More on the West's Indifference to Communist Cruelty

I was disheartened to learn that western scholars are not much interested in parts of the Soviet archives which are available for study. Scott at Powerline discusses revelations about the impression left with a Soviet operative (if you trust what he said to his bosses) that Senators Biden and Lugar wanted to APPEAR to be interested in the fates of Soviet dissidents but were far more concerned that actually pushing the issue might make their negotiations on other issues more difficult.

In the current issue of City Journal, Claire Berlinski has an interesting essay on Soviet archives copied and removed from Russia by Pavel Stroilov and Vladimir Bukovsky. Berlnski describes the archives removed by Stroilov as copies of documents held by the Gorbachev Foundation. 

Berlinski explains that when Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of archival documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation. In 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov.

Among the documents are "reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee's International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev's advisor until 1991." According to Berlinski, Zagladin was both an envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.

The essay is a little long for easy consumption online, but it would be a shame to miss this 1979 glimpse of Joe Biden (and Richard Lugar) from Zagladin's reports:

Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for "human rights." . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

Apparently, no one questioned the senators at the time this information was published. The Front Page article linked by Scott is a bit tough to follow, as the English is non-standard, but it is fascinating.

And there's this:

Bukovsky's book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky's words, tried "to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective." Bukovsky replied that "due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship." The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it.

Pej adds:

I am with Claire Berlinski: More people should care about, and be interested in the content of the Soviet archives. Indeed, the indifference to them is nothing short of shocking, but I suppose that said indifference is easily explained by the fact that the archives revealed Mikhail Gorbachev to think (a) that the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 was good for giggles; (b) that the Chinese were right to massacre protesters in Tienanmen Square in 1989; (c) that the Soviets themselves were right to massacre peaceful protesters in Tbilisi in 1989; and (d) that Zionism/Judaism is equivalent to racism. If the Soviet archives had revealed that Gorbachev was the humanitarian everyone publicly believed him to be, I would bet that there would be significantly more interest in publishing them.

The fact that the archives reveal that there were efforts made to merge the European Parliament with the Supreme Soviet “to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse,” that European socialists believed that perestroika was supposed to lead to “socialist revolutions,” and that socialists “cannot accept” it when “passages in the documents of ‘G7’ [state that] the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level,” might also serve to explain why there is no major push to publish them. Too many intellectual applecarts might be upset by revealing that the Soviet corruption of supposedly mainstream European institutions really was as bad as some people claimed it was. . .

He mentions other evidence of Soviet corruption of European institutions from the scholars who had access to the archives. This issue is worth some study.