A Hero of Our Time: Gareth Jones, 20th-century truth-teller.

National Review, September 17, 2004

The notebooks—worn, creased, and drab, but haunting nonetheless—lay carefully set out on a table in the lobby of a New York hotel. Their pages were filled with notes, comments, and calculations, jotted and scribbled in the cursive, spiky script once a hallmark of pre-war Britain's educated classes. Their author had, it seems, wandered through a dying village deep within Stalin's gargoyle empire. "Woman came out and started crying. 'They're killing us. In my village there used to be 300 cows and now we only have 30. The horses have died. How can I feed us all?'" It was the Ukraine, March 1933, a land in the throes of a man-made famine, the latest murderous chapter in Soviet social engineering. Five, six, seven million had died, maybe more. As Khrushchev later explained, "No one was counting."

But how had these notebooks found their way to a Hilton in Manhattan? Some years ago, in a town in Wales, an old, old lady, older than the century in which she lived, was burgled. As a result, she moved out of her home. When her niece, Siriol, came to clear up whatever was left, she found a brown leather suitcase monogrammed "G.V.R.J." and, lying under a thick layer of dust, a black tin box. Inside them were papers, letters, and, yes, those notebooks ("nothing had been thrown away"), the last records of Gareth Jones—"G.V.R.J."—Siriol's "jolly," brilliant Uncle Gareth, a polyglot traveler and journalist. In 1935 he had been killed by bandits in Manchuria, or so it was said. All that was left was grief, his writings, and the memory of a talented man cut down far, far too soon.

Seven decades later, as I sat talking to Siriol Colley in that midtown hotel, looking through Jones's papers, his press clippings, even his passport, it was not difficult to get a sense of the uncle she still mourned. Welsh to his core, he was typical of those clever, energetic Celts who did so well in the British Empire, restless (all those visa stamps, Warsaw, Berlin, Riga . . .), ambitious, and enterprising. Despite his youth, Jones seemed to get everywhere, Zelig with a typewriter. On New Year's Day 1935, for instance, he was in San Simeon, Kane's Xanadu itself, side by side with William Randolph Hearst. Earlier, we find him on a plane with Hitler ("looks like a middle-class grocer"), and, why, there he is, smiling on the White House lawn in April 1931, standing just behind a hopeless, hapless Herbert Hoover.

Above all, this man who reportedly charmed his captors in Manchuria by singing them hymns, was what the Welsh call “chapel”: pious, hardworking, teetotal, a little priggish, and armed with a sense of right and wrong so fierce that it gave him the strength to report the truth of what he saw, at the cost, if need be, of his career and, some would say, his life. Jones’s politics were typically chapel too, steeped as they were in the Liberal traditions of Welsh Nonconformism. Ornery, high-minded, pacifist, egalitarian, a touch goofy, a little bit utopian, Jones was just the sort of Westerner who might have been attracted to the Soviet experiment. And so he was—initially. In a 1933 article for the London Daily Express, Jones recalled how “the idealism of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the courage of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the internationalism of the Bolsheviks impressed me,” but “then,” he added, “I went to Russia.”

And there, for Jones, everything changed. His accounts of his visits to the USSR (the first was in 1930) are a chronicle of mounting disillusion. Reading them now, particularly the occasional attempts to highlight some Soviet achievement or other, it’s easy to see that this young Welsh liberal, this believer, wanted to trust in Moscow’s promise of a radiant future, but Communist reality—dismal, savage, and hopeless—kept intruding. Unlike many who came to inspect the people’s paradise, he reported on its dark side too. For Jones, there was no choice. It was the truth, you see.

By the autumn of 1932, Jones was sounding the alarm (“Will There Be Soup?” and “Russia Famished Under the Five-Year Plan”) about the catastrophe to come: “The food is not there.” Early the next year, he returned to Moscow to check the situation for himself, took a train to the Ukraine, and then walked out into the wrecked, desperate countryside. Once back in the West, he wasted no time, not even waiting to get back home before telling an American journalist in Berlin what he had seen: Millions were dying.

Soviet denials were to be expected. That they were supported by the New York Times was not. The newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, reassured his readers that Jones had been exaggerating. The Welshman was, he condescended, “a man of a keen and active mind . . . but [his] judgment was somewhat hasty . . . It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkhov and found conditions sad.” Sad—not much of an adjective, really, to describe genocide.

The Times’s man, who had won a Pulitzer the previous year for “the scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity” of his reporting from the Soviet Union, did not share Jones’s sense of “impending doom.” Yes, “to put it brutally,” omelettes could not be made without breaking eggs, but there had been “no actual starvation or deaths from starvation.” Duranty came, he claimed, to this conclusion only after “exhaustive enquiries about this alleged famine situation,” but other discussions probably influenced him more. The big story in Moscow in the spring of 1933—bigger by far than the death of a few million unfortunate peasants—was the pending show trial of six British engineers. Courtroom access and other cooperation from Soviet officialdom would be essential for any foreign journalist wanting to satisfy the news desk back home. That would come at a price. The price was Jones.

Eugene Lyons, another American journalist in Moscow at the time, later explained that “throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered . . . were snowed under by our denials.” According to Lyons (not always, admittedly, the most reliable of witnesses, but the essence of his tale rings true), a deal was struck at a meeting between members of the American press corps and Konstantin Umansky, the chief Soviet censor. “There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take . . . before a formula of denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.” Spinning a famine was, apparently, thirsty work.

Undaunted by the attacks on his accuracy, Jones intensified his efforts. There were articles in the Daily Express, the Financial Times, the Western Mail, the London Evening Standard, the Berliner Tageblatt, as well as a lengthy letter to the Manchester Guardian in support of Malcolm Muggeridge, who had, like Jones, told the truth about the famine and, like Jones, been vilified in return (suggestions that there was starvation in the USSR were, said George Bernard Shaw, “offensive and ridiculous”). In a letter published by the New York Times in May 1933, Jones hit back at Walter Duranty. The reports of widespread famine were, he wrote, based not only on what he had seen in the villages of the Ukraine, but also on extensive conversations with other eyewitnesses, diplomats, and journalists. After a few polite remarks about Duranty’s “kindness and helpfulness,” the tone turned contemptuous. Directly quoting from Duranty’s own dispatches, Jones charged that censorship had turned some journalists into “masters of euphemism and understatement . . . [They] give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’. . . Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried . . . [T]he dead animals are devoured.”

