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Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 573 pp. $17.95 [paper].

Reviewed by Michael Warner, History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency

Ellen Schrecker has produced a comprehensive survey of the public assault on Com- munism in America in the mid-twentieth century. Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Univer- sities, knows her subject inside and out, having researched it from the most recently available documents and memoirs of those involved. The main purpose of the book is to explain the common “mechanisms, assump- tions, and institutions” of McCarthyism. That phenomenon began with the onset of World War II and lingered after Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall. It came in several varieties: right-wing, liberal, Republican, and even left-wing versions (the latter comprising anti-Stalinist radicals and apostates from the Communist Party). All anti- Communists shared a consensus about the nature of Communism and its potential threat to American life, and they cooperated with one another to combat that threat. Many Are the Crimes shows how a relatively small number of anti-Communists became the vanguard of the movement. According to Schrecker, these writers, lawyers, and activists shared, to one degree or another, McCarthy’s “dishonesty, opportunism, and disregard for civil liberties” (p. 265). She argues that, with the institutional support of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they were able indirectly to guide the loyalty proceedings, blacklists, and other McCarthyist actions against suspected Communists in government, academia, the media, and the business world. The concluding chapter of Many Are the Crimes assesses the effects of McCarthyism in four areas of American life: the budding civil rights movement, the federal government, organized labor, and the arts. Schrecker claims that the “body count” from McCarthyism totaled 10,000 to 12,000 persons. She acknowledges that only a handful actually lost their lives but contends that many lost their liberty, repu- tations, jobs, careers, or even spouses as a result of prosecution, blackballing, or stress. The “human wreckage” ranged from the Rosenbergs, executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, to Ellen Schrecker’s sixth-grade teacher, who was eased out of his post for his leftist past. According to Schrecker, the effects of McCarthyism have reached down through the decades by chilling debate and stiºing change in all four areas of American life on which she concentrates. In each area, radicals have lost their nerve or their jobs. By in-

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timidating the left and foreclosing the political development of a generation of activists, she argues, McCarthyism contributed to a narrowing of the possibilities for a more democratic life in a modern capitalist state. McCarthyism is a mineªeld for historians. Schrecker takes pains to pick her way through it, acknowledging the justice of arguments on both sides of some of the most bitter arguments in American history. The paperback edition of Many Are the Crimes includes a brief but signiªcant new preface, in which she concedes to critics of the ªrst edition that her thinking changed somewhat after reading the evidence on Soviet espionage in Allen Weinstein’s and Alexander Vassiliev’s recent book The Haunted Wood. Some of the famous old controversies can now be put to rest, she admits, since the evidence “corroborates too many other sources to leave anyone but a conspiracy junkie in doubt” (p. x). On this and other points, the historiography of the McCarthy era seems to be nearing coherence, if not consensus. Conservatives, liberals, and progressives would all seem to agree with Schrecker that Senator McCarthy was indeed loathsome—but was so only because of his virulence, not because of his aims. Indeed, the Senator himself plays no more than a cameo role in Many Are the Crimes, appearing as the main subject of only one of its chapters. This raises a question about the very term “McCarthyism.” Schrecker seems a little unsatisªed with it at points. She argues that American Communists made themselves peculiarly vulnerable to attack. The party’s rigid adherence to the Soviet line and its conspiratorial manner were easy targets for the anti-Communists: “Many of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists”; they had indeed joined or aided the CPUSA. “Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentiªed” (p. xiv, emphasis in original). If the phenomenon was created by both Democrats and Republicans, and if many of its victims were not mis- identiªed, then why call the movement “McCarthyism” at all? I do not have a better term to substitute, but perhaps someone else will. The speculative conclusion of Many Are the Crimes may be the book’s weak point. Asking “what if” is a risky business for any historian. For example, it may stretch credibility for Schrecker to argue that McCarthyism, by destroying the Left in America, indirectly froze alternatives to the Cold War and delayed the expansion of the welfare state (p. 369). McCarthyism did indeed harm the Left, but this paradoxi- cally may have strengthened American liberals, who rose up in the 1960s to pass legis- lation that collectively changed the country’s life. One could plausibly argue that re- forms in foreign and domestic policies might never have happened if liberals had not “proved” their patriotism by supporting strictures against the Communists, thereby immunizing themselves and their programs against the sort of insults and doubts that might otherwise have impeded them. Many Are the Crimes is well written, and it raises new questions and helps to deªne old issues more clearly. Schrecker knows how to tell a story, how to present both the human aspects of larger events and the general implications of personal decisions, and how to judge individual cases with compassion and de-

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tachment—all welcome skills in a historian dealing with such charged issues and incidents.

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Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 256 pages. $32.50.

