power, as Shifman rightly notes.

The language in which Shifman’s polemic is couched reveals a great deal about the limits of his perspective. His cloud metaphor masks two distinct yet mutually exclusive phenomena. On the one hand, a fascist dictatorship came to power in 1933 by parliamentary means in collusion with Germany’s military-capitalist elites, backed by brown-shirted street terror against Bolshevism.¹⁰ On the other, a Marxist revolutionary government rode to power in 1917 impelled by a mass movement of workers and peasants that generated a new participatory form of government, soviets (councils), that overthrew the Russian state with barely a shot being fired. Contrary to Shifman’s account, what occurred in 1917 was not a coup but a revolution against total war, mass suffering, and underdevelopment.¹¹ As such, it was a threat to the entire imperial order, not only in Europe, but indeed in its colonial world. Shifman fails to even mention the violent environment of total war and backwardness that gave birth to and scarred the Soviet experiment. For Shifman, the so-called Bolshevik coup is just there. But why and in what hellish circumstances the revolution took place and how they impacted developments in Russia and abroad, the issues that engage historians, are missing from his account.

From 1917 onward, the European elites were determined to erase Bolshevism and the new, industrializing state-socialist order it was attempting to establish. The result was a ferocious civil war, unleashed by the remnants of the old czarist order. Again, contrary to Shifman, the Red Terror, officially declared on September 2, 1918, was the Bolshevik reaction to the counterrevolutionary White Terror—massacres and assassinations—amid economic collapse, famine, and civil war fueled by foreign military intervention. In particular, by Britain, France, the United States, and Germany.¹² From 1918, a desperately poor Soviet Union was under siege militarily and economically. Against Bolshevik expectations, an alliance with socialist Germany was denied them, drowned in blood by forces that would form the shock troops of Hitler’s Nazism. The result was a besieged, would-be socialist fortress commanded by Stalin, who ruthlessly industrialized and armed the Soviet state at the expense of millions of peasants, Ukrainians, Russians, and Kazakhs, while vanquishing his erstwhile Bolshevik comrades. Total war is what Stalin and his henchmen feared in the 1930s, and that is exactly what Hitler promised, threatened, and unleashed against the imagined specter of Judeo-Bolshevism. The result was an extremely authoritarian Soviet regime that, as the threat of war rose exponentially, fueled internal social and political tensions to white heat, triggering Stalin’s murderous paroxysm of political paranoia during the Great Purge that saw enemies everywhere, at home and abroad.¹³ Foreigners, no matter how pro-Soviet they might appear, especially Germans, were particularly suspect. Undoubtedly, that paranoia is what Hellman fell innocent victim to, along with other refugees from Europe’s dictators, including communists whom Stalin surrendered to Hitler as part of their Faustian 1939 non-aggression pact.

Shifman is particularly exercised by those intellectual fellow travelers of Stalinism who ignored or apologized for his crimes. This was indeed a disturbing phenomenon. Of course, it is easier to be wise after these cataclysmic events. How could they have been so naive or dishonest? Contempt may be our first reaction, but the task of the historian, however motivated by ethical concerns about the past, is to explain phenomena, however repugnant, not simply condemn them. To do so requires historical empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. Viewing the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, notably in Italy, Germany, and Spain, many intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union as a citadel against fascism. This was especially true when the Western powers, Britain and France especially, seemed to appease and even collude with Nazi Germany, as they actually did during the Spanish Civil War and in the “peace for our time” Munich Agreement. It is not so surprising that many intellectuals, communist and non-communist, actively endorsed the Soviet Union and Stalin personally when they seemed like the only barriers to Armageddon. In such fraught circumstances, the sinister Moscow trials of alleged fifth-column enemies, such as Hellman, seemed credible to the fellow travelers. And for them, like millions of ordinary citizens, the Red Army’s subsequent pivotal role in vanquishing Nazism and liberating Europe from genocidal occupation, above all the Nazi death camps, while the Western allies held their fire, was proof positive of the Soviet Union’s moral superiority. It is in this context that we need to understand the outrage expressed by some of the most illustrious intellects of their time about figures such as Victor Kravchenko. In the aftermath of the apocalyptic war, he was seen as a traitor to the anti-fascist cause, as were millions of collaborators with Axis occupation, many of whom were subject to summary justice.¹⁴

For many pro-Soviet intellectuals the seeming superiority of the Soviet system was an ethical issue—a “New Civilization” as Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it—rather than an analytical issue, based on understanding the nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union as a political and social phenomenon, and its place in the world. Echoing their ethical approach, the Webbs could unequivocally hail the “success of collective agriculture” and justify the Moscow “treason trials.”¹⁵ When revelations began to emerge about the Great Purge and the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, and especially in the wake of Stalin’s denunciation by Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, many former Soviet sympathizers withdrew politically. Even worse, some became cold warriors, lauding witch hunts at home and anti-Sovietism abroad. Ex-communist intellectuals, such as Arthur Koestler, became what Isaac Deutscher’s termed “inverted Stalinists,” mired in “irrational emotionalism” and railing against the “God that Failed.”¹⁶ Such are the pitfalls of moralizing about evil rather than deploying historical understanding.

