Monday, November 18, 2019
Bernie Sanders Has More Diverse Support Than You Think
NOV 11, 2019
truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-has-more-diverse-support-than-you-think/
Suburban women, as Nicole
Goodkind writes in Fortune,
“[were] crucial to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and will be
equally crucial to his reelection campaign next year.” Recent polling and
actual election results, however, show Trump cannot take them for granted, and
the same can be said for more centrist Democrats.
Goodkind is referring to data
released from the Federal Election Commission and analyzed by the Center
for Responsive Politics that reveals women are getting involved in
elections earlier than in previous cycles. Fortune reports, “More than 1
million [women] have already donated $131 million itemized to presidential
candidates.”
And while there’s no one
candidate that’s won the hearts and minds of all women voters, it’s Bernie
Sanders who has made the most progress.
“Of all the potential 2020
candidates,” Goodkind writes, “Sanders has taken in the most money from women,
raising about $17.1 million in itemized contributions, or 40% of his total
funds.”
Many of those women are from
the suburbs, the same ones Trump needs to win. Sanders received “over $13
million in small-dollar donations from nearly 280,000 suburban women. Combining
small- and large-dollar donations, Sanders earned more than any other presidential
candidate amongst suburban women with a total of $15 million from small and
large donors alike.”
These numbers challenge the
prevailing wisdom that Democrats must be aggressively moderate to win
elections, a position that gained traction last week following Democratic
state-level wins in Kentucky,
Virginia and Pennsylvania. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told The Hill on Friday
that candidates in his state won because they “ran on more moderate issues.”
He added that candidates “had
very much followed in the traditional Virginia Democratic model of we’re going
to give you responsible government, it’s going to be fiscally responsible.”
“I happen to believe that
America is a center-right country and that people want us to work across the
aisle, and what they’re most interested in is problem solving rather than
rhetoric,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who endorsed Joe Biden, explained
to The Hill.
Brad Bannon, a Democratic
strategist and consultant, isn’t so sure. “This is bad news for Biden, it shows
he’s got a problem with the female vote,” he told Fortune, regarding the new
data about suburban women. “And when you look at the polls, women are
significantly more likely to be voting for [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren or Sanders
than Biden.”
Suburban women aren’t the only
counterintuitive demographic for a candidate whose supporters are often
referred to as “Bernie Bros”
and assumed to be young, leftist white men. In addition to Fortune’s reporting,
Foreign Policy examined political
contributions from U.S. national security agency staff, also using
data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Per Foreign Policy:
When combining contribution
amounts together, Sanders is the biggest beneficiary of national security
support, followed by [Mayor Pete] Buttigieg and Warren. Democratic front-runner
Biden and President Donald Trump trail behind those candidates, ranking no
higher than third for any one department.
When broken down by sector of
government, Buttigieg had the highest support from the State Department and
Sanders from the military.
Sanders, The New York Times
reported this weekend, “has collected more
money from Latino voters than any other candidate in the Democratic
field, raising three times as much from the group as Barack Obama did in 2008.”
According to a set of new
surveys from The New York Times and Siena College, the Vermont senator is
attracting “28% of
the Democratic primary vote in six swing states.”
In another poll from a crucial
state, California, conducted by the Public
Policy Institute of California, 39% of Latinos in California said they
prefer Sanders, compared to 21% for Biden and 5% for Warren.
Anthony Mercado, a 48-year-old
maintenance worker, explained Sanders’ appeal to Latinos to The
New York Times: “We’re a community of struggle, and this is a man who knows
struggle.. .. Latinos have been promised things and then the winds change. But
he’s been saying the same things ever since he started.”
Horrifying Emails Reveal Stephen Miller’s White Nationalism
NOV 12, 2019
Trump White House senior
adviser Stephen Miller, as The Washington Post reported in August, “rarely
puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls.” Despite
making extensive anti-immigration
comments in high school, and being, as the Guardian pointed out in
2017, “the
architect of the first travel ban,” there has been little written evidence
of Miller’s white nationalist views, aside from college newspaper columns
and emails
to reporters while an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions. Until now.
Hatewatch, a web publication
from the Southern Poverty Law Center, obtained 900
leaked emails, which Miller sent to the right-wing website in 2015 and
2016, while he worked for Sessions. Hatewatch’s Michael Edison Hayden explains:
In the run-up to the 2016
election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white
nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the
loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage. [The emails]
showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he
has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Those policies, Hayden
continues, include “reportedly setting
arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively
banning immigration
from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation
at refugee resettlement facilities.”
