Claire Berlinski: Closed Minds: A Response to Ron Radosh, Et Al
[Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.]
In the latest issue of City Journal, I published a story about a large cache of Soviet-era documents smuggled out of Russia by Pavel Stroilov, a Russian researcher now exiled in London, and a similar collection of smuggled documents held by the former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. I wrote that the world was incurious about these papers; this, I argued, was symptomatic of a dangerous indifference to the history and horrors of Communism.
The historian Ron Radosh issued a disgruntled response. My piece, he wrote, was overstated, unjust, slanderous, weak, lazy, irresponsible, poorly informed, and misleading. (I assume he otherwise liked it.)...
I ask readers to go back and read carefully both my article and Ronald Radosh’s reply. Having done so, they will see that the scholars whom he marshals to contradict me are in fact contradicting one another. When they’re not doing that, they’re making incidental points or replying to an article I didn’t write.
Begin with the gravamen of Radosh’s charges. He finds it “most shocking” that I have implicitly “attacked” Jonathan Brent, one of the giants of American publishing. It would be mildly shocking, I suppose, if I had attacked him—but I didn’t. I noted what Pavel Stroilov had said about him, and then did precisely the responsible thing Radosh says I didn’t do: I asked Brent for his side of the story....
I reported that Brent did not respond to me, and I dismissed the idea that only a conspiracy to suppress the truth could account for this. Brent’s failure to answer my e-mail meant nothing, I said. He was probably just busy, as are we all. Such a surmise is hardly an attack, no less a shocking one....
Radosh’s correspondents seem to be responding to his e-mails, rather than any assertions I actually made. For example, Mark Kramer writes:
I don’t know what Kramer is talking about; and neither does he, it would seem. It was not Bukovsky who was in negotiations with Brent, but Stroilov; Bukovsky’s quarrel was with Random House. Kramer then adds, of Bukovsky’s book, that “The reason that no English edition has been published is partly . . . [that] the commercial prospects are minimal at best.” Perhaps this is true, but if so, it would confirm what I’m saying. Why would the commercial prospects be poor? Because there is no market for such books. What does this tell us? That no one cares. Obviously, I do not use the words “no one” in the very literal sense; of course there are people who care, among them the scholars to whom Radosh appeals. I mean “no one” in the sense of, “The commercial prospects for a book by Vladimir Bukovsky are minimal at best.”
I’ve made it clear that I have no ability to assess these documents. For men and women who seem confident in their ability to do so, however, Radosh’s correspondents certainly do contradict one other. The reason the documents were not worth publishing, says Brent, is that “Bukovsky and his young associate won’t show the originals but only their redactions of the copies they have. There’s no way of knowing what is left out—or what may be put in. . . . If Bukovsky would make the originals available for study by qualified historians, then there would be a chance of real results.” Yet Mark Kramer and Anne Applebaum claim the problem is the contrary: the documents are of no interest, they say, because they’re already available in their entirety in archives around the world. So which is it?...
I could go on at considerable length about other points Ronald Radosh seems to misunderstand, but I’m sure readers would have little patience for it. I’d ask them instead to see whether they have better luck than I did in figuring out just why, precisely, he is so incensed with me. I propose that there is no good reason, and that he and I should return to fighting more important battles.
Read entire article at City Journal
In the latest issue of City Journal, I published a story about a large cache of Soviet-era documents smuggled out of Russia by Pavel Stroilov, a Russian researcher now exiled in London, and a similar collection of smuggled documents held by the former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. I wrote that the world was incurious about these papers; this, I argued, was symptomatic of a dangerous indifference to the history and horrors of Communism.
The historian Ron Radosh issued a disgruntled response. My piece, he wrote, was overstated, unjust, slanderous, weak, lazy, irresponsible, poorly informed, and misleading. (I assume he otherwise liked it.)...
I ask readers to go back and read carefully both my article and Ronald Radosh’s reply. Having done so, they will see that the scholars whom he marshals to contradict me are in fact contradicting one another. When they’re not doing that, they’re making incidental points or replying to an article I didn’t write.
Begin with the gravamen of Radosh’s charges. He finds it “most shocking” that I have implicitly “attacked” Jonathan Brent, one of the giants of American publishing. It would be mildly shocking, I suppose, if I had attacked him—but I didn’t. I noted what Pavel Stroilov had said about him, and then did precisely the responsible thing Radosh says I didn’t do: I asked Brent for his side of the story....
I reported that Brent did not respond to me, and I dismissed the idea that only a conspiracy to suppress the truth could account for this. Brent’s failure to answer my e-mail meant nothing, I said. He was probably just busy, as are we all. Such a surmise is hardly an attack, no less a shocking one....
Radosh’s correspondents seem to be responding to his e-mails, rather than any assertions I actually made. For example, Mark Kramer writes:
I’m not sure precisely what Bukovsky approached Jonathan [Brent] about, but I think it was about putting out an English edition of Bukovsky’s “Jugement à Moscou,” which came out in 1995 from Robert Laffont (the same publisher that later put out “Le livre noir du communisme”)...
I don’t know what Kramer is talking about; and neither does he, it would seem. It was not Bukovsky who was in negotiations with Brent, but Stroilov; Bukovsky’s quarrel was with Random House. Kramer then adds, of Bukovsky’s book, that “The reason that no English edition has been published is partly . . . [that] the commercial prospects are minimal at best.” Perhaps this is true, but if so, it would confirm what I’m saying. Why would the commercial prospects be poor? Because there is no market for such books. What does this tell us? That no one cares. Obviously, I do not use the words “no one” in the very literal sense; of course there are people who care, among them the scholars to whom Radosh appeals. I mean “no one” in the sense of, “The commercial prospects for a book by Vladimir Bukovsky are minimal at best.”
I’ve made it clear that I have no ability to assess these documents. For men and women who seem confident in their ability to do so, however, Radosh’s correspondents certainly do contradict one other. The reason the documents were not worth publishing, says Brent, is that “Bukovsky and his young associate won’t show the originals but only their redactions of the copies they have. There’s no way of knowing what is left out—or what may be put in. . . . If Bukovsky would make the originals available for study by qualified historians, then there would be a chance of real results.” Yet Mark Kramer and Anne Applebaum claim the problem is the contrary: the documents are of no interest, they say, because they’re already available in their entirety in archives around the world. So which is it?...
I could go on at considerable length about other points Ronald Radosh seems to misunderstand, but I’m sure readers would have little patience for it. I’d ask them instead to see whether they have better luck than I did in figuring out just why, precisely, he is so incensed with me. I propose that there is no good reason, and that he and I should return to fighting more important battles.