Shifman concludes with a warning: Those who are foolish enough not to think we live in the best of all possible, if imperfect, worlds and dare to fight for a better one should not be seduced by beautiful theories that fly in the face of seemingly incontrovertible data from failed communist experiments in the extermination of human dignity. Threatened as we are by a heating planet, and now ravaged by a lethal pandemic that has exposed the obscene social inequality and the destruction of the natural world wrought by unfettered neoliberal capitalism, this is a deadly recipe for political passivity and despair. Mass support for European fascism in the 1930s expressed the lack of a real political alternative for millions confronted with degrading destitution. Hitler’s destruction of the German Communist and Social Democratic parties and the trade unions, aided and abetted by Stalin’s social fascism doctrine, which equated the Social Democratic party with Nazism, destroyed any real alternative to the fraudulence of so-called National Socialism. The result was the ultimate war of human extermination. Nearly 90 years later, the rise of authoritarian, racist populism and neofascism under Donald Trump, supported by millions of Americans scorched by neoliberal deindustrialization, is a forewarning that history could repeat itself.¹⁷ Fortunately, human society is not simply subject to the laws of physics. Human beings have collective, conscious agency—an attribute that needs to be mobilized in favor of human emancipation now more than ever. That we should know.

Roger Markwick

Mikhail Shifman replies:

In his letter, Roger Markwick claims that my essay reflects “a naive, Cold War empiricism.” From personal experience, I can confirm that Markwick’s letter embodies all the clichés found in Soviet history textbooks from the Brezhnev era. I remember them all too well. That version of history was, of course, a complete fabrication. I could stop here, but a few points merit further discussion.

It is true that I am not a professional historian. But when I speak of this era, I have a distinct advantage. I and my family, along with millions of other families, lived through the horrors of Stalinism and Brezhnev’s Stalin-lite regime. During the Cold War, we were on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Cold War clichés that Markwick disparages in my essay were part of our everyday lives, and I think I know better to what extent they are true.

The goal of my essay was to describe the tragic fates that befell some of the young quantum scientists forced to flee Europe in the decade preceding the Second World War. Caught between two evils, some of them fell prey to Soviet propaganda. In doing so, I seem to have outraged Markwick by equating the evil of Nazi Germany to that of Stalin’s regime. I would like to make a stronger assertion, if such a thing is possible. In my view, the communist regime established in the USSR was, in fact, the worse evil because it endured far longer than the Nazi regime and its impact was felt much deeper. In today’s Russia, more than a century after the Bolshevik coup d’état, the consequences are still palpable. The Russian people were killed en masse; deprived of human dignity, free thought, and initiative; and were treated as dispensable over the course of four generations. This fact left its imprint on the spirit of a nation that, unfortunately, continues to be ruled by a mafia clique.

Markwick writes about “two distinct yet mutually exclusive phenomena”:

On the one hand, a fascist dictatorship came to power in 1933 by parliamentary means in collusion with Germany’s military-capitalist elites, backed by brown-shirted street terror against Bolshevism. On the other, a Marxist revolutionary government rode to power in 1917 impelled by a mass movement of workers and peasants that generated a new participatory form of government, soviets …

Modern Russian historiography does not portray this episode in such simple terms. In 1917, the Bolshevik Party was a small extremist group in the Russian political spectrum, which already had a well-developed political system of non-Marxist parties. It was, in fact, the liberal-led February 1917 Revolution that ended the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Empire. A democratically elected Constituent Assembly, meant to create a republican Russian constitution, was the goal of all major political forces. It was convened in January 1918, met for thirteen hours, and was then dispersed with brute force by the Bolsheviks. These facts are not mentioned by Markwick.

In an effort to whitewash Stalin’s regime, Markwick reminds us of two undeniable facts: rapid industrialization and the decisive Soviet contribution in the victory over Nazi Germany. Needless to say, I knew all about these fateful events from my early childhood, even before I went to school. My father participated in major battles during World War II from the start of the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, until their capitulation. Markwick narrates these events exactly as I was taught in school. More recently this same narrative is being pushed by the neo-Stalinist historians that are blossoming in present-day Russia. Tacit in Markwick’s remark is the presumption that ends justify means. I categorically disagree.

Imperial Russia was not as economically backward as Markwick would like us to think. Before World War I, Russian industry was growing rapidly. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which extends over 9,000 kilometers, was approved for construction by Czar Alexander III in 1891 and saw its first commercial traffic in 1901. By contrast, it took the Soviet Union twelve years to build a shorter length of railway for the Baikal–Amur Mainline—from 1972 to 1984.