The emails were leaked to
Hatewatch by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who was fired from the
site in 2017 for posting anti-Muslim tweets. McHugh has since said she has
denounced the far right. McHugh told Hatewatch she was introduced to Miller
with the understanding that his ideas would shape her work at Breitbart.
The contents of the emails
range from sharing links from white nationalist website VDARE and conspiracy
theory site Infowars and anger over Amazon and other sites removing products
with the Confederate flag after white nationalist Roof shot nine black people
in a Charleston, S.C., church, to recommending that McHugh read “Camp of the
Saints,” which Hayden describes as “popular among white nationalists and
neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the ‘white genocide’
or ‘great replacement’ myth into a violent and sexualized story about
refugees.”
Miller references the book in
the following email chain:
McHugh, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:34
p.m. ET: “[Breitbart editor] Neil [Munro], Julia [Hahn] and I are going to do a
series of stories on [nonwhite SAT scores] to break it down. Neil says it’s
easier for people to digest that way and change their minds.”
Miller, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:41
p.m. ET: “On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying
west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the
parallels to Camp of the Saints.”
In another thread, Miller
backs policies favored by President Calvin Coolidge, who wanted to ban all
immigration, in an email with Breitbart’s McHugh, Hahn, and fellow Sessions
aide Garrett Murch:
Murch, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:22 p.m.
ET: “[Show host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for
several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green
cards per year. For assimilation purposes.”
Miller, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:23
p.m. ET: “Like Coolidge did. Kellyanne Conway poll says that is exactly
what most Americans want after 40 years of non-stop record arrivals.”
Those examples are only a
small snapshot of the comments leaked to Hatewatch, and of the depth of
Miller’s beliefs. It’s been shown he’s held these anti-immigrant and
anti-minority views at least since high school. In 2018, Los Angeles Magazine
interviewed 20 former classmates of Miller from Santa Monica High School. Kesha
Ram, a former Vermont State Legislature member also from the class of 2003
explained Miller like this:
Some people hide behind a
computer screen and say horrible things about other cultures and other
identities, but he looked people in the eye and said, ‘I don’t think you should
be in this country; I think your family should go back to wherever they came
from or speak English more fluently.’
Hatewatch’s report, however,
is remarkable for the sheer volume of evidence, and for how recently Miller was
espousing these views. His comments from high school and college may be
extremely hurtful, but they take on a new, more tangible power coming from
someone who, at the time of the emails, was an aide to a senator, soon to be a
senior adviser to President Donald Trump. He has the ear of a president who
himself was elected on a campaign of anti-immigrant hate, and the ability to
influence him.
Read Hatewatch’s full
story here.
Vasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths
By Yury Bit-Yunan, Robert
Chandler
NOVEMBER 13, 2019
WESTERN READERS HAVE LONG
TENDED to divide Soviet writers into two classes: corrupt time-servers and
heroic, dissident martyrs. It has been hard for a Soviet writer to attract
widespread attention in the English-speaking world except through some major
international scandal. Doctor Zhivago became a best seller because the
Soviet authorities coerced Boris Pasternak into declining the Nobel Prize.
Joseph Brodsky became known after being tried in court and then sent into exile
in the Far North. Alexander Solzhenitsyn became ever more famous as the
authorities stepped up the pressure against him and eventually deported him in
1974. Great writers with less dramatic biographies have often gone unnoticed.
Andrey Platonov, for example, has only very slowly gained Western recognition.
And Vasily Grossman was more or less ignored for several decades — until we
learned the story of the KGB “arresting” the manuscript of Life and Fate.
In the Soviet Union, needless
to say, it was the other way round. To make a career for themselves, Soviet
writers did all they could to embellish their proletarian and socialist
credentials. Many had much to hide — and sometimes their attempts at camouflage
took surprising forms. The highly successful poet and novelist Konstantin
Simonov, for example, was the son of a princess and a tsarist officer;
apparently he changed his first name from Kirill to Konstantin because he was
unable to pronounce the sound “r” without an aristocratic lisp. [1] Vasily Grossman, too, had to keep
quiet about some aspects of his background; not only did he have two paternal
uncles living abroad, but his father had been a Menshevik — that is, a member
of a socialist faction opposed to the Bolsheviks. And Grossman, of course, made
much of the fact that Maxim Gorky, then the grand old man of Soviet literature,
had encouraged him at the beginning of his career. What was helpful in a Soviet
context, however, was far from helpful in a Western context. And so the poet
Semyon Lipkin went to great lengths in his memoir of Grossman to downplay the
more orthodox aspects of his life and work and to emphasize or exaggerate
everything about him that could be made to seem dissident. Since Lipkin is a
gifted and engaging writer and Grossman’s life is poorly documented, the myths
created by Lipkin have gained wide circulation. [2] But they have outlived their
original purpose, which was to draw attention to a great but neglected writer,
and it is now time to examine them.
