Greatly inspired by my first contact with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1973 as described in my last article here I’m returning to the charge today with more about it. I don’t think I’m beating a dead horse. Our Civil War was over a century before 1973 but books are still pouring off the presses about it, arguments are raging about it -- cf. the continuing agitation over display of the Confederate flag -- and thousands of people get dressed up in its uniforms to reenact its battles for TV. 1973 was last Monday compared to that.
Looking at ‘73 as a date in Russian history, it was a time when the Communist dictatorship was beginning to find itself on the defensive against its own people. This probably accounts for the strident tone of the articles, which uniformly celebrate the beauty of Communism and the infallibility of the Party and particularly its leader Leonid Brezhnev. The natives may have been restless, but you’d never know it from the GSE. One way of promoting tranquility among them was to avoid the mention of disturbing influences likely to upset the minds of the proletarian masses. So, as previously mentioned, there are no biographies of major figures like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Yagoda, or Malenkov. Take my word for it, these were all heavyweights; leaving them out is like leaving out Vice Presidents and Secretaries of State in the U. S.A. Some of their activities, all nefarious, did get mentioned, briefly. Most of the mentions were pure lies, but the big lie was the omission of the biographies in the first place. George Orwell knew all about this technique when he described it as the making of un-persons in “1984”.
One character who did avoid this and enter the hall of fame was Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926). He got a page and a half of puffery. Why? He created the KGB, that’s why. A message was being sent. The KGB was still there. It wasn’t as deadly as in Stalin’s day when it specialized in sudden death for dissidents, but it still lurked about looking for people with so-called mental illnesses, which could be diagnosed by studying their attitude to the Russian government. If they displayed anything less than fanatical loyalty, they became candidates for “treatment” at a sychiatric “hospital” that went in for heavy doses of mind-altering drugs guaranteed to make the patient into a good Communist or a dead one.
This kind of thing aroused protestors even in Russia itself , most of them people who had previously protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the government there was trying to de-communize itself. Not that you’d ever learn anything about this from the GSE. Their story about the tanks rolling into Prague was that the “progressive elements” in the “fraternal republic” had requested assistance to deal with the reactionaries who had insinuated themselves into the government in order to undermine the friendly relations between the Soviet Union and its loyal ally Czechoslovakia. Same damn thing had happened in Hungary in 1956 but good old Russia had come to the rescue there too. Come to think of it, the East Germans had raised hell a bit in 1953. And still to come were the difficulties with Afghanistan beginning in 1979 and Poland in 1980, which eventually led to the extinction of the Soviet Union starting in 1989.
This realignment has led, I hope, to a different attitude, which permits an encyclopedia to be an encyclopedia instead of a promotional circular for defective goods, which is what the GSE amounted to. Its authors no more cared for truth in advertising than circus barkers shilling for the bearded lady and the Wild Man of Borneo.
Their worst sin against the truth was in calling it an encyclopedia. All the encyclopedias that I’ve seen were interested in facts, not in selling the public a gold brick. Of course, being descended from the Encyclopedia Britannica , they took if for granted that the product they described would recommend itself on its own merits without the Russian kind of distortion and rearrangement. This is what we are used to and we can’t take it seriously when articles we expect to be factual are actually nothing but a lot of bombastic lies inspired by what? Vodka? Patriotism? Fear? All three, probably, but never by affection for the truth. Imagination ruled, but only in a way the Party found politically correct.
One of the many capitalist victims was Herbert Hoover, the man who fed the starving Belgians in World War I and moved into Russia by invitation in 1921to fight the famine there. Google says he vaccinated 8,000,000 people and fed 10,500,000 daily, using 120,000 Russian workers led by 300 Americans. This was operating on a big scale in a situation where 5.1 million people died, but the GSE only says it was “some help” and its real objective was to support counter-revolutionaries, spies and saboteurs in the interests of American imperialism. Russia instead gets full credit for ending the famine, but it seems more likely that they did a better job of starting it than ending it. Such is their reputation.
America stepped in once again to help them out in World War II, where we shipped them over $11 billion in aid to keep them in the fight against Germany. This time it was acknowledged, but grudgingly. One U.S. ambassador held a public news conference to denounce the Russians for deceiving their own people by plastering Russian labels on American supplies. That got their attention and they stopped doing this, for a while. I recommend anyone who’s interested to read up the facts in the GSE, where he’ll surely be irritated by the distortions about us, but also be entertained by the cheek of the Russians in printing them.
Things have changed for the better, I hope. And we have to live with Russia just as we did when she was manufacturing lies about, well, everything, on a massive scale. With all this going on, there was still an army of our own people denouncing us for our hostile attitude, saying we were “intransigent” and demanding that we trust our dear reliable Red friends, who after all were people like ourselves and only wanted to live in peace with all mankind. They should have read the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. | |
|
| | |