I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the Soviet Union. For most of my life, it was the other superpower, the villain to our hero, the anti-matter to our matter. We had freedom and prosperity; they had neither. It loomed large in our imaginations but was, as Churchill famously put it, a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” We held their lives in our hands, and they held ours in theirs. During my teens, I read everything about the place that I could get my hands on.
In 1976, paperback editions were issued of both Russia: The People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser, who’d been the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, and The Russians by Hedrick Smith, who’d held the same position at the New York Times. I read both books avidly. At around the same time, probably on the 19-cent used-book tables at the legendary Barnes & Noble annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, I came across a paperback entitled The Soviet Union: The First Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. Published in 1967, it contained twenty-odd essays by New York Times staffers on different aspects of contemporary Soviet life and culture.
I still have my copies of these books. I paged through them just now. In all three, what stands out most is the authors’ readiness to normalize life under totalitarianism – to emphasize the good, to minimize the bad, to make Soviet life relatable to Americans by portraying it as something that, just like our own life, has its pluses and minuses. Smith warns in his foreword that readers shouldn’t “misinterpret my criticisms of certain features of the Russian way of life as constituting approval of corresponding aspects of Western society.” Similarly, Kaiser, in his introduction, writes that “when I criticize some aspect of Soviet life, implicitly or explicitly, I hope it is clear that I am not simultaneously trying to endorse the corresponding feature of Western life.” I only just now noticed the striking similarity between those two sentences. Remarkable, no?
As for Salisbury, his opening chapter actually includes this ridiculous sentence: “Under Soviet direction Russia had made great advances. Her industry, technology, science, and education were second only to the United States and in some respects superior.” I’ve since learned that Salisbury, as Timesman in Moscow from 1949 to 1954, routinely painted life under Stalin as comfortable and pleasant – a Times tradition initiated by his notorious predecessor Walter Duranty – only to change his tune after he returned home and wrote an at least somewhat more honest book entitled American in Russia. “Four years of Salisbury’s misinformation, conveyed by the most influential newspaper in the United States,” wrote Peter Meyer in a damning 1955 review of Salisbury’s book for Commentary, “has perhaps done more damage than the best book in the world can repair.”
Was I fooled as a teenager by the manifest efforts of these purported journalists to sugarcoat the dark reality of Communism? No. I knew better. There were, after all, other books – some of them by (gasp) real Russians. For instance, Solzhenitsyn’s mind-blowing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had come out in 1963, his magisterial Gulag Archipelago in 1974. In neither of them was there a hint of the kind of moral equivalency between freedom and autocracy that the correspondents for the Times and Post seemed to specialize in. Later, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (temporary) opening of its archives would yield a whole crop of eye-opening new volumes about Soviet life.
Yet what difference, in the long run, did it make? Today, millions of Americans who weren’t even born when the USSR evaporated think that Communism is peachy. Massive crowds of young voters cheered Bernie Sanders – a fan of the Kremlin, Castro, and Chávez – when he ran for president. One reason for this obscene turn of events is that American educators, from kindergarten teachers to university professors, routinely sugarcoat Communism. So do writers, journalists, movie directors, and other “influencers”: while there’s no dearth of books, feature movies, and documentaries about just how monstrous the Nazis were, it can be hard to find material for common readers and general audiences that tells the story of the USSR – our nemesis from 1917 to 1991 – in a way that forthrightly depicts the scale of Soviet evil.
This is a deficiency that Michael Malice, the popular podcaster, has sought to address in his estimable new book, The White Pill: A Story of Good and Evil. Simply put, it’s a relatively brief history of the Soviet Union, told with an emphasis on hitting all the key bullet points and capturing the essence of things through vivid anecdotes and illuminating statistics. To be sure, though his topic is the USSR, Malice kicks off his tale in Washington, D.C., in 1947 – an inspired choice, for it was at that time and in that place that Ayn Rand, who’d lived under Stalin, appeared as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The only problem was that even some of the committee members – who, of course, were there precisely because they recognized the danger of Communism – couldn’t quite grasp what it was like to live under it. After both Democrats and Republicans challenged the bleak picture Rand painted of life in the USSR – “Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” queried a profoundly dubious John McDowell (R-PA) – she replied: “Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like.”