Reviewed by Malcolm Byrne, National Security Archive

After more than 50 years scholars are still debating fundamental questions about the origins and early stages of the Cold War. Lately these debates have tended to feature new evidence from archives in the former Soviet bloc. Gregory Mitrovich, by contrast, has relied exclusively on archives in the United States, but he has found plenty of material to support his innovative theory about U.S. objectives “at the creation.” Mitrovich’s thesis is that U.S. policy makers initially did not anticipate a pro- longed period of containing the Soviet Union. They were worried about the global consequences of a drawn-out struggle with the USSR and therefore decided as early as 1947 on a strategy to “destroy” Soviet power altogether. In Mitrovich’s view, George Kennan was the driving force behind this aggressive line, and he found widespread support in the Truman administration, including the president himself. The grand plan, as it evolved, envisioned the elimination of Communist control not only in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union itself. Psychological warfare became the weapon of choice because of its successful application in World War II and because it mitigated the risk of a war with Moscow. American thinking and planning were based on the notion of the balance of power, which Washington assumed was in its favor until the Soviet Union tested a nu- clear bomb in August 1949, sooner than expected. The shock of this new reality prompted Harry Truman to order a reassessment of national security strategy. But Mitrovich argues that the resulting directive, NSC 68, did not fundamentally change U.S. policy, although it did dramatically expand the level of funding devoted to covert subversion of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, according to Mitrovich, the Soviet test of the ªssion-boosted “Joe-4” bomb in August 1953 triggered the opposite impulse in the Eisenhower administration. Mitrovich argues that this much more powerful bomb spurred a general fear that global destruction was now at stake. Despite continued harsh rhetoric, the Eisenhower administration quietly decided by 1955 to call a halt to its clandestine war and to follow a less belligerent policy. Until this change of course, aggressive covert actions targeted at the Soviet bloc were an integral part of U.S. policy—far more so than other scholars have appreciated, according to Mitrovich. Under the rubric of NSC 20/2, which Truman approved in June 1948, American planners had a variety of “instruments” at their disposal, such as planting disinformation and supporting armed resistance groups. However, the main strategy for the region, Mitrovich writes, was “to exploit the ‘paranoid nature’ of the Soviet power structure in an effort to incite conºict within the ruling circles” (p. 9).

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Mitrovich gives some examples of these “spoiling operations.” “Operation Over- load and Delay” was a scheme designed to clog the hyper-centralized Soviet decision- making apparatus by encouraging U.S. ofªcials and businessmen to present Soviet ap- paratchiks with a continuous ºow of “complex and unpredictable” situations. The as- sumption was that lower-level Soviet bureaucrats would be unwilling to resolve these matters on their own, and that eventually they would pass so many problems up the line that higher authorities would have difªculty focusing on truly important issues. Another plan, “Operation Engross,” was aimed at encouraging defections, particularly from the military and security establishments, to erode leadership conªdence in these institutions and in the population as a whole. According to the Truman administration’s blueprint, once the power structures had been sufªciently debilitated and their ability to crack down on dissent effectively impaired, the next step would be to incite revolts within the bloc nations. Despite publicly disparaging Truman’s allegedly soft approach, the Eisenhower administration soon abandoned the concept of rollback that it had so loudly promoted (and that had implicitly guided Truman’s policies). Mitrovich’s study is one of the ªrst attempts to synthesize and assess the many pieces of declassiªed evidence on this subject that have emerged since the mid-1990s. (Peter Grose’s new book, Operation Rollback, covers the same subject, but in a less scholarly framework.) As such, the book is certainly a worthwhile undertaking, especially in its descriptions of the structure and planning of covert operations under Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Previous accounts have discussed some of the important milestones in the development of anti-Soviet strategy (NSC papers 20/4 and 10/2, not to mention NSC 68), but Mitrovich offers a much more detailed look at the thinking and internal debates underlying that strategy than was possible before. Unfortunately, as Mitrovich acknowledges, there is much less available on the speciªc covert operations themselves. The U.S. government continues to withhold the vast majority of these materials. One question that Mitrovich bypasses but that can be clariªed by cross-checking newly available records from the former Soviet bloc is how successful or futile the U.S. covert operations were. For example, in a previous issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies, László Borhi quoted some fascinating reports from Hungary about the impact (real, inºated, or imagined) of various Western anti- Communist schemes. Andrzej Paczkowski and others have uncovered similar records in Poland, including data on the actual costs of trying to block the most successful “psywar” operations—Western radio broadcasts. Other relevant materials have turned up in the archives of the Baltic states. Readers may ªnd speciªc points to criticize in Mitrovich’s analysis. For instance, he does not give enough weight to the impact of the June 1953 East German uprisings on Eisenhower’s reluctance to pursue rollback in the Eastern bloc even before the dis- covery of Moscow’s H-bomb capability. As for Mitrovich’s overall thesis, there is still plenty of room for debate about whether U.S. policy makers, even in the early postwar years, believed they would be able to undermine Soviet power in the near term. Despite these pitfalls, Mitrovich certainly makes a good case that aggressive covert attempts to weaken the Soviet system were a more signiªcant and integrated part of high-level U.S. thinking than has generally been recognized. In the process

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he has produced a wealth of new research on key individuals (notably George Kennan and Charles Bohlen), important policy debates, and incessant bureau- cratic battles, which will be useful for anyone studying this critical period of the Cold War.

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William H. Gleysteen, Jr., Massive Entanglement, Marginal Inºuence: Carter and Korea in Crisis. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. 242 pages. $29.95 [cloth], $17.95 [paper].

