The Volokh Conspiracy

Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov, and a prominent dissident in her own right has passed away:

Yelena Bonner, a rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said Sunday. She was 88....

Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities....

Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb [actually hydrogen bomb - IS], into turning against his country.

But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost.,,,

After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate.....

Nonetheless, she edited her husband’s memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin’s government, denouncing Russia’s bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country’s young democracy.

In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go.

Featuring British NGO representative Leslie Vinjamuri (pro-intervention, sees no legal problem), American peace activist Robert Naiman (anti-intervention, considers the intervention unconstitutional), and me (pro-intervention, but opposed to Obama doing it in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act). On the RT (formerly, “Russia Today”) television program “Crosstalk.” 27 minutes.

In this post, Tyler Cowen asks why Russian Jewish immigrants tend to overwhelmingly support the GOP rather than the Democrats. The reasons are actually no mystery. As I have previously explained here and here, Russian Jews are hawkish on foreign policy and their experience with communism leads them to be suspicious of domestic policies that seem socialistic. Also, they dislike the Democratic Party because it was relatively dovish during the Cold War. Immigrants from other communist countries, such as the Cubans and Vietnamese, tend to be Republican for much the same reasons. So Russian Jews are not unusual in this regard. They only seem so by comparison with native-born American Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats.

Tyler asks why Russian Jews tend to be opposed to affirmative action and gay marriage. But the vast majority of all white Americans are opposed to affirmative action (64% in this 2009 poll). So Russian immigrant attitudes on this issue are not surprising. They only seem so by comparison with native-born American Jews, who are the only white ethnic group that tends to support affirmative action.

As for gay rights, Russian Jews are indeed far more opposed to them, on average, than native-born whites. The reason, unfortunately, is probably simple homophobia. Anti-gay prejudice is widespread in Russia, with 74% of Russians endorsing the view that gays and lesbians are “morally dissolute or mentally defective persons,” according to a 2010 poll. At least in my experience, Russian Jews are no exception to this general tendency, though younger, more assimilated immigrants are less likely to be anti-gay than those who were older when they arrived. Homophobia aside, most Russian Jews are not socially conservative generally. For example, the vast majority are secular and pro-choice.

Tyler is probably wrong to suggest that Russian Jews’ anti-gay attitudes are part of a general willingness to “affiliate with the American brand of Christianity found in the Republican Party” because “[r]elated strains of thought have been prevalent in Russia for a long time.” The Russian Orthodox Church has little in common with conservative American Protestantism, though both tend to be anti-gay. In any event, most Russian Jews feel little affinity for the Orthodox Church because it has a long history of anti-Semitism and (more recently) collaboration with Communism and Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism.

It is probably the case, however, that Russian Jews have less fear of the religious right than native-born American Jews. In recent Russian history, unlike in the US, the main fomenters of anti-Semitism have been communists and secular Russian nationalists. Russian Jews are therefore less likely to see conservative Christians as natural political enemies, even if the two groups have little in common in terms of their religious and social attitudes.

There are some great historical events where it’s difficult to tell whether their net effect was positive or not. Contra Brian Leiter, the fall of the Soviet Union isn’t one of them.

The fall of the USSR led to the establishment of numerous successful liberal democracies, including Poland, the the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, and others. Some of these were established before the USSR fully collapsed. But communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not have fallen were not the USSR itself already close to collapse, as it was in 1989-90.

Even the more authoritarian post-communist successor states are all far freer than their communist predecessors were. For example, all of them have vastly greater freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection for property rights, and freedom of internal and external mobility (nearly all communist governments forbade emigration for most of its citizens, and most also severely restricted internal movement). I am no fan of the quasi-authoritarian government of ex-KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, but it’s a lot less repressive than the USSR was by any conceivable measure. For example, my relatives living in Russia feel free to openly criticize the government and vote for opposition parties. Even under Gorbachev, public criticism of the government was severely circumscribed and opposition parties were banned until just before the regime fell.

On the economic front, after a difficult transition in the mid-1990s, there have been massive increases in incomes and standards of living. For example, per capita GDP in Eastern Europe (including Russia and Ukraine) rose from 33% of Western European levels in 1992 to 45% in 2008. Those countries that adopted free market policies most rapidly and completely (e.g. – Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic) had the highest growth rates and least painful transitions. These figures greatly understate the true amount of economic progress because much of the 1992 GDP consisted of military spending (at least 20% of Soviet GDP at the time) and shoddy communist products many of which did not meet any real consumer demand.

