Why doesn't everybody hate the former Soviet Union/Russia?
- From: holman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Eugene Holman)
- Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 20:26:36 +0200
Having been accused in this august forum of being a Kremlin agent, I would
like to take this opportunity to express and offer for critical discussion
my take on the former Soviet Union/Russia. To simplify things, and to be
consistent with SCB norms, in which alternate entities often engage in
dialogue with themselves, I will use a Platonian, Uo Hu[i]-ian
question-and-answer format to interview myself.
A. When did you, Eugene Holman, first become aware of the existence of the USSR?
B. On October 4, 1957, the televison show ("The Life of Riley") that I was
watching as an 8th grader was interrupted to announce that the Soviet
Union had launched the world's first earth satellite.
A. Had you never heard of the USSR before?
B. Of course. I vaguely remember the news stories about Stalin's death, as
well as discussions among my relatives about whether Stalin was a good or
bad man, comparted to Hitler. I hesitate to add that my father was a WW II
veteran who was fully aware of the role that the USSR had played in the
defeat of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, I was too young, eight years old,
back in 1953 to be able to think systematically about Stalin's historical
role.
A. You grew up in New York during the late 1950s, Eugene, at a time when
the city was full of refugees from Europe. How did this experience
influence the development of your attitudes about Germany, the former
adversary turned ally, and the USSR, the former ally turned adversary?
B. Such a complex question! My grandfather was a Germanophile, and he
taught me about Bach, Beethoven, Brecht, and other positive manifestations
of German culture. It took a while before I learned, on my own, about the
Holocaust, but that was in the late 1950s there was popular song by folk
singer Bill McAdoo, called "Go down you murderers, go down". It contained
the lines: "They even set Hitler's generals free, who killed six million
Jews. They're back with the West German army, and I call that murder,
too." . Being accepted as a student at the élite Bronx High School of
Science in 1958 brought me into contact with people such as Heikki
Leesment, an Estonian who did his best to explain to me and any fellow
classmates willing to listen what had happened in the Baltics. Heikki
taught me my first words of Estonian and, although himself not
particularly gifted at learning languages, helped and encouraged me to
develop my gift. I will never forget the copy of *Vaba Eesti sõna* that he
gave me to pore over.
A. You digress, Eugene. What were your attitudes about Germany and the USSR?
B. Well, having had a strong Germanophile grandfather, I followed his
advice and chose, to the distress of my parents, who would have wanted me
to study Latin or at least French, to study German as my first foreign
language. I eventually emerged as the best student in our high school in
German, also winning a city-wide German competition and being awarded the
prize for excellence in German in a school where approximately half of my
fellow students spoke German or Yiddish at home. On the other hand, after
sputnik, a Russian club was established at our school, thank you Mr.
Joseph Cotter. We learned Russian from a PBS program, the purpose of which
was to teach scientific Russian. I will never forget the theme music: the
prelude to Ravel's orchestration of Moussorgsky's 'Pictures at an
Exhibition'. Our high school only began to teach Russian officially during
my junior year, and, as a rule we were not allowed to study two foreign
languages. My German teacher, Ms. Rosa Karlin, happened to be the Russian
teacher as well. She recognized that I had more than a normal knack for
languages, and allowed me to sit in on her 8-in-the-morning Russian
classes. This, and my own curiosity about Russian as the language of the
Soviet Union, at the time evidently an emerging scientific power, served
as the basis for one of the riskiest decisions I ever made: at the tender
age of 16 I decided to take the College Board Examination in Russian, a
language that I had never studied officially. I finished with a schore of
650 or thereabouts, at that time among the top one percdnt in the country.
Thus, when I was accepted at Cornell University as a major in German, I,
quite exceptionally, had scores on the SAT language examinations that put
me in the top one per cent for both Russian *and* German.
A. You are still digressing. How did you feel about the countries that
used these languages?
B. That is a difficult question. As a person with mixed African-American,
American Indian, and European background, I began to become cynical about
the claims that certain peoples were making about being right, and others
being wrong. Having been taught by Mr. E. Karpf, probably one of the
greatest social studies teachers ever, to be critical abut such claims, I
learned how to avoid confusing the German or Russian languages with
whatever the German and Russian-speaking states had done. Knowledge of
German made me aware of Central European patterns of thinking, while
knowledge of Russian opened access to masses of information about the
peoples of Eastern Europe, such as the Vepsians, Mordvins, and Bulgarians,
that I would never have learned to understand to any degree without a
knowledge of Russian. For many years I subscribed to *Novoye Vremya*, even
if 'communist', a far better source of news about the world than *Time*,
*Newsweek*, or *Der Spiegel*.
A. So tell us, Eugene, what is your take on the Soviet Union?
B. Briefly, I regard the Soviet Union as a failed social experiment. Its
original purpose was to continue the revolutionary trend begun by the
American in 1776 and by the French in 1789. The goals were too high and
the leaders too ruthless for the experiment to succeed. In any case, I do
not regard the earliest Soviets as Russian imperialists, nor do I regard
the Soviet Union as, essentially, Russia in communist drag, even if its
ultimate fate was to be something similar. I concede that the Soviet
Union, a country that murdered or democided tens of millions of its
citizens, was one of the most criminal countries ever to have existed.
Nevertheless, it had one redeeming feature, that I consider to be of the
utmost importance. Although a dictatorship, the Soviet Union was dedicated
to providing its best minds with a real education. Having myself spent
some time as a researcher in the USSR, I know what a person had to master
in order to effectively use a Soviet library, some of them among the best
in the world. The best thing that the Soviet Union did was allow people to
develop intellectually, which included questioning the entire Soviet
system, to such a degree that they were able to bring the system down in
an elegant and controlled fashion. Many contributors to SCB hate Mikhail
Gorbachev. I regard him as one of the greatest personalities of the 20th
century: he realized that the Soviet system was going nowhere, and he
presided over its peaceful demise. No colonial empire has ever
desintegrated as stylishly as the former USSR did, and I have no pangs of
conscience, even when thinking about the victims in Vilnius and Riga, when
mentioning this.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
.
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