A few years ago the American leftist Mike Davis wrote an opinion piece called “Remembering Bill and Ivan,” which implored American readers, then celebrating the 60th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, to remember the pivotal role played by the USSR in ending the Second World War. As a matter of military history, it was a fair point, and one too often overlooked by Americans. The problem was that Davis wasn’t simply setting the historical record straight. He was “commemorating and celebrating” the Soviet and Anglo-American “liberation of Europe.”
Liberation is a curious word to use to describe the division of Europe between the American and Russian imperialisms. Look at the very first act of “liberation” orchestrated by the Soviet Union: the sack of Berlin. Paul Mattick, a German-American communist, wrote that
The rape of Berlin was not the aftermath of the struggle but part of it. The fight was less a military affair than a gigantic raid of a million-fold army of bandits. Even the appearance of the Russian soldiers ceased to be military; they discarded filthy and torn parts of their uniforms for German civilian clothes. They wore two and three suits under the military blouses and pants. Hardly able to walk, they advanced from street to street, tommy-gun in one hand and a suitcase of loot in the other. The bayonet broke open closets and drawers; what was removable was taken, only to be lost again to the Commissars who organized the eastward track of the previously westward Nazi caravans of plunder.
In great demand, of course, were things that could be carried on the body, such as watches and jewelry of all descriptions. As the victory must be celebrated, schnapps and vodka were also in great demand. Every bottle of vinegar was opened and tasted before the Russians accepted their possessors’ protestation that they contained no alcohol. And with the schnapps the fighting and thievery gained in elan. Those who could not deliver quickly enough were shot down; women, not willing to give in at once, were thrown out of the windows with their throats slit. Fires were set to the houses that yielded too little, their occupants fleeing the basements into the deadly cross-fires of the streets.
During the battle, the interval between life and death is the occasion for love. Stopped for days at a particular spot, there was time for enjoyment before the sniper’s bullet found its mark. Women and girls dragged from their basements were lined up on the sidewalks. They tried to make themselves appear old and ugly by smearing their faces with soot and by dirtying the shabby rags they wore in the cellars. But a soldier’s hand would wipe away the filth and discover good looks behind the mask of fear. Children would follow their mothers and sisters, only to see them ordered to bend over and lift their skirts to make ready for love in daylight and collectivity, to be loved by drunken soldiers still able, however, to keep an eye on the rooftops so as not to be killed in the act of copulation. Long afterwards, the smaller of the children would play the newly-learned “game of raping.”
After “order” was restored, the Russians began a process of looting East Germany of most of its industry (even carry railroad track back to the USSR!) and imposing the harshest “discipline” on that country’s working class. Elsewhere it was the same. For instance, the Soviets demanded of Hungary large quantities of industrial outputs as reparations for the war. These onerous demands, along with the brutality of the Soviet-backed state capitalist leadership, compelled the Hungarian Rebellion of 1956 (following similar uprisings in Poland and East Germany).
Thank the Russians who “liberated” Eastern Europe, says Davis, repeating in substance an old Stalinist argument. An argument that the then-revolutionary Max Shachtman thoroughly demolished when Earl Browder used it on him in a famous debate on the nature of the USSR:
The workers [in Russia] have no rights! The workers live in terror! If I’m told, by the way, I almost forgot – if I’m told: but how do you explain, didn’t they whip Hitler? Doesn’t that show superiority? Doesn’t that show it’s socialism? – I’m aghast! The most powerful army in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century was whose? Napoleon’s! The man who spread bourgeois rule over feudal Europe. Napoleon! The Grand Army of the Republic! Who whipped him? Czar Alexander, with his serf army, with his Marshal Suvorov. They fought well, didn’t they? Does that prove that bigoted, semi-feudal, backward, czarist Russia of the early 19th century was socialist, or that Czar Alexander was the best disciple of Lenin, or that he was the sun who radiates light throughout the world, as you read about Stalin in the Stalinist press, or that he created the world, as you read about Stalin in the Stalinist press? No, he was the Czar, the autocrat of all the Russias.
The defense of Stalinist barbarism and the softer, gentler repression of the proletariat by the western democracies – that’s the peculiar logic of anti-fascism.
But that’s something I’ll return to once I’m done with Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke and ready to review it here.