(no subject)
Oct. 16th, 2008 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_kleberComments on ideology and reality in the soviet system
George F. Kennan
Institute for Advanced Study
(Read November 11, 1954, in the Symposium on Ideology and Reality in the Soviet System)
Proceedings of the American Pphilosophical Society, vol. 99, no. 1, january, 1955, pp.29-30
I AM sure you will all have shared with me this impression of the three learned and distinguished communications we have just heard--namely, that seldom have three expressions of opinion on these subjects complemented each other so well and contradicted each other so little.
The three papers need little further development; but they do all point, in my mind, to one or two reflections (I shall not venture, in the presence of the exact scientists, to call them conclusions) which I might make bold to commend to your attention before we abandon these subjects entirely. It seems to me that what has been said here this afternoon has served primarily to highlight, on the example of the leading instance of modern totalitarianism, the glaring and profound disparity between the crude and naive utopian ideal, hovering in some dim and distant limbo, and the terrifying, sharply defined reality, projected into every detail of contemporary life, felt in every aspect of the daily experience of each of millions and hundreds of millions of people.
A number of reasons, all of them cogent ones, have been suggested here in explanation of this disparity. To my mind, these reasons group themselves around one central reality, observable in the Soviet experience, which I might attempt to define as follows:
The violent usurpation of governmental power by any coterie of men, supported only by a small minority of popular opinion, and the effort to apply this power ruthlessly for pre-conceived purposes not sanctioned in the experience and feeling of the people, create a situation in which the behavior of the usurpers themselves soon comes to be governed not by whatever utopian ideals they may once have entertained but by the cruel necessities of that political power they have usurped.
Power, in other words, exercises a reverse discipline on those who wield it. And whenever people seize power in the way that the original Soviet leaders did, they place themselves in a species of predicament to which they and their successors are later in increasing measure beholden. They create a situation in which every one loses freedom, but they lose most, for they are the most exposed, the most hated, and the most responsible.
Now there are certain implications of this situation, to which I would like to draw your attention :
While the utopian ideals to which such men may conceive themselves dedicated may be new and unprecedented, and while modern weapons and means of communication have indeed brought certain alterations--which we understand very poorly--in the conditions and possibilities for the exertion of despotic power by men over other men, this predicament in which men place themselves when they seize power and attempt to apply it for schematic utopian ideals is, after all, one familiar to human history in its major outlines. Of course, no two historical situations are the same. Therefore, one can, as Mr. Wilks (1) so well demonstrated this morning, draw no firm conclusions from the vast experimental record of political history. Nevertheless, what happens to the great usurpers, and to their successors in office, is at least something for which we have a large number of imperfect but suggestive historical examples. And I would suggest that the present process which we can observe in the Soviet Union, while of course in certain ways unique, is nevertheless not in its major aspects a new one. It is the degeneration of a fanatical political regime from the rule of the original "true prophet" to the tyranny of the terrible and ruthless political chieftain who seizes the apparatus of power the prophet had erected; from there to the crystallization of a new bureaucracy, and the emergence of a number of bureaucratic organizational entities so strongly installed that personal rule has to take place by their sanction; and so, finally, to the replacement of the personal autocracy by the influence of a privileged oligarchy in which--who knows?-such things as civil liberties and real constitutional limitations may again find their birth, as they have so often done in the past.
Possibly one extremely important point of difference between the present rulers of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin, whose political personality has been so well illustrated by Professor Robinson's searching study of his utopian ideals, is that the present rulers seem to show a greater understanding of this historical process than Stalin did, and are more appreciative of the necessity, in their own interest, of accepting it, recognizing it, not flying defiantly in the face of it.
It is for these reasons that I would not feel too tragically hopeless about the possibility of coping with Moscow's Communism by means short of a world war. But where one cannot have this optimism, and where the thoughts expressed here this afternoon have the most frightening connotation, is in the case of the Asian Communists, and indeed of the entire Marxist or Marxist-influenced intelligentsia of the underdeveloped areas.