In 1932, Grossman was
struggling to publish his first novel, Glück Auf, set in a mining
community in the Donbas region of Soviet Ukraine; an editor had told him that
some aspects of the novel were “counter-revolutionary.” Gorky was, at the time,
the most influential figure in the Soviet literary establishment, and Grossman
tried to enlist his support. In his first letter to Gorky, Grossman wrote, “I
described what I saw while living and working for three years at mine
Smolyanka-11. I wrote the truth. It may be a harsh truth. But the truth can
never be counter-revolutionary.” Gorky replied at length, clearly recognizing
Grossman’s gifts but criticizing him with regard to his attitude to truth:
It is not enough to say, “I
wrote the truth.” The author should ask himself two questions: First, which
truth? And second, why? We know that there are two truths and that, in our
world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively
preponderates. […] The author truthfully depicts the obtuseness of coal miners,
their brawls and drunkenness, all that predominates in his — the author’s —
field of vision. This is, of course, truth — but it is a disgusting and
tormenting truth. It is a truth we must struggle against and mercilessly
extirpate. [3]
There is no doubt that this
view of truth was anathema to Grossman. He argues against it both in Stalingrad and
in Life and Fate. Unsurprisingly, Lipkin puts great emphasis on Grossman’s
disagreement with Gorky, since this fits with the way he wishes to portray
Grossman — as a proto-dissident. It is equally unsurprising that Lipkin says
little about the central role played by Gorky in orchestrating Grossman’s
remarkably successful literary debut, since this would conflict with that
image. It is clear, however, that Grossman would not have come to prominence in
the mid-1930s without Gorky’s help.
In 1934, heavily edited
versions of Glück Auf were published both in the Donbas and in
Moscow. Gorky then republished the novel in his almanac The Year XVII.
Around the same time, the prestigious journal Literaturnaya Gazeta published
Grossman’s short story “In the Town of Berdichev” — despite it being twice
their standard length. A well-attended “evening with the critics” was arranged
to celebrate this. Lipkin gives the impression that this evening somehow just
happened and that the story was greeted with an outburst of spontaneous and
unanimous praise — from such diverse writers as Gorky, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac
Babel, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Babel apparently said, “Our Yid capital has been
seen through new eyes.” And Bulgakov exclaimed, “Don’t say it’s really been
possible to publish something worthwhile!” [4]
Even if Lipkin’s record of
Babel’s and Bulgakov’s comments is accurate — and there is no evidence for it
other than his word — he certainly leaves much unsaid. Gorky was closely
connected with Literaturnaya Gazeta and the publication of such a
long story, along with the organization of an “evening with the critics,” could
not have been arranged without his blessing. [5] And it seems likely that Gorky
wanted not only to help Grossman but also to make use of him — to foreground
him as an example of the new breed of Soviet writer. [6]
Born in 1905, Grossman
belonged to the first generation to have received most of his education under
the Soviet regime. He was both a talented writer and a trained scientist.
Having worked as a safety engineer in the coal mines of the Donbas, he knew
working-class life. He was therefore an ideal figure to exhibit to the world as
proof that the Soviet regime was as successful in encouraging the arts as in
bringing about social change and industrial development. And this was
particularly important in 1934, the year that the Union of Soviet Writers was
founded.
Glück Auf was, in any
case, published in English translation in the Soviet journal International
Literature (no. 6, 1934); “In the Town of Berdichev” was translated into
German in 1934 [7], and an English translation was included
in the second issue of John Lehmann’s important left-wing journal New
Writing (Autumn 1936). Grossman was one of only five Soviet writers
included in this journal’s first two issues; among the others were such
well-established figures as Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Sholokhov. There can be
no doubt that Grossman had powerful official backing — something that Lipkin
chose to downplay.
¤
One of the stories most often
repeated about Grossman is that Stalin personally, three times, “vetoed” his
being awarded a Stalin Prize — for Stepan Kolchugin in 1941,
for The People Immortal in 1943, and for For a Just Cause (the
novel titled Stalingrad in our recent English translation) in 1953.
