In memory of Svetlana Alliuyeva, 1926-2011
The idea behind this ancient joke about playing dominoes was to ridicule the Latin mass: "My father plays dominos better than your father plays dominos."
Get it? You will if you grew up Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, that is to say, pre-1963, the year in which the liturgy went from Latin to the vernacular.
"Domino," "Domini," etc. Latin words for God. Yuk-yuk-yuk.
But for the moment, I'm not thinking about dominos in terms of mocking the Catholic liturgy.
I'm thinking of them in terms of what used to be called "the domino theory."
Now, once again, for anyone reading this who happens to be under 40, (or maybe even over 40) I feel constrained to explain what the "domino theory" was.
The "domino theory" dominated (no pun intended) U.S. foreign policy, particularly in southeast Asia, for more than a generation.
In a news conference in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."
The idea was that, the Communists having succeeded by 1949 in taking over China, if somebody (the U.S.) didn't stop them, well, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, India and ultimately, maybe even Australia might follow.
Based largely upon the "falling domino" theory, not to mention George Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" sent to the U.S. State Department from the American embassy in Moscow in February, 1946, (it was originally classified "Secret," but you can Google it -- it was declassified years ago) the United States embarked upon its famous policy of "containment" toward Communism. The idea was "Don't let Communism spread any further than it already has."
This policy had profound consequences for the U.S. and the world. Korea, Vietnam ... United States foreign adventures going all the way up to Grenada in 1983 stemmed from the "domino" theory, which in turn had its roots in the notion of "containment."
Ain't it just too funny for words, the way history sometimes plays tricks on us?
Well, maybe "funny" isn't the right term, seeing as how the years between 1946 and 1991 saw so many thousands and thousands of lives lost in the name of either stopping Communism or promulgating it.
But then again, didn't Josef Stalin himself say "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic?"
Why do I say "funny?" Because what ultimately happened was the opposite of what we were all told to lie awake in our beds being afraid of. (That is when we weren't being commanded to dive under our school desks and "take cover" from a "pretend" nuclear attack.)
Would a school desk have saved me when my school, and my city itself, were being vaporized? I never asked and they never explained.
Many years later I discussed these issues with a Russian friend.
She informed me that in her own childhood, Moscow schoolchildren had been subjected to similar rituals, only they didn't involve desks. Chula Vista, California, where I grew up, had no subway system. Most American cities didn't, which was why we were always being told to "Duck and Cover." But Moscow did have a subway system. Hence, rather than being ordered to duck under their desks, Moscow children were herded down into their local Metro stations in "drills" similar to the ones I remember from my childhood.
There, safe in the deep subway tubes, Soviet children would huddle against imaginary American missiles.
We will now pause for laughter all around.
Jokes about nuclear war aside, it slowly became clear, as the Cold War dragged on, that Soviet "hegemonism," as it was referred to a generation ago, contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Empire-building only works until you can no longer maintain the empire, as the Romans, the British and ultimately, the Soviets learned.
But in 1954, who knew? Historians might have been able to make an educated guess here and there. But amid the hurlyburly of fear, loathing, accusation, counter-accusation, coup, war, riot and all that other fun stuff, who was going to listen to the likes of Thucydides, Edward Gibbon or Arnold Toynbee? (Adlai Stevenson might have, but America seldom elects bald men as presidents. Eisenhower got a "pass" only because he was already a war hero.)
So the nations went at it. A war here, a war there. Under Harry Truman (whom Gore Vidal credits with creating the American National Security State), The Office of Strategic Services, a relic of World War II, morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency, which then mestastasized into every corner of the earth. And then of course you had Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Dien Bien Phu. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. My Lai. The "Paris Peace Talks."
The "Us versus Them" idea was everywhere. Even in 1979, when the Khomeni-ites overthrew the Shah of Iran, some people in America thought the Soviets were behind it.
When Pope John Paul II, the former Polish cardinal Karol Woytija, was shot in 1981, some people thought the Soviets were behind that. (They may indeed have been; it was no secret that Moscow was not happy about a cardinal from an eastern bloc country having been made pope in 1978.) But the counterintelligence trail in the pope's shooting was such a mess of "spaghetti code," as software engineers call it, that a direct connection to the Kremlin could never be established. In any case, the pope survived that attack. And forgave the shooter, by the way. Visited him in jail. The shooter's name was Mehmet Ali Agca. He was Bulgarian. Bulgaria was a Soviet client state. ???
Beyond that, well, check with the CIA. They probably don't know any more than you do. Or if they do, they're not telling.
Anybody remember Korean Airlines Flight 007?
August 31, 1983: a KAL Boeing 747 shot down, with 269 civilians aboard, and killed, after it accidentally strayed into Soviet air space.
A total, disastrous screwup.
Afterward, embarrassed and unable to come up with a plausible explanation for why they had done such a hideous thing, the Russians lamely tried to claim that this civilian airliner was on a "spy mission."