Finally, the fall of the USSR lifted the specter of global nuclear war arising from a confrontation between the two superpowers. Although US-Russian relations are sometimes tense today, there is no realistic chance that the two nations will go to war.

What can Leiter stack against these massive improvements? The following:

[W]hether the collapse of the Soviet Union should be considered a good thing is a separate question. Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes, though some of the former Soviet republics have remained thoroughly undemocratic, and Russia itself has moved strongly back in that direction. Then, of course, there was the enormous human cost to the collapse (increased mortality, a decline in longevity, and massive economic and thus human dislocation and suffering). Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, are unlikely to have occurred if the Soviet Union had remained intact.

I have covered the points about economic well-being and political freedom above. The evidence of huge improvements in both is overwhelming, even though some of the post-Soviet successor states are far from admirable.

What about life expectancy? It is true that life expectancy in Russia and Eastern Europe fell in the early 1990s. But as this German Max Planck Institute study describes, life expectancy in those countries began falling in the mid-1960s, with a brief acceleration in the early 1990s, that was soon reversed. One can’t blame the fall of the USSR for a trend that long predated it. The same study also shows that life expectancy in Eastern Europe (and to a lesser extent Russia) began to rise again in the late 1990s, possibly because of increased economic growth and improvements in standards of living. Moreover, most of the fall in Russian life expectancy in the 1990s predated privatization of the economy and was probably caused by rising alcoholism (due in large part to falling vodka prices) rather than by economic shocks.

In this context, it’s important to remember that communist-era health statistics and economic data are extremely unreliable and in many cases falsified for propaganda purposes. For example, official East German data absurdly claimed that East Germany had higher per capita income than Italy by 1970 and had nearly equaled Britain. Thus, the above data probably underestimate the extent of post-Soviet progress because they likely overestimate life expectancy and living standards in the Soviet era.

Finally, we have Leiter’s claim that the survival of the USSR might have averted “world-historic crimes” such as the US invasion of Iraq. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War, I think it’s not at all obvious that it counts as a “world-historic crime.” Although the war may not have been worth its cost from a US point of view and was often badly conducted, the replacement of a mass-murdering despot by a relatively democratic government is very likely a net gain for Iraqis themselves. It’s also worth noting that the Cold War era was far from free of bloody proxy wars, many of which had worse outcomes than Iraq. Such conflicts would likely have continued had the USSR survived.

Perhaps more to the point, the USSR had a tendency to commit “world-historic crimes” of its own, such as the mass murder of millions of its own people and – most recently – the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, which ended up killing over 1 million people. Had the USSR survived the 1980s, it is very likely that such atrocities would have recurred. Previously in Soviet history, periods of liberalization (e.g. the mid-1920s and early 1960s) were followed by periods of heightened repression at home and expansionism abroad (e.g. – the Stalin and Brezhnev eras). Had Gorbachev’s reforms fizzled out or been reversed, the same pattern would likely have recurred as more hardline communist leaders returned to power and tried to suppress liberal tendencies.

We cannot know exactly how history would have unfolded if the USSR had survived to the present day. But the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that the world is far better off without it.

UPDATE: I recognize that Leiter wasn’t suggesting that the fall of the USSR was necessarily bad, merely that the issue is a close call. But even the latter claim isn’t defensible.

The Way Back, Hollywood’s first-ever movie about the Gulag system, recently opened in theaters. Anne Applebaum, author of the excellent history Gulag, has an informative column on the movie in the Washington Post. Applebaum served as a consultant on the film. As she explains, the escape story is at least partly fictional. However, the portrayal of conditions in the Gulag system itself is very accurate. The BBC has an interesting article about the making of the movie.

The fact that it took Hollywood 70 years to make its first Gulag movie is itself a telling indication of our longstanding neglect of communist crimes. After all, the Gulag system was an episode of mass murder that took as many lives as the Holocaust and possibly even more. And we are still waiting for the first Hollywood movie about the even larger Soviet mass murder of the forced famines of the 1930s, to say nothing of the Chinese communists’ repetition of this atrocity, probably the biggest mass murder in all of world history. Scott Johnson of Powerline notes two previous Gulag films. But one of them was a little-known 1970 Swedish film, and another a low-budget 1980s HBO TV movie. For obvious reasons, neither had anywhere near the impact that a full-scale Hollywood production might have.

