27-12-2008, 08:31 AM
Charles Drago Wrote:Much to think about here.
For the moment, know that your sense of divisions within ostensibly monolithic constructs is key to understanding the deeper political complexities of broader (hemispheric, etc.) ideological conflicts.
An example: To view post-revolutionary Cuba as an ideologically coherent state is to misapprehend -- fatally -- the forces whose conflicting agendas and the battles they engendered remain the focus of our attention now.
The Beria Interregnum
Throughout the Cold War, British and U.S. intelligence spent sizable quantities of tax payers money lying to the latter about their crimes. A favourite front was the émigré and/or dissident, and the preferred medium, the book. Thus in Mihajlo Mihajlov’s “Moscow Summer” – reassuringly, copyrighted in 1965 by those noted bibliophiles of the American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc. – we learn, ostensibly from the fearless Yugoslavian dissident-author, that Patrice Lumumba was killed by the same institutional hand that placed an ice-pick in Trotsky’s skull (1). The revelation of the existence of the CIA prior to 1947 was not the work’s only addition to the sum total of knowledge. Elsewhere, we learned that “only the destruction of all power will open the door to spiritual unity for mankind” (2), a proposition that no doubt elicited a chuckle or two from the CIA professor charged with overseeing the fulfilment of that year’s Langley literary quota.
Such vehicles also offered another use - the opportunity for the spooks to vent their deepest fears and neuroses. In the CIA’s case, the simmering terror was that the Soviet Union would de-ideologise and deprive it of its public raison d’etre. A second Mihajlov book, this one published in 1977, expressed this fear in the course of an episodic analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” Here, Mihajlov/the CIA overseer reinterpreted Soviet history from Lenin on, noting that the very revolution itself represented a repudiation of classical Marxism and its tenets. Even more revealing was this section:
Quote:On Yugoslav TV screens not long ago, there was shown weekly for two months a new Soviet series entitled “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” based on a screenplay by Julian Semyonov. Although the hero of the series was a Soviet secret intelligence officer – a KGB man who worked at the end of the war in the highest echelons of Hitler’s Reich – due to the wonderful directing of Tatyana Leonova and Vyacheslav Tikhonov, the series became a truly artistic creation rather than a stereotyped KGB spoof. The most interesting thing is that the author…crammed into the series a great number of very interesting reflections and thoughts on the totalitarian system (3).
What lay at the heart of these “very interesting reflections and thoughts”? Semyonov’s indifference to Marxist ideology; and boundless contempt for democracy. What was there in this to trouble the CIA’s more thoughtful elements, given that the CIA itself had spent its entire history destroying democracy at home and abroad? The fear that the Cheka would gain the same freedom from supervision and ideology as the CIA enjoyed.
It is a measure of the dismal nature of most Anglo-American scholarship on the post-Stalin succession that one must turn to a book, published in the late 1950s, and authored by a German former inmate of the gulag, to find lucidity and insight into what Beria sought to do, and why only a Chekist and the secret police bureaucracy could have attempted it. Bernhard Roeder’s analysis has a further vital utility: It offers us a precedent for the Gorbachevian revolution-from-above.
“Did Beria really intend to introduce a new regime, grant more freedom to the oppressed nations, abolish collective farming, initiate a policy of concilitation with the West – in short, revert to the Menshevik, Social-Democratic ideals of his youth?
One thing is certain: nobody knew better than he, Beria, in his position of potent, omniscient Chief of Secret Police, that extensive reforms were objectively necessary to get the Soviet system out of the blind alley into which Stalin had led it. And nobody but he could make such an attempt, for his Cheka was not, like the Party, entwined with the whole machine of State and economy. The Cheka was isolated, and therefore efficient; Cheka officials were in no danger of losing their jobs in the course of such radical reforms, as would be the case with Party officials, but would rather gain new positions of influence. Most important of all, the Cheka was not, like the Party, tied to a rigid ideology. The Cheka was an instrument of power for power’s sake. It can do without any ideology, can serve any ideology and betray any ideology. It has no ideology of its own, because it is the abstract organisation of absolute power which is not ashamed of its nakedness and therefore does not need the fig-leaf of an ideology…” (4).
Quote:(1) Mihajlo Mihajlov. Moscow Summer (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1966), p.214.
(2) Ibid., p.168.
(3) Mihajlo Mihajlov. Underground Notes (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977), p.96.
(4) Bernhard Roeder. Katorga: An Aspect of Modern Slavery (London: William Heinemann,1958), p.210.