Reviewed by Donald P. Gregg, The Korea Society

South Korea’s amazingly rapid metamorphosis from an “economic basket case” in the 1950s to a thriving democracy and a member of the Organization of Economic Coop- eration and Development (OECD) less than 50 years later is a fascinating process that until recently has been only partially documented in the West. Former Ambassador William Gleysteen’s book sheds valuable light on one of the most difªcult and chaotic periods in South Korea’s recent history. Gleysteen’s tenure as ambassador in Seoul from 1978 to 1981 was marked by many key events: the persistent efforts of President Jimmy Carter to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, a rather bizarre U.S.-South Ko- rea summit meeting in Seoul, the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, a military coup led by General (later president) Chun Doo Hwan, massive riots in South Korea’s major cities protesting the coup, the massacre of at least 200 citizens in the city of Kwangju, and the sentencing to death of the celebrated dissident Kim Dae-jung on charges of sedition. No other American ambassador in postwar Seoul has had to deal with such a tor- rent of critical developments, and Gleysteen’s book is an admirable record of how he coped with the daunting agenda thrust upon him. My own term as American ambassador in Seoul from 1989 to 1993 was far calmer. Only by making several visits to Kwangju did I derive a clearer sense of how wrenching and difªcult my predecessor’s tour must have been. Gleysteen’s rendition of the mid-1979 summit between Presidents Carter and Park is vivid and at times hilarious. Carter’s two-pronged agenda—U.S. troop reduc- tions and human rights—was perfectly designed to evoke the worst possible reaction from Park, as indeed it did. Following a bristling confrontation in which the two presidents “mangled the process of communication,” Carter was left deeply unsettled and took out his anger on Gleysteen in a ªnger-wagging session in the presidential limou- sine. Rapid scrambling on the part of South Korean and American staffers produced workable compromises that allowed the summit to conclude on a constructive note. After watching Air Force One lift off with Carter aboard, Park turned to Gleysteen and gave him a bear hug of appreciation for having helped to salvage the summit. This was an extraordinary gesture from a deeply reserved man. Park was assassinated less than four months later, on 26 October 1979.

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Park’s death set the stage for the rise to power of Chun Doo Hwan, a tough and ambitious South Korean general totally devoid of charm. Taking advantage of his strong position as Defense Security Commander, Chun seized control of the South Korean army on 12 December 1979. The United States protested, but to no avail. In late January 1980, thirty South Korean generals requested American support for a counter-coup against Chun, but the United States eventually rejected the request. Gleysteen remains somewhat cryptic in his description of this incident. He declines to name the coup plotters, but he admits that the rejection of their request for support caused him great personal anguish. Perhaps the experience in Vietnam in 1963, when a coup plot against President Diem received American support and approval, weighed heavily on the Carter administration. Gleysteen is not clear on this point. Chun contrived in April 1980 to have Choi Kyu Ha, the weak president who had succeeded President Park, appoint him acting director of South Korean intelligence. This move gave Chun, who had kept his Defense Security Command position, extraordinary power. It also triggered growing student protests, which spilled into the streets in May. In Seoul, the protests were contained effectively, but in Kwangju riot- ing escalated, fueled in part by the arrest of Kim Dae-jung, who was from the Cholla- Namdo province in which Kwangju is located. The riots grew into a full-scale insur- rection, which was put down with great severity by Korean Special Warfare Forces, who killed at least 200 civilians in Kwangju from 18 to 21 May 1980. The damage from the crisis increased when the Chun regime falsely claimed that the United States had encouraged the use of troops in Kwangju; when Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of sedition; and when Chun forced his way into the presidency on 1 September 1980. The United States made futile protests every step of the way, fully exemplifying Gleysteen’s apt book title, Massive Entangle- ment, Marginal Inºuence. Chun successfully deªed U.S. wishes, but his victory in the long run was pyrrhic. Extraordinary U.S. efforts to keep Kim Dae-jung alive ultimately paid off. Much of the credit belongs to Gleysteen and other ofªcials in both the Carter and the Rea- gan administrations. Chun served one full term as president from l98l to l988 and then stepped down. He was never a popular ªgure. In the summer of 1987, faced with massive public protests, he acquiesced in the establishment of a political system in which the president would be elected by a direct vote of the people. Roh Tae-Woo was the ªrst president elected under that system. In 1989 the South Korean parliament launched an investigation of the Kwangju massacre, and in June of that year the United States belatedly issued a report certifying its non-involvement in the tragedy. (Among many South Koreans and some American scholars, suspicions persist about U.S. responsibility for Kwangju.) After Kim Young Sam, who had suffered at Chun’s hands, was elected president in 1992, he ordered the arrest of Chun. The general was sentenced to life imprisonment for his seizure of power in 1979 and his involvement in the Kwangju massacre, but he was pardoned by President Kim Dae-jung shortly after his inauguration in 1998. Gleysteen’s book shows the U.S. Foreign Service at its best. He is generous to his associates, appropriately self-critical of his own judgments, and honest in reºecting on

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issues that might have been handled better. The threat of North Korean exploitation of protracted unrest in South Korea constantly acted as a brake on U.S. objections to Chun’s brutal tactics. South Korea’s voters subsequently demanded political reform and eventually got it on their own terms. Democracy is developing strong roots in South Korea, and Ambassador Gleysteen should derive deep satisfaction from recent events in that country, and for his own positive contribution during a far more trou- bled time.

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Dieter Heinzig, Die Sowjetunion und das kommunistische China 1945–1950: Der beschwerliche Weg zum Bündnis. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesselschaft, 1998. xix, 710 pp. 148.00 Deutschmarks.

