Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. Her memoir of an Australian childhood, My Father’s Daughter, will be published next year.
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Vol. 27 No. 6 · 17 March 2005
pages 3-7 | 4295 words
I sailed away with a mighty push, never to return
Sheila Fitzpatrick
- The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton, 438 pp, £18.95, October 2004, ISBN 0 691 11995 3
This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.[*] Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet Union (and the United States and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject.
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[*] I should say straightaway that Slezkine was a PhD student of mine in the 1980s – his subject was the ‘small peoples of the Siberian north’ – and that more recently we edited together a collection of interviews with Soviet women, In the Shadow of Revolution (2000). I also read an early draft of The Jewish Century.
[†] See Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, translated by Laura Esther Wolfson (2001).
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 7 · 31 March 2005
From Clive James
Is Sheila Fitzpatrick sure of what she means when she talks about ‘the Bukharin/Darkness at Noon model of confessing everything, no matter how bizarre the accusations, “for the good of the cause”’ (LRB, 17 March)? That was indeed what Koestler’s fictional Old Bolshevik did, but it wasn’t what Bukharin did. Bukharin confessed because his family was threatened. So the confidently inserted forward slash is a mark of falsification, not punctuation.
There are more falsification marks in Slavoj Žižek’s piece in the same issue. Telling us how ‘the “pure” liberal attitude’ of finding Fascism and Communism ‘both bad’ is ‘a priori false’, he leaves, to those of us who think that they were indeed both bad, the task of fighting off the imputation that we are either impure liberals or that liberalism is impure in itself. He should be encouraged to put away his inverted commas until he can use them responsibly. In his very next sentence he even uses them against himself: ‘It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally “worse” than Communism.’ Unless ‘worse’ means worse, the sentence means nothing. If it means what it would mean without the inverted commas, then there is a simple answer: it isn’t necessary. Without the slightest bow to Ernst Nolte, you can take sides against both of the totalitarianisms put together. In fact you can’t be a liberal if you don’t.
No kind of liberal, whether pure or impure, needs to waste time deciding which had the harder surface, the hammer or the anvil. As the German Social Democrats of the 1930s discovered when they were caught between them, all that mattered was the impact. Those who survived gave much of the impetus to the ‘postwar European identity’ that Žižek touchingly believes is based solely on ‘anti-Fascist unity’. So that’s what the Bundeswehr was doing: warding off the return of the Nazis.
The Bolsheviks did indeed release all kinds of constructive energies, as did the Nazis in their turn. But in both cases the destructive energies were released simultaneously, and eventually the poison settled the fate of everything that grew. The disturbing thing for liberals now is that there are still so many gauchiste intellectuals who persist in believing that the roots of injustice might be found in liberal democracy itself, and the roots of justice in some version of unlimited, self-perpetuating power. Generously ready to concede that the second thing might sometimes go wrong, they nevertheless earn their living from reminding the first thing that freedom is an illusion. They are free to do so, and will never be short of evidence; but their position is false, and their marks of falsification are the tip-off.
Clive James
Cambridge
