Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, no, no. He’s a German. He doesn’t really believe in Nazism, but he ends up going around raping Russian women. That’s the fascist version of someone who’s not a believer, not nearly as good as the Soviet version. I think he knows he rooted for the USSR to win the war. In part, in this novel, he’s trying to explain to himself, “How could you root for such a horrible society, and how could it have been on the side of the Allies?” Which, of course, we would have been rooting for at the time. That, I think, is part of his answer, the central idea of negotiability, that it never quite goes away under Communism. Even Viktor is saved by this weird intervention from Stalin, which makes no sense, but there’s some outcome possible other than just death and destruction. Yes. I want to come back to the torture theme, the scenes in the Lubyanka with Krymov. I’ve read a lot of Solzhenitsyn. I’ve read all The Gulag Archipelago. I’ve read many of his novels. I’ve read about a lot of scenes in Lubyanka. I can’t say I feel like I’ve been there, but it’s familiar to me. It’s the prison where people were tormented, not merely tortured but tortured until they confessed, often, sometimes tortured until they confessed things that weren’t true, sometimes tortured until they confessed about loved ones or comrades or colleagues. It’s an unbearable, tragic place. Having read all that before, I felt, reading Grossman’s account, an awareness of how hard it was to stay on your principles. It’s almost, yes, they tortured their victims, and they extracted confessions under torture. But by the end, you feel like Grossman captured this idea that for many of them, they were glad to confess, even though they knew what they confessed to wasn’t true, but they did it out of love for the system. All the purge, the show trials of the ’30s, which, in 1938 and ’37, keep coming back into this book, and the purges before that, where Stalin’s opponents were systematically killed, none of them were killed at night by the firing squad or with a murderer. They all confessed. What Grossman captures, which I’ve never really read with this level of intensity, the willingness of people to confess, even though they know it’s not true — what they’re confessing to — because they think the system itself is worth preserving. They have a . . . I would make a distinction. It’s a Dostoevskian distinction between the church and its practitioners, right? It reminds me of the grand inquisitor scene. The officers of the church — and here I’m talking about not any particular church but any religious dogma — they’re flawed. They’ve lost the original doctrine that inspired the believers, but the idea of giving up that doctrine is so painful to the adherents that they confess to things they didn’t do because they have to believe that the system, the church, still stands. In this case, a secular church, the church of Communism. Do you feel that? It’s a profound book on the psychology of confession. I think another element of how people come to confess is that in part, they believe they are guilty. They may not believe they’re fully guilty. If you think of Krymov, if you reread the earlier parts of the book, he does, in fact, whine about his colleagues in such a minor way, but that looms larger and larger in his mind as they talk to him. He starts wondering, “Well, have I, in fact, done something against the system?” when confronted with the power of the interrogator. And, of course, the indirect reference to Dostoevsky and how the system, ex ante, takes advantage of what a Christian might call original sin, to put people in positions where they almost cannot help but confess because they believed something, to begin with. Then the theme that passivity underlies how so many social structures operate, the novel is quite profound on, including how the camps operate, how an army battalion operates, how chains of command operate in the military — that the default of passivity is responsible for so much of social order, even when that social order can be very, very bad. By the way, it’s Lieutenant Peter Bach who is the German I was referring to in my earlier comment.…

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