Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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His book is entitled Witness, published in 1952, and it's one of the most compelling books you could ever read because it's so full of both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies and a sense of huge issues being at stake. ones upon which the future of humanity turns. So talk about the ethical element being of importance there.
Through the apparatus of the state, the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America's military as well as government institutions. One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus, claims that he was unable to substantiate with details, that reality had actually changed.
been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s than his own time. But the association of American communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union and ultimately an adherence to its interests did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.
The American communist movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda. Before the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace.
just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that this was a great win for peace and for human harmony and to completely change their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn't stomach this and who, in disillusionment, simply quit their party memberships or drifted away.
But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in American political history.
Well, that's canonical, right?
Well, I think The short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would have been healthy about the recent past, in ways that's not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patients or leisure or surplus for introspection. But
after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone— in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources, after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today.
And the result is that there's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning, even in a signing of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past. No Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would have established responsibility.
And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important one as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past.
In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic, and often mutually contradictory historical memories or packages of memories.
So on the one hand, in Putin's Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin, by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as...
nations regain their independence, while Stalin, it's acknowledged, exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. This produced where we are today. It's a commonplace that echoed by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire.
And Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin's rule, but still is nostalgic about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values, has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here.
It's fascinating to try to imagine what if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier. I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past, packaged however it might be and however nostalgic it might be made to appear.
And there, I think that Putin's expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome Ukraine. The advance of Russian forces. And instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day.
And surprises, yeah.
I'm very pessimistic on this score, actually. And for the reasons we just talked about, about how these things escape human management or even rationality. I think that war takes on a life of its own as accumulated suffering actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that one might talk about in the abstract. I think that
Showing 361–380 of 414 · page 19 of 21
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