Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…This is where I think we might disagree because I disagree with everything else I’ve read about this book, including the main Grossman biography. If I had to name a central theme of the book, I think it’s, in a funny way, a patriotic book, arguing that Communism, for all of its horrible faults, is actually better than fascism and explaining or showing to us why it is better than fascism. I have a riff on that, which I’ll do, but let me just put that out on the table and hear your immediate reaction. I’m not sure I disagree with that. I wasn’t suggesting that they were equivalent. It’s just that they have certain powerful equivalencies that the characters in the book find repellent. The idea to the Communists that they have a brother in the Nazis, the idea that to the Nazis, they have a brother in the Communists is extremely disturbing. Grossman forces a number of his characters to confront those similarities. But I agree it’s a very patriotic book. It’s a very Russian book. There’s a lot of talk in his biography and in people who write about him, how much he was pro-regime, how much his antagonism to the regime and the Soviet regime changed, how it grew over time, and like his characters, and it’s a very autobiographical book, which is bizarre, but it’s a very autobiographical book. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a physicist, a world-class physicist. Grossman himself was a chemist, not a world-class chemist as far as I know, but he identified with Shtrum’s marital problems, his problems of keeping faith with his conscience. In that sense, I think he’s overwhelmingly, certainly, on the side of the Russians, but I don’t think he has any romance about Communism. I think what he sees as the fundamental difference is that for him, fascism is ultimately just a philosophy of death. He says on page 94, “Man and fascism cannot coexist.” The feature about Communism — and he’s under no illusions about its evils, as you just said — is there’s some degree of negotiability built into the system. If you look, say, when the Nazi commander, Liss, is interrogating Mostovskoy, Liss just keeps on asking questions. There’s no dialogue. Nothing can happen. There are no real questions, there are no real answers, and Mostovskoy simply ends up being killed. The other characters going to the camps — they’re simply killed. There is no negotiation. But if you look at the main Soviet interrogation scene, when Katsenelenbogen is interrogating Krymov, a scene which goes on for quite a while, they talk back and forth. It’s weird. It’s sick. It’s twisted. There’s torture involved. But actually, Krymov comes away from that scene alive. He at least learns something. Also, you have figures–one of them is Viktor; another is Novikov, the tank commander — maybe they’re imperfect, but they’re not just all bad, by any means.…

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