Yeah, right. With U.S. spy satellites watching the USSR 24/7 from space, and the U.S. Strategic Air Command buzzing the perimeters of that country around the clock, why on earth would a civilian 747 be sent on a "spy mission?" As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.
Americans were sold the reality of a "struggle" that was really just a big, murderous game. And I don't just mean the hoi polloi, either. So-called "intellectuals" among my parents' generation, and even my own, were among the most convinced of the believers (and many of them were of course cheerleading for the "other side.")
Fidel Castro's PR machine, for example, hoodwinked much of America into believing that his "revolution" was the glorious wave of the future, and not the dawn of shitty manufacture, deteriorating infrastructure, political intolerance and third-rate pizza that it really was. The young Bob Dylan, during his "protest" period, admiringly tipped his hat to Castro in Who Killed Davey Moore? A generation of willingly-suckered American hippies volunteered, loudly, to go to Cuba and "help with the sugar-cane harvest."
Oh, gosh, how touching! How Romantic! Jean-Jacques Rousseau must have been masturbating in his grave!
Damn sugar cane, by the way! It ruined the Cuban soil for tobacco. Cuban cigars (cigars being for years the only thing Cuba made better than the rest of the world) turned to shit. As a cigar lover, I really resent that, although as an American, my opportunities to get my hands on Cuban Cohibas have admittedly been few and far between.
Capitalism, we were told in my youth, was in retreat. The triumph of Marxist socialism was as inevitable as the cockeyed "laws of history" that Karl Marx had cooked up in the British Museum a century earlier had said it was. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, as stupid as he was brilliant, jumped up and down cheering like a fat little girl. Neruda loved Stalin. That's because he never met him.
History has no "laws." History is, as James Joyce had one of his characters say, "the nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken."
Nightmares don't have "laws." Sorry, they just don't.
Still, Anthony Burgess, one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation (and also a talented composer of music, by the way), was among those most thoroughly taken in. Burgess so fervently believed that the future of the western world was fated to be "Soviet" that in 1962 he published A Clockwork Orange, an appalling vision of what that future, specifically on "Airstrip One," might look like.
("Airstrip One," for those of you who don't read -- and I'm afraid that in 2011 that's most people -- is the name George Orwell gave "England" in his equally apocalyptic 1948 "prophecy," 1984.)
The 20th century was so tough on prophets (With one exception, as we shall see.) That's really what this essay is about.
In Burgess' novel, the young street punks of futuristic "London" speak among themselves a patois consisting entirely of words borrowed from Russian. "Nadsat," as it was called. Burgess assumed that Russia was going to dominate the future, linguistically anyhow.
Funny, funny. Here I am in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, teaching children to speak English. Why? Because the government of this former Soviet republic wants tomorrow's Georgians to speak either Georgian or English. Preferably both.
But whether they speak Russian or not is a matter of relative indifference to the current Georgian regime. Schools here do still teach Russian, but Russian does not have a high priority. English does. That's why they're flying in teachers to teach it.
Oh, my. Irony is oozing out of the woodwork.
In fairness to Burgess, the publication of A Clockwork Orange coincided with the zenith of Soviet global power and influence. For a few moments there, it really did look like the Russians were "winning."
1962 was high noon for the Soviets. They did indeed seem to be "on the march" that year. They had established a client state only 90 miles from Florida, they were staging missile parades every May, and the previous year they had put the first man into space. They were building Communism! As the Kremlin's favorite poetaster-toady Yevgeny Yevtushenko put it, "The world marches forward/To Lenin...to Lenin." (Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where are you now, Gene? Dead, maybe? Hiding in Oklahoma? If you are dead, you ain't buried at the Kremlin. That honor went to, among others, a moronic American journalist named John Reed, who didn't understand that joining the True Believers usually means asking for trouble.)
Ironically enough, two other events of that year, 1962, ultimately spelled the Soviet Union's doom. One was a global crisis, the other, a literary event.
In that year, Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev, responding to the placement of American missiles in Turkey, proposed to place Soviet missiles in Cuba.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy said "No, you don't," and for a few tense hours in that autumn of '62, the two superpowers, USA and USSR, seemed to be on the brink of nuclear war.
Then Kruschchev blinked. The Soviet missiles bound for Cuba never got there.
And by the way, that was the end of Kruschchev. Less than two years later, the Soviet politboro, viewing the Cuban missile crisis as a defeat for the USSR, threw Kruschchev out of power and replaced him as premier with the more hard-line Leonid Brezhnev. (Kruschchev more-or-less died in exile, writing his memoirs at his dacha.)
But the same year as the Cuban missile crisis, 1962, a small literary earthquake happened in the USSR. As part of a nationwide campaign to discredit his predecessor Stalin, Kruschchev had permitted the publication of Alexander Isaievich Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch, a brief-but-devastating portrait of the Siberian labor camps which had been established under Vladmir Ilyich Lenin, but had really flourished under Stalin.
When Solzhenitsyn's novella appeared in the prestigious Moscow literary journal Novy Mir, the entire issue sold out in a few hours.
