Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Yesterday I received an advance copy of Vladimir #Bukovsky's "Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Hypocrisy," which is to be published *for the first time* in English. @BukovskyCenter vladimirbukovsky.com/judgment-in-mo…

I've read it in French, so I already know it's "a massive and major contribution," as Conquest put it. He wrote it 22 years ago, and published it in many languages--but not English. The reasons for this amount to a squalid story about US publishing, explained in the book.

The heart of Bukovsky's argument: we're where we are now because the KGB was never subjected to Nuremberg-style trial and lustrations. "Putin and his KGB cohorts would never have climbed to power if Russian society had the courage to launch [such a process]."

"Without it, the country went full circle and reverted back to the USSR."

Consider this thought experiment, which isn't hard to imagine. (What if the US and Germany both developed nuclear weapons after the fall of France, say.)

What does he mean by saying, "It is still the USSR?" You have to read the book, but roughly, that the same people are running the show, and the ruling mafia retains the same reflexes and moral postures--both toward its own citizens and the rest of the world world.

"But they're no longer communists, so what's the problem?" (Here'a an extreme, parodic example of this view: eu.app.com/story/opinion/…)

One of the especially interesting parts of the book is where Bukovsky remarks that while it's impossible to know what they really thought,

it's also impossible to imagine that by the Brezhnev era, the party bosses were true believers. It must have dawned on Brezhnev, even more so on Andropov, Chernenko, etc, that attributing failures of Soviet society to the nation's "class enemies" could not make sense.

There were none left. Their predecessors had zealously liquidated them.

Imagine, in the Nazi counterfactual, the plight of Hitler's successors. By the 1960s, ascribing all of society's misfortunes to the Jews would be impossible; they would have all been murdered.

But of course they'd still be stuck defending the ideology. You can't announce that all of the murder, slavery, and suffering was for nothing--a pointless ideological mistake. So the right slogans came out of their mouths, but who knows what they really believed.

They certainly believed their survival tied to the regime's. Could Andropov believe that 51 years of Soviet rule had created a paradise such that only an insane man could find fault with it. Bukovsky doubts it. By then, the only true believers left were those who hadn't tried.

Yet the USSR was the USSR. This is roughly what he means when he says, "It still is."

Is he right to say that trying the CP and the KGB elites for their crimes would have given rise to a moral reckoning and Russian rebirth? I don't know. We never will know.

It might have been de-Baathification with nuclear weapons. But certainly he predicted exactly what would happen without it.

To the volunteers who worked tirelessly to translate and publish this book, at last, in English: thank you.