Monday
NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin made a Stalin allusion on MSNBC’s A. M. Joy yesterday that caught my eye because I am currently reading a novel about Stalin’s Soviet Union during the German invasion. Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary Life and Fate (1960), resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the way it captures the country at a moment of extraordinary crisis. It will be clear in a moment why Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew who was one of the first to report on Hitler’s death camps, couldn’t publish the novel while Stalin was still alive. It was even banned during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization period and after, appearing only in the late 1980’s.
Rubin was responding to Ohio Representative Jim Jordan saying, “I don’t think the president’s lied about Russia at all.” Jordan went on to argue that it was Hillary Clinton who colluded, not Trump, leading Rubin to remark,
It’s kind of like Stalinist Russia where whatever the great leader says we’ll figure a way to justify it. The fact that he said something different the day before doesn’t matter. Whenever you ask about the lies the answer is a complete disconnect. No collusion.
Normally I’m wary about Stalin and Hitler analogies because people often employ them as emotional attack weapons rather than illuminating parallels. Rubin is on target in this instance, however, as historical perspective casts useful light on the mental gyrations that Trump supporters and the Trump media are engaging in.
Grossman’s novel gives us the editor of a state newspaper, one Sagaydak, who isn’t interested in the news. Rather, his job is to “educate the reader.” Listen hard to hear Grossman’s irony under his apparent matter-of-fact description, especially when he gives examples of “fortuitous events”:
He considered that the aim of his newspaper was to educate the reader—not indiscriminately to disseminate chaotic information about all kinds of probably fortuitous events. In his role as editor Sagaydak might consider it appropriate to pass over some event: a very bad harvest, an ideologically inconsistent poem, a formalist painting, an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, an earthquake, or the destruction of a battleship. He might prefer to close his eyes to a terrible fire in a mine or a tidal wave that had swept thousands of people off the face of the earth. In his view these events had no meaning and he saw no reason why he should bring them to the notice of readers, journalists and writers.
Sagaydak’s educational mission doesn’t end there, however. Even when he acknowledges a fortuitous event, he applies a creative spin. Note how he handles Stalin’s 1932-33 “forced famine” in Ukraine, an unimaginable atrocity that led to seven million deaths in “the breadbasket of Europe”:
Sometimes he would have to give his own explanation of an event; this was often boldly original and entirely contradictory to ordinary ways of thought. He himself felt that his power, his skill and his experience as an editor were revealed by his ability to bring to the consciousness of his readers only those ideas that were necessary and of true educational benefit.
When flagrant excesses occurred during the period of out-and-out collectivization, Sagaydak…wrote that the reason for the famine of this period was that the kulaks were burying their grain and refusing to eat, that whole villages—little children, old people and all—were dying, simply to spite the State.
At the same time he included material about how the children in kolkhoz creches were fed chicken broth, pirozhki and rissoles made from rice.
Only at this point does Grossman step in, pointing in an understated way to inconvenient facts that Stalin would undoubtedly label “fake news”:
In reality they were withering away, their bellies distended.
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera once told Fox host Sean Hannity that Richard Nixon “would never have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74.” While Fox News doesn’t face Stalinist pressure, it has borrowed some of the techniques of Stalin’s press. Its goal is to ensure that history does not repeat itself.
Further thought: For an in-depth description of how Fox is operating as “state news” and “a servile propaganda operation,” check out the incomparable Jane Mayer’s recent article in the New Yorker, “The Making of the Fox News White House.”