Reviewed by Mark Kramer, Harvard University

After the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the Russian government opened some of the former Soviet archives for scholarly research. The status of those archives has been a constant source of frustration ever since. The most important repositories of documents on the Cold War—the Presidential Archive, the foreign intelligence archive, the state security (KGB) archive, and the main archive of the Ministry of De- fense—have remained sealed. A handful of other repositories have been relatively open and accommodating, but, even at those archives, nettlesome problems have arisen. Although the partial opening of archives in Moscow has been a welcome change from the complete lack of access during the Communist era, scholars who were hoping that the archives would be fully opened after the demise of the Soviet Union have been sorely disappointed. For a few select topics, however, the situation has been much more auspicious. The Russian authorities have been willing to release unusually large amounts of sensi- tive documentation about the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, Sino-Soviet relations in the ªrst several years after World War II, and one or two other topics. Scholars focusing on these events have been able to draw on a much greater volume of high- level documentation than is available for other subjects. Many valuable books and ar- ticles on the “favored” topics have already been produced, and more are likely to be published soon. Perhaps the best of the studies to appear thus far is Dieter Heinzig’s comprehensive survey of Soviet relations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1945 to 1950. Heinzig’s book will remain the deªnitive treatment of the subject for many years to come. Heinzig has consulted a vast array of declassiªed Soviet archival materials, published Soviet records, and retrospective accounts by former Soviet ofªcials in both memoirs and interviews. He has beneªted greatly from documents released by Sergei Tikhvinskii and Andrei Ledovskii, two long-standing “China hands” in Moscow who were inºuential advisers during the Soviet era and enjoyed privileged access to closed archives in the 1990s. In addition to relying on new sources from Russia, Heinzig has

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made extensive use of available Chinese sources and of many Western sources. Al- though the archives in Beijing are still sealed to foreign and most Chinese researchers, a large number of important ªrst-hand accounts by former Chinese diplomats and party functionaries have appeared, and some ofªcial collections of declassiªed documents have been published. Moreover, some useful documents have surfaced from Chinese regional archives, which have been more accessible (at least for Chinese researchers) than the repositories in Beijing. Heinzig is well aware of the limits as well as the value of the Soviet and Chinese sources, and he makes judicious use of them, indi- cating where uncertainty and gaps remain. In writing his book, he has built on and gone well beyond recent works by Chen Jian, Michael Sheng, John Garver, Xue Litai, Sergei Goncharov, Yang Kuisong, Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Hunt, and others who have drawn on newly available sources. Heinzig carefully points out where and why his own ªndings and conclusions differ from theirs, and he also takes due account of the secondary literature published in earlier decades, before the East-bloc archives were (partly) opened. The exhaustive research and meticulous weighing of evidence that went into Heinzig’s book are truly impressive. This massive volume—a 653-page text with more than 2,300 footnotes, a twenty-page documentary appendix, and a lengthy bibliography of sources in English, German, Russian, and Chinese—is the capstone to a long and productive scholarly career, which began in the late 1950s. In the late 1960s Heinzig edited the two-volume autobiography of Zhang Kuotao, a senior Chinese Communist ofªcial in the 1920s and 1930s who was ousted from the party by Mao Zedong. In the 1970s Heinzig completed an authoritative, detailed study of Soviet military advisers to the Kuomintang in the 1920s, Sowjetische Militärberater bei der Kuomintang, 1923–1927, which was published in 1978 by the same press that has put out his latest book. In addition to these seminal works, Heinzig has produced many other analyses of Chinese politics, Sino-Soviet relations, Chinese foreign policy, and regional security problems in the Paciªc Ocean and East Asia. Die Sowjetunion und das kommunistische China draws on some of Heinzig’s earlier research, but it is more sweeping and ambitious than what he has attemped before. Heinzig sets out to trace the “difªcult road” (beschwerliche Weg) that led from the So- viet treaty of alliance and friendship with Republican China in August 1945 to the new Soviet treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance with Communist China in February 1950. To set the scene, Heinzig provides a concise but thorough overview of the emergence of the CCP in the early 1920s (when it was purely a creation of the Soviet Union), the subsequent evolution of the party (a process of “Sinoization,” though with pronounced Soviet leanings), the development of Soviet- Kuomintang relations in the 1920s and 1930s, the dual Soviet policy in China during the Japanese occupation and World War II (when the CCP’s posture toward Moscow was one of “obedience with reservations”), and the brief “ºirtation” between the CCP and the United States in 1944–1945 (when the Chinese Communists were trying to minimize American involvement in China). Heinzig then recounts the civil war that engulfed China after World War II, providing 120 dense pages on the events of 1945– 1948. This preliminary material alone is enough to make for a very useful book, but

