Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Lenin and the Cold War

If you come across someone talking about the Cold War as 
something that has been and gone, something in the past, just 
tell that person to watch the History Channel on Foxtel. There, 
the Cold War is well and truly being waged here and now.

Whether dealing with WW2, the USSR or any East European country, 
China or Vietnam, the Middle East, Latin America — in short, the 
modern history of virtually anywhere — the History Channel's 
take on it is not just bourgeois history but the crudest Cold War 
propaganda.

I don't know if the Reader's Digest has any involvement in 
the History Channel, but the anti-Soviet spin in the channel's 
offerings is straight out of that esteemed anti-Communist rag, 
which ran anti-Soviet articles even while the battle of 
Stalingrad was raging.

Just over a week ago, the History Channel ran a program about 
Lenin. It made me so angry and disgusted I could only tolerate 
its abuse of history for a very short time before I just had to 
turn it off.

There have always been anti-Soviet books, articles and TV 
programs. But these days, ever since Gorbachev, anti-Soviet 
propaganda, especially anti-Soviet TV programs, make heavy use of 
Russian "experts", to add authenticity, apparently.

With genuine Marxist-Leninist Russian experts — academics, 
political figures and former military leaders — dismissed, 
reduced to poverty, ignored and otherwise silenced, every urger 
or opportunist in Russia who wants to advance himself or just 
make some money knows that the thing to do now is to jump on the 
anti-Soviet bandwagon.

Attacking the Soviet period in Russian will get you on Russian TV 
and earn Brownie points from the Putin regime. Doing it in 
English will get you on foreign TV, which pays even better.

So on the History Channel's Lenin program, we had a so-called 
Russian historian solemnly explaining to us, over a bust of Lenin 
to give the sequence added "colour", that Lenin was "essentially 
a writer".

He had, declared this expert, begun as a writer and had done 
almost nothing else until, apparently to his surprise, he found 
himself running the country. But because he was a writer, with 
little or no understanding of real people, the deaths of 
multitudes of people were "just lines on paper" and meant nothing 
to him.

There was lots of drivel of this sort, all of it jaw-dropping in 
its inanity. Indeed, it made one wonder at the intellectual 
mendacity of the new breed of Russian academics.

There is not just ample, there is overwhelming evidence — in 
official documents, reminiscences, Lenin's own writings, speeches 
and deeds, and in the whole of Soviet culture and achievement — 
to give the lie to such nonsense.

Only someone with no more than modest intellectual gifts or 
someone who deliberately tailors their academic work to suit the 
prevailing official prejudice could advance such views.

There have always been people who would do just that, of course: 
mean minded types peeved at some real or imagined slight, 
"unfairly" passed over for some promotion or academic honour, who 
allowed their subjective views to warp their judgement and their 
intellectual honesty.

In the past, they had to confine their griping to their like-
minded friends or else do a runner and defect to the West, where 
they were liberally honoured while their anti-Soviet diatribes 
could be given free rein.

Today, however, such people are elevated to the front rank of 
Russian educators and researchers, heading institutes with 
formerly high reputations and standards. But now, the 
intellectual rigour of Marxist-Leninist analysis is replaced with 
petty-bourgeois trendiness and a reactionary political agenda.

Soviet research in history and the social sciences had very high 
standards. Soviet historical studies were astute, detailed and 
accurately grounded in the relevant class relationships.

It is indeed a pity to see such a rich tradition overthrown and 
replaced by the kind of spurious scholarship shown on the History 
Channel's Lenin program.

At one point in that program, in an attempt to show how Stalin 
was supposedly conspiring against Lenin when the latter was being 
nursed in Gorky, it was revealed, in tones of "here's conclusive 
proof", that the security services sent daily reports on Lenin's 
health to Stalin.

Frankly, this is a laughable distortion of history. That the 
Cheka were protecting Lenin and watching over his health care was 
no more than would be expected.

Certainly the Soviet people and the Communist Party would expect 
it. After all, Lenin had already been severely wounded in one 
assassination attempt on his life, by a Social Revolutionary 
using notched and poisoned bullets, no less.

That daily reports were sent to the Party's General Secretary is 
evidence of concern, not of conspiracy, for heaven's sake.

No, the Cold War is not dead. Major offensives are still being 
waged with monotonous regularity.

And they will continue to be waged as long as capitalism 
continues to exist and the spectre of Communism to haunt it.