Berlin 1945
We are very near the centenary of the Bolshevik coup d’état or “October Revolution” of
1917 that brought the Communists to power in Russia, and there are dozens of
scholarly conferences and other conclaves marking the event. This has meant that real experts on Soviet
Communism, much bidden, have been in such short supply that program committees
have been willing to turn to some fairly marginal “experts,” such as yours
truly. My modest claim to fame is my
book The Anti-Communist Manifestos,
which is mainly about European and American literary critiques of
Communism. I am a day later than usual
in posting this essay because most of yesterday was taken up with travel home
from a conference, at which I had given a lecture, at Hillsdale College in
Michigan. Both the conference and its
host institution were full of revelation to me.
I have a
reasonable knowledge of the contours of American higher education, but I was
unaware of Hillsdale, a pioneering liberal arts college, coeducational since
its founding in 1844 and an early hotbed of abolitionism, that prides itself on
staunchly conservative attitudes in political and educational theory. Practice is not far removed from
precept. To avoid the annoyances of
entangling federal regulations and mandates, Hillsdale accepts no federal funds. Most institutions with which I am familiar
have sizable bureaucracies tasked with securing as much federal funding as
possible. I suspect that few other
campuses feature a statue of Margaret Thatcher, or are in the midst of building
an imposing and expensive new house of worship.
I sensed that many of the attendees at the conference were not alumni
but affluent elderly admirers and financial supporters of the institutional
mission. My guess would be that the
percentage of Trump voters in the Hillsdale academic community is about that of
the percentage of Clinton voters in the Princeton academic community. In a country that is so dangerously
polarized, it is very salutary to switch bubbles now and again. Though the concept of “diversity” approaches sacral status in current
educational theory, what I found in my career was that it often meant “some
more people who think the way I do.”
Hillsdale College Campus: Two Iron Ladies (one technically bronze)
I have often
commented on the happy coincidences of my life.
This one involves my experience with military history. As you may know from last week’s post we are
recently returned from a wonderful house party in the south of France. Like most vacation homes, this one has over
the years constructed an eclectic library reflecting the tastes of its owners
and frequent visitors. Two strong suits
developed over the years are long biographies
and military history, sometimes overlapping as in the nine hundred pages of
Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The
Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson.
Ordinarily, I don’t read much in this genre, but when in Rome, or rather
Salernes…. One author copiously
represented is the historian Antony Beevor.
In previous years I had read his books on Stalingrad and the fall of
Berlin. I was astonished by the skill
deployed in the Stalingrad book to organize in clear and compelling narrative
such an epic struggle of such complicated and protracted nature. Just this past month I read two more Beevor
volumes, both of them excellent: the book on D-Day, and that on Hitler’s “last
stand” in the Ardennes (the “Battle of the Bulge”) in the final winter of the
War. The man has an unusual gift.
To my
delight and surprise—as I had not noted his name in early announcements of the
conference—Beevor was a fellow speaker at the Hillsdale conference. Sir Antony (he has recently been knighted)
gave a terrific lecture on “The Soviet Role in World War II”. We hit it off in a couple of memorable private
conversations. He told me that
historians reckon that at Stalingrad alone the military commissars shot 13,500
of their own troops for cowardice, desertion, or insufficient enthusiasm. The execution squads needed to be kept in a
state of semi-permanent drunkenness to carry out their task. By way of contrast there was one execution for dereliction of
military duty (as opposed to murder or rape) in the American army—that of Eddie
Slovik.
The level
of the formal academic lectures—leaving my own aside--was very high. Two I would point out for special praise were
the first and the last. The first
speaker, Professor Mark Steinberg of the University of Illinois, spoke with
sparkle, verve, and lucidity on the complicated revolutionary scene in late
Romanov Russia (1905-1917). I left the
lecture room thinking I understood some rather complicated matters—sort of.
Now, if I could only reach similar quasi-enlightenment concerning the
Spanish Civil War….The last talk was by Daniel Mahoney, a professor of
political science at Assumption College, a prolific author on themes and figures in
modern political theory, and an expert on the work of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. I think I have read
everything by Solzhenitsyn available in English translation, but I don’t think
I would have the nerve to write about him.
For me he remains too strange, too prophetical, too Dostoyevskian, too alter—as he did to his shocked audience
at the Harvard Commencement of 1978. But
Mahoney got to the very essence of the Gulag
Archipelago in a fashion that elucidated its spiritual and even theological
core in a way I had not previously seen.
An additional pleasure was learning for the first time that Solzhenitsyn
refused to meet with Jean-Paul Sartre, a man my petty mindedness cannot forgive
for temporarily corrupting my youthful intellect. I believe that videotapes of all the
conference talks will soon be available on the Hillsdale website.
Berlin 1989
