di Robert Conquest


At this time of the Year we, “writers”, are commonly asked to name the “Best Books of the Year”.
If you had to name the “Worst Book of the Year” – or even just a Bad such – how would you choose? It should, if possible, be one published and publicized in the international academic establishment, and by an author widely perceived – at least in his homeland – as impressively scholarly. David Irving’s holocaust denial could hardly have competed, even though he is now subjected to what is called “censorship”, if applied to those who tend to something not dissimilar. Still, Mr Irving’s awful work might give us a clue. What other horrible regime is now, one would have thought, totally disgraced in the Western mind?
Yes, indeed – Stalin’s Soviet Union. And today, A.D. 2005, a major public, and publishers’, row is raging in Europe – the Canfora Affair. A “distinguished” Italian professor of classical philology at Bari University – Luciano Canfora – has produced a book, in something like the worst of the neo-pro-Stalinist vein. “La Democrazia: storia di un’ideologia” is part of the Series “The Making of Europe”, put out by publishers in five countries under the direction of the French Medievalist historian Jacques Le Goff. If somehow sneaked through publishers’ offices into print - in Italy, France, Spain – and (note title change) as “Democracy in Europe. A History” (in England last week, in America next month).
But German Publisher C.H. Beck refused to publish it, returned the rights to the author and offer “gladly” to make the translation available. In Italy, the Corriere della Sera printed Mr Canfora ‘s angry charges of “censorship” – a cry quickly taken up elsewhere. In an interview on the subject, Jacques Le Goff told the Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung: “It’s not that I went to defend Canfora. I just think that a contract should be kept”. Nothing that the series on Democracy was planned four years ago and “Canfora’s political and academic positions were widely known”, he went on to say that should publication be “banned” in Germany, “it would look very like censorship”. But that comment has not stopped the detection and exposure of the flaws in such an argument.
Joachim Guntner, writing in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung agrees with the accusations by Beck’s chief editor Detlef Felken (that Mr Canfora is “palliating communism”), noting that “the word ‘gulag’ does not make a single appearance in the German Translation. But the USA is violently attacked for its support of ‘fascist regimes world wide’...”. Asking “if the author blind in his left eye?” Mr Guntner takes Mr Canfora to task for not breaking “with the communist idea of historical ‘necessity’, according to which Stalin was not simply blood-thirsty and power-crazed but someone who did what he had to do for the Soviet Union”.
Some Italian voices are heard in some sort of defence of this book, a sad paradox when one remembers that the Italian left – and even Italian communists – were among the earliest exposers of Stalinism in the 1960s. One defence has been that the publisher is obliged to honour his contract. Yes, but does he have a previous obligation to examine the material covered by the contract? Publishers cannot be expected to produce every manuscript they receive. Some are bound to be rejected. And those who work in publishing, especially among those at lower levels, may lack judgment, or taste. We must, of course, put up with this. But it cannot be presented as a reason to evade later criticism. It was unanimous conclusion of five independent consultants that Beck would be well advised not to publish the book. Even the well-known left wing historian Hans Ulrich Welher criticized it, noting that “in its dogmatic stupidity he [Canfora] exceeds the products of the GDR in the sixties and seventies”.
So, contrary to all civilized expectation, the lessons of the past three generations are rejected. Those of us who thought they had been learnt must, once again, face the non-facts. Thus we learn, from Mr Canfora, of the negative role of Poland is failing to support Stalin, Katyn (like Gulag) does not figure in the index. We are treated to a Hungarian revolution of 1956 in which the West is the main villain. And “historically anti-soviet” opinion (particularly in Poland) is berated (A useful guide to Stalinophilia is the use of “hysterical”, “frenzied” and “rabid” to describe non-communists).
To be called “distinguished” is not an adequate reply to the objections emerging from all sides of the political spectrum. Mr Canfora’s expertise as a classicist is in itself no qualification, or not one adequate to refute the facts of the 20th century Stalinism. But we get not merely a favourable, but an intellectually indefensibly favourable view of gulag-denial in the form of gulag-avoidance – a lesson to all the David Irving.
As to the charge that the rejection of this book amounts to censorship, it is a pity that the author did not cover the Soviet censorship machine – Glavlit – with some 70,000 employees (whose approval stamps appeared on almost everything printed in the USSR, even including bus tickets). Nothing in the least anti-Stalinist could be published. But even the rest had to be intensively checked. As to books, after two “preliminary” checks, 28 pilot copies were sent to a number of ministries, including those of Defence and Security (the MVD) – who also were sent three copies of “artistic, socio-political, children’s and instructional literature”. After further inspections, permission to print was given, with the first “obligatory copies” given to the MVD and the central Book Chamber of the RFSFR. Several more steps preceded release to the public. And this could all be stopped at any point by Glavlit, which could seal and destroy the whole edition. There’s censorship for you! One feels that censorship as alleged in the Canfora case is a bit different.
I have not had the chance, as yet, to look at anything but extracts from Canfora’s book, though I look forward to reading Chapter 14: “the cold war: Democracy in retreat”. Perhaps the book has perspectives not yet available to me – though I doubt if it contains, for example, such irrefutable material as, say, theatre’s “distinguished” Vsevolod Meyerhold’s account, from the NKVD prison, of his long tortures before execution. The English and American publisher Blackwell’s catalogue blurb for Mr Canfora’s book notes that the scope of the series in which it appears “is broad, encompassing the history of ideas as well as of societies, nations and states to produce informative, readable and provocative treatments of central themes in the history of the European peoples and their cultures”. Evidently, “factual” does not come into it.
Meanwhile, have we anything to learn from this? Over Stalinophobia is rare even in moderately informed circles. Still, one does find a remnant of the “revisionism” of a generation ago in some of the lesser by products of academe – in particular in some recent excellent Moscow historical studies dumbed down by old style Western editors. But nothing to compare with what can be done by true Stalinophile veterans with distinguished reputations in other fields. The Canfora row certainly shows that there are still “intellectuals” prone to unreality. But also that they fail to escape the vigilant scepticism so central to the open mind – yes – and the open society. Some of us prefer these to the alternatives.

(Wall Street Journal, 5 December 2005)