Interestingly, one of the three main characters in the film is an American Gulag prisoner. Quite possibly, he was included in order to give American filmgoers a character they could identify with. However, it is in fact true that several thousand Americans were imprisoned in the Gulag system, most of them dying there. These people were skilled workers lured in by the Soviet government in the early 1930s with promises of high wages, along with some leftists who moved to the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. Within a few years, most of them were arrested and sent to the Gulags (or in some cases just executed) on trumped up charges of being spies or “enemies of the people.” Historian Tim Tzouliadis tells their story in his fascinating 2008 book, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia.

To me, the most surprising part of Tzouliadis’ book was not that several thousand Americans ended up in the Gulag. That fact has long been known from Gulag survivor memoirs and work by previous scholars (though Tzouliadis tells the story in much greater detail). The real surprise was Tzouliadis’ meticulous documentation of the State Department’s near-criminal indifference to the issue over a period of some twenty years, even though officials in both Washington and the US embassy in Moscow knew very well what was going on. With very rare exceptions, they refused to even raise the problem with the Soviets, even during periods when the USSR’s need for good relations with the US gave the State Department substantial leverage with Stalin.

Tzouliadis points out that a few diplomats representing much less powerful Western states did successfully lobby the Soviets to release their own nationals who were caught up in Stalin’s purges under similar circumstances. The State Department could have achieved at least comparable results had they tried. In many cases recounted by Tzouliadis, they actually turned away desperate Americans who showed up at the US embassy seeking help. As Tzouliadis explains, a few of the diplomats chose to ignore the issue because they were ideologically sympathetic to communism. In most cases, however, their neglect seems to have been primarily the result of bureaucratic inertia and incompetence. Being a libertarian, I’m not easily surprised by tales of inefficient or callous government bureaucrats. This example, however, shocked even me. The Stalin-era US embassy in Moscow makes even the worst DMV office seem like a shining paragon of devotion to duty by comparison. Their superiors in Washington also deserved a hefty share of blame.

In a comment on my last post on Russian Jewish immigration, University of North Carolina law professor and blogger Eric Muller writes:

Again and again I find myself wondering to what extent it’s true that Jewish refugees/emigres from Soviet totalitarianism (and their offspring) tend to have a libertarian and/or conservative political orientation. Does anyone know whether this has been studied? Are Eugene, Sasha, and Ilya typical in this regard, or atypical?

There is actually survey data on this, which reveals that some 75% of Russian Jewish immigrants vote Republican, as compared to only about 20% of native-born American Jews. The same pattern is evident among other refugees from communism, such as Cubans and Vietnamese. The reasons are not hard to figure out. The experience of living under communism makes these refugee groups hostile to anything that smacks of socialism and also to those political parties and ideologies that they perceive (with some justice) as having been soft on communism during the latter part of the Cold War. This in turn leads them to be more “right-wing” than they might have been otherwise. As I discuss in my immigration memoir, I probably would have become a liberal or leftist had I been born in the US and had the same interests and personality.

The overwhelming majority of Russian Jews in legal and social science academia tend to be conservative or libertarian (more often the latter), which is in sharp contrast to the generally left-wing orientation of the vast majority of other US academics. My impression is that rank and file Russian Jewish immigrants also tend to be on the right, more libertarian-leaning than conservative (e.g. – most are pro-choice and favor fairly strong separation of church and state). Obviously, most are not nearly as self-conscious or consistent in their libertarian leanings as academics such as Sasha and myself. And the term “libertarian” is probably not familiar to most of them, just as it isn’t to the majority of the 10-15% of other Americans who hold generally libertarian views.

I agree with most of what co-blogger Sasha Volokh says in his post on Gal Beckerman’s important new book on the political struggle over Jewish emigration from the USSR.

For example, it is indeed true (and in retrospect, very interesting) that the campaign united many ideologically disparate groups in the US. When I worked for Action for Soviet Jewry in the late 1980s, we had important assistance from political leaders as disparate as Barney Frank and Jesse Helms. It is also true, and and already well-known, that Henry Kissinger was negative about the whole deal, as he was about human rights in general. Recent Nixon tapes revelations about Kissinger’s attitude confirm that.