In the chapters that follow, Malice strives to give his readers the kind of details that Rand might have offered up to those members of Congress in an attempt to make them understand Soviet life. But first, remaining for the nonce in the U.S., Malice recounts a couple of signal events – the 1886 bombing by German anarchists in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz – that, by underlining the reality of radical violence in late 19th-century America, suggest that Russia’s long totalitarian nightmare might well have ended up being ours, as well, had the cards been played just a bit differently.
After all, as Malice makes clear, our 28th president, the “progressive” Woodrow Wilson, surely had the soul of a tyrant: “In 1916, keeping us out of war was a winning slogan. By 1917, working to keep us out of war was a crime.” Fortunately, Wilson – for whom, as Malice notes, “liberty was a luxury not to be permitted” in wartime – was a pussycat compared to Lenin, who consciously founded the USSR on the basis of “organized terror.” The Lithuanian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who’d been deported to Russia by Wilson, who believed that violence had its place in the scheme of things, and who thought at first, upon arriving in Russia, that she’d found the Promised Land, fled in 1921, appalled by what she’d seen: while she was OK with bloodshed, the kind of systemic violence implemented by the Soviets was, even for her, way over the line. When, in 1924, she gave a frank talk about the USSR in London, pandemonium ensued: Britain’s smart set simply didn’t want to listen. (And nearly a century later, many of them still don’t.)
After Lenin came Stalin, and with him the Great Terror – the execution of thousands of members of his own secret police, the deportation of “[e]ntire ethnicities,” the “disappearance” of virtually every staffer at Pravda and Izvestia, and the murder of “[o]ver half a million Jews.” Some readers may be aware of the many black Americans who embraced Communism and emigrated to the USSR; Malice quotes the testimony of a Jamaican engineer, Robert Robinson, to the effect that “[e]very single black I knew in the early 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared from Moscow within seven years.”
Yet even as the horrors unfolded, bien pensant types in the West defended them. Jean-Paul Sartre refused to criticize Soviet labor camps; so did the American novelist Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy). Among the signatories of a pro-Stalin letter in August 1939 were Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), and New Yorker contributors James Thurber and Dorothy Parker. The anti-capitalist author Upton Sinclair, who compared Stalin to America’s Founding Fathers and likened his mass murders to U.S. Civil War deaths, refused to believe that the Soviets censored books – because they published him.
Then there was Henry Wallace, who was vice-president during FDR’s third term – and who, if he hadn’t been replaced on the 1944 ticket by Harry Truman, would’ve become our 33rd president when FDR dropped dead in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. Wallace, whose admirers included Albert Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright, would later celebrate the USSR in a 1949 book in which, among much else, he compared the shipping of people to Siberia against their will to the settling of the American frontier. The film director Orson Welles was quite left-wing, but – to his credit – he despised Wallace, whom he called “a prisoner of the Communist Party.”
In short: the U.S. came very close to having a president who was an outright Communist.
But we were spared that. And history marched on: the fall of the Iron Curtain; Khrushchev’s “secret speech”; the Berlin Airlift; the Berlin Wall; the Stasi; the heroism of Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, John Paul II, and – yes – Viktor Orbán. Malice explains all of it for the uninitiated, and brings all of it to life. And finally there’s that truly remarkable last act, which begins when Hungarian leader Miklós Németh tells Gorbachev of his plans to tear down the fence along his country’s Austrian border, and Gorbachev “[doesn’t] bat an eye.”
And so it happened. East Germans start pouring through Hungary into West Germany, making East German leader Erich Honecker and his Stasi pals “livid” – but impotent. When, on November 8, 1989, Lech Walesa, founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement, tells German chancellor Helmut Kohl that the Berlin Wall “will come down soon,” Kohl laughs, explaining that such a development will “take many years”; the very next day, East German authorities declare the borders between the two Germanies and the two Berlins open – thereby rendering the Wall magnificently meaningless.
In the Matrix-derived glossary that has proved useful in recent years for so many political commentators, being “blue-pilled” means clinging to the illusions proffered by the leftist establishment; being “red-pilled” means deciding to face the reality behind the lies; being “black-pilled” means being so overwhelmed by the grimness of that reality that you become a nihilist; and being “white-pilled” means facing the grim truth while finding cause for optimism. The point of Malice’s title is that, yes, the Soviet Union truly was, as Reagan put it, an evil empire. But it collapsed – and it did so quite suddenly and peacefully and well-nigh miraculously, astonishing armies of Western “experts” and giving victims of tyranny everywhere a wonderful reason to hope.