These people seem to have a naive confidence that by establishing various forms of local totalitarianism, uncontaminated by any Western influence or participation, they are now going to achieve various results which seem to me clearly utopian, notably the skipping over of great stages of economic and social development in the achievement of early industrialization, and the immediate and painless overcoming of the manifold aspects of economic and technological backwardness that have heretofore distinguished their peoples from the West, and all of this without sacrificing anything of the spiritual and traditional foundations on which society in their countries has heretofore rested.
Could there be any frame of mind more in conflict with the realities that have been highlighted in this discussion today? Can there be any shadow of doubt that, to the extent these people are initially successful, what they are really going to achieve is merely this: to replace the relatively mild and rapidly mellowing restrictions of colonialism or of Western influence with new and vastly more cruel forms of authority, under which--as in Russia--a great fund of traditional cultural and spiritual values will be sacrificed and lost, to be recaptured, if ever, only by rediscovery in future ages?
This conclusion would seem to me to be inescapable. Yet I see not the faintest reflection of such a recognition in the minds of the Asian leaders. They are wandering willfully, blindly, in defiance of all historical evidence, into situations and predicaments in which there is not the slightest historical probability that they will realize their utopian ideals, but there is every probability that they will do deepest damage to the spiritual foundations of their own people--a damage comparable to that which they have already inflicted on the relationships between white and colored, between East and West.
In this failure of understanding I see the greatest problem of communication with which Western society is faced today. How do we go about it to bring to the intellectual world of the East the sober, thoughtful, and unquestionably correct interpretation of the nature of Soviet society which we have been privileged to have expounded to us today--so relevant to the experiment on which the Eastern peoples are about to embark--so vital to their future and to the future of world relationships in general. It is the urgency and immense significance of this question which seems to me to stand out as the most important lesson of the discussion we have heard here today.
1) Samuel S. Wilks, Statistical aspects of the design of experiments. Paper read at the Autumn Meeting of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Nov. 11, 1954.
George F. Kennan
Institute for Advanced Study
(Read November 11, 1954, in the Symposium on Ideology and Reality in the Soviet System)
Proceedings of the American Pphilosophical Society, vol. 99, no. 1, january, 1955, pp.29-30
I AM sure you will all have shared with me this impression of the three learned and distinguished communications we have just heard--namely, that seldom have three expressions of opinion on these subjects complemented each other so well and contradicted each other so little.
The three papers need little further development; but they do all point, in my mind, to one or two reflections (I shall not venture, in the presence of the exact scientists, to call them conclusions) which I might make bold to commend to your attention before we abandon these subjects entirely. It seems to me that what has been said here this afternoon has served primarily to highlight, on the example of the leading instance of modern totalitarianism, the glaring and profound disparity between the crude and naive utopian ideal, hovering in some dim and distant limbo, and the terrifying, sharply defined reality, projected into every detail of contemporary life, felt in every aspect of the daily experience of each of millions and hundreds of millions of people.
A number of reasons, all of them cogent ones, have been suggested here in explanation of this disparity. To my mind, these reasons group themselves around one central reality, observable in the Soviet experience, which I might attempt to define as follows:
The violent usurpation of governmental power by any coterie of men, supported only by a small minority of popular opinion, and the effort to apply this power ruthlessly for pre-conceived purposes not sanctioned in the experience and feeling of the people, create a situation in which the behavior of the usurpers themselves soon comes to be governed not by whatever utopian ideals they may once have entertained but by the cruel necessities of that political power they have usurped.
Power, in other words, exercises a reverse discipline on those who wield it. And whenever people seize power in the way that the original Soviet leaders did, they place themselves in a species of predicament to which they and their successors are later in increasing measure beholden. They create a situation in which every one loses freedom, but they lose most, for they are the most exposed, the most hated, and the most responsible.