At the same time, I do have a few disagreements with Sasha and Beckerman’s analysis. Sasha is correct to suggest that much of the more severe repression described in the book “might not have applied to Soviet Jews who kept their heads low and didn’t try to leave.” But of course such people still had to endure the serious ordinary oppression of life in the USSR, including (but far from limited to) widespread official anti-Semitism. I briefly described some of this in the first part of my own immigration memoir. The most important weakness of Beckerman’s book is that he gives very little description of the lives of ordinary Soviet Jews who were not activists or dissidents, and therefore doesn’t clearly explain why so many wanted to leave. The increased repression of the late Brezhnev and Andropov periods had a ripple effect on non-dissidents as well, since they had to be even more careful to avoid offending the authorities than before.

I also have some reservations about Sasha’s and Beckerman’s discussion of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. It is true that the amendment was never waived until 1990. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that its economic sanctions had no effect. The hope of getting it waived or repealed was likely one of the factors that motivated the Soviets to allow increased Jewish (and also German, Armenian, and evangelical Christian) emigration in the 1970s, and later under Gorbachev. Certainly, Soviet officials repeatedly lobbied for a waiver throughout that time, pointing to the increased emigration numbers as justification. The waiver was never granted because the amendment called for fully free emigration (as opposed to mere increases in numbers within a system in which the government retained discretionary power to reject emigration applications at will), which the Soviets did not concede until the late Gorbachev era. But the Soviets, of course, did not know that in advance. Moreover, as Sasha and Beckerman partly recognize, the ongoing battle over the amendment was one of the factors that focused Western public attention on the issue, and thereby gave the Soviets further incentives to liberalize emigration policy, even aside from the trade restrictions themselves. It is actually very difficult to disentangle the impact of Jackson-Vanik from other factors influencing Soviet calculations, and Beckerman doesn’t really succeed in doing so. The debate over the amendment’s effect is part of the much broader debate about the extent to which economic sanctions can influence human rights policy in oppressive regimes, which is similarly contentious.

Another small but annoying flaw of Beckerman’s book is his tendency to describe any right of center activist or organization as “neoconservative” even in cases where the term is clearly inaccurate (e.g. – in the case of the Heritage Foundation, which, especially during the period covered in the book, was led by more traditional conservatives who were on the right long before there were any neoconservatives, and believed that the neocons were far too liberal and too supportive of the welfare state).

Despite these reservations, Beckerman’s book is by far the most thorough account of the political battle over Soviet Jewish emigration so far. Anyone interested in the issue should certainly read it.

UPDATE: I blogged about the ethics of imposing trade restrictions on socialist states in this 2007 post:

Libertarianism is generally seen as requiring free trade. Certainly, libertarian thinkers from Adam Smith to the present have strongly condemned protectionism. How then can a libertarian endorse trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied free trade to totalitarian states that refused to allow their citizens to emigrate freely?....

Libertarianism does indeed imply free trade between private individuals and firms. But trade with socialist governments is very different. When two private individuals trade with each other, it is reasonable to assume that both legitimately own the goods they exchange. Thus, at least as far as libertarians are concerned, the law should not restrict their transactions unless there is specific proof that one or both are trading in stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired goods. By contrast, a socialist state engaging in international trade is usually exchanging goods that it forcibly acquired from its citizens. The socialist state’s goods are either confiscated from former private owners or produced by compelling workers to work for the state (which they generally must do whether they want to or not, because there is no competitive employment market). Socialist states also make extensive use of out and out forced labor.... Just as in the domestic context libertarianism is perfectly consistent with forbidding trade in stolen goods, in the international context it is consistent with forbidding trade with socialist governments.....

Restrictions on trade with socialist states may or may not be good policy. Sometimes trade with such states can serve important strategic interests (as with US trade with the Soviet Union when the two nations were allied during World War II). Critics of trade sanctions claim that they fail to achieve their goals and may even be counterproductive. Be that as it may, restricting trade with socialist states does not violate any libertarian principles.

In his excellent recent book Stalin’s Genocides, Stanford historian Norman Naimark argues that Joseph Stalin committed genocide and not “merely” mass murder. Few any longer deny that Stalin’s regime slaughtered millions of innocent people. But the Russian government and some Western writers continue to argue that these murders were not genocidal, and that Stalin therefore cannot be classed in a category with Adolf Hitler and others who slaughtered entire racial, ethnic, or religious groups.