Moscow responded by barring Jones from the USSR. He was cut off for good from the site of the story he had made his own. Duranty received a rather different reward. Some months later he accompanied the Soviet foreign minister on a trip to America, a journey that was to culminate in FDR’s decision to extend diplomatic recognition to the Communist regime, a decision that was fêted, fêted in that famine year, with a celebration dinner at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, at which Duranty was honored with cheers and a standing ovation. On Christmas Day 1933 came the greatest prize of all—an interview with Stalin himself. Well, of course. It was a reward for work well done. Duranty had, said the dictator, “done a good job in . . . reporting the USSR.”

But history had not yet finished with Gareth Jones. The young Welshman possessed, explained David Lloyd George, the former prime minister for whom Jones had, some years before, worked as an aide, “a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk.” So, it’s no surprise to find him in Japan in early 1935, interviewing, questioning, snooping, and perhaps attracting the sort of attention that could turn out to be fatal. By July that year he was heading through the increasing chaos of northern China toward Japanese- controlled Manchuria (Manchukuo). On July 26, Jones updated the narrative he was writing for the last time. He was, he wrote, “witnessing the changeover of a big district from China to Manchukuo. There are barbed-wire entanglements just outside the hotel. There are two roads . . . [O]ver one 200 Japanese lorries have traveled; the other is infested by bad bandits.” Two days later, the bandits struck. Jones was kidnapped. He was murdered two weeks later. It was the eve of his 30th birthday.

We will probably never know who was ultimately responsible for Jones’s death. There had been a ransom demand, and so, perhaps, this was just a kidnapping that went horribly wrong. There are, however, other possibilities. The Japanese would certainly not have welcomed a Westerner watching the takeover of yet another Chinese province, and there is some evidence that the kidnappers were under their control. It’s also intriguing to discover that one of Jones’s contacts in those final days was linked to a company now known to have been a front for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. To Lloyd George, only one thing was clear: “Gareth Jones knew too much.”

And if he knew too much, the rest of the world understood too little. For decades, like the dead whose story he told, this lost witness to a genocide seemed doomed to be forgotten, a family tragedy, a footnote, but now that’s changing. Jones is at last returning to view, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the indefatigable Siriol Colley, the author of a book about her uncle—and a second is on the way. (Colley’s son Nigel has also set up a website: www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html.)

One thing, however, has not changed. On December 4 last year, not long after the Pulitzer committee decided that Duranty should retain his prize, Colley wrote to the New York Times asking whether the paper could at least issue a public apology for the way in which its Moscow correspondent had smeared Jones. She’s still waiting.

Times Lied, Millions Died

National Review Online, November 24, 2003

So that's it then. Despite all the protests, the Pulitzer Prize board has decided that it will not revoke the award won by Walter Duranty of the New York Times for his reporting in Stalin's Soviet Union. This was not a decision that it took lightly, mind you. The board's members want everyone to understand that they only took their decision after "more than six months of study and deliberation." Six months — that's around one month, perhaps less, for each million who died in the holodomor, the man-made famine that Duranty tried so hard to deny. Here's how Petro Solovyschuk from the Ukraine's Vinnytsia region remembers that time:

I no longer lived in my house. I slept in patches of clover, in haystacks; I was swollen from hunger, my clothes were in shreds. Our house was torn down and they took everything to the collective farm. Only a pile of clay remained. And there is no trace of my family — not a grave, nor a cross. There are only these names: my father — Makar Solovyschuk, died May 1933; my mother — Oliana Solovyschuk, died March 1933; my brother — Ivan Solovyschuk, died April 1933; my sister — Motrya Solovyschuk, died April 1933.

Here's what Walter Duranty said in June of that year: "The 'famine' is mostly bunk."

To be fair, the board's argument is not without some logic.

In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the Board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931...In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, fall seriously short....

But what can the board mean by "today's" standards? The distortions, cursory research, and rehashed propaganda that characterized so much of Duranty's work even prior to the famine were a disgrace to journalism — then just as much as now.

The board adds that there was "not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that standard."

Quite how those circumstances are "different" isn't explained. Are we meant to believe that it was perhaps reasonable in those days to expect that the Five-Year Plan would be buttressed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning lie or two? The board does not say. As for trying to justify its inaction on the grounds that "all the principals are dead and unable to respond," let's just say that's an unfortunate choice of words in the context of a horror that left five, six or seven million (Khrushchev: "No one was counting") dead and, thus, one might agree, "unable to respond."

But the argument (with which I have some sympathy) that, however repellent they were, the events of 1932-33 should be irrelevant in considering a prize won for writings that predate them, can only be taken so far. Duranty's behavior in those later years is certainly relevant in coming to an assessment as to whether the flaws in his prizewinning work were the product of a deliberate piece of deception. And the evidence from 1933 is clear. Duranty was a liar. And if he was a liar in 1933, it's probable that he was a liar in 1931.

To make things worse, not only may Duranty have been lying, but also the New York Times may have known that he was lying. One historian has pointed to State Department papers recording a 1931 (note the date) conversation between Duranty and a U.S. diplomat in Berlin suggesting that there was an "understanding" between the New York Times and the Soviet authorities that Duranty's dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet regime rather than his own point of view.

Now, Duranty could have been lying about that too, or the diplomat could have misunderstood what he was being told, but, like so much of this story, it raises issues that need airing in something more than one brief press release. As the body responsible for administering journalism's most prestigious prize, the Pulitzer board ought to be advocates of openness and disclosure. We are told that it considered this matter for over six months of "study and deliberation." Assuming this is true, the board should publish its findings in full.

But if the Pulitzer Prize board can, in theory at least, make a respectable case for leaving the prize in Hell with Duranty's ghost, the New York Times, usually so exquisitely sensitive to the injustices of the past, is on less certain ground. To be sure, over time it has distanced itself from its former Moscow correspondent, but not (apart for some rather feeble cosmetic gestures) from his Pulitzer.

In response to the latest campaign to revoke the prize, earlier this year the New York Times commissioned Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen to review Duranty's work. He turned out to be no fan of a man who, the New York Times once said, had been on perhaps "the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time." In the report, von Hagen describes Duranty's work from 1931, for example, as a "dull and largely uncritical" recitation of Soviet sources, but the report itself contains no final recommendation. Subsequently, however, von Hagen has argued that the prize should be withdrawn for the sake of the gray lady's "honor."