Stalin, according to both Semyon Lipkin and Ilya Ehrenburg, intervened because
he disliked — or even hated — Grossman. A large part of this story, however, is
demonstrably false, and it is surprising that it has gone unquestioned for so
long. Apart from anything else, what could have made normally timid Soviet
literary functionaries keep nominating a writer known to have incurred Stalin’s
personal enmity?
The first four sections
of Stepan Kolchugin — an epic novel about the revolutionary movement
in the Donbas between 1905 and 1917 — were published in the journal Znamya between
1937 and 1940; they were also published as separate volumes. The novel was
reviewed widely, and most of the reviews were positive. There were no serious
criticisms — and certainly none of an ideological nature; along with Alexey
Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov, Grossman was clearly a contender for the role of
a “Red Tolstoy.” In the December 1940 issue of the journal Literaturnoe
obozrenie, for example, a reviewer referred to Stepan Kolchugin and
Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don as the two most important books of the
year. [8]
Lipkin seldom names his
sources, but he lays claim to an improbable degree of inside knowledge about
the workings of the Stalin Prize. In his account of a wartime meeting with
Grossman, he writes,
It was known that Stalin had
personally deleted Stepan Kolchugin from the list of nominated books
unanimously confirmed by the committee. Stalin had called it “a Menshevik
novel.” […] During the evening before the list of laureates was published,
Grossman received congratulatory phone calls from the country’s most important
newspapers.
This may seem credible on
first reading, but it is not difficult to see that Lipkin is playing on the
reader’s emotions. The words “personally deleted” (samolichno vycherknul)
suggest that there was something unusual and extreme about Stalin’s supposed
intervention. In reality, however, Stalin quite often took decisions about the
various prizes himself — and the Literature Prize was probably the prize he
considered most important. [9] The sentence about the “Menshevik
novel” is still more questionable; if Stalin was known to have said this, Kolchugin would
not have continued to be published in large editions and to be hailed as a Soviet
classic. [10] And if Stalin’s words were not
common knowledge, how could either Lipkin or Grossman — neither of them close
to the inner circles of power — have known of them? Also, Lipkin fails to
mention that Grossman faced stiff competition that year. The three novels
awarded a Stalin Prize, First Grade, were Alexey Tolstoy’s Peter the First,
Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don, and Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky’s Sevastopol
Harvest Campaign. The first two have stood the test of time, more so than Kolchugin.
In any case, it has now been
established, from documents declassified in 2006, that Kolchugin was
not even nominated for the Stalin Prize; the title does not appear in the list
sent to M. B. Khrapchenko, the head of the prize committee, nor did Khrapchenko
himself attempt to bring the novel to Stalin’s attention. [11] Also, Grossman wrote regularly to
his father throughout these years and kept him well informed about the progress
of his literary career. That he never mentions even the least rumor of Kolchugin being
nominated makes it seem possible that Lipkin’s account is invention from
beginning to end. There are, admittedly, two other memoirs that appear to
support Lipkin, but both were written after Lipkin’s memoir and clearly borrow
from it.
The memoir by Grossman’s
stepson Fyodor Guber, who was then about 10 years old, is a mixture of blurred
recollections and paraphrases of Lipkin. [12] The other memoir, by the editor and
translator Yevgenia Taratuta, contains more detail. Taratuta relates how
Grossman, certain that he would be awarded a prize, invited her and other
friends to a celebratory evening at the theater. In the event, she continues,
Grossman’s hopes were dashed and he put on a brave face. [13] Unfortunately, the differences
between the two published versions of this account make it appear not entirely
reliable. In 1987, Taratuta wrote, “People said that [Grossman’s] name had been
deleted at the last moment.” [14] In a book published in 2001,
however, she repeated Lipkin’s words almost exactly: “People said that Stalin
himself had deleted [Grossman’s] name at the last moment.” [15] It appears that she wrote the first
version before reading Lipkin’s memoir, which had been published only the
preceding year, and that she wrote the second version after reading Lipkin’s
memoir, which had by then been republished twice by Moscow presses. [16]
On the other hand, human
memory is seldom perfect and it is wrong to dismiss a particular memoir out of
hand simply because it contains errors, borrowings, or contradictions. It is
entirely possible that Grossman heard false rumors about the prize and that
Taratuta’s account of the “celebratory evening” is largely accurate; most
“Soviet intelligentsia folklore,” after all, stems from at least some small
seed of truth. Two things, however, can be said with certainty: that Stalin did
not “personally delete” Kolchugin from a “unanimously agreed” list of
prize-winners, and that he did not refer to it as a “Menshevik novel.” The word
“Menshevik” was not simply the name of a defeated political faction; by the
1930s, it had become a codeword for something like “Jewish intellectuals
opposed to Stalin.” Stalin’s criticism, had he really voiced it, would have
been close to a death sentence. And, far from falling into disgrace, Grossman
continued to enjoy considerable success. Sovetsky Pisatel, the publishing house
associated with the Union of Soviet Writers, republished Kolchugin after
the war — with a print run of 75,000 copies and in the prestigious series
“Library of Selected Works of Soviet Literature 1917–47.” And in 1951, even
though Stalin’s antisemitic campaign was gathering momentum, Sovetsky Pisatel
republished the book yet again. On neither occasion were they criticized for
this — not even by the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Party Central
Committee, an organization usually quick to seize on every opportunity to
attack the Union of Soviet Writers.
