Cultural Amnesia (83 page)

At Cambridge, the gusto and the speakable narrative style of J. H. Plumb rubbed off on a whole school of young historians.
Nowadays, by consulting the chronology, I can shamefacedly compute that while I was dancing to mainstream jazz in the annexe of the Red Lion in
Petty Cury, the real action was
in the bar, where Simon Schama was listening to Plumb—or, more likely, Plumb was listening to Schama. Namier had no such influence. Lacking Isaiah Berlin’s personal charm and
clubbability, Namier was slow to gain status as an establishment figure. A. J. P. Taylor found academic preferment elusive because of his opinions, the flamboyance with which he expressed them,
and his Fleet Street outlets, which were deemed undignified. Namier missed out on the grand invitations for more personal reasons. An honorary fellowship at his beloved Balliol came late and
might never have come at all. The drawback of academic fellowship in the ancient English universities is that fellowship means what it says. An Oxbridge college is like a London club with
slightly less miserable food and wine. Conviviality counts for at least as much as gravitas. The chaps are supposed to get on with one another. With a thick accent that didn’t always make
his dogmaticism sufficiently hard to decipher, Namier was unusually disagreeable in a context where merely to disagree was to be disagreeable enough. He was a wet weekend in Lwów. In the
long run this was probably a lucky break for both him and us. Isaiah Berlin—the truth must still be whispered—wasted far too much time at grand dinner tables. Like F. R. Leavis,
Namier was condemned by his personality to the monastic dedication that the college system nominally favours but in fact frustrates. His mere presence at Manchester helped to put the redbrick
universities at the heart of post-war intellectual achievement in Britain. His solid brilliance helped to give the writing of history in post-war Britain a weight of seriousness that not even the
United States could match. America had the power: in the East Coast foreign policy elite, a scholar-diplomat like George Kennan was shaping the world. But Namier was understanding it: there was a
difference, and part of the difference was conferred by Namier’s prescient awareness that to draw up a balance sheet was Europe’s privilege, and precisely because its power was
broken. Namier obviously found that fact at least as liberating as inhibiting. The title of one of his later books,
Vanished Supremacies
, was not entirely a
lamentation: vanished supremacies could mean values reaffirmed. One of the old man’s strengths was that he was a realist without being a materialist: abstract ideas were never his strong
suit, but the concrete idea of a spiritual value was not alien to him. So-called
realpolitik
had destroyed the world he came from but
had not infected him. He was not a plague carrier.

What was he, apart from an historian of unquestionable eminence? For most of us, the eminence is
unquestionable because we are never going to know much about his special subject. Eventually he cut down on his journalism and went back to parliamentary history, where he disappeared into the
archives and never emerged alive, so that only a specialist can decide whether he was valuable or not. But his achievement as a stylist is apprehensible to all. He was one of those
refugees—Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was another—who helped to make an exhausted Britain conscious of its lasting strengths. Pevsner did it through listing the buildings, and Namier through
reaffirming the supple empiricism of the language. The war having been decided by the New World’s gargantuan productive effort, the United States should logically have become the centre of
the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men like Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to
be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience. With Namier’s example to the forefront, Britain became the natural home for a language of
diplomatic history, which is essentially concerned with that range of events, beyond America’s ken, in which power can’t be decisive. The echo of Namier’s voice can be heard in
Abba Eban’s enthralling book
Personal Witness
, perhaps the most remarkably sustained work of intricate diplomatic exposition ever published. When Eban
talked, it could have been Namier talking. Eban said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Namier said things like that. Though he said them in the thick
Polish accent that he never lost, they all depended on his croquet champion’s mastery of an adopted syntax. It was Jewish humour, but it employed all the resources of the English language,
as once it might have done with German. You couldn’t call it a shift of power, because there was no power involved. It was a realignment of civilization.

One of the measures of our commitment to civilization is the extent to which we realize that material strength can never
be more than a part of it, even if the part is essential. (An admirer of Talleyrand’s cunning, Namier nevertheless found his craving for money not only
pathological, he
found it—a telling word—“pathetic.”) Namier died as he had lived, largely unloved. There was nothing cuddly about his person, and nothing charming about what he said,
except if we are charmed by a style adequate to the grim truth. We ought to be. What finally matters is the holy books, and how they are kept. If I had to choose a tone of voice in post-war
expository prose that was commensurate with the importance of what had just happened to the world, I would choose the tone of Sir Lewis Namier. At Cambridge a history don once caught me reading
the essays of Lord Acton. The don considered that Acton had deserved his high reputation at the time but “of course he’s out of date now.” I suppose it is possible that
Namier’s researches into the structure of politics at the accession of George III will eventually go out of date. But it will be a fateful day if historians cease to read Namier’s
incidental prose, because incidental was the last thing it was: it was vitally concerned with all the issues of his age, many of which are still the issues of ours. And one of those issues, by
implication, is the most troubling that faces the humanist heritage: how are we to pass it on in its full complexity, and what can transmit that except style? Namier said of George
Canning’s letters to George IV that they were “brilliant, incisive, at times even boisterous.” Although it is not the first word we think of in relation to Namier himself,
“boisterous” must eventually be used for him too. He saw, and indeed foresaw, the whole European tragedy in modern times; yet somehow he persuaded it to give him energy. There was
something biblical in that, like a prophet drinking oratorical inspiration from the splendid cataclysm of a sinful city punished by divine fire. Sometimes an artist is measured by the steadiness
with which he holds himself when history leaves him no alternatives except to speak or weep. If he speaks, he is a seer: but when there is grief in his voice even though it does not break, we
call that poetry.