Honor? Well, when it comes to accepting responsibility for Duranty, the New York Times (usually so eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels) has always tended to be a little reticent, so perhaps it is no surprise that its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., seemed a touch unwilling to go quite as far as his historian. Oh yes, he did what he had to. He dutifully forwarded von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer board. He even sent a cover letter with it in which he condescended to "respect" whatever the board might choose to decide, but he just couldn't resist adding the thought that rescinding Duranty's prize evoked the old Stalinist practice of "airbrush[ing] purged figures out of official records and histories," a view, interestingly, that von Hagen does not share.

Sadly for Pinch and his paper, any airbrushing would likely to be ineffective anyway. Whatever was finally decided, the controversies of recent years have ensured that the historical record will always be clear. The 1932 Pulitzer, the prize about which the New York Times was so proud for so long, was won by a liar and a fraud, won by a journalist to whom genocide was not news that was fit to print, won by a journalist who by his silence made his newspaper an accomplice to mass murder.

If I were Arthur Sulzberger Jr., I would have begged them to take that prize away.

Prize Specimen

National Review Online, May 7, 2003

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone). Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize "for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

"Despite present imperfections," he explained, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman."

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did he right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. ** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.

Hollow Laughter

Martin Amis: Koba the Dread - Laughter and The Twenty Million  

National Review Online, July 16, 2002

Stalin, Moscow, 1997  © Andrew Stuttaford

Back in the time of the revolution he was described as a gray blur, and it is as a gray blur that Stalin survives today, a nullity, a gap in our memory, an absence. In the lands of his old empire, they remember more, far, far more. The absence there is absent fathers, absent mothers, absent grandparents, absent uncles, absent aunts, absences in the millions, all victims of the monster who remains, remarkably, still present in Red Square (there's a small bust at his burial site by the Kremlin's walls and usually someone takes the trouble to leave a flower or two). In our ignorant, spared West, the West that never knew him, not really, we catch only glimpses of what we think what was. The images are caught on fading, flickering newsreel, a friend from the greatest of America's wars, FDR's pal, smiling benignly out, hooded eyes beneath a peaked cap, good old Uncle Joe.

In his new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, the British novelist Martin Amis makes an attempt to fill this gap. It is a curious, compelling but more than occasionally self-indulgent work, a meditation that uneasily combines snatches of its writer's autobiography with tales of the Soviet holocaust.

The tone too seems just slightly off. Amis has long been known as a master of the acid one-liner, but it jars to read his snide reminiscence of the trivial (attendance at Tony Blair's dreary millennium celebrations) within a few pages of this extract from a letter written by the elderly Soviet theater director, Vsevolod Meyerhold after his arrest and torture by the secret police:

I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap…For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain…Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it.

Meyerhold was shot three weeks later. He managed, at least, to outlive his wife. She was found murdered in their apartment a few days after his arrest. Reportedly, her eyes had been cut out.

And so yes, London's Millennium Dome may, indeed, have resembled a "second-rate German airport," but, in the context of such horror, so what?

It's not just the tone and the awkward snippets of autobiography. Martin Amis's style, mannered, arch and self-consciously clever, also seems out of place, an all too elegant frame for such a crude and bloody canvas. We read of the "fantastic sordor" of the Gulag's slave ships, and that Stalin's "superbity" was "omnivorous." When told of the Wehrmacht's initial successes on the Eastern front, the Soviet dictator apparently "collapsed as a regnant presence." The baroque vocabulary acts as a barrier between the reader and the events that it is being used to describe. It may also signify the emotional distance that Amis himself feels from the Soviet tragedy. Good writer that he is, he understands "why Solzhenitsyn needs his expletives, his italics, his exclamation marks, his thrashing sarcasm," but rarely seems to feel such a compulsion himself.

What Amis does offer is a brief, and competent, introduction to the Stalin years, drawing both on recently published research and, very obviously, a long acquaintanceship with Robert Conquest, the finest English-language historian of Stalinist terror, who happens also to be an old friend of the Amis family. Tics of style and tone apart, the tale is well told, and clearly benefits from the skills of an accomplished and insightful writer. We learn, for instance, that Stalin failed to show up for his mother's funeral, a decision that "scandalized the remains of Georgian public opinion." The insertion of those three bleak words, "the remains of," tells the reader all that he or she needs to know about Stalin's impact on his native land.

Similarly, in describing the catastrophe of collectivization Amis manages in a few short lines both to summarize the onrush of disaster and to speculate what that might say about the differing personalities of Lenin and Stalin. Faced by peasant resistance, "Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. The peasantry no longer faced a frigid intellectual. It faced a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and crackling in the heat of power. He would not accept reality. He would break it." The result was a death toll that ran into the millions and, in Amis's vivid phrase, "swaying, howling lines" in front of the few food stores with anything to sell.

It is a hideous story, and Martin Amis should be thanked for retelling it. In forgetting those who were murdered, it is as if we kill them again, and yet with Stalin's dead that it is just what the world seems content to do. As many as seven million died in the genocidal Soviet famine of the early 1930's, yet in most histories it usually merits no more than a footnote. Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who tried to deny the famine's existence earned a Pulitzer for his "reporting" in Moscow, a prize that the "paper of record" still includes on its roll of honor.

As for the other slaughtered millions (Amis believes that Stalin was responsible for a total of at least 20 million deaths — and there are other, much higher, estimates), their fate is often passed over in silence or with the most insultingly cursory of regrets. Almost no one has ever been held accountable. There has never been a Soviet Nuremberg. Solzhenitsyn has calculated that between 1945-1966 West Germany convicted some 86,000 people for crimes committed for the Nazis. The number of those found guilty of similar atrocities on behalf of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union is unlikely — even now — to run into triple digits. In the countries of the former USSR, however, there is at least an argument (albeit misguided) for inaction: it is said that the long duration of Soviet rule manufactured too many accomplices to permit — yet — a full examination of the past in societies where democracy remains fragile.

In the West there is no such excuse, yet, when Stalin is discussed at all, the tone is often strangely sympathetic, and the tally of victims is frequently subjected to downwards revisions on a scale that would embarrass even David Irving. Where Koba The Dread fails, and fails most completely, is in trying to explain why. As a first step, Amis looks again at the old question as to whether Hitler's crimes were "worse" than those of Stalin (Conquest, interestingly, believes that they were, but can give no reason other than the fact that he "feels" so), but this controversy is, forgive the phrase, a red herring. Any moral distinction between these two bestial systems is so slight as to be irrelevant, and yet our response to them is strikingly different. In contemporary discourse, the Nazis are totems of wickedness, while Communism (despite accounting for far greater slaughter, a slaughter that still continues) is somehow seen as not so very bad.