Fine, for the moment.
But once Kruschchev had been removed from power in the wake of the Cuban missile affair, the limited bit of freedom that he had seen fit to allow the Soviet people was gone. For a long time to come.
With the so-called "thaw" of the Kruschchev years suddenly over, and a new crew of hard-liners (read: the KGB) running the show in the Kremlin, thus began what the Soviets themselves would years later call "The Period of Stagnation." Brezhnev presumably still had all of his marbles when he was installed as premier in 1964, but by the time he died in November, 1982, he was so far gone in the head that jokes about him were being whispered in every Soviet kitchen (as long as the radio was on to discourage the KGB from listening in.)
And Brezhnev was the perfect metaphor for his country. An orgy of oil-based military spending had accompanied the Brezhnev years. The USSR had enough missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines to blow up the world 50 times.
What it didn't have were luxuries like bread and toilet paper.
In fairness to the USSR, the United States also had enough missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines to blow up the world 50 times.
What the United States had that the Soviet Union didn't have was plenty of bread and toilet paper. And fruit and vegetables. And meat. And milk. And butter. And cheese. And automobiles. And stereos. And TV sets. And clothing stores. And single-family homes. And on and on and on.
And the rest of the world gradually woke up to this fact: the Soviets were nothing but a bunch of well-armed losers.
When Soviet power failed to subdue the 1979 uprising of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, people began to wonder whether the mighty Soviet empire was as mighty as it claimed to be.
There were two operative principles involved in Afghanistan. (1) Tanks, the USSR's usual means of enforcing its will, are just about useless in mountainous country, which Afghanistan is, and (2) The mujahideen were being supplied with Stinger missiles, for use against those Soviet tanks, by the CIA.
By the time Brezhnev cooled in the fall of '82, people were already beginning to refer to the USSR as "Burkino Faso with missiles," i.e. the world's most heavily-armed poor country.
In the United States, except among the most rock-ribbed members of the political right, this idea had been a commonplace for years. In 1975 the CBS Television Network broadcast (briefly) a "summer replacement" series (as they were called in those days), Ivan The Terrible. Starring the late Lou Jacobi, Ivan The Terrible was a situation comedy about a Soviet family living in a Moscow apartment. Its portrayal of life in the Soviet hell house, warts and all, was so funny and so accurate that the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. protested and the show was yanked off the air.
And it had been just the previous year, 1974, that the inevitable "showdown" between Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn, who had been on a collision course for years, finally happened. Solzhenitsyn had been secretly busy for those same years on a monster work of nonfiction, The Gulag Archipelago, which documented the horrors of Stalin's labor camps in three devastating volumes. A copy of Solzhenitsyn's manuscript was leaked to the KGB. The jig, as they used to say, was up. Solzhenitsyn and Brezhnev played their final two chess moves: to cover himself, Solzhenitsyn authorized the publication of The Gulag Archipelago abroad. In response to that, Brezhnev had Solzhenitsyn stripped of his Soviet citizenship and exiled.
Checkmate? Not quite. Brezhnev knew perfectly well that if he had had Solzhenitsyn killed, he would be buying trouble. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. He was "high-profile," and a hero to many dissidents.To have him "disappear" would have created a martyr.
Brezhnev knew that, so he went for the "other" form of retribution familiar to his fellow Tsars: exile. Brezhnev figured if he just kicked Solzhenitsyn out of the country and had his name erased from the history books, that would be the end of that.
Well, it wasn't quite. Solzhenitsyn spent the next 20 years in Cavenish, Vermont, USA, writing, writing, and writing when he wasn't coming out of his cubbyhole every now and then to make a speech somewhere, usually vilifying the west for not being more vigilant against Communism. And Solzhenitsyn outlived Brezhnev, the sweetest form of revenge (just ask my late father.)
In fact Solzhenitsyn outlived Brezhnev by more than a quarter-century. And lived to perform what he saw as his life's mission: overseeing the destruction of that very police state which Brezhnev had been entrusted by the politboro in 1964 to preserve.
By the time of Brezhnev's death in November, 1982, the USSR was in big trouble and it knew it. It couldn't feed itself. It was buying grain from the United States. It continued to spend billions of rubles propping up the network of eastern European puppet states in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania, etc. which Stalin had bullied Roosevelt and Churchill into accepting at Yalta in 1945, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, like the Romans, the Russians could no longer afford to be an empire. The Romans eventually ran out of the gold that kept their empire hale; the Russians, by the early 1980s, were running out of the oil money that kept them mighty.
What to do? Stall, for now. When Brezhnev died, he was replaced with Yuri Andropov, a sclerotic KGB boss whom everyone knew wasn't going to live much longer. He didn't. Andropov promptly died, and was replaced with Konstantin Chernenko, another sclerotic KGB boss who wasn't going to live much longer, and everyone knew it.
