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Grigory OrdzhonokidzeWhen mass murderers repent.

By Clive James
Updated Tuesday, March 13, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

It is not recorded that Kirov declined the honor of being addressed as one who summoned up his bravery for the challenging task of making war on the defenseless. Because Kirov was later murdered in his turn (in 1934, the year the letter was written), we tend to forget that his own record as a murderer was exemplary. But the fact might be remembered when the Kirov Ballet company next comes on tour to a theater near you. St. Petersburg is no longer called Leningrad, but the Maryinsky company, when on tour outside Russia, is still called the Kirov, presumably on the assumption that the ballet audience abroad remains clueless enough to believe that Kirov had once had some sort of background in the fine arts, like Sir Kenneth Clark or Sir Jeremy Isaacs. Kirov's background was one of unrestricted power and the extermination of blameless human beings. A measure of our slowness to face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the "Kirov Ballet" does not strike us as obscene though the "Madame Mao School of Calligraphy" would. The Soviet Union, an earlier and more massive event even than Communist China, has retained its legitimacy, at any rate to the extent that some of its historical figures are still granted a stature that was always ludicrously at odds with their true significance.

In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the class of professional exterminators divided fairly neatly into homicidal perverts who couldn't get enough and routinely squeamish placemen who had to get used to it. The second category necessarily outnumbered the first by a long way: Under both regimes, there was a large reservoir of men and women who were not much more insane than we ourselves but who, in extreme circumstances, could be talked into, or could talk themselves into, extreme behavior. In that respect, the regimes were mirror images of each other. When the long reluctance of the world's intellectuals to admit this disturbing fact was at last overcome—and until the collapse of the Soviet Union the admission never looked like happening—the pendulum swung the other way. On the whole, however, we have gained from the two great streams of unreason being seen in parallel: A full body count has at least had the merit of depriving apologists for the left (necessarily the more eloquent, because nobody except a psychopath ever apologized for the right) of the opportunity to excuse Communism by saying Nazism was quantitatively worse.

But the drawback of bringing the two main ideologies closer together has been to encourage the assumption that a system of belief can explain the killing. Such an assumption springs from the familiar tendency—and in some ways it is a commendable one—to invoke a complex mental preparation for an elementary human act. The absurdity becomes manifest in the political sphere when its proponent, as he must, finds himself trying to establish similarities between the mental processes of a sophisticated intellectual like G.Y. Zinoviev and a lumbering maniac like Saddam Hussein. Really, it doesn't matter what such different men believe, or think they believe. What matters is that they behave the same way, hence allowing us to deduce that what really interests them is unchallenged power, for which the necessity to commit murder is seen as a small price. (In harsh actuality, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some of the great killers became political figures in the first place for no other purpose except to wipe out their fellow human beings when they got the chance. Lenin was always vicious: a fact that, for more than 70 years, was the very last to be admitted by the international left intelligentsia even though men who had known him personally, and believed in his cause, had said so from the earliest days of the regime.)

The great mystery of the socialist totalitarian regimes has been not how they grew into killing machines—in retrospect, nothing seems more logical; it is how the machines were put into reverse. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, it was remarkable enough. Khrushchev began his career as an apparatchik capable of any crime the state ordered. But when the time came and he saw the glimmer of a chance, he didn't want to live that way any longer. Nor did Brezhnev.

But the real breakthrough was further back, when the first mass killers got tired of killing. Against all the odds, it happened. When you think of the blood on their gloves, it doesn't seem much of a comfort: but if you want to live in hope, you have to deal with some very raw material. And if you want to see an end to the kind of "State the like of which the world has never seen," you have to accept that for some people there is nothing more habitual than to do their worst. The sole function that your fine opinions might perform, and always at a tangent, is to affect those people at the moment when they begin to wonder whether being ordered to torment their fellow human beings might not indeed be a blow, and scarcely to be borne any longer.

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Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Reprinted from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James © 2007 by Clive James, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher. Photograph of Lewis Namier © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.
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