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Detroit News
04 June 1996
Indeed, Thurston challenges the notion that the Soviet people under Stalin were ruled by fear and coercion. There was, he says, plenty of popular support for the regime and the purges. And plenty of democracy, too; you could criticize your boss or even a low-level party official.
When the secret police tortured suspects, it was “to extract confessions, not simply to debase individuals”; besides, some people who were arrested weren’t even tortured! And Stalin never planned to rule by terror – he just reacted to events around him and let things spin out of control. (That’s much the same argument Irving makes about the Nazis.)
While the critical response to Life and Terror has been generally negative, there has been no outcry and no pressure on Yale University Press to pull the book. Publisher’s Weekly, which branded the Irving book “repellent,” called the Thurston book “controversial.”
Scholar Tina Rosenberg notes this paradox in the New York Times Book Review; the difference, she says, is that Irving engages in “deliberate distortion,” while Thurston “may be a bad historian,” but he’s honest. Actually, his use of materials is so selective and the rationalizations with which he dismisses inconvenient data are so shaky that it’s hard to make conclusions about his intent.
His claim that ordinary people had no reason to fear persecution is contradicted by numerous first-hand accounts.
His map of labor camps omits sites researchers have actually seen.
More likely, the different reaction is another example of the enduring double standard: to defend Nazism is a offense against humanity; to defend communism is – well, controversial. Minimizing Stalin’s terror has never been considered beyond the pale.
Why? Maybe many well-meaning liberals still believe that communism, unlike Nazism, had some redeeming value – after all, it was motivated by the noble ideal of equality – and regard anti-communism as tainted with the legacy of McCarthyism. To them, it is somehow unseemly to say that the Cold War was a battle the West waged against evil.
I know nothing of Robert Thurston’s politics. But in his conclusion, he states with obvious disapproval that images of Stalin as “an icon of evil … serve to vindicate history and politics in the West, itself a construct of virtue in contrast to Soviet malice.” Earlier, he suggests that the purges were not that different from other collective panics in which the rights of the accused were trampled – McCarthyism or the lynching of Southern blacks.
The Cold War may be over, but the intellectuals’ insistence on moral equivalence between imperfect Western democracy and communist totalitarianism is not.
Cathy Young’s column is published on Tuesday.