And since I began this essay with a reference to the Roman Catholic Church, let me mention here that the politboro, between 1983 and 1985, was doing precisely the same thing that the Church's college of cardinals had done repeatedly down the centuries. When a pope died, and the cardinals couldn't agree on an appropriate successor, they would deliberately choose a cardinal who had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, figuring that by the time he died, they would have found someone they liked better.
Before Pope John Paul II, (who pretty much eclipsed all of his predecessors in the popularity department) one of the 20th Century's most beloved and remembered popes was John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli.) His papacy ran from 1958 to 1963.
John XXIII was no dummy. Before he became pope, he was perfectly aware of this tradional "wait-'til-he-croaks" practice among his fellow cardinals. When he was picked to succeed Pius XII in 1958, 77-year old Cardinal Roncalli, now Pope John XXIII, famously remarked, "We are at the end of our rope and at the top of the heap."
The politboro borrowed a page from the college of cardinals' playbook. It ran through Andropov and Chernenko, and then decided, two years or so later, on Mikhail Gorbachev, an unknown agricultural bureaucrat from somewhere out in the sticks.
All of us over age 40 remember what happened next. Unlike his geriatric predecessors, Gorbachev knew that a few things had to change. One of them was Moscow's insistence upon central control of everything across 11 time zones.
Uh-uh. Didn't work, and Gorbachev knew it. So he embarked upon a program he called Perestroika, ("Restructuring"), which attempted to spread the decision-making power around a bit wider.
Another ongoing Soviet problem was that everybody was so scared of his or her boss that nobody wanted to blow the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse. Gorby tried to change that, too, with a program called Glasnost ("Openness") which encouraged workers to step up and speak out where they saw problems.
But all of this was window-dressing. The rot went much deeper than that. Gorbachev was like a kitten picking at a ball of yarn. Once it started to unravel, there was no stopping it.
Sooner or later, non-Russian republics in the USSR, which had been coerced by Stalin into joining the Soviet Union in the first place, were going to get the scent in the wind and start agitating for more freedom.
And then, when they got a little freedom, start agitating for independence.
Meanwhile, along came SDI. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" as it was derisively referred to in the news media, was the last nail in the USSR's coffin. President Ronald Reagan aggressively pursued the goal of a computer-based defense system that could "zap" incoming Soviet missiles with lasers.
The Soviets screamed bloody murder -- for 40 years, Mutually Assured Destruction had been the lynchpin of so-called World Peace (through innumerable brushfire wars.) Now Reagan was threatening to upset that apple cart.
It was poker, pure and simple. SDI may have been, in reality, an unattainable engineering feat, but the Russians didn't know that. Reagan even offered to "share" SDI technology with them -- "Here, we're building this thing, and we'll show you how to build it too." But Reagan and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what they were up to. They knew that the Russians were every bit as capable (or incapable) of building a missile defense system as were the Americans, the British or anyone else. Nothing wrong with Soviet science and technology; they were among the world's best.
What the Soviets didn't have was the money. Reagan knew that, and he used that leverage to make Gorbachev deal with him.
Then Boris Yeltsin came along, saw an opportunity to get Gorbachev out of the way and scoop up all the chips in Moscow for himself, and he took it. What did Yeltsin care if the death of the Soviet Union was necessary to put him at the "top of the heap" in the Russian Federation? He assumed the role of "hero" when an unsuccesful coup was staged against Gorbachev in 1991, then started playing his own cards. Some say Yeltsin negotiated a secret deal with some of the republics -- don't stand between me and what I want, and you'll get independence. (Google the "Belovezha Accords" if you want to know more about this.)
On Christmas Day, 1991, I was sitting in my living room in Abidjan, the capital of the west African nation of Ivory Coast, DX'ing around on the shortwave radio for some news. I heard on the BBC that the Soviet Union was no more. Gorbachev, after resisting the unraveling of the ball of yarn for several months, had finally faced the fact that he no longer had a country to be the leader of. The USSR was as dead as the dodo bird. With a minimum of ceremony, Gorbachev went on Soviet television, made a farewell speech, wished everyone good luck, and went off to write his memoirs.
No nuclear holocaust, no Clash of the Titans, no WWIII. All those things that had been predicted with such dire hand-wringing when I was growing up had turned out to be...well, nothing more than second-rate television. In 1983 the American media whooped up a massive brouhaha about a made-for-TV movie called The Day After. The subject of this film was the nuclear war which was supposedly inevitable if America didn't stop refusing to appease the Soviets. This TV movie got more press build-up than anything I could remember since the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (in 1964, the same year Brezhnev came to power in Moscow.)
The media really wanted everyone to watch this film. They were breathless about it. Nuclear war! Coming next! It's five minutes to twelve!
Reviews of The Day After were lukewarm at best.
In the end, it was just another low-budget movie. It sank like a stone and was never watched again. Everyone, including the TV critics, yawned and then channel-surfed away to watch The Love Boat.
Say goodnight, Gracie.
The idea behind this ancient joke about playing dominoes was to ridicule the Latin mass: "My father plays dominos better than your father plays dominos."
Get it? You will if you grew up Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, that is to say, pre-1963, the year in which the liturgy went from Latin to the vernacular.