Back in 2008, I blogged about the debate over the question of whether the Soviet terror famine of the early 1930s (in which some 6 to 10 million people died) was a case of genocide or mass murder (see here and here). Many Ukrainians and some Western scholars argue that this was a case of genocide because Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin specifically targeted Ukrainian peasants for extermination. By contrast, the Russian government claims that Stalin was an equal opportunity mass murderer. The distinction matters because international law defines mass murder as genocide only if it was the result of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” It also matters because of the ongoing debate over whether communist mass murders deserve as much opprobrium as those of the Nazis.

Naimark concludes that both the terror famine and various other Stalinist atrocities qualify as genocide. His book is the most thorough and compelling study of the subject so far. In the end, however, I am not so much persuaded that Stalin committed genocide as reaffirmed in my view that the genocide-mass murder distinction isn’t a morally meaningful one. Moreover, Naimark overstates Stalin’s personal role in the mass murders committed by his regime and understates the impact of the communist system.

I. Was it Genocide and Should it Matter if it Was?

There is no doubt that at least some of Stalin’s crimes were genocides. The deportation and partial extermination of ethnic groups such as the Crimean Tatars surely qualifies. These indisputably genocidal crimes, however, accounted for only a small fraction of Stalin’s victims. Naimark’s main objective is to prove that Stalin’s much greater mass murders – the terror famine, the killing of millions in Gulag slave labor camps, and the “Great Terror” of 1937-38 – should also be considered genocidal.

Here, Naimark runs into the problem that most of the people killed in these mass murders were targeted not on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, but because of economic class or political background – or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he points out, the Soviet Union and its allies successfully worked to exclude “political” murder from the international law definition of genocide; they did so to insulate their own crimes from potential condemnation. This is one of the most blatant examples of the extent to which international human rights law has been perverted by the influence of nondemocratic and totalitarian governments . In effect, Naimark argues that the international law definition of genocide should be read to cover precisely the kinds of crimes that it was deliberately crafted to exclude. In legal terms, the text, original meaning, and legislative history of the international law definition are all against Naimark.

In the case of the early 1930s terror famine, Naimark also argues that Stalin intended to target the Ukrainians as an ethnic group. If so, then this counts as genocide even under the traditional view of international law. Naimark notes that the impact of the famine was greater in Ukraine than in most other parts of the USSR, and that the region was treated with special harshness. On the other hand, it is also true that the main goal of the famine was to exterminate the independent peasantry regardless of ethnicity and carry out the forced collectivization of agriculture. Ukraine may have been targeted as much because it was the USSR’s most important agricultural region as because it was populated by Ukrainians. Moreover Ukraine had large minority populations, including millions of ethnic Russians (my own grandmother, was one of the many non-Ukrainians living in the region during the famine). Many of these people also died in the famine. Stalin’s motives were probably mixed. His main goal was to crush the peasants and collectivize agriculture. But he was also happy to deal a preemptive blow to Ukrainian nationalist aspirations (which he feared because they were the USSR’s largest minority group).

Ultimately, the distinction between genocide and “mere” mass murder should not matter. For reasons I explained here and here, it doesn’t make any difference whether the Soviet regime killed millions of innocent people because they were “kulaks” and “class enemies,” because they were Ukrainian, or for some combination of both reasons. In all three scenarios, innocent people were slaughtered for no good reason, in most cases on the basis of immutable characteristics that they could not change (“kulak” status was determined primarily by family background).

II. The Role of Stalin.

Naimark’s book is also interesting in so far as he blames Stalin personally for most of the crimes committed by the Soviet government during his rule. Absent Stalin’s malign influence, Naimark contends, the regime probably would not have committed mass murder or genocide on such a large scale. There is little doubt that Stalin’s paranoia and sadism influenced Soviet policy. Nonetheless, I think Naimark overstates the importance of Stalin’s personal role. Most of the major repressive policies and institutions – including the secret police and the Gulag slave labor camps – of the Soviet state were begun by Lenin, not Stalin. As historians such as Richard Pipes have shown, even the terror famine was a reprise of the first Soviet effort to collectivize agriculture in 1918-21 (which also led to a famine in which millions died). Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s main rival for power after Lenin’s death, attacked Stalin on the grounds that his policies were too generous to “bourgeois” elements and otherwise not repressive enough. Had Trotsky defeated Stalin, life for most Soviet citizens might have been just as bad or even slightly worse. One of the very few ways in which Stalin was harsher than Trotsky was in his much greater willingness to kill and imprison members of the Communist Party elite. Here, Stalin’s extreme paranoia about possible rivals for power really did make a big difference. Under Trotsky, the party comrades would have suffered a lot less; the rest of the population would not have been so fortunate.