As a shorthand for these perversely different responses to two very similar evils, Amis records how at a debate featuring the two Hitchens brothers (Christopher and Peter), Christopher Hitchens (quoted elsewhere in Koba as — astonishingly — still believing that Lenin was a "great" man) referred to evenings passed in the company of his "old comrades," a remark greeted with affectionate laughter (it is the laughter referred to in the title of Amis's book), a laughter that would be inconceivable as a reaction to a light-hearted reference to happy days with the fascists.

As Amis (who admits to laughing himself) concedes, "this isn't right." To explain that laughter, he turns, unconvincingly, to the elements of black farce that were never absent from Communist rule (but which were, he neglects, crucially, to say, equally present under the Nazis), and then, more believably, "to the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society, [which] is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million."

And in that one word "unconsciously," Martin Amis gets it all wrong. Murder, turmoil, and repression were always explicit in that "old, old, idea" and they play no small part in its appeal. Glance, just for a second, at Lenin's writings and you will be amazed by the morbid love of violence that permeates his prose. The "Just City" of Marxism's dreams always came with a concentration camp. The Bolsheviks had the genius to understand this. Their intellectual descendants know enough to try and cover it up: thus the silence about Stalin, thus that disgusting laughter.

Martin Amis's achievement is that, in writing this odd, flawed book, he has done something to help ensure that it is we — and not Stalin's heirs — who will have the last laugh.

Party On

Imagine, for a moment, that some crime had taken place, an act of wrongdoing so outrageous that it gripped the attention of the nation. And suppose that the perpetrator of this crime had been the member of an ethnic minority, do you think, even for a second, that the New York Times would have set up a meeting with some genial racist to find out his reaction? Would the reporter from the New York Times have sat there, quietly nodding as he took his notes, preparing to write an article that (with, of course, the appropriate amount of ironic distance) hinted that the recent outrage might show, just perhaps, that there was something to the crackpot's theories? Well, hopefully not, but on Friday the "paper of record" published an article that, in a number of ways, was not really so different from doing just that. "Letting the Capitalists Eat Crow" by Clyde Haberman, takes the form of a chat about the recent Wall Street scandals with Jarvis Tyner, the executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA. Tyner is a veteran activist with a lifetime of Communist politicking behind him, including a stint as the running mate to party leader Gus Hall in the 1972 U.S. presidential election (it's worth remembering that Hall, an unrepentant Stalinist, had effectively endorsed the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia only four years before) and again in 1976. I'm not sure where Comrade Tyner stands now on the Soviet rap sheet, but offered a platform for his views on capitalist criminality, he unsurprisingly jumped at the chance.

Why anyone should care about Tyner's opinions on this topic is quite beyond me. The American Communist Party is a grubby group with a shabby history. Its numbers are miniscule these days and its significance is even less. If its leadership has anything interesting at all to say, it would be to shed some light on a murky Moscow-subsidized past that includes espionage, Stalin worship, tacit support for Hitler (during that embarrassing Nazi-Soviet pact) and acquiescence in mass murder. Sadly, Mr. Haberman did not choose to raise any of this. The only reference to earlier times came from Tyner himself with his wistful references to the "radicals" of the 1960s, and, inevitably, the 1930s. Ah yes, the radicals of the 1930s, that generation of leftists who will forever be associated with the CPUSA, the Gulag groupies who added further disgrace to an already ghastly decade, creepy enthusiasts for collectivism, coercion, and revolutionary violence, the old comrades who Tyner apparently still mourns.

Worth mentioning, Clyde? But, no, Mr. Haberman would prefer to discuss the country's current economic troubles with the beaming Bolshevik. Fair enough, you might think. Having presided over the impoverishment of much of the planet, Communists know a thing or two about mismanagement. Unfortunately, the incompetence that Mr. Haberman wants to discuss is not theirs, but ours.

"Is there any greater joy," writes Haberman,

for a heart that pounds to the beat of a hammer attached to a sickle than the sight of capitalists resorting to a form of corporate hara-kiri…Thanks to the shenanigans of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the rest, the Dow Jones industrial average has fallen further in the last three months than it did in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Think about it. The boardroom brethren have walloped the stock market harder than Osama Bin Laden did.

That's the sort of simplistic analysis that could only appeal to someone with absolutely no grasp of economics, to someone like, well, a Communist. And it does. The "smiling" Jarvis Tyner's response to the crisis is "we told you so". Blithely ignoring the fact that Marxists have been "telling us so" every year since about, oh, 1848, Tyner tells us again.

The growing corruption of big business is a sign of its inability to generate profits honestly any more…People were left out in the cold. But capitalism always functioned that way. It's just gotten worse. We've got a society that's run on greed. And they've got their guys in the White House now.

Hmm, greed. There are those who hint that Tyner's old running mate Gus Hall might have had some explaining to do on that account. Rather less ascetic than his creed might suggest, greedy Gus was said to have lived in some style, even, one old comrade has claimed, going so far as keeping a stable of Arabian racehorses, a gift, it was alleged, from Mr. Brezhnev himself. Can this be true? Racehorses? Brezhnev? Now, that's what I call a story.

Alas, these tales of socialist sybaritism never come up. Readers are, instead, presented with Tyner's tired sloganeering. He believes the president's proposed crackdown on corporate crime is meaningless: Bush is "playing softball with the big guys…He's running with the big dogs and he's not going to hurt them." Yada, yada, yada. As even Haberman notes, "what else would you expect from a Communist?"

Quite, but then the journalist goes on to write, "But isn't it funny that Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, have been saying pretty much the same thing?" And so there you have it; that sly half-suggestion that maybe this repulsive old ideology is not quite so demented as it once seemed.

It is a nauseating conclusion to a distasteful piece, and it overlooks a simple, and rather obvious point: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Fashion Victims

National Review Online, February 26th, 2002

Over in Europe, as George Bush has been reminded only very recently, the chattering classes are uncomfortable with the notion of evil. As an idea it is just so, to borrow a word from the French foreign minister, "simplistic." However, even allowing for the old continent's tawdry attempts at world-weary sophistication, it is disappointing, to say the least, that a disgusting event in London last Wednesday passed with little notice, no criticism and, here and there, some applause. It was a spectacle that combined shallow frivolityand deep, deep moral relativism and, of all unlikely places, it occurred at a show during the British capital's Fashion Week, at the catwalk debut for a collection created by Helga and Eva, 24-year-old twins from Austria.