Malice, who throughout his book admirably delineates the day-to-day terror of life in the USSR, does a particularly fine job, in his book’s closing pages, of capturing the sheer exhilaration of those magical days and weeks when the whole corrupt Communist contraption came crashing to the ground – and when the deliverance from despotism that professional prognosticators had considered utterly impossible actually came gloriously and blessedly to pass.
Admittedly, if you’re reasonably well versed in Soviet history, you won’t learn any earthshaking new facts from Malice. But you’ll likely encounter enough new material in his book (as I did) to make your reading experience more than worthwhile. And if you’re not terribly knowledgeable about the history of the USSR – or if somebody close to you is one of the millions of young Americans who are so ignorant of Communism as to think that Che Guevara was a paragon of virtue and Lenin a noble visionary who established a paradise on earth only to have it undone by Stalin – well, The White Pill is the ideal place for you, or that poor benighted young person, to start learning.
The HEROISM of GORBECHOV? Surely you jest!
I thought the same thing.
Gorbachev fought to keep communism in place. He was part of the problem, but his weakness inadvertently made him part of the solution.
The chickenshit Nobel Committee gave Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize for getting his ass kicked.
They’d have never considered giving the Prize to winners like Reagan or the Iron Lady. (It’s only reserved for losers like AL Gore, Jimmy Carter, B. Hussein & a plethora of other America-hating pricks.)
You forgot Henry Kissinger. The same Noble Peace Prize 1973 was rejected by Vietnam President. Le Duc Tho, knew it was not deserved. Kissinger’s ego would never refuse a prize.
With all the ginned up Putin hatred, maybe by tying him to the Soviets is the way in to “reach one and teach one,” so to speak.
Wh as r about the heroism of Sharansky & co who spent time in Siberia merely for engaging in support of Israel and teaching snd practicing Judaism ?
You’re right:-).
Looks like an excellent review of communism by a provocative author. Probably better than any dry academic book in terms of spreading the word to a new audience. Thanks for the heads up.
Mr. Bawer’s article explains that people living under Communism
experience day to day systemic violence. That is indeed hard
to fully grasp. Even Ayn Rand indicated to Congress that a
complete understanding of a terrified totalitarian life is hard to
convey.
Looking forward to reading Michael Malice’s book “The White
Pill: A Story of Good and Evil” – which encapsulates what such
horror is truly like. Especially now that our once-free country
is slowly succumbing to tyranny.
What do you mean by “even” Ayn Rand? Are you being dismissive of Rand? Have you ever even read her work and understood it? What makes me suspect the answer is “no”?
I was actually alluding to how both ordinary people and
prominent people like Ayn Rand suffer under Communism –
even if my comment didn’t come across that way. I meant
no slur against Rand.
I am no Rand scholar, and will probably never plow through The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, But We The Living is an extraordinary read, and is long overdue for a new film version–with the right director, of course. Someone like a John Milius.
God forbid anyone should mock or slur the fake goddess.
not so slowly anymore
The vile Dumb-o-crats and European Leftists have always been comfortable whitewashing the evils of malignant and totalitarian ideologies whether of the communist or Islamic varieties.
Just look at how Comrade Sanders and other Dumb-o-crats have long praised Cuba’s despotic regime, for Cuba’s high literacy rate and so-called “free” healthcare. This malign stupidity and collaboration persists, to this very day.
I read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s. Now, close to 50 years later I still think of those in the camps convinced that if only Stalin knew of their plight he’d swoop in and right their wrongs. How many like that are there today waiting for (politician of choice) to make things better? You can’t change human nature. That’s one thing communism, the theory, gets wrong and that, as much as anything, ensures its failure every time. (Of course the guys at the top know it’s a lie and use the theory as cover and human nature, as it is, to seize and maintain control.)
“In the history of mankind it is EARLIER than we think.” – Ayn Rand
What is the fundamental and crucial aspect of human nature? RATIONALITY. Man is the rational animal but rationality is a choice, man has free will, objective knowledge has to be discovered by hard work. Man is neither omnisicent nor infalible, he is neither automatically moral nor automatically evil, at any step of the way in his quest to discover the facts of reality he can make honest mistakes or EVADE them because of EMOTIONALISM.