Stalin’s industrialization program came at a huge cost. Free labor was provided mainly by gulag prisoners kept in subhuman conditions. To this end, large industrial complexes were built in the immediate vicinity of such camps. Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, was a prisoner of the gulag. He was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to death. Korolev’s sentence was later commuted, and he served several years in a sharashka, a special research bureau within the gulag system. The sharashkas were another ingenious invention of the socialist state.

History has demonstrated that it is possible to achieve rapid industrialization without human sacrifice at the scale characteristic of Stalin’s program. Although Japan lay in ruins after World War II, the country was able to recover by 1960. Aside from the military sector, Russia’s present-day economy is in a shambles. This is partly a legacy of the Bolshevik-style centralized industrialization that took place in the 1930s.

Regarding the defeat of Germany in World War II, Markwick is apparently unaware of a number of top-secret documents that became publicly available in the 1990s.¹⁸ According to these documents, during the six months following the German invasion in June 1941, the German army captured 3.8 million Red Army soldiers and officers. Most of these POWs perished in camps during the first winter. This tragedy occurred despite the fact that by June 1941 the Red Army had an overwhelming numerical superiority over the Germans in the numbers of tanks, airplanes, artillery, and troops massed on its western border. It should be clear that Stalin was not the genius commander-in-chief depicted in Soviet historiography. A year or two before the war, he had the top brass of the Red Army, as well as the next echelon, arrested and executed by firing squad. His dictatorial powers obviously blurred his judgment, and there was nobody around to explain the consequences to him. Between 1941 and 1942, incompetent generals regularly dispatched young conscripts, lacking even basic training or equipment, to the frontlines as cannon fodder.

The Red Army’s lack of preparation became evident after the disastrous invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939. In comparison to the USSR, Finland is a small country with a tiny population and army. Despite vastly superior military strength, especially in tanks and aircraft, the Soviets suffered severe losses and made little headway. The war lasted for only three months. Around 25,000 Finns were killed during the invasion. Soviet losses were far, far higher: estimates range from 120,000 to more than 160,000 dead. Again, it seemed that nothing was learned from the experience. Any lessons were lost in the Soviet echo chamber.

After the disastrous start to the war during the summer and autumn of 1941, morale among Red Army soldiers and officers collapsed. Pre-war forced collectivization, the Great Terror, famine, and the gross mistakes made by the Communist party elite in managing the centralized economy also left deep scars. It is not surprising that, between 1941 and 1945, around half a million Soviet citizens defected to fight with the Germans. So much for the “mass movement of workers and peasants” in support of the Bolshevik regime.

The Soviet people won the war at the greatest price possible. This much is undeniable. Their heroism and self-sacrifice will be remembered forever. Indeed, there is no conceivable way in which this victory can be ascribed to Stalin’s regime. I hope thoughtful readers will find the remarks thus far a sufficient response to Markwick’s critique of my views concerning Stalin and his era.

Rather than dwelling further on this topic, a more general criticism of my essay by Marwick deserves further scrutiny. As mentioned above, I find the notion that the ends justify the means abhorrent. This viewpoint was as horrific one hundred years ago as it is today. Marxism postulates that people should not be judged individually according to who they are, on their own merit, but rather according to their class affiliation—be it political, economic, ethnic, religious, or anything else. This position should be left to the nineteenth century where it belonged.

While history is not physics, certain lessons can be drawn from history if patterns are repeated in different places and at different times. The ruling regimes in the Soviet Union, the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the Eastern bloc, Yugoslavia, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Kampuchea-Cambodia, Cuba, and more recently Venezuela, were all notionally founded on Marxists principles. They were also all notable failures in economic terms and especially when it came to human rights. The victims of these regimes number in the millions—around a quarter of the population in the case of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Rather than creating a workers’ paradise, these regimes exploited ordinary people, leaving them equal only in misery. All the while, a tiny Communist elite enjoyed a life of luxury and privilege. What are the chances that the next experiment will end in anything other than a failed police state?

Near the end of his letter, Markwick misrepresents what I wrote in my essay:

Shifman concludes with a warning: Those who are foolish enough not to think we live in the best of all possible, if imperfect, worlds and dare to fight for a better one should not be seduced by beautiful theories that fly in the face of seemingly incontrovertible data from failed communist experiments in the extermination of human dignity.

This is a distortion of my words. In the original, I wrote:  

[W]e see an imperfect world in which there is grief, poverty, resentment, death, betrayal, blood, and sweat. Life is unfair. Someone may be born into a family of loving parents, but someone else into a family of alcoholics. Someone may have wonderful teachers, but someone else indifferent and ignorant teachers. Thousands of accidents make our starting conditions unequal. Equality before the law is not all that we might hope for but it is the best that we can expect.

Comparing today’s world with that of the early twentieth century, we can see enormous progress in human civilization. The level of cruelty that was typical of that time is inconceivable now. Moral standards are much more humane. Politics has become much more transparent. Tolerance prevails. Technological advancements have led to unprecedented prosperity, at least in the developed countries. I am sure that this trend will continue but—fortunately—not by virtue of the methods advocated by Markwick in his letter.