Helga and Eva claim to find their inspiration in their country's past, including, they say, the Third Reich. They have already enjoyed some success. Their label was included as part of Fashion Week's "New Generation," a group of young designers sponsored by a leading British retailer.

In what was, doubtless, intended to be a witty gesture, invitations to see the twins' collection were based on Nazi-era passports. At the show itself, the musical backdrop contributed to the totalitarian theme with a soundtrack that combined classical tunes, Wehrmacht chants and folk songs, all overlaid with Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page's heavy metal was included, apparently, as a gesture to contemporary western culture.

The collection featured designs based on both the industrial and political aesthetic of the former dictatorship. On display that Wednesday were cloaks and knitted sweaters, all, naturally, in parade-ground brown, and often emblazoned with the regime's most famous symbol, the swastika. In a neat touch, jackets and dresses were edged with little Iron Crosses.

The London press seemed to like what it saw. A commentator in one leading daily said that Helga and Eva had brought the old despotism's fashion sense "in from the cold", while another newspaper ran a friendly piece in which the writer noted that the twins' collections were available at a number of expensive British stores. American fans of designer tyranny will be thrilled to know that these clothes can also be found in New York, Boston, and LA.

Interestingly enough, the prospect of Helga's and Eva's show did not seem to worry Britain's Labour government, usually so sensitive to the slightest hint of political incorrectness. The night before the collection's launch, there was a party in honor of Fashion Week hosted by Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, and the secretary for trade and industry, a busy lady, who doubles up as the U.K.'s "minister for women."

To be fair, these two grandees may have had no idea what would be strutting down the catwalk the next day, and, so far as I know, there was no foretaste of the totalitarian treat to come. It was an evening of chandeliers, not searchlights, of velvet ropes, not manacles. There were no guard-dogs, no watchtowers, no burial pits. The waiters wore shoes, not jackboots, and carried drinks, not guns. Guests were permitted to arrive by taxi rather than cattle truck. There were no amusingly staged beatings or faux executions to sit through. Best of all, everybody was allowed home alive at the end of the evening.

How very different it was 60 or 70 years ago, in that era desecrated by men marching under the symbol now found to be suitable for an expensive knitted sweater. The twins' art is, consciously or unconsciously, a celebration of cruelty, an insult to slaughtered millions, many of whom ended their lives dressed in the only real totalitarian style, the rags and tatters of concentration camp clothing. That two designers can borrow evil's insignia to make a fashion statement is yet another dismal reminder of how little mankind has really understood the nature of 20th-century mass murder.

At this point, I should, however, admit that I have changed a few details in this story, none of which ought to make any difference, but, strangely, they seem to.

The twins' real names are Natasha and Tamara Surguladze. They do not come from Austria, but from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Their Tata-Naka label features designs inspired not by the Third Reich, but the USSR.

Oh, so that's all right then.

The London Daily Telegraph described the scene:

Graphic prints were based on original propaganda motifs from the "industrial art" movement championed by Lenin and Trotsky. Others featured the Cyrillic letters CCCP, which represented the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sweeping cloaks and knitted sweaters in "Red Square red" were emblazoned with the symbol of the Russian revolution, the hammer and sickle, while glittering Russian stars clasped the edges of jackets and dresses…The "Mother Russia" theme was reflected in the invitations, based on the old USSR passports…and in the music, a garage mix of Shostakovich, Red Army chants and folk songs, overlaid with Led Zeppelin.

And, no, this is not all right.

Yet, somehow, people think that it is. Fascist fashion would shock. Communist chic does not. To wear the swastika has become, quite rightly, a taboo, but the hammer and sickle is, in the hands of Tata-Naka, no more than a vaguely "daring" image, a mark of Cain reduced to a potentially lucrative logo. Quite why this should be the case is difficult to grasp. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were as bad as each other. Trying to find a moral distinction between those two charnel-house states is a pointless exercise in political theology — about as useful as debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pin, and rather more dangerous (it is a partial explanation for the failure to hold a Soviet Nuremberg). Nevertheless, that is exactly what we tend to do — on those rare occasions when the issue is discussed at all. And the usual conclusion, that Hitler's Germany was easily the greater (and history's greatest) horror, has developed into a part of our culture's conventional wisdom, a facile nostrum that removes the need to ask the necessary questions about other monstrous savagery.

It is an illusion that soothes, and it accounts for the fact that most readers of this article were, I suspect, more than a little relieved to discover that the twins had taken their design hints from the creators of the Gulag rather than the architects of Auschwitz.

Well, weren't you?

Baltic Reflections

National Review Online, July 14, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

It is playtime now in Tallinn. The brief, bright northern summer has transformed the Estonian capital into a city of outdoor cafes, tourist buses, and long, lazy strolls. At night, if you can call it that, music bursts out of the bars and clubs, bouncing off old town walls, and echoing down winding streets still lit by a sun that seems never quite ready to set. Add to the picture some of Europe's most attractive architecture, a vista of church spires, merchant houses, and impressive medieval fortifications and you have, for once, a city that really does deserve the label "fairytale." But, as with all the best such tales, reality is not quite what it seems. A good portion of the old town is, in fact, a reconstruction, the product of years of careful rebuilding, a restoration made necessary by Russian bombardment towards the end of the Second World War. The country's prosperity is also less than Tallinn's glow may initially suggest. Estonia's current economic recovery, the most impressive of any former Soviet Republic, is the product of hard work and free-market economics, but it remains, inevitably, uneven. Outside Tallinn, much of the country remains trapped in post-Leninist torpor, while even in the capital itself existence is tough for many, particularly if they are old, dependent on a hopelessly inadequate pension, and wondering where it was that their lives had gone.

A new exhibition located, with characteristically blunt Estonian reproach, a hundred yards or so from the Russian embassy, gives part of the answer. It commemorates the 60th anniversary of the mass arrests and deportations of June 1941, an episode of totalitarian savagery that still haunts this small Baltic nation. The black mourning banners announcing the exhibit flutter in the breeze. They are dark reminders of a cruel past, a haunting contrast to the bright skies, pale stucco and cheery advertising of contemporary Tallinn, basking in the summer sun.