Grigory Ordzhonokidze

GRIGORY ORDZHONOKIDZE

Grigory Konstantovich Ordzhonokidze (1886–1937) is sometimes given retroactive credit
because he died mysteriously during Stalin’s terror campaign in the late 1930s, and therefore might have been some sort of proto-liberal who, despite his curriculum vitae as an Old
Bolshevik, had been secretly at odds all along with the course towards absolutism. There can be no doubt that in the year of his “suicide” he protested directly to Stalin about
the free hand given to the NKVD, and it seems probable that in the mid-1930s he had more than once expressed doubts about Stalin’s excesses: a sign of independence which certainly spoke
for his bravery, and might well have ensured the subsequent mysterious death all on its own. But his earlier record was of a factotum thoroughly implicated in repressive measures that neither
he nor other grandees of his rank thought excessive at the time. Indeed he wasn’t just implicated in those measures: in many cases he planned them. One of the few non-Russians ever to
serve in Stalin’s government, he was born in Georgia, joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and during the Civil War was instrumental in bringing the Caucasus under Soviet control, with
appropriately firm methods of persuasion. Moving to the economic sphere, in the
1920s and early 1930s he led the forced march to industrialization, with an impact on the
civilian populace that would have looked excessive enough if he had not been so confident about acting as one of the instruments of history. If he did indeed become a member of the
“moderate bloc” that some historians would like to think made an attempt to rein Stalin in, his motives for joining it would have had to be the result of considering some of his
own past actions, about which he was on record as being unrepentant, if not untroubled. From our position now, at a safe distance from the ideal State which at one point he was proud of
having helped to build, we can see that his true historical role was to provide us with a standing joke. He really did believe, and really did say, that the people who inflicted the suffering
suffered most.

Our cadres who knew the situation of 1932–1933 and who bore
the blow are truly tempered like steel. I think that with them we can build a State the like of which the world has never seen.

—GRIGORY ORDZHONOKIDZE TO
SERGEI KIROV, JANUARY 1934, QUOTED IN
Le Livre noir du communisme
, P. 239

N
ATURALLY ENOUGH,
this
immortal statement was first made in Russian, and had to be translated into French for its appearance in
Le Livre noir du communisme
in 1997. Further
translated into English, it needs more translation yet: into its true sense. When Ordzhonokidze talked about the cadres who “bore the blow,” we need to know that the blow they bore
was the supposed necessity to
inflict
injustice, not to suffer it. (They had been inflicting it since Lenin decreed that the Party would have to rule by
terror.) In other words, we are being asked to sympathize with the butchers, not the victims. As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the
perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze
was saying more that that. He was
saying that the perpetrators were the true victims.

In the period 1932–1933 Stalin staged the first of his great massacres: the immense disaster
comprising the collectivization of agriculture, the liquidation of the kulaks, and famine exploited as a social weapon. His second great massacre was still ahead: the Yezhovchina, the
comprehensive terror of which the 1938 show trials were merely the small component that the world heard about. But the two-year jamboree of repression euphemistically cited in
Ordzhonokidze’s grotesque letter was bad enough. The upper-echelon officials, many of them the very same Old Bolsheviks who later on would be eliminated almost to a man by the bureaucrat
they had foolishly allowed to inherit Lenin’s keys of office, had faithfully carried out their orders to mow down the innocent. Anyone who had qualms did not allow them to affect his
trigger finger. Ordzhonokidze should really be talking about the ruined lives of hundreds of thousands of blameless citizens. But the only suffering that interests him is the supposed wear and
tear on the nerves of those deputed to carry out the destruction. By implication he includes himself and Kirov among their number: a brotherhood of martyrdom. This brand of sentimental
fellow-feeling is not uncommon among mass murderers and presumably helps to sustain them in their shared memories. One of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, Paul Blobel—the distinguished leader of
Einsatzkommando 4A—said after the war that the liquidators were the real unfortunates. “The nervous strain was far heavier in the case of our men who carried out the executions than
in that of their victims.” (Quoted, along with much other similarly noxious testimony from the hard-done-by, on page 364 of Heinz Höhne’s
The
Order of the Death’s Head
. Not a book for the beach.)