¤
In 1943, however, Grossman
truly did come very close to winning a Stalin Prize. The People Immortal,
the short war novel he had published the previous year, was one of six works
listed in discussions held by the Prize Committee on March 3 and 4, 1943. The
lists compiled on these two days are not identical, but Grossman figures on
both, even if not on some later lists. [17] And in an undated letter to Stalin
and Vyacheslav Molotov, Khrapchenko states that the prize committee has
completed its deliberations and voted for prizes to be awarded to four works of
prose: Alexey Tolstoy’s The Road to Calvary, Leonid Sobolev’s Soul of
the Sea, Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, and Pavel Bazhov’s The
Malachite Casket. In the event, however, Tolstoy, Bazhov, and Sobolev received
prizes, but Grossman did not. The remaining prize went to the Polish Communist
Wanda Wasilewska for her novel The Rainbow. Only two people were in a
position to effect this late change: Stalin and Molotov. Given that Wasilewska
was one of Stalin’s most trusted consultants — and that she was then playing an
important role in preparations for the establishment of the postwar Polish
government — the initiative may well have been Stalin’s. In any case, there can
be no doubt at all that Stalin agreed to it.
Once again, however, this does
not indicate that Grossman had in any way fallen from favor. Four separate editions
of The People Immortal were published in 1943 [18] and five in 1945 [19]. In 1945 and 1946, three editions
of The Years of War, a collection of Grossman’s wartime journalism along
with The People Immortal, were published in Moscow, while a fourth was
published in Stavropol. And in 1950 a volume of Grossman’s short stories, also
including The People Immortal, was published in Moscow. Most of these
publications were in large editions, and the top Soviet writers received high
royalties; Grossman’s total royalties over this period would have exceeded the
100,000 roubles of a Stalin Prize, First Grade. If not at the very summit of
the Soviet literary establishment, Grossman was not far below it.
The novel’s failure to win a
Stalin Prize is, in any case, unsurprising. The People Immortal covers
the war’s first year, which was a time of retreat. The list of laureates was
published on March 19, 1943, six weeks after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which
is usually seen as the turning point of the war. Though reviewers praised
Grossman for his ability to discern in those early defeats the seeds of
victories to come, the subject matter of The People Immortal no
longer corresponded to the requirements of the Soviet propaganda machine.
Victory, not courageous retreat, was now the theme of the day.
Once again, however, we find
the writers of memoirs invoking Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman. In
1966, Ilya Ehrenburg published the third volume of his influential memoir People,
Years, Life. In it he wrote, “The star under which Grossman was born was a star
of misfortune. […] I was told that it was Stalin himself who deleted his
story The People Immortal from the list of books nominated for the
prize.” And he goes on to say that Stalin must have hated Grossman for “his
love of Lenin, for his genuine internationalism.” [20]
And in 1980, in a memoir
published in Paris, Natalya Roskina, a younger friend of Grossman, both
disagreed with Ehrenburg and repeated his central assertion. “It was certainly
not love for Lenin,” she writes, “that was the reason for Grossman being
constantly in disgrace. It was exclusively the fact that Grossman never sought
Stalin’s love.” She continues, “It was Stalin who deleted the novel from the
list of laureates.” [21]
Roskina does not say who told
her this; it is likely, though, that she has borrowed from Ehrenburg, just as
Taratuta borrowed from Lipkin. And this helps us to see that it is Ehrenburg’s
memoir that lies at the origin of this myth of Stalin’s personal animosity
toward Grossman. Ehrenburg was the first memoirist to claim that Stalin hated
Grossman — and he almost certainly did this with the best of motives. By
asserting that Grossman loved Lenin and was hated by Stalin, he could have been
hoping to pave the way for an eventual Soviet publication of Life and Fate —
if only in a bowdlerized version; Ehrenburg was politically shrewd and he
rarely acted without some ulterior motive. And in 1986, 20 years after
Ehrenburg, Lipkin resuscitated the idea of Stalin’s personal hostility toward
Grossman — though in connection with Kolchugin rather than The
People Immortal. He too was doing what he could to further Grossman’s
reputation. Ehrenburg, however, was trying to salvage Grossman’s standing in
the Soviet Union, while Lipkin was trying to promote his reputation abroad. And
so, whereas Ehrenburg writes about Grossman’s love of Lenin, Lipkin makes out
that Kolchugin was seen as a “Menshevik,” i.e., dissident and
anti-Stalinist, novel.
