From: Chris Doss <nomorebounces@mail.ru>
Subject: Re: Re: Eduard Lucas 9259-Johnson's Russia List
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005
I am not going to be sidetracked onto the issue of whether an "official history" even exists in Russia, much less trying to determine what it is by comparing highly contradictory statements made by different government officials at different times to different audiences. Neither am I going to try to deduce said history from textbooks written by different people for different audiences that I have not read. However, if the theory is that "official Russian history is sidling into Gulag denial," then the presence of anti-Stalin miniseries and endless documentaries discussing the subject on state-run television does not bode well for it.
I am also not going to involve myself in a discussion of the relative worth of Applebaum's book and that of the current Russian scholarship. To do so would presuppose an encyclopedic knowledge of the Russian-language literature on the subject, i.e., only a scholar of the era is in any position to discuss it. I am not such a scholar. There is enough pontification on a poor knowledge base in the public space as it is without me beginning to engage in it myself.
The issue is that, in the original comment, once the rhetoric is stripped away, the insinuation seems to have been made that Applebaum's book has to date not found a publisher in Russia due to the machinations of some dark force, presumably the heavy hand of the Kremlin trying to keep it from seeing the light. Now this is a serious charge, which if true requires that some evidence be adduced. None was.
I find it much more likely that Russian publishers have come to the conclusion that yet another book on Stalin, written by a foreigner no less, would not be a good idea. The Russian reading audience has been hearing denunciations of Stalin since Khrushchev's Thaw. They are also tired of what they perceive as being lectured by foreigners.
The only real potential audience for Applebaum's book in Russia is scholars of the era and the self-described liberal intelligentsia who circle around Ekho Moskvy and Novaya Gazeta (and write largely for a foreign audience anyway) and their extremely small following. And they read English.
Solzhenitsyn's "Dvesti Let Vmeste" has been in print for three years now, and has to my knowledge yet to find a publisher in the English-speaking world. Zinoviev's hilarious novel "Katastroika" was published over a decade ago, but is now out of print, and, despite the fact that Zinoviev is the author of "Yawning Heights" and "Homo Sovieticus" and a philosopher who has made great contributions in formal logic, none of his later work has been translated and published in English excepting a few pages of "Russkaya Tragediya" that have appeared on the Internet on an obscure website. Despite his being the author of "Let History Judge," Roy Medvedev's books on Andropov, Luzhkov, and his second book on Putin have not appeared in English. Paul Klebnikov's "Razgovor s Varvarom" also falls into this category*. Now, as I am an opponent of both Bush and Blair and so, from the point of view of sheer political expediency, would love to be able to blame the fact that these seminal writers are! not being published in the US or UK on the machinations of the White House and 10 Downing Street (perhaps because they would all contradict the view of Russia currently fashionable in the Anglophone world?). However, I do not do so, because I find it more likely that they have not been published because there is little market for them outside of the tiny Russia-oriented academic world -- which is also Russian-speaking.
As a related aside, can the charade finally be dropped that Russia contains large numbers of Western-oriented liberal intellectuals and young people? Putin's approval reaings are highest among people under 35, and the Russian intelligentsia is not liberal. Here I am refering not to the self-appointed intellectuals in Novaya Gazeta, but to the Academicians of the RAS, the Nobel Prize winners, the people in the think tanks, digging through the archives in Rostov-on-Don, working the cyclotron over in Dubna, and doing research off of Vladivostok. These folks are largely over 60, miss the days of Soviet science, and are politically conservative and of a left-wing bent. They support Putin, the KPRF, or Rodina. Zhores Alferov is high up in the Communist Party. Solzhenitsyn is a Slavophile Russian nationalist. Zinoviev is an advisor to the KPRF. Alexander Dugin is, well, Alexander Dugin. They are not pro-Western liberals, and all of them are leading members of the Russian intelligentsia. Off of the top of my head, the only "liberal intellectuals" I can think of that have any clout whatsoever are Tatyana Tolstaya and Yakovlev.
* Klebnikov, of course, had nice things to say about Putin, so I would guess that he would fall into the "sycophantic useful idiot" category. So would Medvedev for that matter. And Gorbachev. Solzhenitsyn is no fan of Putin, but his hatred for Yeltsin and the 1990s is almost bestial, so I suppose he would be a border case.