And now, live from the Kremlin crypt…

  

Paul R. Gregory.  Lenin’s brain and other tales from the secret Soviet archives.    Stanford, CA:  Hoover Institution Press.  2008.

Paul Gregory, the most influential Western economist in the Soviet specialty, presents here a kaleidoscope of 14 case studies drawn from archives of a conservative American think tank, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

Some chapters are more entertaining than even Dracula.  After Lenin died in 1924, the Soviets preserved his brain in a jar and launched an 11-year confidential study of its size in order to prove his brilliance. They called in a German, Oskar Vogt, styled by Kremlin bureaucrats as “the only world specialist on this question.”  This arrangement became less comfortable as Nazi aggression grew.  Finally the Soviets took over the project themselves.  Thirty-one thousand brain slices later, they found “a high degree of organization” in Lenin’s noggin, not to mention a high ratio of the temporal lobe to total brain mass.  Ergo, Dear Leader was a genius.  The Kremlin did not publicize this discovery; Gregory speculates that in the purge-year 1936, Stalin did not enthuse over the prospect that his predecessor may have had a larger brain than he.   

The Afghanistan chapter will interest Central Asians.  In 1978, a pro-Soviet government, headed by Nur Mohammad Taraki, came to power in Kabul.  Politburo members doubted its staying power in “a primitive country without a strong working class and…challenged by religious fanatics, foreign interventionists, tribal warlords and bourgeois elements,” writes Gregory.  In April 1979, the Politburo decided not to send in troops to prop up Taraki because, it said, this would “seriously harm our international integrity and would turn back the process of détente.  It would also reveal the weak position of the Taraki government and further encourage counter-revolutionaries inside and outside Afghanistan….”  That September, Taraki was overthrown by his prime minister. Hafizullah Amin. 

Do the Kremlin flip-flop

By December, a controlling minority of the Politburo had changed its tune.  “…An increasingly paranoid…gerontocracy accepted the KGB’s theory that imperialist forces, headed by the United States, intended to threaten [Soviet] southernmost republics from Afghanistan as part of a vast conspiracy to create a second Ottoman Empire,” notes Gregory.  In the Christmas season, KGB troops shot down Amin in cold blood.  This was announced by an alleged “Afghan People’s Revolutionary Council” that in reality was broadcasting from Uzbekistan.  Mikhail Gorbachev ended the futile invasion in 1989. 

Leonid Brezhnev’s misadventure had stemmed from a perception that the US, China and Pakistan controlled “the levers of the conflict,” Gregory concludes.  “Viewing the world through the prism of Marxist thought, there [sic] was no room in their vision for a Taliban, a Mullah Omar, or an Osama bin Laden.  The absence of this insight came back to haunt post-Brezhnev and post-Gorbachev Russia in Chechnya and in the growing restiveness of the Muslim populations of Central Asia.”  That passage illustrates both Gregory’s political acuity and his uncertain command of grammar.        

The book is absorbing but flawed.  Gregory’s blunt prose can be a bit wearisome, and the editing is abominable.  Often Gregory will summarize a document and then extract from it a passage making exactly the same point.  He also repeats himself:  On the same page, we read of “KGB head Yury Andropov” and “Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB”; of “Kosygin, the head of state,” and seven lines later, “the head of state and Politburo member, Aleksei Kosygin”; of “the general secretary of the Afghan party, Taraki” and, in the next line, “President (and party general secretary) Taraki.”  Hoover readers must have short memories.  Gregory’s vocabulary is also limited, but one payoff is that students in the post-Soviet space, speaking English as a second language, will find the book within their ken.         

John Raisian, Hoover’s director, asserts that these tales “produce a surprising [sic] deep understanding of totalitarianism.”  They really don’t.  Gregory selected the tales for their dramatic value; they represent outliers of the Soviet experience, not its mean.  But the extremes that totalitarianism permitted itself are troubling indeed.  – Leon Taylor, tayloralmaty@gmail.com