"Domino," "Domini," etc. Latin words for God. Yuk-yuk-yuk.
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| Remember Dr. Strangelove? I sure do. |
I'm thinking of them in terms of what used to be called "the domino theory."
Now, once again, for anyone reading this who happens to be under 40, (or maybe even over 40) I feel constrained to explain what the "domino theory" was.
The "domino theory" dominated (no pun intended) U.S. foreign policy, particularly in southeast Asia, for more than a generation.
In a news conference in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."
The idea was that, the Communists having succeeded by 1949 in taking over China, if somebody (the U.S.) didn't stop them, well, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, India and ultimately, maybe even Australia might follow.
Based largely upon the "falling domino" theory, not to mention George Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" sent to the U.S. State Department from the American embassy in Moscow in February, 1946, (it was originally classified "Secret," but you can Google it -- it was declassified years ago) the United States embarked upon its famous policy of "containment" toward Communism. The idea was "Don't let Communism spread any further than it already has."
This policy had profound consequences for the U.S. and the world. Korea, Vietnam ... United States foreign adventures going all the way up to Grenada in 1983 stemmed from the "domino" theory, which in turn had its roots in the notion of "containment."
Ain't it just too funny for words, the way history sometimes plays tricks on us?
Well, maybe "funny" isn't the right term, seeing as how the years between 1946 and 1991 saw so many thousands and thousands of lives lost in the name of either stopping Communism or promulgating it.
But then again, didn't Josef Stalin himself say "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic?"
Why do I say "funny?" Because what ultimately happened was the opposite of what we were all told to lie awake in our beds being afraid of. (That is when we weren't being commanded to dive under our school desks and "take cover" from a "pretend" nuclear attack.)
Would a school desk have saved me when my school, and my city itself, were being vaporized? I never asked and they never explained.
Many years later I discussed these issues with a Russian friend.
She informed me that in her own childhood, Moscow schoolchildren had been subjected to similar rituals, only they didn't involve desks. Chula Vista, California, where I grew up, had no subway system. Most American cities didn't, which was why we were always being told to "Duck and Cover." But Moscow did have a subway system. Hence, rather than being ordered to duck under their desks, Moscow children were herded down into their local Metro stations in "drills" similar to the ones I remember from my childhood.
There, safe in the deep subway tubes, Soviet children would huddle against imaginary American missiles.
We will now pause for laughter all around.
Jokes about nuclear war aside, it slowly became clear, as the Cold War dragged on, that Soviet "hegemonism," as it was referred to a generation ago, contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Empire-building only works until you can no longer maintain the empire, as the Romans, the British and ultimately, the Soviets learned.
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| Was the principal of my school really stupid enough to think that making me stick my butt under my desk was going to save me from this? |
But in 1954, who knew? Historians might have been able to make an educated guess here and there. But amid the hurlyburly of fear, loathing, accusation, counter-accusation, coup, war, riot and all that other fun stuff, who was going to listen to the likes of Thucydides, Edward Gibbon or Arnold Toynbee? (Adlai Stevenson might have, but America seldom elects bald men as presidents. Eisenhower got a "pass" only because he was already a war hero.)
So the nations went at it. A war here, a war there. Under Harry Truman (whom Gore Vidal credits with creating the American National Security State), The Office of Strategic Services, a relic of World War II, morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency, which then mestastasized into every corner of the earth. And then of course you had Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Dien Bien Phu. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. My Lai. The "Paris Peace Talks."
The "Us versus Them" idea was everywhere. Even in 1979, when the Khomeni-ites overthrew the Shah of Iran, some people in America thought the Soviets were behind it.
When Pope John Paul II, the former Polish cardinal Karol Woytija, was shot in 1981, some people thought the Soviets were behind that. (They may indeed have been; it was no secret that Moscow was not happy about a cardinal from an eastern bloc country having been made pope in 1978.) But the counterintelligence trail in the pope's shooting was such a mess of "spaghetti code," as software engineers call it, that a direct connection to the Kremlin could never be established. In any case, the pope survived that attack. And forgave the shooter, by the way. Visited him in jail. The shooter's name was Mehmet Ali Agca. He was Bulgarian. Bulgaria was a Soviet client state. ???
Beyond that, well, check with the CIA. They probably don't know any more than you do. Or if they do, they're not telling.
Anybody remember Korean Airlines Flight 007?
August 31, 1983: a KAL Boeing 747 shot down, with 269 civilians aboard, and killed, after it accidentally strayed into Soviet air space.
A total, disastrous screwup.
Afterward, embarrassed and unable to come up with a plausible explanation for why they had done such a hideous thing, the Russians lamely tried to claim that this civilian airliner was on a "spy mission."
Yeah, right. With U.S. spy satellites watching the USSR 24/7 from space, and the U.S. Strategic Air Command buzzing the perimeters of that country around the clock, why on earth would a civilian 747 be sent on a "spy mission?" As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.
