The last known photographs of Isaiah Oggins as a prisoner in the Soviet gulag, shortly before he was executed in 1947 by injection. Photo by C.J. Chivers of the New York Times

Robbin Oggins, a retired historian of Medievel Europe at Binghamton University, stands after a tragic chapter in his family’s history. The New York Times tells today of his father, the Jewish leftist Israel Oggins working as a spy for Stalin.

An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.

It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.

By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.

The journalist Andrew Meier made a book about Israel Oggins called “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). In my classes students read about the gulag through the eyes of Alexandr Solzhenitzyn in his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Those students who read about the fictional Ivan Denisovich — a willing soldier for the Red Army against the fascists who was sentenced simply for a mild joke in a private letter at Stalin’s expense — would not be surprised to hear in the case of Israel Oggins that the benefectors of Stalinism were also its victims.

I don’t know this blog at all, but I found Mahablog did a terrific job of excavating President Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on capitalism, state intervention, and economic justice. Very timely. Here ’s Mahablog quoting TR:

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

My only moral to the story is to try to tamp down this anti-intellectual streak in political talk that wants to replace social science with anecdotes and gotchas: The U.S. government is going to play a role in a twenty-first-century economy. Do not pretend we are all Jefferson’s yeoman farmers any more or the pin-maker of Adam Smith.  The smarter question is what that government role should be, and to whose benefit? By saying “don’t spread the wealth”, conservatives are leaving unsaid their real message: “keep spreading it upward.”

For now the courts are siding with the National Archive, historians, and a watchdog group in a legal case to compel Vice President Dick Cheney to publicly preserve his papers for the sake of research. It is more important in Cheney’s case to preserve his records for posterity because his influence within the Bush White House has been greater (far greater?) than the influence of any other vice presidents over their respective administrations. At least, so I am told. But I have to plead quilty to ignorance of the potency, or in most cases even the names, of most vice presidents in history.

A lawsuit was filed this month by many historians and a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington out of fear that Cheney would destroy his papers rather than follow a 1978 law (spawn of Watergate) compelling documents of a presidency to be preserved. I can see grounds for this fear, since this vice president has spurned access and shown contempt for the spirit of openness during his tenure. The deliberations he presided over regarded energy policy in the first Bush term is an example of this, because Cheney fought to the end to keep those deliberations, involving energy industry leaders, secret. Cheney’s staff has also begun to assert that he is legally a part of the legislative branch (presiding over the Senate) rather than executive branch, suggesting that they would claim the presidential records law of 1978 shouldn’t apply to Cheney. 

A U.S. District Judge agreed enough with the merit of the suit this week to issue a temporary injunction against destroying any Cheney papers.

Presidential palace in Santiago burns on the day of the coup

Sept. 11 has not been just any ol’ date in Chile either. That’s because in 1973 a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet attacked the government of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende on that date. Allende died during the attack for reasons that are still disputed.  Pinochet ruled as dictator for the next 17 years.

The case of 1973 is a good lesson in historical probity. I have been told more than once by people or in print that the U.S. overthrew Allende. Whatever your politics might lead you to want to believe, the U.S. in this case helped the cause of overthrowing Pinochet but did not lead it. If you want a case where the CIA piloted the overthrow of a left-leaning but democratically elected Latin American president, look instead at Guatemala in 1954.

More detail about CIA actions in Chile, and the active role of Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has emerged recently. They might be justified in some minds by the perceived need at the time to fight any whiff of communism. But they hardly seem noble in hindsight.  

The CIA subsequently acknowledged it had supported the 1970 kidnapping of Chile’s top general, Rene Schneider, for refusing to use the army to prevent the country’s congress from confirming Allende’s election. The kidnapping failed, but Schneider was killed in the attempt — and Allende’s election was confirmed. . . The subsequent coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government on Sept. 11, 1973.