You cannot change man’s rational human nature, you cannot change that reality. Neither can you change metaphysical reality, you can neither change the Law of Identity or its corollary the Law of Causality. And it is precisely those REALITIES that the communist, the Nazi, the socialist, the Muslim, the Christian, the Jew, the Hindu, and every MYSTIC and MAGICAL THINKER wishes to change, evade, destroy.
When you wish to change, evade, or destroy metaphysical, fundamental, reality (taking the blue pill and black pill) with magical thinking you only succeed in destroying your self, your mind, and other men. Reality can never be destroyed.
Are we talking about your reality?
The Big Lie about human nature (that it is malleable) isn’t some innocent mistake that leftists “get wrong,” it is the foundation of sand on which their evil ideology is built. Leftist leaders know their ideology always produces oceans of blood, but don’t care.
Nice review…let me just recommend the reviewer’s fabulous book “While Europe Slept”.
“One reason for this obscene turn of events is that American educators, from kindergarten teachers to university professors, routinely sugarcoat Communism.”
First of all, thank you Bruce Bawer, for mentioning Ayn Rand. In the history of mankind, the West, and America, it is EARLIER than we think. Ayn Rand is a historical, paradigm shift, philosopher though few people know it, realize it, or want to admit it. One day, if there is a future for mankind of freedom, liberty, and capitalism it will be because of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason — Objectivism. I have no doubt whatsoever that she will be as revered as Aristotle, John Locke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers.
But why do they do it? What are the psychological triggers that motivate them to EVADE the facts of reality? What precisely does the EMOTIONALISM of the evasion of the facts about socialism consist of?
The same emotionalist evasion and closing down of rational thinking occurs with Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims when you tell them their religious claims are simply not real, not true. The irrational, mystical, and magical thinking of the religious person is held to as tightly, emotionally, and stubbornly as the socialist holds on to his emotional, mystical, irrational, magical thinking.
As Ayn Rand wrote, “In the history of makind, it is EARLIER than we think.” Unreason, faith, and mystical, magical thiking, religious and secular, are still deeply entrenched in mankind.
OMG here’s my big chance. Someone mentioned “even” Ayn Rand. After all she isn’t mentioned all that often anymore.
Did you contact those links I sent to you about getting an actual job?
A woman named Lili Hahn wrote a memoir about civilian life in Nazi Germany. She describes meeting a man who told her Hitler ימח שמו didn’t know about the Holocaust
Like those who made such putrid movies like Reds or The Butler and Ant Bully
About 2.5 blocks north on the other side of the street from the Barnes and Noble site mentioned was a Soviet bookstore. At the time, much of what was at B&N was not allowed in the USSR, Some of the writers mentioned who wrote about the USSR also wrote about China. The Iron Curtain was intended to act as an osmotic barrier. It was supposed to keep ideas out, let technology and investment in, and keep subjects from leaving.
eventually even the robespierres of this world become victims of their own ideology . if not in this life then the next .
“The US put Lenin and Stalin in power so we’d have Straw Men”-my paranoid Brother..
Are you being sarcastic?
Yes! It’s the kind of thing my Brother says all the time, and it annoys me no end.! A lot of Left pundits echo that-whatever is wrong with Communism, it’s all the US’s fault because the US made them mad!?!?!?
Excellent article, Mr. Bawer. I, too, read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s. The Left could never sell me on whatever nonsense they were spewing. For sometime, I ignorantly thought everyone knew the difference between Soviet authoritarianism and our Constitutional Republic–and perhaps they did–unfortunately too many sided with the monsters Lenin and Stalin.
After visiting communist China, where hot water was available 4 hours per day, 6 days a week and where your camera could be confiscated for pointing it at the wrong thing, I often wonder what the iPad/latte/me crowd would do if they were told “no”…or their Internet was censored. But then our information has been warped by our own government, as confirmed by the Twitter Files, so where do we stand? Is our Gulag made of Digital Cages and fast food rather than barbed wire and gruel?
A very good read. I like it when a author is knowledgeable in what he or she writes instead of just filling up space with words and such.
Richard Pipe’s trilogy — “Russia Under the Old Regime”, “The Russian Revolution”, and “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime”— are utterly breathtaking and give a thorough glimpse into the utter depravity of Marxism-Leninism.