To enter the exhibit hall is to return to that past. Walk into the lobby and find yourself in a gray dawn, feet crunching on a gravel path. It was the last sound that many deportees were to hear in what they mistakenly thought was still their familiar, normal existence. It was the sound of visitors, but who was it, they must have wondered, so early in the morning? Secret policemen, their victims were soon to discover, prefer not to do their work in the full light of day.

The exhibit's second room, an old dining hall by the look of it, gives the background to the tragedy. On its stone floor, strangely, there are patches of illustration, faded signs of the zodiac, a relic, perhaps, of some earlier avant-garde daubing. They must have proved impossible to erase. In a way, that is appropriate. All around the room are relics of another modernist experiment, Soviet Communism, the future, the world was once told, that "worked," the future that, in June 1940, rolled into Tallinn on the back of Red Army tanks, and left an indelible stain on the history of Estonia.

It was to be the end of the country's pre-war independence, a brutal return to the foreign rule that had characterized this land for over seven hundred years, a return made worse by the fact that of all Estonia's alien rulers, the Soviets were the worst, barbarians with a Plan that had no room for small, inconvenient nationalities. Estonia's First Republic passed into memory and into myth; it was, as older people sometimes still refer to it, "the Estonian time," a lost Eden, a moment in the light no more durable, in the context of centuries of oppression, than the short Baltic summer. And yet its memory endured, preserved by the Estonians as a reminder to themselves, if not to an indifferent world, that they were still a nation. In Tallinn's museums you can still find lovingly preserved consumer products from the 1920s, chocolate bars and tins of coffee, resplendent under glass, poignant souvenirs of an outraged sovereignty.

You can see that same clutching for the past at the deportation exhibit. There is evidence, that all-important proof, of Estonia's inter-war existence prominently on display. Drawn from home movies and news reels,  jerking images of farmers, factories, picnics, politicians, parades with too many flags and all the other clumsy baby steps of a new nation flicker and shine as they are projected against the walls of the old banqueting hall.

Across the room, there are reproductions of the doomed republic's newspapers from 1940-41. They reflect the end of independence. In June and July, 1940 the front pages could still boast a few advertisements, for Alex Rahn's radio store, for example, or "Isis Kreem" ointment, but these suggestions of capitalist prosperity already have to coexist with pictures of arriving Soviet satraps, 'elections' where the communists win over 90 percent of the vote, and the first calls for Estonia to join the USSR. By August the same year, the advertising has gone, and so has the republic's independence. Free Estonia is mutated into the 'Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic', the latest recruit into Stalin's gargoyle Union. The headlines now jabber of progress, proletarians and production. The only significant information is what they leave out.

On June 14, 1941, the front page of the principal Estonian newspaper featured a photograph of rowers on a canal in Moscow. There was no mention, of course, of the real news that day, the simultaneous arrest and deportation of people across all three Baltic countries. Ten thousand were deported from tiny Estonia alone, of whom one third (counter-revolutionaries, I'm sure) were under the age of seventeen.

The Tallinn exhibit tells some of their stories. There was Niina (guilty!), arrested at 14, and Juula (guilty! Her brother was a philatelist, and thus, it was explained, a British spy). As for Ebba Saral, well, she was a criminal too dangerous to be confined to a mere cattle truck with the others. They put her on a sofa on a flatcar and, surrounded by guards, she rode into hell "like a queen." She and her husband (a professor — guilty!) both perished. There is a photograph of his grave, and copy of her death certificate, grudgingly issued nearly half a century after her execution. Fittingly, it is in Russian. This is, sadly, not a rare story. In the first year of the Soviet occupation a total of sixty thousand Estonians (four percent of the population, the equivalent of around eleven million Americans today) were deported, conscripted or murdered.

Two doors then lead from the exhibit's main hall. It is not much of a choice. One door leads to "prison," the other to "Siberia." "Prison" is an assembly of iron doors and a nightmare reconstruction of a squalid Soviet jail cell. "Siberia" displays homemade tools and rough-hewn luxuries, the former essential for existence, the latter for sanity. There are group photographs of the deportees, stoic in the tundra, dumped into a wilderness and left to adapt or to die. Some of them even managed to survive and so, miraculously, did the dream of freedom. An independent democratic Estonia finally reemerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in August 1991.

Understandably, this new Estonia has applied to join NATO. Russia's arrogant, disturbing opposition remains one of the best reasons to agree to the request. George W. Bush appears to sympathize. Speaking recently in Warsaw, he said that, "All of Europe's new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea" should have the chance of NATO membership. It was, for the peoples of the former Soviet bloc, a marvelous moment. In Western Europe, needless to say, the political classes were not quite so sure. To many of those folks, the real threat lies elsewhere. Sweden's prime minister, a Social Democrat by the name of Goran Persson, marked Mr. Bush's arrival in Europe by calling on the European Union to build itself up as an alternative to American "domination."

Of course, Swedish Social Democrats know a thing or two about "domination." Not long after those Red Army tanks rolled into Tallinn, a few weeks, perhaps, after the day that Ebba Saral was taken to her death in the East, the Swedes (the government was led by a Social Democrat then, as now) decided to do something about Moscow's Baltic land grab. And what they did was give it diplomatic recognition, one of the first two countries in the world to do so.

The other was Nazi Germany.

Lenin’s Last Stand

National Review Online, April 22, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

Shrines should be for saints, not killers, but no one seems to have told them that at Gorki Leninskiye. There, twenty miles outside Moscow, a holy place still stands, a tribute to a tyrant, and an insult to his victims. It is paid for by a state unable to cope with the truths of its terrible, barely acknowledged past. Its citizens have a better understanding. They know what is celebrated there and they prefer to avoid it. "Why would you want to go there?" I am asked, "there is nothing to see." "I'm interested in Soviet history." There is a shrug in response, no words, just silence. Navigation is difficult; there are no signs pointing the way, no billboards, no fluttering flags or excited crowds, just country roads, a few disheveled hamlets and the stillness of the Russian plain. Finally, after an hour or so, we drive up to a statue, more than twenty feet tall. Massive, monumental and an eyesore, Lenin still stands, eternal, hectoring, damaged now in one leg, forever gazing out at that radiant future that was never to come, still signaling to visitors that they had arrived in Gorki Leninskiye, the place where the father of the revolution was taken to die.