¤
Where Ehrenburg and Lipkin
led, Western scholars and journalists were glad to follow. Cold War politics,
together with the seductions of the image of the courageous, truth-telling
artist, made it almost impossible for them to do otherwise. Almost every
episode of Grossman’s life has been distorted one way or another in order to
fit the heroic myth conceived by Ehrenburg and Lipkin. A further example of
this is the excessive emphasis placed in nearly all articles about Grossman on
the attacks to which his play If You Believe the Pythagoreans was
subjected in September 1946. [22]
The most important of the
criticisms was that the cyclical theory of history propounded by its central
character was anti-Marxist. This was at the very beginning of the postwar
cultural clampdown enforced by Stalin’s henchman Andrey Zhdanov and there was,
at the time, no knowing what these attacks might lead to. In the event,
however, they simply faded away. Most Soviet writers — even such important
figures as Sholokhov and Alexander Fadeyev (chairman of the Union of Soviet
Writers) — were subjected to vicious criticism at one time or another, and
there was nothing so very unusual about the criticisms made of this play. This
chapter of Grossman’s life deserves mention, but it does not merit the
prominence it is usually accorded.
In late 1952 and early 1953,
however, Grossman truly was in mortal danger. In October 1952, Stalingrad was
nominated for a Stalin Prize by the Presidium of the Union of Soviet
Writers. [23] Soon after this, Stalin’s
anti-Jewish campaign escalated swiftly, and the novel, rather than being feted,
was subjected to vicious attacks. But for Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953,
Grossman might well have been arrested and shot. Even during those months,
however, he can — at least in retrospect — be said to have been fortunate; he
was one of only a few writers associated with the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee who survived. It is curious, incidentally, that such astute figures
as Fadeyev and Alexander Tvardovsky (chief editor of the journal Novy Mir)
seem to have failed to predict the intensity of the anti-Jewish campaign. They
began publishing For a Just Cause during the very month — July 1952 —
when most of the leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were
undergoing secret trial, before being executed in August.
One detail of the complex
intrigues around Grossman deserves mention, if only because it provides
particularly clear evidence of Lipkin’s witting or unwitting distortions.
According to Lipkin, Sholokhov — a great writer, but a notorious reactionary —
responded indignantly when Tvardovsky tried to enlist his support for the
publication of Stalingrad. Lipkin quotes him as saying, “Whom have
you entrusted to write about Stalingrad? Are you in your right mind? I am
against this.” [24] Lipkin makes out that it was this
gibe — which he understood as antisemitic — that led to the novel’s title being
changed, against Grossman’s wishes, from Stalingrad to For a
Just Cause. Grossman’s own records, however, contradict this. According to
Grossman’s detailed diary about the novel’s journey through the editorial
process, Tvardovsky told him that Sholokhov replied as follows, “I shan’t
myself be writing about Stalingrad, since it would be unacceptable to write
worse than Grossman and I can’t write better.” Sholokhov was not noted for his
generosity toward other writers, but on this occasion, at least, he appears to
have been both honest and modest. [25]
No one could feel safe in the
Stalin era, and there is no reason to think that Grossman was any exception.
Nevertheless, it is wrong to make out that he was singled out for special
persecution. From his successful debut in 1934 until his death in 1964, he
remained a much-published and well-paid writer. Only during Stalin’s last
months was he in greater danger than others — and this was because he was a
Jew, not because he had incurred Stalin’s personal enmity.
¤
The “arrest” of Life and
Fate in February 1961 was, of course, a crushing blow to Grossman.
