#13 - JRL 8165 - JRL Home
From: "William Mandel" <wmmmandel@earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: 8161-Roy/ Brown
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004
(1) I earned the first money of my life (not aware beforehand that I'd be paid) by writing, in 1931, a vignette of my impression of a Moscow factory (Kauchuk) for the paper of which he is now the editor, Moscow News, and being handed the fee by Anna Louise Strong, its first editor-in-fact (I don't recall whether Borodin, who I met, or she was editor in name). Later, I got to know her well personally when I was a Hoover Institution Fellow (1947) and she, too, lived near Stanford. Subsequently I differed with her very strongly, writing in 1957 an acid review of her book defending Stalin, The Stalin Era.
(2)As far as I have been able to determine, I knew Russia and the Soviet Union (I visited all the union republics, most of them repeatedly, some as many as eight times -- Kazakhstan, Ukraine) over a longer period than any other foreign writer on Russia in recorded history: 68 years, 1931 to 1998).
(3) I always identified myself as an American, although, as a general rule, Soviet people regarded my totally free use of Russian to be good enough that they believed I was a member of a Soviet nationality other than their own until I did so identify myself, sometimes having to display my passport as proof. There were non-intellectual Russians, particularly peasants, who thought I was Russian, explaining the difference between their use of the language and mine by saying: "You speak like a professor."
(4) Although I was not in Russia when Roy spent 72 hours in front of the besieged White House, I participated in Moscow demonstrations for democracy of up to a quarter-million people in the period immediately before Yeltsin came to power.
(5) Perhaps most important, most of the six hundred Soviet people with whom I conversed at sufficient length and developed sufficient trust for them to give me their names and addresses over those many years were of the intelligentsia, although I went out of my way to meet manual workers (most particularly the striking coal miners of the Kuzbass, Donbass, and Karaganda under Gorbachev, and those of Vorkuta encamped behind the White House under Yeltsin).
So I regard myself as qualified to comment on Roy and, for that matter, on Archie Brown, who is less important simply because he is not a Russian, and it is they who have made, and will make, Russian history.
I am no exception to the high regard for the Russian intelligentsia that is shared by everyone I know who has met them, but my respect is not unqualified. Their snobbishness toward those of lower station, as evident in Roy's attitude toward Gorbachev's Southern accent, always bothered me. When Roy writes, with some contempt, of the half-educated bureaucrats who ruled the USSR, he disregards the fact that industrialization required the turning out of the largest possible number of engineers in the shortest possible span of years. That was made worse by Stalin's refusal to permit education in the social sciences other than via his works and those of Lenin he permitted to be published. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, themselves of that working class origin, could hardly be expected to understand the need for a broader range of education. Khrushchev kept his coal-mine plumber's tools when brought to Moscow by Stalin to head the Party there, and explained to literary analyst Vladimir Kantorovich, later a close friend of mine, whose apartment he was moved in to share, that he might need them if he failed in his new post and had to return to the mines. Brezhnev himself was an engineer trained under the affirmative-action program for workers.
When I participated in the American-Soviet Peace Walks each year 1987-1990 (Moscow-Leningrad, Odessa-Kiev, Uzhgorod-Kiev, Tashkent to the nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk), I heard Moscow intellectual participants say that they had joined them "to learn how people live in Russia"(kak zhivutsia na Rossii). They were fully aware, as Roy does not seem to be or at least does not speak about, of the differences between life as they lived it and as the bulk of the population did.
I am in no position to challenge either Brown's or Roy's evaluations of Gorbachev, but, watching on TV Gorbachev's conversations with ordinary folk who surrounded him on "campaign stops" in his early travels to the boondocks, I was impressed by the fact that, when they pressured him to improve matters in one way or another, he replied, in his schoolteacherly way, that that depended on what they did from the bottom.
I cannot agree with Roy that "the people" shared his view of Raisa Gorbacheva's credit-card spending abroad. Roy's intellectual friends doubtless knew of it, but ordinary folk did not know, and did not mention it, ever, anywhere. In my view, one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union is the knowledge of the privileges and pecadillos of the upper crust that became known to the people via Literaturnaya Gazeta and Ogonek, both widely read by that stratum of the intelligentsia throughout the USSR having closest contact with ordinary folk: school teachers. Previously they literally did not know.
As to Roy's contempt for Gorbachev's "Columbus method": aiming for India but discovering America, I would put it much more simply. He was ignorant of economics, although he hated the State Planning Commission, and believed that democracy would solve everything. He hadn't the vaguest notion that turning industries, utilities, and services organized as monopolies loose to set their own prices would result in behavior identical to that of monopolies everywhere: hiking prices sky high.