© Andrew Stuttaford

Before the Bolsheviks, Gorki (the "Leninskiye" came later) had been one of those pleasant country estates that are the backdrop to our sunny image of aristocratic Russia before the Fall: silver birches, a river, a yellow stucco manor house in the neo-classical style. In 1909 the widow of an early financier of the revolutionary cause bought the manor. Ungratefully, the revolutionaries nationalized the place in 1918. Lenin first came to stay that same year, despite, according to his wife, "exquisite embarrassment" over the size of the accommodations.

The Lenins evidently got over this shame and their frequent visits made Gorki a natural choice when the time came to find the Bolshevik leader somewhere to recuperate after a series of strokes. Despite the efforts of a team of foreign doctors (the Great Man eschewed the "usual Soviet bunglers"), recovery proved elusive. Deteriorating rapidly, Lenin spent most of the last 18 months of his life effectively confined to Gorki, and it was here, on January 21, 1924, that the "genius of geniuses" finally succumbed.

Past the statue, we find the road toward our objective. We are alone. There are no tour buses, no wheezing, dirty Ladas or struggling rusty Volgas, no Red Army trucks, no determined pedestrians. It was not always this way.

In the old days, half a million pilgrims would come to pay their respects each year. It was a patriotic excursion, a break from the factory, school, or barracks, a day in the country for all those young pioneers, kindergarten Octobrists, Komsomol kids, Party members, and plain, ordinary working folks.

Now there is just us. As we get closer, the site appears abandoned, the route to its empty parking lot blocked off by a needlessly locked gate, a gate without fences.

To reach the first, and newest, part of the shrine, the Political History Museum, it is necessary to climb up a slight slope. At one time, this must have been a reminder to visitors that to be worthy of their destination they were expected to elevate themselves to some higher level, an impression that the temple-like architecture of the museum was clearly designed to reinforce. It fails. Thrown up, with exquisite timing, in the later Gorbachev era, the building would have embarrassed Albert Speer. It is a gimcrack Parthenon, worthy only of some Neanderthal Olympus. Grass now peeps through the cracks of its empty, stone steps, but an open door signals that the faithful are still welcome.

They are not, however, expected. My wife and I are the only visitors. Sold our tickets by an astonished attendant, we walk up a sweeping staircase past a large statue of a pensive-looking Lenin. Another attendant switches on a wind machine and a red flag begins to flutter behind the marble revolutionary. As we reach the top of the stairs, the machine is turned off. It is a pattern that is repeated in each exhibit room. On our approach, an attendant darts ahead to switch on the lights, and on our departure the room is plunged back into darkness. Lenin used to say that Communism was "Soviet power plus electrification." It is a mark of progress that his successors have to contend with utility bills.

The exhibits themselves are worthy of that most bureaucratic of revolutions, production statistics, in addition to pamphlets, philosophical treatises, and proclamations. There are also some banners and photographs of the Communist leadership looking like Communists should, sullen, discontented, and filled with self-importance. Of the camps, the prisons, the mass graves, the famines, the torture chambers, there is nothing.

It is a disgusting omission, all the more so in an institution that is funded by the Russian state, but it is also typical of a country where there is no shared understanding of Communism's savage history. When the Soviets fell, too many of their myths were allowed to survive. An exhausted people and a compromised governing class had no wish to examine the past, preferring instead to reveal a few glimpses here, an archive or two there. The spirits of the gulag dead were to be appeased by no more than a few half-measures.

So, it should be no surprise that when, in 1994, the decision was taken to empty out Lenin's old Kremlin apartment (it had been a tourist attraction for privileged visitors during the Soviet era), the contents were neither destroyed nor placed in context in some proper place. Instead, they were taken to quiet, damp Gorki Leninskiye and dumped not far from the Political History Museum, in one of the original buildings of the Morozov estate, waiting, perhaps, for better days — out of sight, but not, quite, out of mind.

To reach this building, one must trek through silent woodland with only the crows for company. Unlike in the years of more closely shepherded visits, there are few signs to point the way, but another helpful Lenin (red granite this time and hoisted, appropriately enough, on the shoulders of the proletariat) tells us that we are on the right track. It is not a long walk, fifteen, twenty minutes at the most, and at the end of it we are back in the early Soviet era.

"It was all moved, almost overnight: 40,000 objects put into trucks and not even catalogued," the attendant explains, shocked by the sacrilege. She is a pleasant, educated woman, one of those intellectuals caught on just the wrong side of a changed Russia, with a degree, perhaps, in Marxism-Leninism and, maybe, a doctoral dissertation on some forgotten revolutionary. Too rooted, it seems, in the old order to adapt to or even understand the new one, she prefers to recreate the past, cataloguing, listing, and displaying the relics that she so loves, comfortable in this building that no one comes to visit, a place where it is still January 21, 1924, and where every clock is stopped, literally, at the moment of Lenin's death.

And what a treasure trove there is to see, souvenirs of the public man (complete with wall maps of the young Soviet Republic, the telephones, the long meeting table) and the private. We see Lenin's furniture, his bed (and, in a separate room, that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, dull, shrill, and neglected, a Rodham avant la lettre). Wait, there's more. Lenin's desk! Lenin's piano! Krupskaya's briefcase! A monkey bust from Armand Hammer! There is not much on the walls: a family photograph here, a pin-up of Marx there, but little else. We are led down corridors deep into the labyrinth of Leninist myth, into the realm of an ascetic philosopher-king. "He could read six hundred pages a day!" There are books everywhere, turgid treatises in plain brown covers, with broken spines, underscored, and filled with scrawled commentary, the giveaway spoor of somebody who had spent too much time in libraries.

The kitchen and dining room feature utilitarian furniture, mismatched cutlery, and a few old pots and pans. The message is clear, and false; we are told that the plain-living Lenin shared the tough times endured by the starving Russia of the early 1920s. That the always well-fed Soviet leader saw famine as just another political weapon ("Desperate hunger will give us a mood among the broad peasant masses that will guarantee us [their] sympathy … or at least their neutrality") goes unmentioned. There is no place here for the real man, the cynical murderer and didactic thief who destroyed a civilization.