Nevertheless, the often-repeated suggestion that this brought about his death
from cancer seems simple-minded. Even the belief that it plunged him into deep
depression is questionable. For all Grossman’s trials, the three and a half
years from the “arrest” of Life and Fate to his death were a
remarkably creative period. As well as his vivid account of his two months in
Armenia, he composed the finest of his short stories and around half of Everything
Flows, including the trial of the four Judases, the account of the Terror
Famine, and the chapters about Lenin and Russian history that constitute one of
the greatest passages of historico-political writing in Russian. In a letter to
his wife in October 1963, he himself wrote, “I’m in good spirits, and I’m working
eagerly. This greatly surprises me — where do these good spirits come from? I
feel I should have thrown up my hands in despair long ago, but they keep
stupidly reaching out for more work.” [26]
Nor did Grossman — as Lipkin,
Roskina, and others assert — become a “non-person,” living out his last years
in dire poverty. Another volume of already-published stories came out in 1962
and four new stories appeared in periodicals between June 1962 and September
1964. [27] And For a Just Cause was
republished for a sixth time in 1964, this time in a print run of 150,000
copies. For all these, and for his many major publications during the 1950s, he
would have been well paid. Afraid that Grossman might somehow manage to
get Life and Fate published abroad, the authorities were trying not
only to intimidate him and his family, but also to bribe them.
¤
One of the most frequently
quoted elements of the heroic myth is that Mikhail Suslov, the chief Kremlin
ideologue, told Grossman in June 1962 that there was no question of Life
and Fate being published for at least two hundred years. These words are
taken to exemplify both the arrogance of the Communist Party bosses and their
startling acceptance of the novel’s possible greatness — that it would still be
of interest in two hundred years’ time. Suslov, however, prepared for this
meeting diligently, and the notes he made beforehand have now been
published; [28] they contain no mention of “two
hundred years” or anything of the kind. More importantly, Grossman compiled a
long and detailed record of the conversation as soon as he returned home; he
too makes no mention of Suslov’s assertion. Given Grossman’s phenomenal memory
and the evident care with which he recorded this meeting, it seems highly
unlikely that Suslov truly said such a thing.
As we have seen, the story of
Stalin deleting one of Grossman’s novels from a list of prize-winners was
conceived by Ehrenburg and then disseminated by Lipkin. The “two hundred years”
story also seems to have developed only gradually; it seems to have been
engendered by the writer Boris Yampolsky, to have been helped on its way by
Roskina, and then — once again — to have been more widely disseminated by
Lipkin.
According to Yampolsky’s 1976
memoir, Grossman did indeed say he was told by Suslov that there was “no
question of the novel being published for two to three hundred years.” [29] Roskina, however, tells a very
different story; remembering what Grossman told her of a meeting between
himself and Tvardovsky, she writes, “As for publication of the novel,
Tvardovsky said that this was realistically conceivable only after another two
hundred and fifty years.” [30] This, of course — if her record is
accurate — would have been said in an entirely different tone; it is not
difficult to imagine Tvardovsky saying exactly this as a wry joke. Her account
is eminently plausible, but it does not further the heroic myth. And so it is
Yampolsky’s version that Lipkin and others followed and that is now quoted in
countless articles and reviews, both in Russia and in the West.
It is difficult,
unfortunately, to discuss these issues without seeming over-critical of Lipkin
and other memoirists. During most of the Soviet period there were, however, no
reliable sources of information with regard to anything of even the slightest political
sensitivity. For anything they had not witnessed themselves, people were almost
entirely dependent on rumor and guess work. In many instances, there is no
knowing how much Lipkin and others simply misremembered, how often they
consciously chose to distort a story — perhaps for the best of motives — and
how often they were accurately recording the “intelligentsia folklore” of the
time. Lipkin may even, in at least some instances, have been remembering
misleading ideas that emanated from Grossman himself; Grossman’s daughter, for
example, remembers her father saying of Stalin, “He doesn’t send me to the
camps, nor does he award me prizes.” Julia Volohova, one of the most thoughtful
of the younger researchers into Grossman’s work, has suggested, after reading a
draft of this article, that it might be better to think of these “myths” about
Grossman as having been engendered not by Lipkin or Ehrenburg or any other
individual but by the era itself. Fear, rumor, and whispered conversations
were, after all, the tissue of everyday Soviet life. She has also suggested
that those who survived to write memoirs during the 1970s and 1980s may have
felt guilty before those who died before them — and that this may be an
additional reason for their feeling the need to make such figures as Grossman
into saintly heroes.