Americans were sold the reality of a "struggle" that was really just a big, murderous game. And I don't just mean the hoi polloi, either. So-called "intellectuals" among my parents' generation, and even my own, were among the most convinced of the believers (and many of them were of course cheerleading for the "other side.")
Fidel Castro's PR machine, for example, hoodwinked much of America into believing that his "revolution" was the glorious wave of the future, and not the dawn of shitty manufacture, deteriorating infrastructure, political intolerance and third-rate pizza that it really was. The young Bob Dylan, during his "protest" period, admiringly tipped his hat to Castro in Who Killed Davey Moore? A generation of willingly-suckered American hippies volunteered, loudly, to go to Cuba and "help with the sugar-cane harvest."
Oh, gosh, how touching! How Romantic! Jean-Jacques Rousseau must have been masturbating in his grave!
Damn sugar cane, by the way! It ruined the Cuban soil for tobacco. Cuban cigars (cigars being for years the only thing Cuba made better than the rest of the world) turned to shit. As a cigar lover, I really resent that, although as an American, my opportunities to get my hands on Cuban Cohibas have admittedly been few and far between.
Capitalism, we were told in my youth, was in retreat. The triumph of Marxist socialism was as inevitable as the cockeyed "laws of history" that Karl Marx had cooked up in the British Museum a century earlier had said it was. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, as stupid as he was brilliant, jumped up and down cheering like a fat little girl. Neruda loved Stalin. That's because he never met him.
History has no "laws." History is, as James Joyce had one of his characters say, "the nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken."
Nightmares don't have "laws." Sorry, they just don't.
Still, Anthony Burgess, one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation (and also a talented composer of music, by the way), was among those most thoroughly taken in. Burgess so fervently believed that the future of the western world was fated to be "Soviet" that in 1962 he published A Clockwork Orange, an appalling vision of what that future, specifically on "Airstrip One," might look like.
("Airstrip One," for those of you who don't read -- and I'm afraid that in 2011 that's most people -- is the name George Orwell gave "England" in his equally apocalyptic 1948 "prophecy," 1984.)
The 20th century was so tough on prophets (With one exception, as we shall see.) That's really what this essay is about.
In Burgess' novel, the young street punks of futuristic "London" speak among themselves a patois consisting entirely of words borrowed from Russian. "Nadsat," as it was called. Burgess assumed that Russia was going to dominate the future, linguistically anyhow.
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| In 1962, Anthony Burgess had the street thugs in his novel A Clockwork Orange speaking bastardized Russian. By 2011, just about nobody in the world was even interested in learning Russian anymore. |
Funny, funny. Here I am in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, teaching children to speak English. Why? Because the government of this former Soviet republic wants tomorrow's Georgians to speak either Georgian or English. Preferably both.
But whether they speak Russian or not is a matter of relative indifference to the current Georgian regime. Schools here do still teach Russian, but Russian does not have a high priority. English does. That's why they're flying in teachers to teach it.
Oh, my. Irony is oozing out of the woodwork.
In fairness to Burgess, the publication of A Clockwork Orange coincided with the zenith of Soviet global power and influence. For a few moments there, it really did look like the Russians were "winning."
1962 was high noon for the Soviets. They did indeed seem to be "on the march" that year. They had established a client state only 90 miles from Florida, they were staging missile parades every May, and the previous year they had put the first man into space. They were building Communism! As the Kremlin's favorite poetaster-toady Yevgeny Yevtushenko put it, "The world marches forward/To Lenin...to Lenin." (Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where are you now, Gene? Dead, maybe? Hiding in Oklahoma? If you are dead, you ain't buried at the Kremlin. That honor went to, among others, a moronic American journalist named John Reed, who didn't understand that joining the True Believers usually means asking for trouble.)
Ironically enough, two other events of that year, 1962, ultimately spelled the Soviet Union's doom. One was a global crisis, the other, a literary event.
In that year, Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev, responding to the placement of American missiles in Turkey, proposed to place Soviet missiles in Cuba.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy said "No, you don't," and for a few tense hours in that autumn of '62, the two superpowers, USA and USSR, seemed to be on the brink of nuclear war.
Then Kruschchev blinked. The Soviet missiles bound for Cuba never got there.
And by the way, that was the end of Kruschchev. Less than two years later, the Soviet politboro, viewing the Cuban missile crisis as a defeat for the USSR, threw Kruschchev out of power and replaced him as premier with the more hard-line Leonid Brezhnev. (Kruschchev more-or-less died in exile, writing his memoirs at his dacha.)
But the same year as the Cuban missile crisis, 1962, a small literary earthquake happened in the USSR. As part of a nationwide campaign to discredit his predecessor Stalin, Kruschchev had permitted the publication of Alexander Isaievich Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch, a brief-but-devastating portrait of the Siberian labor camps which had been established under Vladmir Ilyich Lenin, but had really flourished under Stalin.
When Solzhenitsyn's novella appeared in the prestigious Moscow literary journal Novy Mir, the entire issue sold out in a few hours.