More generally, Stalin’s policies were far from unique in the communist world. Almost every other communist regime engaged in very similar mass murders, including in countries like China and Cuba where the rulers had a high degree of autonomy from Soviet control.

In sum, evidence from both the Soviet Union and elsewhere suggests that Stalin’s deranged personality was probably only a secondary factor in explaining the crimes of his regime. “Without Stalin,” Naimark writes, “it is hard to imagine the genocidal [Soviet] actions of the 1930s.” By contrast, I find it all too easy to imagine communist mass murder even with a less maniacal leader at the helm. In fact, not a lot of imagination is necessary, since the same policies were promoted by Lenin, Trotsky, and other communist leaders with very different personalities.

Despite these reservations, Naimark’s book is a great analysis of both Stalin’s crimes and the debate over the meaning of genocide under international law. Anyone interested in the subject should definitely check it out.

In response to my memoir about emigrating from the Soviet Union, a Chinese-American reader e-mailed me the following [posted with permission of the author]:

Thank you for posting your memoir. I really enjoyed reading it. I can completely identify with your experiences, as my family also had to make its escape from a Communist country, China. My parents are professors who came to this country with nothing, and worked their way up by taking 2-3 menial labor jobs. Your anecdote about how adults never criticized the government in front of you had me nodding my head; my mother told me one of the big reasons why she wanted to leave the country was the ever-present tension between telling me the truth and risk me getting into trouble in school and not saying anything and watching me be brainwashed.

My parents have made similar statements to me, noting that telling me the truth in the USSR was even more dangerous than with most other children because I was never one to keep my opinions to myself.

This, of course, is not the first time that people have noticed parallels between the Russian and Chinese experiences with communism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made the same comparison many years ago, as did various others. The two regimes adopted very similar policies and institutions: a one party state, government ownership of the economy, a vast network of secret police, collectivization of agriculture, and stultifying censorship and political repression, among others.

At the macro level, this led to massive death and suffering, with Mao Zedong possibly exceeding the world record for mass murder previously set by Stalin. At the micro level the similarity is reflected in stories like the above. Two small incidents from my own family history further illustrate the point:

In the 1950s, when the two big communist powers were still allies, my grandfather had some Chinese students at the scientific research center where he worked. After relations between the two regimes soured in the 1960s, he learned that at least one of the students had spent years in a brutal “reeducation camp” during the Cultural Revolution, in part because he had previously been in the USSR. China’s reeducation camps were of course largely based on Soviet models.

In the late 1970s, my father was required to run a political education session at his workplace. By this time, he had become disillusioned with communism and had already applied to emigrate. So he picked as his subject the “errors” of the “dogmatic” Chinese communists. He saw it as an indirect way of criticizing the USSR’s own very similar rulers without running afoul of the authorities.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) runs a fascinating website that posts memoirs of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived over the last 40 years. A friend of the family who runs the site asked me to write up my own story for them. Since HIAS helped out my parents when we first arrived in the US back in 1979, I was more than happy to do so.

Unfortunately, the technology of the HIAS site isn’t yet quite able to handle some of the formatting in my document. So for the moment I have posted it here. It tells the story of my experience as an immigrant from roughly the age of 5 to 18 (1978-91). We plan to transfer it to the HIAS site later.

Memoir writing isn’t one of my strong suits. But some aspects of the story might be of interest to VC readers. For example, I describe how I first became a libertarian (pp. 22-24), and how the immigration experience influenced my later research agenda as a scholar (40-42).

There are also cameo appearances by world-famous political philosopher John Rawls, whom I encountered when I was fifteen (24-26), and financier/Obama transition team economic policy adviser Anjan Mukherjee, who was my high school debate teammate and closest friend at the time (various places, esp. 30-33, where I describe the interesting parallels between our two immigrant experiences). Those of you who are former high school debaters yourselves might also be interested in the parts where famous debate coaches Les Phillips (my coach at Lexington HS in Massachusetts), Richard Sodikow (Bronx High School of Science), and Tim Averill (Manchester, MA) figure in the story. Obviously, I also describe my family’s life in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, and the reasons why my parents chose to emigrate (1-7).