Still more important, there is
no doubting Vasily Grossman’s astounding integrity and courage. Our hope, in
fact, is that this deconstruction of some of the myths that have accrued around
him may serve to bring out these qualities still further. Grossman was, for
most of his life, in a position of privilege — and it is a great deal easier,
as he himself well understood, for an outsider to attack the system that has
excluded him than for an insider to attack a system that has brought him
comfort and wealth.
Trump Asks Supreme Court To Block Tax Returns Subpoena
“A lot of folks get really
upset about someone getting $140 a month for food stamps. How should we feel
about Trump’s golfing vacations at his resorts putting $100 million into his
pockets?”
Peter Castagno November
16, 2019
President Trump asked the
Supreme Court to block two lower court decisions ordering him to comply with
subpoenas on Friday, setting up a showdown between the branches of government
that will set a major new precedent for future disputes between Congress and
the Executive Branch.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit ruled on Wednesday that it would not overturn
its October decision supporting the House of Representatives Oversight
Committee’s authority to subpoena the president’s tax records from accounting
firm Mazars LLP. In another case, a New York-based federal appeals court
supported state prosecutors’ subpoenas into the same accounting firm.
Trump is requesting that the
Supreme Court nullify both decisions.
In 2016, Trump broke with a
decades-old tradition of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns.
He previously claimed he would share them with the public after an audit, but
has since used every legal means at his disposal to block their release.
Immunity Doctrine
If the Supreme Court decides
to take on the case, their ruling will not only have lasting ramifications on
Congress’ ability to investigate a sitting president, but on the legitimacy of
Trump’s lawyers’ central argument: that the president is awarded total immunity
from criminal investigations in office – even
if the president shoots someone in broad daylight.
U.S. District Judge Victor
Marrero previously rejected
the broad interpretation of presidential immunity last month, calling
it “virtually limitless” and describing Trump’s argument as “repugnant to the
nation’s fundamental structure and constitutional values.”
Ryan Thomas, spokesperson for
progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, asserted
that Trump’s legal argument essentially states that he is above the
law.
“No one is above the law,
including Donald Trump,” said Thomas. “It’s absolutely shocking the lengths
Donald Trump will go to shield himself from accountability. If Trump has
nothing to hide, then he should immediately release his tax returns and give
the American people the transparency they deserve.”
Politicization Of Courts
Trump’s two Supreme Court
nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have shifted the nine-member court
right. The Senate has so far confirmed 162 Trump judicial nominees, many of
whom lack experience, a reflection of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s efforts to reshape
the nation’s courts with partisan loyalists.
Earlier this week the Senate
confirmed Trump legal adviser Steve Menashi to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a position with pivotal influence over legal
battles on the president’s subpoenas. Menashi has never even tried a case
before and refused to answer Senators’ questions in his confirmation hearing
about potential involvement in the White House’s efforts to conceal the Trump-Zelensky
phone call at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
Critics argue Trump picks like
Menashi undermine the principle of checks and balances and enable the president
to ignore basic Constitutional principles like the emoluments clause.
Trump Profiting From His
Public Office
Critics believe it is
important for the public to see President Trump’s tax returns because his
private business interests could be influencing his public policy decisions.
For example, some critics believe Trump’s business interests in Turkey
influenced his decision to clear
Turkish President Erdogan’s path to massacre U.S. allied Kurds last month.
“I have a little conflict of
interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told former
campaign adviser Steve Bannon during a Breitbart radio show in 2015. “It’s a
tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of
one, not the usual one, it’s two.”
Mother
Jones’ Russ Choma explained last month how Erdogan has previously
manipulated Trump by threatening to remove his name from the buildings, which
have earned the president millions in royalties since he launched his election
in 2015.
This August, a report by Citizens
for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) found that Trump
has visited his properties at least 362 times at taxpayer expense since his
2017 inauguration. Ninety members of Congress made 188 visits to a Trump
property, 111 foreign officials stayed at Trump properties, and political
groups hosted 63 events at the president’s properties between Trump’s 2017
inauguration and CREW’s August
report.
“A lot of folks get really
upset about someone getting $140 a month for food stamps,” tweeted
economist Dean Baker last week. “How should we feel about Trump’s
golfing vacations at his resorts putting $100 million into his pockets?”
“No other president has
retained ownership of a massive global business while serving, so this
president’s self-enrichment and conflicts of interest represent a unique and
unprecedented affront to the democracy,” CREW’s executive director Noah
Bookbinder said in a statement.
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