As dark as this chapter is in Chile’s history — and even most supporters of Pinochet’s coup found his rule too oppressive over the long haul – it is heartening to realize that the current president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was once a political prisoner under the Allende regime.

It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn and other victims concluded, which had been influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal, at a Party congress in 1961, to build a national memorial to Stalin’s victims?

Although somber about his passing, I do get pleasure from noting a person such as Solzhenitsyn who clearly shaped history but was nonetheless not in command of armies nor economies. The New York Times did a thorough and enjoyable obituary from which I learned many things. There have also been some mostly awful commentaries by pundits, most of them mangling history to score some points in current political pissing matches. I am sure Alexandr would be stocially disgusted by it all.

I have used Solzhenitayn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in my class on the world history of the twentieth century, and even this tough audience of freshmen non-majors seem to enjoy it and benefit from it.

The point I make about Solzhenitsyn in this class is that his impact and fate was another tell-tale sign that the Soviet regime was doomed. Nikita Khrushchev, although he had Ukraine’s blood on his hands and his smooch marks on Stalin’s rear-end, did sincerely wish to take the Soviet Union on a non-repressive path after Stalin. Khrushchev, when he denounced Stalin in the secret speech of 1956, did earnestly hope that its residents would find a satisfying life within Soviet socialism. Khrushchev was impressed by Solzhenitsyn’s literary skill and decided to allow the publication of One Day, signaling that ideas and art would no longer be bound and gagged. But this gesture, made in 1963, was empty. Khrushchev had already reverted to the easier street of thuggery in dealing with Hungary in 1956, and in conceding the need for the Berlin Wall in 1961.

When Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago shone harsh light in 1973 for the first time on the breadth and depth of the Soviet’s police-state tactics, the successors of Khrushchev arrested and exiled Solzhenitsyn. This crackdown meant that Khrushchev’s loosening of the control on words was not only an empty gesture, but also temporary. And the renewed oppression would prove correct the worrisome assumption that drove Khrushchev to an early, meek attempt at reform: that you can’t coerce a people into creating a successful social system. ]]> http://blogs.uww.edu/pastpresent/2008/08/09/alexandr-solzhenitsyn-1918-2008/feed/ http://blogs.uww.edu/pastpresent/2008/07/17/let%e2%80%99s-poke-fun-at-powerpoint/ http://blogs.uww.edu/pastpresent/2008/07/17/let%e2%80%99s-poke-fun-at-powerpoint/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:39:27 +0000 kreitlob http://blogs.uww.edu/pastpresent/?p=61 I may be one of the last to see this, but I am posting it anyway. I share the misgivings of a lot of people about PowerPoint, or more precisely, about how ubiquitous it has become. It has its place. But PowerPoint is not always the best means to communicate, and it is a heck of a lot worse than a well written and well spoken speech in some cases.

Take for example, the best speech in history, the Gettysburg Address. 

Hilarious.

The New York Times reporter Semoni Sengupta finds the promises of  India’s so-called Green Revolution era now emptied. At the same time,  the environmental harms endure to this day that were inflicted by these farm modernization programs of the 1960s in South Asia.  

The surge this year in food prices has brought some attention back to farming, which is normally willfully neglected by most of the people who eat. That greater attention is a good thing, even if food shortages are not. Good also is examples such as this article of looking backward at the history of agriculture of the 20th century, which deserves to be termed a “revolution” (for better and for worse) every bit as much as the agricultural revolution that was centered in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

 I have used this article by Gregg Easterbrook in my classes on Twentieth Century World History as an introduction to the Green Revolution. It’s a compelling overview, and I agree that it is curious how unfamous is Norman Borlaug, even though the wheat plant he bred saved millions from starvation and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (I had the honor of meeting Dr. Borlaug and interviewing in Platteville, Wisconsin about 20 years ago).

Unfortunately, Easterbrook’s article doesn’t say enough about the social and environmental problems brought on by the Green Revolution; the Times article today clearly points out that some consequences have been unforeseen and regrettable.