| IT'S A SIN TO TELL A LIE? |
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I’ve been living on Long Island for eight years now and for most of that time visiting the same local library when necessary. That is not so often these days with Google standing by to answer questions you used to need to look up in a book. Still, there are times. And so going there I’ve finally come to take notice of one of the treasures of the place, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The layout is such that the Reference section is the first part of the library that you encounter upon entering and the Great Soviet is the first set of books you see there. There are 31 volumes, so they’re hard to miss. Russia is a big place after all.
Even so I’ve managed to ignore this great feast of knowledge until very lately. But, as I’ve reported here, I have recently wrestled with a couple of Russia-centered books, one about the Great Stalin and the other about his associate and short-term successor, Lavrenty Beria, leading me finally to see what the encyclopedia had to say about them. Stalin came first. The encyclopedia was published in 1973 when Stalin had been dead for twenty years, so the article on him wasn’t the one that would have appeared when he was known as the “Leader of Progressive Mankind”, the “Hero of the Toiling Masses”, the “Genius of Marxism” and other such titles. In fact he got short shrift , with only a page and a half devoted to his career and no mention of such deviations as the Moscow trials of 1935-38 or the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1952-53. The biographers contented themselves with noting that he tended to “overestimate” his abilities. Certainly, and the worst thing about Hitler was that he had bad breath.
The new man in town in 1973 was Leonid Brezhnev. He had “rich experience” and “great organizational talent” and he “labored tirelessly” for the lucky people of the Soviet Union. There was a page and a half of this, much different from Stalin’s equal space. Not that anyone was going to create a “cult of personality” of course. That was what was wrong with Stalin. He encouraged all the adulation and genuflection that went on, but Leonid was made of sterner stuff. He deserved the compliments he got, that was the difference. He was a world-beater, Leonid, and if you thought otherwise, you kept your opinion to yourself if you knew what was good for you. In 1953 after Stalin’s death Beria freed a million people from the labor camps, but Lenny had filled them up again and there was always room for one more. And look what happened to Beria. He got shot for his troubles and not only that, his name was taken out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and he became a Great Soviet Zombie.
I looked for myself and sure enough there was no entry for Beria. Clearly someone had made a mistake. There was something wrong with the research. How could they forget to include a man who was Stalin’s closest associate and who stepped into his shoes when he died in 1953, thereby becoming the best-known Russian in the world? I knew someone had said that Russian histories were issued in loose-leaf form, so pages could be removed and added as necessary, but here I was actually encountering this unusual process. No mistake had been made with Beria, because others got the same treatment. For instance, Zinoviev, one of the five top leaders in the 1917 Revolution, but executed by Stalin in 1936. No mention. His friend Kamenev. Another one of the Big Five. Also shot in 1936. Also overlooked. Some encyclopedia, this one.
And so it goes. No Malenkov. He was the fat man who was one of the Big Four in1953 who stood on the balcony of Lenin’s tomb and took the salutes of the crowds below. They called it “collective leadership” in contrast to Stalin’s kind, which was more of the Genghis Khan type, with hints from Attila the Hun and the Marquis de Sade.
Two of the Big Four did make it into the encyclopedia. They were Molotov, world-famous during World War II, and Nikita Khrushchev, famous after that. One was Foreign Secretary for years and the other Chairman of the Communist Party, equivalent to dictator of Russia until 1964, but both got into trouble along the way. Their bios in the book were reticent about this except to say that Khrushchev had been given to “subjectivism” and “voluntarism”, which I suppose are communist words for pounding a shoe on the desk at the UN and getting caught sneaking missiles into Cuba. Molotov had a standard bio, reciting all the offices he’d held without saying much about what he did in them, plus a list of his medals without any explanation of why he got them. At the end we learn that he had gotten a pension and, I suppose, had been told to get lost.
In 1973 this kind of treatment was an improvement over former days when heads rolled freely and very few lived to get a pension. Civilization had advanced in Russia, but not enough by a long shot. How could it have when a modern government was willing to publish a guide to every aspect of its nation’s existence, which an encyclopedia is, which is nothing but a tissue of lies from Volume 1 to 31? Lies which even a large part of its own population would recognize as such, so as to return the regime’s contempt for them with contempt of their own. The people of Russia knew that Stalin had done a lot more than just win the war with Germany and yield to the “personality cult’ which had somehow gathered around him, and they knew that people like Zinoviev and Kamenev and Beria and Malenkov and hundreds of others had existed and that their exclusion from history was a form of lying by omission.
This was a negative type of lie, but there was positive lying as well. Unlimited space was devoted to denouncing the evils of Trotskyism, (though Trotsky himself got no biography) which struck the encyclopedists as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” in the words W. L. Garrison used about the Constitution. Similarly, in an article about John Kennedy, after criticizing him for negative notions about the U.S.S.R. they noted that he had warmed up to it a little, thereby antagonizing American “reactionaries”. He was then viciously assassinated. The linkage is quite clear. The fact that Kennedy was shot by a Communist who had just come back from four years in Russia is not clear at all, because it’s not mentioned.
In spite of this kind of blatant lying, this is a very scientific encyclopedia. There are pages and pages of diagrams and formulae illustrating scientific articles. A whole army of scientists and scholars is listed in the front of the book as authors of these articles. But their list of degrees and Orders of the Red Banner that they’ve earned does not impress me. Any intellectual who lends his name to a hoax like the GSE can’t possibly be respected for his honesty. After all, scientists can cheat and claim discoveries they never made. Every article in this book should be read with that in mind, whether it’s on aerodynamics or spermatozoa. The whole thing’s unintentionally funny, so I’ll return. | | |
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