Now there are certain implications of this situation, to which I would like to draw your attention :
While the utopian ideals to which such men may conceive themselves dedicated may be new and unprecedented, and while modern weapons and means of communication have indeed brought certain alterations--which we understand very poorly--in the conditions and possibilities for the exertion of despotic power by men over other men, this predicament in which men place themselves when they seize power and attempt to apply it for schematic utopian ideals is, after all, one familiar to human history in its major outlines. Of course, no two historical situations are the same. Therefore, one can, as Mr. Wilks (1) so well demonstrated this morning, draw no firm conclusions from the vast experimental record of political history. Nevertheless, what happens to the great usurpers, and to their successors in office, is at least something for which we have a large number of imperfect but suggestive historical examples. And I would suggest that the present process which we can observe in the Soviet Union, while of course in certain ways unique, is nevertheless not in its major aspects a new one. It is the degeneration of a fanatical political regime from the rule of the original "true prophet" to the tyranny of the terrible and ruthless political chieftain who seizes the apparatus of power the prophet had erected; from there to the crystallization of a new bureaucracy, and the emergence of a number of bureaucratic organizational entities so strongly installed that personal rule has to take place by their sanction; and so, finally, to the replacement of the personal autocracy by the influence of a privileged oligarchy in which--who knows?-such things as civil liberties and real constitutional limitations may again find their birth, as they have so often done in the past.
Possibly one extremely important point of difference between the present rulers of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin, whose political personality has been so well illustrated by Professor Robinson's searching study of his utopian ideals, is that the present rulers seem to show a greater understanding of this historical process than Stalin did, and are more appreciative of the necessity, in their own interest, of accepting it, recognizing it, not flying defiantly in the face of it.
It is for these reasons that I would not feel too tragically hopeless about the possibility of coping with Moscow's Communism by means short of a world war. But where one cannot have this optimism, and where the thoughts expressed here this afternoon have the most frightening connotation, is in the case of the Asian Communists, and indeed of the entire Marxist or Marxist-influenced intelligentsia of the underdeveloped areas.
These people seem to have a naive confidence that by establishing various forms of local totalitarianism, uncontaminated by any Western influence or participation, they are now going to achieve various results which seem to me clearly utopian, notably the skipping over of great stages of economic and social development in the achievement of early industrialization, and the immediate and painless overcoming of the manifold aspects of economic and technological backwardness that have heretofore distinguished their peoples from the West, and all of this without sacrificing anything of the spiritual and traditional foundations on which society in their countries has heretofore rested.
Could there be any frame of mind more in conflict with the realities that have been highlighted in this discussion today? Can there be any shadow of doubt that, to the extent these people are initially successful, what they are really going to achieve is merely this: to replace the relatively mild and rapidly mellowing restrictions of colonialism or of Western influence with new and vastly more cruel forms of authority, under which--as in Russia--a great fund of traditional cultural and spiritual values will be sacrificed and lost, to be recaptured, if ever, only by rediscovery in future ages?
This conclusion would seem to me to be inescapable. Yet I see not the faintest reflection of such a recognition in the minds of the Asian leaders. They are wandering willfully, blindly, in defiance of all historical evidence, into situations and predicaments in which there is not the slightest historical probability that they will realize their utopian ideals, but there is every probability that they will do deepest damage to the spiritual foundations of their own people--a damage comparable to that which they have already inflicted on the relationships between white and colored, between East and West.
In this failure of understanding I see the greatest problem of communication with which Western society is faced today. How do we go about it to bring to the intellectual world of the East the sober, thoughtful, and unquestionably correct interpretation of the nature of Soviet society which we have been privileged to have expounded to us today--so relevant to the experiment on which the Eastern peoples are about to embark--so vital to their future and to the future of world relationships in general. It is the urgency and immense significance of this question which seems to me to stand out as the most important lesson of the discussion we have heard here today.
1) Samuel S. Wilks, Statistical aspects of the design of experiments. Paper read at the Autumn Meeting of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Nov. 11, 1954.