I would like to thank Anjan, my parents, and others for reading over the memoir and helping me correct some factual and stylistic errors. Undoubtedly, there are some mistakes that remain, for which I alone am responsible.

Enjoy... or not, as the case may be.

UPDATE: I have fixed the flawed link to the HIAS site.

Fellow Russian Jewish immigrant Alina Simone recently wrote a New York Times op ed about her decision to change her last name from the original “Vilenkin,” which she considered to be a liability for an “aspiring indie rock singer.” Historically, it is not unusual for immigrant actors and other performers to change foreign-sounding names that are difficult for English-speakers to pronounce. On the other hand, it has become far less common for ordinary immigrants to change their names merely to seem more assimilated, as was common in the early twentieth century.

In my case, the name “Somin” has actually been a slight advantage in my career. It’s short, easy to pronounce, and also distinctive. That makes it more likely that academics and other readers of my work will remember my name, and less likely that they will confuse me with anyone else. There are a few other Somins in the United States who are not related to me, and more in Russia. But the name (which derives from the town of Somino in present-day Belarus) is uncommon even Russia. And there are no other Somins in the American academic world, as far as I know.

I have previously blogged about the massive impact that Ayn Rand had as the leading modern popularizer of libertarianism and the recent controversy over whether she is an asset or liability for free market advocates today. An interesting question (at least to me) is whether Rand was the most influential Russian immigrant to the United States. To my mind, her only serious competitors for the title are aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, who designed the first mass-produced helicopter, among other achievements, and novelist Vladimir Nabokov. I exclude cultural figures like composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff, who came to the US late in life, but did most of their important work elsewhere. Like Rand, Nabokov and Sikorsky left Russia in large part because of ideological opposition to the communist regime. Interestingly, Sikorsky was precisely the type of anti-communist inventor and entrepreneur who could have been the hero of an Ayn Rand novel, but for the fact that he was a very religious Orthodox Christian. Nabokov has far more “high culture” cache than Rand and his novels have greater technical merit. But I think it’s clear that Rand has influenced the world views of far more people; she certainly has had many more readers. Even among those who have read Nabokov, I doubt that many have significantly changed their views on any important moral or political issues as a result.

Google founder Sergei Brin is a dark horse candidate. But I think that internet search engine technology was likely to develop in a roughly google-like direction even without Brin’s distinctive contributions.

Are there any other candidates I’m missing – besides Senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh, of course?

UPDATE: Commenters reasonably point out that I omitted some important candidates, such as Irving Berlin, primarily because I had not bothered to check whether these people (mostly Russian Jews) were born in Russia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. I think it’s fairly clear that some of the others mentioned (e.g. – Isaac Asimov), had a lot less influence than Rand. Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but his influence was largely limited to that field (he did write many non-SF books, but they had little lasting impact). Still others (e.g. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Golda Meir) fall under my category of people who made their major achievements outside the US.

Finally, I tend to attribute greater individual influence to those who fundamentally changed the world views of large numbers of people than to innovators in the arts or in technology (except in the rare cases where it can be shown that the technology in question would not have been developed in similar form within a few years anyway). In my view, great influence is a matter of unique impact, rather than contributions that were likely to be interchangeable with those of other similarly situated people. Obviously, other theories of influence are possible, and I’m not going to argue for my approach in detail – at least not in this post.

Last week, I was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language station about the 30th anniversary of the Iranian seizure of American diplomatic hostages in Tehran. The transcript, in Russian, is here. For the fraction of VC readers who do not read Russian (a fraction that is smaller than almost any other U.S. law/policy weblog), here’s a summary of my key points: The hostage crisis initially helped President Carter fend off a primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy, as Carter stayed in the White House attending to the issue. However, as the kidnapping wore on, Carter’s weakness became increasingly evident to the American people; it was observed that Soviet government diplomat do not get seized, because everyone realized that the Soviets would respond forcefully. Accordingly, one result of the hostage crisis was the election of Ronald Reagan. (Who of course later made his own terrible mistakes in thinking that he could establish a working relationship with the Iranian tyrants.) Today, Iran is still ruled by tyrants who hate the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, and the West has new leaders who, like many of their predecessors, cling to the vain hope that the Iranian regime can be pacified by concessions. The world’s largest exporter of terrorism, the Iranian regime aims to  dominate the Near East and the Muslim world. With nuclear weapons, the the Iranian regime threatens the whole civilized world. Everything would be different if the Khomeni revolution had been stopped at the very beginning. The longer that regime change in Iranian is delayed, the worse for everyone.