Fine, for the moment.
But once Kruschchev had been removed from power in the wake of the Cuban missile affair, the limited bit of freedom that he had seen fit to allow the Soviet people was gone. For a long time to come.
With the so-called "thaw" of the Kruschchev years suddenly over, and a new crew of hard-liners (read: the KGB) running the show in the Kremlin, thus began what the Soviets themselves would years later call "The Period of Stagnation." Brezhnev presumably still had all of his marbles when he was installed as premier in 1964, but by the time he died in November, 1982, he was so far gone in the head that jokes about him were being whispered in every Soviet kitchen (as long as the radio was on to discourage the KGB from listening in.)
And Brezhnev was the perfect metaphor for his country. An orgy of oil-based military spending had accompanied the Brezhnev years. The USSR had enough missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines to blow up the world 50 times.
What it didn't have were luxuries like bread and toilet paper.
In fairness to the USSR, the United States also had enough missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines to blow up the world 50 times.
What the United States had that the Soviet Union didn't have was plenty of bread and toilet paper. And fruit and vegetables. And meat. And milk. And butter. And cheese. And automobiles. And stereos. And TV sets. And clothing stores. And single-family homes. And on and on and on.
And the rest of the world gradually woke up to this fact: the Soviets were nothing but a bunch of well-armed losers.
When Soviet power failed to subdue the 1979 uprising of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, people began to wonder whether the mighty Soviet empire was as mighty as it claimed to be.
There were two operative principles involved in Afghanistan. (1) Tanks, the USSR's usual means of enforcing its will, are just about useless in mountainous country, which Afghanistan is, and (2) The mujahideen were being supplied with Stinger missiles, for use against those Soviet tanks, by the CIA.
By the time Brezhnev cooled in the fall of '82, people were already beginning to refer to the USSR as "Burkino Faso with missiles," i.e. the world's most heavily-armed poor country.
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Leonid Brezhnev, (1906- 1982)
poster boy for hardened arteries, in more
ways than one.
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In the United States, except among the most rock-ribbed members of the political right, this idea had been a commonplace for years. In 1975 the CBS Television Network broadcast (briefly) a "summer replacement" series (as they were called in those days), Ivan The Terrible. Starring the late Lou Jacobi, Ivan The Terrible was a situation comedy about a Soviet family living in a Moscow apartment. Its portrayal of life in the Soviet hell house, warts and all, was so funny and so accurate that the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. protested and the show was yanked off the air.
And it had been just the previous year, 1974, that the inevitable "showdown" between Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn, who had been on a collision course for years, finally happened. Solzhenitsyn had been secretly busy for those same years on a monster work of nonfiction, The Gulag Archipelago, which documented the horrors of Stalin's labor camps in three devastating volumes. A copy of Solzhenitsyn's manuscript was leaked to the KGB. The jig, as they used to say, was up. Solzhenitsyn and Brezhnev played their final two chess moves: to cover himself, Solzhenitsyn authorized the publication of The Gulag Archipelago abroad. In response to that, Brezhnev had Solzhenitsyn stripped of his Soviet citizenship and exiled.
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| Alexander Solzhenitsyn, (1918-2008) Brezhnev's pet headache. |
Checkmate? Not quite. Brezhnev knew perfectly well that if he had had Solzhenitsyn killed, he would be buying trouble. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. He was "high-profile," and a hero to many dissidents.To have him "disappear" would have created a martyr.
Brezhnev knew that, so he went for the "other" form of retribution familiar to his fellow Tsars: exile. Brezhnev figured if he just kicked Solzhenitsyn out of the country and had his name erased from the history books, that would be the end of that.
Well, it wasn't quite. Solzhenitsyn spent the next 20 years in Cavenish, Vermont, USA, writing, writing, and writing when he wasn't coming out of his cubbyhole every now and then to make a speech somewhere, usually vilifying the west for not being more vigilant against Communism. And Solzhenitsyn outlived Brezhnev, the sweetest form of revenge (just ask my late father.)
In fact Solzhenitsyn outlived Brezhnev by more than a quarter-century. And lived to perform what he saw as his life's mission: overseeing the destruction of that very police state which Brezhnev had been entrusted by the politboro in 1964 to preserve.
By the time of Brezhnev's death in November, 1982, the USSR was in big trouble and it knew it. It couldn't feed itself. It was buying grain from the United States. It continued to spend billions of rubles propping up the network of eastern European puppet states in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania, etc. which Stalin had bullied Roosevelt and Churchill into accepting at Yalta in 1945, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, like the Romans, the Russians could no longer afford to be an empire. The Romans eventually ran out of the gold that kept their empire hale; the Russians, by the early 1980s, were running out of the oil money that kept them mighty.
What to do? Stall, for now. When Brezhnev died, he was replaced with Yuri Andropov, a sclerotic KGB boss whom everyone knew wasn't going to live much longer. He didn't. Andropov promptly died, and was replaced with Konstantin Chernenko, another sclerotic KGB boss who wasn't going to live much longer, and everyone knew it.
