Epistemophilia: useful idiots

I really like the PRI show The Changing World, but it can be a bit up and down. Their recent two parter on  polyezniy-or useful-idiots was however one of their best. The term was coined possibly by Lenin but in practice really refined by Stalin to describe Westerners who were either blinded by the idealistic falderal of Soviet idiology or just susceptible to flattery (or both) and were thus unable to see the misery of Russians under the Soviet rule. Or just didn't care. Stalin was said to have been capable of being quite charming when he wanted, as befits a psychopath.

Some of the people name-checked: Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw (who apparently admired Stalin's Pygmalion-esque manhandled transformation of Russia) and American singer Paul Robeson. They played a clip of Lessing herself being interviewed about it and it was rather mortifying. The story of Robeson was particularly sad because he was lured by the Soviet propaganda about the lack of racism in the Soviet Union (interesting to think of this in terms of the rising number of racial incidents against Africans in Moscow now.) He would travel to the Soviet Union to see old friends who were largely in prison by then and were pulled out and cleaned up for his visit so he could see they were fine. They were promptly shipped back to their labor camps afterwards. Robeson even recorded the Soviet anthem in English. I see a clip on YouTube of him singing the Chinese anthem as well.  Mao and Stalin? Could you pick two worse leaders in the 20th century? Dude, I hope you figured this out before you died in 1976.

The most interesting story though was about an NYT reporter named Walter Duranty who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Russia in 1931 where he reported that NO ONE died directly as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan (they estimate 10 million people died in Ukraine.) The Pulitzer, interestingly, is still on display at the Times-along with a placard saying many people disagreed with his receiving it, including Times' staff.

Here's more interesting trivia about Duranty: in his former life he collaborated with Aleister Crowley on some poetry and in some vague sort of debauchery.

There has been some rumbling lately that Russia is once again becoming a country we should be wary of, thanks in part to Putin. The PRI documentary also mentioned he is trying to whitewash Stalin's image in the history books of Russian students. This might explain why on an NPR story about the Volga River, some people expressed dismay the name was changed back to Volgograd from Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, btw, is possibly the bloodiest battle in history.

Part II of the documentary looks at some more recent useful idiots, like those who supported the Hussein regime in Iraq.