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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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Al Weeks was an NYU professor whom I persuaded in the 1980s to write, as I did, a column for the New York City Tribune, for that was a publication where we could pay attention to what interested us, not to what was “politically correct.” In particular, we paid attention to Viktor Suvorov’s book “Icebreaker,” and recently Weeks sent me a collection of 15 articles published in Russian in 2006 and entitled “The Truth of Viktor Suvorov.”
What are Suvorov’s “Icebreaker” and Andrei’s Times review of it about? About a case of conformity pertaining to the history of the Second World War and Suvorov’s “allbecrushing” of that conformity. Indeed, Andrei’s review is entitled “Allbecrushing Intellect.” The word “allbecrushing” the English poet Coleridge applied to Kant. The word has been forgotten, but it is worth recalling.
When I gave a lecture to the Sovietologists at Columbia University on our arrival in New York in 1972, there ensued an icy silence after I finished. The audience was shocked that I spoke in the same breath about Hitler and Stalin. Surely Hitler was the villain who attacked Europe and Russia, while Stalin, a friend of Churchill and Roosevelt, was the hero, who put to death the villain, anxious to commit suicide in order to avoid Soviet captivity. True, after WW2, the Cold War raged, when Stalin was accused of going to launch war against the United States — a false accusation, since Stalin could not launch such a war before he had acquired post-nuclear superweapons. But when I spoke at Columbia about WW2, the Cold War was gone and Nixon had embraced and kissed Brezhnev.
The professor who had invited me to give the lecture did not know what to say after my presentation. She must have liked it because through her intermediacy I became an Albert Einstein Prize laureate. But most of those present — professors, assistant professors, and other servants of academic conformity — regarded me as a monster. Why?
We had fled from Soviet Russia to be able to express publicly our own thoughts, no matter how allbecrushing.
When Suvorov’s “Icebreaker” and “Day M” were published in one volume in Russian in Moscow in 1995, he sent me a copy with this inscription: “To Lev Navrozov — the teacher.” Surely I could not be his teacher in Soviet military matters, which he, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, knew better than I. He meant that I was his teacher in allbecrushing the conformities of WW2.
An example of allbecrushing? Hitler was created by those nice Western politicians who authored the Treaty of Versailles — and by Stalin. The Treaty of Versailles made Germany virtually defenseless. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, two trends began in Stalin’s Russia. The “industrialization” (that is, militarization) and the “liquidation” of 10 million prosperous farmers. On the basis of Soviet documentaries of that time, Goebbels represented both events in his own documentaries shown before German feature films. Hitler was the only politician who seemed to be determined to do away with the Treaty of Versailles and thus defend Germany against Stalin. Hence his party in the Reichstag received more votes than any other, and accordingly, he became the Reichschancellor.
Hitler did launch the rearmament of Germany contrary to the Treaty of Versailles. Now Stalin feared Hitler’s surprise attack and wanted to preempt it, using Hitler as an icebreaker, breaking constitutionalism and democracy in Europe, whereupon it would be easy to seize Europe the way Stalin seized the eastern part of it at the close of the war. Nor was this something new. In Lenin’s Collected Works we read that after the seizure of Warsaw, the Red Army was to move on, westward. However, France fortified Warsaw so that the Red Army could not take it, and Lenin’s plan of European (and then global) communism was postponed. Now (the summer of 1941) it was time to resume it.
But it was obvious to Stalin that Hitler would try to preempt Stalin’s surprise attack. So, he, Stalin, had to preempt Hitler’s preemption of Stalin’s attack. The historical truth is that Hitler preempted Stalin’s preemption. “Duce,” wrote Hitler to Mussolini to explain his motives on the eve of the invasion of Stalin’s Russia, “I do not trust Stalin.” Hitler feared Stalin’s surprise attack.
As children, we saw the Soviet film “If War Tomorrow.” With this film, Stalin wanted to prevent Hitler’s surprise attack by demonstrating to Hitler the power of Stalin’s armed forces. No, the film did not show a Soviet answer to Hitler’s surprise attack. But one country (read: Germany) somehow provoked our Motherland. As a result, this insolent country was devastated — turned to ruins. When the last building was still intact, the Soviet bomber pilot rammed his bomber into it.
Stalin wanted to scare Hitler in order to prevent his surprise attack. But Hitler thought about Stalin’s surprise attack with all those Soviet armed forces. Surely he had to preempt Stalin’s surprise attack by his surprise attack.
Andrei recalls today that Suvorov’s “Icebreaker” sold in Britain “something like 800 copies,” despite Andrei’s glowing review “on what was then Britain’s most influential literary page.” Andrei writes:
By comparison, in Russia to date “Icebreaker” has sold 5,000,000 copies.
There is a general shrinking of the horizons of publishing in the West. Why should Westerners read about Stalin and Hitler of more than half a century ago to understand how and why WW2 occurred? For entertainment there is television, and for big serious books there are university professors who write such books (“Publish or Perish!”), print them on university presses, and read each other’s books as part of their salaried work.
Fashionable in the United States are also commercially published books of fired or retired high-level officials and their friends and relatives who disclose real or imaginary official and private secrets to the joy of Democrats or Republicans respectively. Since the authors are interviewed on television, there is no need to read these books either, yet publishers can expect some limited but sure sales to defray the costs and make a modest profit.
As for pop entertainment books, I foresee their end in New York when the subway and buses install television, and those riding to or from their work will have no need to read them in order to kill time.
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.
On May 5, 1990, the day “Icebreaker” was published in English by the prestigious British publishing house Hamish Hamilton, The Times of London carried my son Andrei Navrozov’s 1,000-word review of the book.
Since the Hamish Hamilton edition of Icebreaker, no English language edition of any work by Suvorov has been published: not even of the two other volumes in the trilogy, Day M and The Last Republic. Copies of Icebreaker now sell on the Internet for up to $350 because of the combination of their bibliographical rarity and word-of-mouth-generated demand.