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the analysis becomes even more exhaustive when Heinzig turns to the central focus of his study—namely, the decisive events of 1949 and early 1950, when the Chinese Communists achieved ªnal victory in the civil war and, after considerable delay, signed a security treaty with the Soviet Union. Heinzig’s fascinating account of this brief but momentous period, which he divides into two chapters totaling some 420 pages, is remarkable in its breadth, circumspection, attentiveness to detail, and elo- quence. Heinzig’s ªndings and conclusions, buttressed by reams of evidence, are in some instances fully compatible with those of previous studies. Like Chen Jian, Michael Sheng, and a number of other scholars, Heinzig persuasively debunks the “revisionist” claim that the United States had a “lost chance” to win the CCP over to its side in 1944, 1947, or 1949. Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, as Heinzig shows, were never interested in alignment or friendship with the United States and wanted only to undercut (or at least offset) American support for the Kuomintang. Heinzig’s analysis of the Chinese civil war conªrms the ªndings of recent studies that have high- lighted the importance of Soviet backing for the CCP, contrary to Mao’s later assertions. Although the Soviet Union in 1945 established a formal alliance with the Kuomintang and strongly advised the CCP not to resume its drive for all-out power, Heinzig refutes Mao’s subsequent claim that Moscow neglected and impeded the Chi- nese Communists during the civil war. Josif Stalin’s “double game” in China was obvi- ously not what Mao would have liked, but it made eminent sense from Moscow’s per- spective. Stalin had planned all along to facilitate the CCP’s rise to power in Manchuria, and he steadily expanded the level of Soviet aid to the CCP as the war in China progressed and it became clear that the Kuomintang government was more vulnerable than Stalin initially assumed. During the decisive stages of the ªghting, Soviet military supplies to the CCP—as Heinzig shows—proved crucial. Heinzig also puts to rest another myth purveyed in later years by Mao, who alleged that Stalin had urged the CCP to “stop at the Yangzi” in early 1949 rather than pressing on to gain control over the whole of China. Heinzig ªnds no credible evidence to support Mao’s post-hoc contention, and he marshals a plethora of evidence that contra- venes it. On many other issues as well, Heinzig breaks valuable new ground. He shows, even more convincingly than others have, that Soviet policy toward China was strongly inºuenced by Stalin’s assessment of U.S. intentions and motives. The Soviet leader was determined to avoid any steps vis-à-vis China that would provoke a direct military clash with the United States. According to Heinzig, Stalin’s disinclination to risk war with the United States largely accounted for his unwillingness to invite Mao to Moscow during the civil war, despite Mao’s persistent requests. Only after it became clear in 1949 that the United States would not intervene to prevent the CCP from coming to power was Stalin willing to contemplate such a visit. Heinzig’s account of the secret missions by high-ranking Soviet and CCP ofªcials in the ªrst half of 1949—the talks held by Anastas Mikoyan at the CCP’s headquarters in Xibaipo in February and the visit by Liu Shaoqi to Moscow ªve months later—draws on a wealth of largely untapped materials. New documentation also enriches Heinzig’s discussion

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of events that followed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. Of particular note is his 200-page chapter on Mao’s long-awaited sojourn in Moscow from mid-December 1949 through mid-February 1950 and the tortured negotiations that produced the Sino-Soviet security treaty, the main text of which was ªnally signed on 14 February 1950. (Secret protocols to the treaty were signed in March and April 1950.) Heinzig meticulously sifts through huge amounts of archival material and ªrst-hand accounts to reconstruct what happened. He shows that many of the issues in dispute between Moscow and Beijing in 1950 were the same ones that arose during the Soviet-Kuomintang treaty negotiations in 1945. In contrast to scholars who have played up the ideological bonds between the Soviet Union and Communist China, Heinzig ªnds that the evidence is more condu- cive to a power politics interpretation. He maintains that the “traditional national interests” of the two sides ultimately shaped their behavior. In support of this claim Heinzig emphasizes the points of contention between Moscow and the CCP from the 1920s on, and he argues in his concluding chapter that the roots of the Sino- Soviet split of the 1960s lay in the differences that emerged during the Stalin era. Perhaps this is so, but Heinzig may well overstate his case here. In retrospect, the link between the earlier differences and the bitter rift of the 1960s may seem stronger than it actually was. It would have been impossible to achieve identical views on all issues in the 1930s and 1940s. Heinzig tends to exaggerate the importance of some of the divergences. (He is not alone in this regard. In recent years a number of West- ern scholars have been surprised when archival materials revealed that the Soviet Union and its allies did not always view things identically and did not necessarily approach every issue the same way. Why anyone would ªnd this surprising is un- clear.) It has long been known—well before the archives opened—that Soviet and CCP leaders did not always see eye-to-eye, but what is striking is that the lingering disagree- ments did not inhibit the PRC from staunchly allying itself with the Soviet Union from 1949 through the early to mid-1950s. So determined was Mao to consolidate the alliance that he not only stayed in Moscow for two months and put up with Sta- lin’s rude treatment, but also accepted what from China’s standpoint was a less than ideal treaty. (Later on, some former Chinese ofªcials insisted that the PRC had achieved all it wanted in the Moscow negotiations. Heinzig conclusively rebuts these assertions by analyzing and reproducing the relevant documents, which indicate that important concessions were made by both sides, particularly by the Chinese.) Heinzig is undoubtedly justiªed in arguing that a Sino-Soviet alliance was not a foregone conclusion (the same is true of most things in life), and he rightly eschews the excessive emphasis that some scholars have accorded to ideology. Nonetheless, he is wont to un- derestimate the role of ideological afªnity in Mao’s decision to ally China so closely with the Soviet Union for several years. These minor problems in no way detract from the richness of Heinzig’s elabo- rately documented volume, which sets a standard for all future studies of Sino-Soviet relations and the Cold War in general. Despite the formidable obstacles to archival re-

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search in Moscow and Beijing, this book demonstrates the magnitude of what can be accomplished with the materials now available. ✣✣✣

Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 266 pp. $17.95.