I was a freshman in college, watching this Peter Jennings broadcast with my roommates in 75 Holder Hall with a sense of complete astonishment that the world could shift so suddenly– all the while trying to adjust the rabbit ears of our early 1970s TV to try to get better reception.

I’m sorry I wasn’t and I don’t quite know what happened.  I don’t say this to be flippant in the least.  I knew that big things were happening, but unlike many others’ experiences, it all seemed very gradual to me and finally anti-climactic.  It seemed like something that was gradually sliding into place that had been sliding into place for a long time but was also terribly fragile.

I credit that feeling to two things.  One was that I was working in a Manhattan law firm, and completely buried in learning international tax.  The other was that I had spent the previous several years putting in large amounts of time with Human Rights Watch, both its Americas division and its Helsinki division.  I had done many missions in Yugoslavia, watching the Soviet empire fall apart while watching Yugoslavia fall apart very much upclose, at the village level, and watching it lead to war, affected how I saw the Soviet Union.  I had a huge anxiety that war would break out in the Warsaw Pact; or that it would be a repeat of 1968 – especially a fear of a repeat of the end of Prague Spring, that fear more than anything – or something that I didn’t know, but bad, would happen.

I was also perhaps lulled into a sense of passivity that was somewhat Bush senior’s approach – looking backwards, it had important advantages by treating it as a matter of course – but for me, at least, it felt a little like events were unfolding, not so much as Frank Fukuyama would later say, but more as people like Adam Michnik and the Eastern Europeans intellectuals I knew said it would, if only the US and Western Europe would stay the course.  In Yugoslavia, it was a very different sense; the intellectual elites of Yugoslavia understood very well that the end of the Cold War undercut the existential position of Yugoslavia and so it did.  I had a sense of trepidation, not of liberation and freedom. The profound sense of liberation came later for me, when I finally believed that it was permanent and not a temporary blip.

Not very Reaganite, but then I wasn’t a Reaganite or a con or a neocon then.  The books that were on my mind were George Konrad’s magnificent, but unbearably sad, The Loser and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and, above all, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I had a deep fear that if one looked at it all too closely, someone, the Red Army, someone, somewhere would take it all away again.  I was an editor with Telos, the critical theory journal that had introduced so much of the zamizdat intellectual production into English from Eastern Europe; I knew lots and lots and lots about the intellectual politics there.  It was very hard for me to believe that this was actually real and tangible, and not something so fragile that a little puff could bring the house of cards down.

So I wish I had been more attentive to events, and wish that I could blame it merely on working such long hours in the law firm – but rather, it felt to me like something happening in slow motion across many years.  November 11 was weirdly not so special for me, because I had been involved for so many years, since the early 1980s, with HRW and Telos watching events unfold at the level of civil society activists.

A close friend of mine was there when it happened, though, David, a gay man with AIDS.  I was astounded when he stopped by to see me in New York with photos of himself chipping away at the Wall.  Possibly a little bit cheated – since when was David off partying in Berlin and not me?  He had never been “political” in any sense, not gay rights, not really anything, and I told him I was pretty sure he couldn’t find Bratislava on a map – until AIDS caught him and he became deeply involved in ACTUP.  Since when did he deserve to go celebrate the end of Communism and the Wall?

But David saw in some deep way, as AIDS closed in on him, that being at the fall of the Wall was as an act of liberation even for people otherwise altogether uninvolved in the politics of the Cold War, or the politics of Europe, or any of that.  It was just freedom, and maybe David actually captured its pure spirit – dissociated from politics.  If that is possible, and  I don’t know that it is; actually, I am pretty certain it is not.  But David died just a month later, AIDS caught up with him for good, in the hospice of the San Francisco Zen Center; the Lord bless him and keep him, he was a good man, and so were the monks of the Zen Center who watched over him.

And so, for better and worse, that’s how I remember the fall of the Wall.  Photos of David that I no longer have, pre-digital, gaunt and his long hair swinging round, laughing and singing, wearing some kind of weird poncho that he never would have worn in 80s LA (but of course I might), standing on top of a big pile of cement.  There isn’t any big moral here about freedom and liberty – there is all of that, for me as for others, but in my case it wasn’t associated with the actual moment.  The comprehension of liberation and freedom came later.