It is not recorded that Kirov declined the honour of being addressed as one who summoned up his bravery for the
challenging task of making war on the defenceless. Because Kirov was later murdered in his turn (in 1934, the year the letter was written) we tend to forget that his own record as a murderer was
exemplary, with the White Sea Canal—which efficiently depleted the number of those prisoners who built it but was never dug deep enough to float a ship—as his masterpiece. But the
fact might be remembered when the Kirov ballet company next
comes on tour to a theatre near you. Petersburg is no longer called Leningrad, but the Maryinsky company, when on
tour outside Russia, is still called the Kirov, presumably on the assumption that the ballet audience abroad remains clueless enough to believe that Kirov had once had some sort of background in
the fine arts, like Sir Kenneth Clark or Sir Jeremy Isaacs. Kirov’s background was one of unrestricted power and the extermination of blameless human beings. A measure of our slowness to
face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the expression “Kirov Ballet” does not strike us as obscene. The expression “Himmler Youth Orchestra” would. So, to
be fair, would “Pol Pot Academy of Creative Writing” or even “Madame Mao School of Calligraphy.” The subsidiary Communist regimes have been stripped of their prestige:
acquired late, it was quick to go, and it would be an uncommonly servile Western ideologue who still said, or even thought, “hands off democratic Kampuchea.” But the Soviet Union, an
earlier and more massive event even than Communist China, has retained its legitimacy, at any rate to the extent that some of its historical figures are still granted a stature that was always
ludicrously at odds with their true significance. The regrettable tendency of intellectuals to worship power is exemplified by their readiness to attribute dignity to men who could prove their
seriousness about politics only by slaughtering anyone who might disagree with them, as if ruthless nihilism were a testimonial to dedication, and an utter lack of mercy a mark of strength: if
you can’t stand the blood, get out of the abattoir.

Few among the intellectuals of the civilized world ever made a comparable investment in the future of Nazi Germany, so
they had no trouble condemning it even before it fell, and showed no reluctance to analyse its workings. As a result, we are well acquainted with the retroactive soul-searchings of Nazi
functionaries who were obliged by circumstances—circumstances beyond their control, according to them—to list mass murder on their curriculum vitae. Whereas we tend, erroneously, to
think of the Soviet Union’s Ordzhonokidzes and Kirovs as rare birds, we know that for the Nazis an upstanding blockhead like Gustav Franz Wagner was standard issue. As second in command
under Franz Stangl, Wagner was the man in charge of the day-to-day business of the extermination camp at Sobibór. The place was supposed to be a bad dream but Wagner made sure that it was
even
worse than it needed to be. Rather distinguished in his personal appearance, he had a talent for supererogatory sadism that made the few survivors of his hellhole
grateful for the relative humanity of those among his myrmidons who were content to devote themselves to mere murder instead of prolonged torture. Interviewed on film in his old age, he was full
of the difficulties of the “hard task.” Such language echoed Himmler’s with the cold precision of a pistol shot in a brick-built barracks. Himmler was always telling his
lovingly nurtured young SS officers how hard it would be for them to overcome their natural compassion. He had the same grim news for senior members of the party. At the October 1943 Posen
conference (the one where Albert Speer was present according to eyewitnesses but absent according to himself) Himmler wrung all hearts by painting a picture of how the high-ranking party
officials sitting to attention in front of him would have to put their civilized German values into abeyance while they continued to face the seemingly endless challenge of obliterating the
sub-humans infesting Europe. “The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.” Touring an alfresco prisoner-of-war pen near Kiev, Himmler
demonstrated his own fragility by fainting dead away when he was accidentally confronted with real blood instead of a statistic. But he nerved himself to the job. He made the sacrifice. He bore
the blow.

In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the class of professional exterminators divided fairly neatly into homicidal
perverts who couldn’t get enough and routinely squeamish placemen who had to get used to it. The second category necessarily outnumbered the first by a long way: under both regimes, there
was a large reservoir of men and women who were not much more insane than us but who, in extreme circumstances, could be talked into, or could talk themselves into, extreme behaviour. In that
respect the regimes were mirror images of each other. When the long reluctance of the world’s intellectuals to admit this disturbing fact was at last overcome—and until the collapse
of the Soviet Union the admission never looked like happening—the pendulum swung the other way. The first and loudest voice of the
Historikerstreit,
the acrid verbal battle between German historians that broke out in 1986, Ernst Nolte was only the most conspicuous example of a scholar who wanted to argue that the Communist ideology had
brought the fascist ideologies into being, by a process more like cloning than parturition. On the whole, however, we have gained from the two great streams of unreason being seen
in parallel: a full body count has at least had the merit of depriving apologists for the left (necessarily the more eloquent, because nobody except a psychopath ever apologized for the right) of
the opportunity to excuse communism by saying Nazism was quantitatively worse.