Reviewed by Golfo Alexopoulos, University of South Florida

Peter Kenez’s brief survey of Soviet history has a number of important strengths that make it valuable for students and scholars alike. It cogently describes the func- tions and failures of Soviet central planning, introduces some of the major historio- graphical debates among Western scholars and even discusses the views of ofªcial So- viet historians and their inºuence on what Soviet students were taught in schools. Kenez’s treatment of literature and cinema is especially interesting and greatly en- hances the book. Kenez makes his arguments well, but in certain instances he offers explanations that are not entirely persuasive. Although his discussion of the various factors that helped the Bolsheviks win the revolution and the civil war is sound, he is less convinc- ing when he tries to analyze why Josif Stalin refused to mobilize troops at the German- Soviet border in 1941 even after numerous intelligence reports had warned of an im- pending German attack. Kenez states that “one must look for a psychological explanation” (p. 138) of Stalin’s failure to act and his lack of conªdence in the Red Army’s ability to stop the Germans. Kenez does not stress Stalin’s faith in the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact, his distrust of Western intelligence, or his fear that mobilization might be read as a provocation. In attempting to explain how Stalin was able to defeat the so-called “Left” and “Right” oppositionists, Kenez argues that “Stalin won because he ultimately succeeded in persuading the communist activists, who at this point were decisively important within the political system, that his policies were realistic as well as within the Leninist tradition” (p. 81). It seems unlikely that persuasion and realism were actually of much signiªcance in this case. Kenez aptly highlights the role of ofªcers and soldiers in the February (March) 1917 Revolution and asserts that “once the chain of command and the bonds of au- thority were broken, the imperial order collapsed with amazing speed” (p. 16). But he does not take account of the important divisions within the military and the role of insubordinate ofªcers in the failed 1991 August coup. Indeed, the book generally is rather weak in its treatment of military affairs. Kenez describes Stalin’s military purges in only two short sentences, and he does not mention Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky or discuss the scope and depth of the purges. Kenez merely notes that “the Stalinists eliminated the high command of the armed forces” (p. 106), but he needs to elaborate on this point if he wants to demonstrate that the purges affected military readiness on the eve of the war. Another important omission is the impact of the U.S. Lend-Lease Act on the Soviet war effort, since Marshal Georgii Zhukov himself admitted that American aid was signiªcant. Moreover, Kenez makes the questionable assertion that

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after the battle of Moscow, Hitler’s defeat “was only a question of time” (p. 141). Who really believed this in December 1941? The claim that in the Brezhnev era “the Soviet Union achieved its greatest international success; it became a world power, second to none” (p. 218) is also overstated. Kenez analyzes the important role of ideology in the behavior of Soviet leaders and deftly balances his interpretation with the caveat that the Bolsheviks “were prag- matists, able to concede where necessary” and sometimes “showed considerable ºexibility” (p. 55, 58). At times, however, the balance tips too strongly in favor of an ideological explanation. Although Kenez rightly notes the difªculty that historians en- counter when trying to determine people’s “real” beliefs, he often makes claims about this matter without qualiªcation. For example, he asserts that there was a “loss of idealism” (p. 218) after Khrushchev: “Nikita Khrushchev was the last Soviet leader with a ªrm belief in the superiority of Marxist-Leninist ideology” (p. 210). Kenez argues that Soviet leaders after Khrushchev abandoned utopian ideology, ideological commitment, and “the promise of a just and afºuent society” (p. 216). In the Brezhnev era the Soviet people “had lost faith in the noble ideas of equality and freedom as essential features of the future communist society” (p. 217). Kenez stresses ideology as a key distinction between the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, but his statements exaggerate both the idealism of the earlier period and the lack of ideological commitment in later years. On the question of nationalism in the Soviet Union, Kenez persuasively describes the various factors that promoted ethnic identities. For example, he mentions Lenin’s policy of “indigenization,” which fostered the development of national languages and cultures, and he explains that “the ironic consequence of this policy was the growth of national consciousness among the non-Russian population of the union” (p. 58). In the rest of the book, however, Kenez does not explain how indigenization created ethnic enclaves and elites or how these elites encouraged nationalist sentiment for their own purposes. Instead, he stresses the role of modernization, universal literacy, urbanization, and mass mobilization. Signiªcantly, he notes that, “above all,” nationalist sentiment grew because of shifts in population. Russians moving to Central Asia or the Baltic states “created a desire among natives to get rid of outsiders” (p. 233). Na- tional identities emerged “in opposition to outsiders” (p. 233) and to “mixing, closer acquaintance with others, even intermarriage”(p. 271). It is not exactly clear why, of all the factors that promoted nationalist sentiment, Kenez chooses to emphasize mi- gration and demographic changes. Finally, he argues that “it was not Stalinist or post- Stalinist repressive policies that created nationalism,” but surely these policies contributed greatly to nationalist resentment of the Soviet state, particularly in the Baltic States and Ukraine. The book’s great strength is the amount it covers in a concise and readable form. Inevitably, though, some crucial issues are left out that should have been discussed. First, more extensive analysis of Stalin’s and the party’s perceptions of internal and ex- ternal enemies and threats (the fear of capitalist encirclement, paranoid concerns about kulak theft and deception, etc.) would have helped Kenez explain the leadership’s crash industrialization program and its insistence that peasants give up their

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grain to the point of starvation during the collectivization campaign. Second, there is surprisingly little on the Gulag system and life in the camps. Since the author claims that the NKVD secret police force was at times more powerful than the party, it is important to explain that the power of the NKVD was due in large part to the vast net- work of labor camps that it managed.