And since I began this essay with a reference to the Roman Catholic Church, let me mention here that the politboro, between 1983 and 1985, was doing precisely the same thing that the Church's college of cardinals had done repeatedly down the centuries. When a pope died, and the cardinals couldn't agree on an appropriate successor, they would deliberately choose a cardinal who had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, figuring that by the time he died, they would have found someone they liked better.
Before Pope John Paul II, (who pretty much eclipsed all of his predecessors in the popularity department) one of the 20th Century's most beloved and remembered popes was John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli.) His papacy ran from 1958 to 1963.
John XXIII was no dummy. Before he became pope, he was perfectly aware of this tradional "wait-'til-he-croaks" practice among his fellow cardinals. When he was picked to succeed Pius XII in 1958, 77-year old Cardinal Roncalli, now Pope John XXIII, famously remarked, "We are at the end of our rope and at the top of the heap."
The politboro borrowed a page from the college of cardinals' playbook. It ran through Andropov and Chernenko, and then decided, two years or so later, on Mikhail Gorbachev, an unknown agricultural bureaucrat from somewhere out in the sticks.
All of us over age 40 remember what happened next. Unlike his geriatric predecessors, Gorbachev knew that a few things had to change. One of them was Moscow's insistence upon central control of everything across 11 time zones.
Uh-uh. Didn't work, and Gorbachev knew it. So he embarked upon a program he called Perestroika, ("Restructuring"), which attempted to spread the decision-making power around a bit wider.
Another ongoing Soviet problem was that everybody was so scared of his or her boss that nobody wanted to blow the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse. Gorby tried to change that, too, with a program called Glasnost ("Openness") which encouraged workers to step up and speak out where they saw problems.
But all of this was window-dressing. The rot went much deeper than that. Gorbachev was like a kitten picking at a ball of yarn. Once it started to unravel, there was no stopping it.
Sooner or later, non-Russian republics in the USSR, which had been coerced by Stalin into joining the Soviet Union in the first place, were going to get the scent in the wind and start agitating for more freedom.
And then, when they got a little freedom, start agitating for independence.
Meanwhile, along came SDI. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" as it was derisively referred to in the news media, was the last nail in the USSR's coffin. President Ronald Reagan aggressively pursued the goal of a computer-based defense system that could "zap" incoming Soviet missiles with lasers.
The Soviets screamed bloody murder -- for 40 years, Mutually Assured Destruction had been the lynchpin of so-called World Peace (through innumerable brushfire wars.) Now Reagan was threatening to upset that apple cart.
It was poker, pure and simple. SDI may have been, in reality, an unattainable engineering feat, but the Russians didn't know that. Reagan even offered to "share" SDI technology with them -- "Here, we're building this thing, and we'll show you how to build it too." But Reagan and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what they were up to. They knew that the Russians were every bit as capable (or incapable) of building a missile defense system as were the Americans, the British or anyone else. Nothing wrong with Soviet science and technology; they were among the world's best.
What the Soviets didn't have was the money. Reagan knew that, and he used that leverage to make Gorbachev deal with him.
Then Boris Yeltsin came along, saw an opportunity to get Gorbachev out of the way and scoop up all the chips in Moscow for himself, and he took it. What did Yeltsin care if the death of the Soviet Union was necessary to put him at the "top of the heap" in the Russian Federation? He assumed the role of "hero" when an unsuccesful coup was staged against Gorbachev in 1991, then started playing his own cards. Some say Yeltsin negotiated a secret deal with some of the republics -- don't stand between me and what I want, and you'll get independence. (Google the "Belovezha Accords" if you want to know more about this.)
On Christmas Day, 1991, I was sitting in my living room in Abidjan, the capital of the west African nation of Ivory Coast, DX'ing around on the shortwave radio for some news. I heard on the BBC that the Soviet Union was no more. Gorbachev, after resisting the unraveling of the ball of yarn for several months, had finally faced the fact that he no longer had a country to be the leader of. The USSR was as dead as the dodo bird. With a minimum of ceremony, Gorbachev went on Soviet television, made a farewell speech, wished everyone good luck, and went off to write his memoirs.
No nuclear holocaust, no Clash of the Titans, no WWIII. All those things that had been predicted with such dire hand-wringing when I was growing up had turned out to be...well, nothing more than second-rate television. In 1983 the American media whooped up a massive brouhaha about a made-for-TV movie called The Day After. The subject of this film was the nuclear war which was supposedly inevitable if America didn't stop refusing to appease the Soviets. This TV movie got more press build-up than anything I could remember since the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (in 1964, the same year Brezhnev came to power in Moscow.)
The media really wanted everyone to watch this film. They were breathless about it. Nuclear war! Coming next! It's five minutes to twelve!
Reviews of The Day After were lukewarm at best.
In the end, it was just another low-budget movie. It sank like a stone and was never watched again. Everyone, including the TV critics, yawned and then channel-surfed away to watch The Love Boat.
Say goodnight, Gracie.
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