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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian. .
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On November 7, the music of numberless bands and the singing of songs filled the decorated and illuminated streets of Moscow and all other Soviet cities. You see, on November 7, 1917, Lenin seized power.
The columns of demonstrators were converging in Moscow on Red Square, where they marched past the pyramid-like Mausoleum where the embalmed Lenin had been lying in a glass sarcophagus after he had died in 1924, while ÒStalin and his fellows-in-armsÓ stood on the outside rostrum of the Mausoleum first to review the troops passing by and then to greet the ÒSoviet working people,Ó demonstrating their patriotism.
Our neighbor was a well-known professor of medicine, a Jew. Shortly before his death in 1953 Stalin was planning the annihilation of the Soviet Jews, his version of Hitler's Final Solution. But before WW2, anti-Semitism was regarded as part of Nazism, and in a Soviet spy thriller it was a Jewish couple that caught a spy. One neighbor, and eminent professor of medicine, was a great Soviet patriot. Early in the morning, he put his little daughter on his shoulders and marched in a column of demonstrators to Red Square to see Stalin in the flesh on the rostrum of the Mausoleum. They came back at noon, telling how they had seen Stalin. The professor was as excited as could be a deeply religious man who had seen God. Yes, on the rostrum of the Mausoleum He stood and even raised His hand to greet them. They were both delirious.
The mood in the marching columns was festive even outside Red Square. Whenever a column stopped, there would be Russian folk dances, with a dancer shrieking:
The songs were both folk-Russian and Soviet-patriotic, and the music of one of them, ÒKatyasha,Ó is still played all over the world more than half a century later, minus its patriotic lyrics.
Shostakovich, now considered in the United States one of the greatest composers, composed the music of one of the patriotic songs that was originally offered (minus its patriotic lyrics) as the anthem of the newly founded United Nations. Under Stalin and after his death, Shostakovich was or at least behaved like a great Soviet patriot, and finally joined the Communist Party.
Let me recall that in a recent Russian public opinion poll asking who was the greatest statesman of Russia, Stalin received four times as many votes as Yeltsin. The highest rating, even about half a century after Stalin's death.
While Russia under Stalin was magnificent, according to many or perhaps most Soviet people, the future surpassed any optimism. Communism to come! Do you know what it is?
No money (take free whatever you need!), no billionaires versus denizens of night shelters (everyone has whatever he or she needs for a sensible creative artistic or intellectual life), no hard work (since all of it will be done by machines), no government, no army, no police, no courts (everyone all over the world will behave responsibly except those clinically insane (until they have been cured).
So what was the matter with me? Instead of celebrating November 7 as the anniversary of the greatest event in the history of mankind, I was one of those malicious teenagers who sneers at everything, likes nothing (except pretty girls), and won't end well, if you ask a patriot like the professor of medicine, our neighbor.
Speaking of pretty girls. Here not everything was so smooth either! I never considered myself handsome, and when I was asked how I could hope that Z., a beauty, would ever pay any attention to me, I quoted Goethe, who was asked how he could hope that a beauty of eighteen would respond to him, a toothless man of eighty. He said that a woman loves in a man his future son to inherit the man's mind.
However, in my case Goethe's insight did not work. After Stalin's death I wanted to show Z. my mind, and ridiculed Stalin. Instead of admiration, Z. burst into tears, and I made out her saying between her sobs: ÒI didn't know you were so cynical!Ó
Look! The Englishman Bernard Shaw, the world's wittiest, most sarcastic and critical writer was a Òfriend of the Soviet Union.Ó And I, an obscure urchin, born in Soviet Russia, refused to recognize the Soviet present and future splendorsÑBernard Shaw, not I, was a Soviet patriot!
What was the matter with me?
Bernard Shaw saw Soviet Russia from afar, while I was living within it. When he heard something patriotic said in Soviet Russia, he might find it original, profound, sensible, thoughtful, because he had heard it for the first and last time. I had heard it hundreds of times, and to me it was a clichŽ Soviet patriots usedÑoften for purposes of their own, such as reducing me to silence or getting a higher post or a better paid job.
Besides, Marx, Bernard Shaw, and many other Westerners who never suffered from dictatorship never understood how evil it is. Look at the prevailing Western attitude toward the dictatorship in China. Dictatorship? Nonsense! China is a just, peaceful, and otherwise lovely society, complete with the Beijing duck for Western tourists!
In 1215 the barons in England understood how evil autocracy or absolutism could be and forced the king to sign Magna Carta, restricting or limiting his power. In my teen years, I understood it, about 725 years later. And hence I became a venomous critic, while Gene Lyons, the late American friend of mine, called the 1930s in the United States Òthe Red Decade,Ó glorifying Stalin. One third of the Italian voters and one fourth of the French voters voted after WW2 for their respective Communist (that is, Stalinist) parties. The Western celebrities like Bernard Shaw, Òfriends of Soviet Russia,Ó were a formidable phalanx of the best and the brightest.
In 1945, as Stalin was grabbing Eastern Europe and some British MPs criticized Stalin. Winston Churchill, who has been represented as the greatest sage in world politics, said in the House of Commons.
ÒMarshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders want to live in honorable friendship and equity with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.Ó
The British Conservative prime minister could well celebrate November 7 in 1945. Later, Churchill could no longer deny Stalin's seizure of Eastern Europe, but he blamed it on his wicked subordinates, deceiving Stalin, too good to see their deception.
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.
Hey, people, take a chance,
I am going to dance!
I'll dance the best I know;
Don't laugh if I am slow!