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Daniel Peris. Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 237 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by David Powell, Wheaton College

Although Soviet Communism, like its Nazi cousin, raised barbarism to the level of state policy, some of its activities and institutions still strike one as more bizarre than evil. The League of the Militant Godless, an organization employed by Josif Stalin to “storm the heavens,” ridicule and humiliate clergymen, and transform “superstitious” citizens into atheists, is one such institution. In chronicling the League’s rise and fall, Daniel Peris—formerly a history professor at the University of Wyoming and cur- rently employed by a Western investment ªrm in Moscow—reminds us that some aspects of Soviet history were at the same time horrifying and comical. Set up in 1925, the League was, in Peris’s words, a “nominally independent organization established by the Communist Party to promote atheism.” It published news- papers, journals, and other materials that lampooned religion; it sponsored lectures and ªlms; it organized demonstrations and parades; it set up antireligious museums; and it led a concerted effort to persuade Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and prac- tices were “wrong” and harmful, and that good citizens ought to embrace a scientiªc, atheistic worldview. The League arranged competitions between christened and unchristened infants (to demonstrate that there were no differences in their health or growth rates), and it staged contests to show the superiority of “godless ªelds” (agricultural plots that used modern soil and plant science) over those of religious peasants who employed traditional techniques and asked a priest to bless their land. In addition, the League opened antireligious museums in former monasteries and churches around the country. In 1929, “godless shock brigades,” “godless factories,” and “godless collective farms” appeared. Groups of industrial workers and farmers promised to fulªll and overfulªll their production plans, while simultaneously deriding religious beliefs. The League was a classic Soviet “mass organization.” Within a decade it claimed to have 5.5 million members, 2 million more than the Communist Party itself. From the beginning, however, it offended more people than it persuaded. One Soviet commentator termed the League’s efforts “all bluster” and derided it as an “atheist sect”; another said that the League had “adopted all of its adversary’s worst features of intol- erance and fanaticism.” Membership ªgures for branches were inºated, and reports of antireligious activities were simply made up to please higher-ranking ofªcials. Entire

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factories and schools were enrolled in the League, often without the permission (or even the knowledge) of the workers or students who had “joined.” By 1930 Emelyan Yaroslavskii, the head of the organization, observed that whole towns and villages had declared themselves “godless,” although in fact there had been no discernible change in the population’s views. Even if some branches had encountered limited success, Yaroslavskii went on, “when entire districts are declared Godless, in a region where there is nothing, no cul- ture, no [antireligious] work—this is a joke.” As early as 1928 Anatolii Lunacharskii, the minister of education, said that “religion is like a nail; the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood,” but this did not deter Stalin. A decade later another commentator admitted that “it is much more difªcult to uproot religion from the minds of the workers than to liberate them from the exploitation of capitalism.” Anti- religious propaganda, it turned out, was at best an exercise in futility and self-deception and at worst an instrument that stimulated and reinforced the religious convic- tions it aimed to destroy. What does Peris have to say about this “peculiar institution”? He draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the journals Bezbozhnik (The God- less) and Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the Work-Bench) and various collections of documents. In addition, he has made use of archival materials that until recently were inaccessible scholars. What makes this volume particularly intriguing is that he has gone beyond the various Moscow and St. Petersburg archives—such as the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsialno-Politicheskoi Istorii, formerly the Central Party Archive of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, formerly the Central State Archive of the October Revo- lution and Socialist Construction) and the Central State Archive of Historical-Politi- cal Documents of St. Petersburg (formerly the Leningrad Party Archive)—with addi- tional research in provincial archives. In particular, he made considerable use of Communist Party and local government archives in the industrial city of Yaroslavl and the much smaller town of Pskov. The story Peris tells is not new. It has been chronicled, though in considerably less detail, by such scholars as Joan Delaney, Sheila Fitzpatrick, William C. Fletcher, Walter Kolarz, Dmitry V. Pospielovsky, Boleslaw Szczesniak, Nicholas Timasheff, and, most notably, John Shelton Curtiss. What makes Peris’s effort different is his use of anecdotes, statistics, and quotations from the Yaroslavl and Pskov branches of the League. What could have been a dry recitation of data is invigorated by quotations from debates among local notables, as well as from “criticism and self-criticism ses- sions” run by higher authorities. It is here that one must ask how much the opening of archives has contributed to our knowledge of antireligious (or any other) policy. For example, Peris cites a com- plaint from a Pskov newspaper in 1928 about “Potemkin secularization” in the city. On paper, the story indicates, there were two district councils and twenty cells with 600 members. “Many knew this,” the source goes on, “but when efforts were made to unite the councils into one city council, there were [not only] no members and cells,