No, the Lenin that haunts these strange, transplanted rooms is the Lenin of our guide's Soviet childhood; it is the Lenin of legend, the hero of the Finland Station, the austere visionary. And this, sadly, may be the Lenin of Russia's immediate future. Rather than reckoning with the past, Vladimir Putin is trying conceal it under the façade of a unifying national narrative, a narrative that will include, he says, "the best" from the Soviet years, a narrative that may well devote more time to the 40,000 objects in Lenin's apartment than the more than 20 million killed in Lenin's dystopia.

In the end, President Putin will probably be unsuccessful. The ghosts of the past will not be so easily exorcized. In the meantime, the shrine at Gorki Leninskiye will endure, dishonest and misleading, funded by the state but abandoned by its worshipers; in its own way, a fitting memorial to a god that failed.

Ghost Town

National Review, March 27, 1998

Stalin, behind Lenin, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

You wouldn't have wanted to live there, but the Evil Empire was fun to visit. Every empty shop was an ideological vindication, each dismal meal the basis for a grimly amusing anecdote. The tourist could play Dissident (Visit an oppressed church!) or Spy (Lurk outside the Lubyanka in a raincoat!). And what about that air of menace? You could be tailed by the police, harassed by goons, or even, if you were very, very lucky, get caught in a KGB sex trap. Everything was forbidden, and thus enticing. Pointlessly, but excitingly, train stations could not be photographed. Nor could bridges. Take that, Mr. Reagan! And as for bringing in Samizdat? Try explaining freedom of the press to the suitably surly ("You want to make trouble in our country?") border guards as they confiscate The Hunt for Red October. These were people who wanted to bury us. And they were not going to apologize. And they still aren't. Which is why, even now, Moscow remains the place to go for a sinister, Stalinist thrill. To be sure, there have been changes, but many of the old Soviet ways persist. That Russian talent for the gothic and the just plain weird has also survived. And so will most visitors.

Even if, as true nostalgics should, they check into the Hotel Ukraina. Not the usual Intourist concrete block, the Ukraina is one of the six Stalinist wedding-cake skyscrapers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. It is a grimly lit and exuberantly totalitarian hulk, festooned with crumbling concrete stars, hammers, and sickles. Other Cold-War relics can be found inside, including seedily threatening security men, a jolly mural of Soviet Ukraine, and, incredibly, a group of earnest Americans over to talk "people to people" about peace. In a few years, the Ukraina will be a place of luxury and pseudo-sophistication filled with New Russians and old investment bankers. But that moment has not yet arrived. Like Russia itself, this hotel is in transition, and the journey can be a little rough. Which is why it is better to dine elsewhere.

Ukraine Hotel, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Just down the road, in fact, by the cheerfully unrenamed Barrikadnaya (Barricades) Metro station. Le Gastronom is one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Located at the bottom of another Stalinist tower, it promises yet more dictatorship chic. Vast, dominated by overlarge chandeliers, over-officious security men, and clumsy marble pillars, it is a Cecil B. De Mille, nose-pressed-to-the-window idea of how the rich should live, something all too suitable for the Stalinist bureaucracy and the morbid tourist. It's bogus, unfortunately. Gastronom was a food store, not a restaurant. Stalin never ate there.

Nor did he dance his cares away at the nightclub called Titanic. In his day, the evening was for arrests, not discos. Now there is a nighttime scene as shifting and evanescent as anything found in Manhattan. If a bit tougher. That explains the airport-style weapon detectors at the entrance to many of the better spots. In New York they may be the sign of a bad high school. In Moscow they herald a great night out.

And having them may be prudent. At Titanic, notes one English-language paper, "you won't get laid, but you might get shot." But then this is typical of an expatriate press only too pleased to wear its "aren't we tough to be in Moscow" credentials on its sleeve. Amid the stock prices and the guides to eating out, the pages are filled with entertaining summaries of recent scandals, crises, and crimes. Cannibalism seems unusually popular at the moment. Perhaps the restaurants are to blame.

The determined tourist can also visit the sites of earlier, more traditionally Soviet atrocities. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria's Moscow mansion, for example, still stands. These days it's the Tunisian Embassy. Tunisian diplomatic intrigues take place over the network of cells in which Beria's victims were tortured, raped, and murdered. For the Tunisians have left the basement much as they found it. The cells are dank and sinister, accessible by dark stairs and gloomy passages. "I don't believe in ghosts," explained one diplomat.

That's strange, as Moscow is a city where the dead don't always know their place. Hitler's jaw is on a shelf in the archives of the Russian Counter-intelligence Service and, some say, can be viewed for a fee. Meanwhile, at Moscow's Brain Institute they have Lenin's brain, sliced into 31,000 pieces and carefully preserved on microscope slides. Famously, the rest of the old Bolshevik's remains remain in their mausoleum above ground, as embalmed as the attitudes of his supporters. In the Duma they continue to talk of the proletariat, imperialism, and the Glorious October Revolution. Outside, where the Lenin Museum used to be, unpleasant old people still gather, Stalin banners in their hands, anti-Semitic pamphlets in their pockets. A tape of some of Stalin's better speeches can be bought for $1.

Outside the old Lenin Museum, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

An even less reliable record of the past is available down the road, at the Lubyanka. K, G, and B have been replaced by more tactful initials, but the old yellow building still holds secret policemen and a small museum that details some of their achievements. With a few gaps.

Elsewhere, Moscow could do with a few more gaps, particularly where statues are concerned. For all the changes, the hugely increased freedom, and the chance of a greater prosperity, this is still too much the city of the Soviets. Its buildings, its monuments, its manners and morality still deliver that old malevolent charge. Looking at the St. Petersburg of the 1830s, the waspishly reactionary Marquis du Custine snidely noted that it was "barbarism plastered over." Well, at least someone had tried.

It would be more difficult to say the same of the Moscow of the 1990s. Lenin still enjoys his public spaces. Lenin in iron, Lenin in concrete, Lenin as statue, bas-relief, or painting, thoughtful, brave, and wise. His victims? They get a bare rock taken from the site of the first Gulag. It sits across from the Lubyanka, just a few minutes' walk from a monumental statue of Karl Marx.

That comes as no surprise. To be fair, some streets have been renamed, and a Bolshevik statue or two taken down, but for the most part the relics of the ancient regime survive alongside, or under, the shiny construction of the new era.

And so Stalin's Metro, the showpiece that actually worked, continues to function. Its escalators still thunder at alarming speed down past marble torn from a cathedral. And the idols still stand in its halls: Red Army men, workers, and peasants reminding you that the State will prevail and that, yes, the train will arrive soon. And it just might.