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but also no district councils.” When this became known, “a provisional council was somehow thrown together and the search began for cells, their members, and the aktiv.” How different is this from the Yaroslavskii quotation mentioned above, which was taken from an “open” source? How much of what Peris has found in the archives is genuinely “new”? As Peris points out, the principal “successes” that were achieved in the struggle against religion did not necessarily—in fact, almost deªnitely did not—derive from the League’s efforts. Even though churches were closed and clergy arrested, he writes, “this was an exercise in power, not cultural transformation.” More generally, it is no easy matter to distinguish among coercion, the threat of coercion, and propaganda when explaining why relatively few people attended church. In addition, he observes, “the demographic upheaval resulting from the regime’s concomitant policy of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization also created tremendous obstacles to the maintenance of stable religious communities.” It is even more difªcult to assess the effects of propaganda on religious belief. The census of January 1937 asked all citizens whether they were “believers” or “nonbelievers,” but the results were not published until more than half a century had elapsed. The reason, in all probability, was the regime’s embarrassment that too few people had declared themselves atheists—only 42.9 percent of those who answered stated that they were nonbelievers. This result was especially surprising because many respondents undoubtedly felt obliged to classify themselves as nonbelievers. As Peris notes, “An answer could have been interpreted as a statement of political support or opposition to the regime, quite distinct from an individual’s genuine feelings about religion.” But even though the details were kept secret, the general picture was available at the time to anyone who read the Soviet press. In November 1937, for example, Yaroslavskii publicly acknowledged that one-third of the rural population and two- thirds of the urban population—less than half of all Soviet citizens—had become atheists. A process of secularization undoubtedly accompanied urbanization and education that transformed a large segment of the population during the 1920s and 1930s. Peris notes, however, that this process “clearly had little to do with the organization speciªcally created to promote atheism”—the League of the Militant Godless. Instead, Peris suggests that broader social, political, and economic forces “challenged the traditional order and provided little space for religion.” Why should we care about what the League did half a century ago? In retrospect, both the organization and its program seem little short of preposterous. Russia has un- dergone a religious renaissance in recent years, and in survey after survey citizens of all social and economic strata express greater respect for the Orthodox Church than for any other organization in Russia. In 1988, on the occasion of the millennium of Prince Vladimir’s “Baptism of Rus,” Mikhail Gorbachev met with Patriach Pimen of the Orthodox Church. Gorbachev spoke of the Church’s loyalty and patriotism, and he promised that religious men and women would no longer be treated as pariahs. “Believers,” he declared, “are Soviet people, working people, patriots, and they have every right to express their views with dignity.”

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Gorbachev was as good as his word. Churches, mosques, synagogues, and prayer houses reopened; religious pilgrimages resumed; and organized religious groups once again were allowed to perform a “social mission,” a function that Stalin had outlawed in 1929. By April 1991 Patriarch Aleksii (who succeeded Pimen) stated that “Russia has painfully...endured a time of serving false gods,” clearly implying that a new era had begun. Three months later the Patriarch repeated this point, asserting that “during the past year, I think that we truly have been able to extricate ourselves from the state’s obtrusive tutelage.” We do not know what induced Gorbachev to make this radical shift in ofªcial policy, but a variety of motives—his desire to gain popular support for his policies of glasnost and perestroika, his quest for legitimacy on the part of the regime, his search for an ally in combating the country’s social problems, and perhaps even his desire to unleash the creative energies of a population alienated by years of restrictions on religious belief and conduct—seem to have persuaded him of the need for change. Unfortunately, the period since the fall of 1997, when the Russian Orthodox Church and its allies pushed through a bill in the Duma that restricted the rights of all religious organizations other than Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, has witnessed a good deal of retrograde movement. While Orthodoxy has ºourished, other denominations—especially Catholicism and some of the smaller, proselytizing, millenarian Protestant groups—have found their freedom severely curtailed. Further- more, the state once again has set up a body to “supervise” religious affairs, although this time the relationship appears to be symbiotic. In fact, high-level Orthodox church functionaries—most of whom advanced to positions of inºuence in Soviet times—seem to represent an obstacle to genuine religious freedom. As the British historian Geoffrey Hosking wrote in 1990, Decades of active persecution alternating with contemptuous manipulation have left it [i.e., the Russian Orthodox Church] not only numerically re- duced but spiritually debilitated. . . . Enfeebled by subservience to an atheist state, the Church is no longer ªtted to act as [a] vehicle for a religious revival or to promote social solidarity. In early 1990 the Holy Synod admitted publicly that the government had been inter- fering in church appointments and the administration of parishes for many years. Pa- triarch Pimen himself, after subsequently admitting “we had to tell lies,” asked for “forgiveness, understanding, and prayer.” More recently, evidence has emerged that his successor, Aleksii, worked as a KGB informer for several decades and owed his rapid rise through the hierarchy, at least in part, to security police “friends.” Peris tells the story of ofªcial pressure, as well as of a sometimes compliant and sometimes recalcitrant population of religious believers, with considerable skill. Whether he has managed to reveal anything dramatically new is uncertain, but he has done a valuable service by reminding us of the cruel and mocking attitude adopted by a regime that claimed to speak for the oppressed. And he has done so with grace and style.

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