It’s really, really weird

Jonah Goldberg observes:

The Times has been running a series on Communism called “The Red Century.” It’s really, really weird. At times, it feels like the greatest high-brow trolling effort in recorded history. Some of the headlines read like they were plucked from the reject pile at The Onion. I particularly enjoyed “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” One wonders what all the women who had to service their prison guards for a crust of bread would think about that. With the exception of one essay by Harvey Klehr, the upshot seems to be an effort to rehabilitate Communism for a certain kind of New York Times liberal who desperately needs to cling to the belief that he was on the right side of an argument he lost.

This series has mystified me. Other titles: Lenin's Eco-Warriors; The Cold War and America's Delusion of Victory; and The ‘Bright Tomorrow’: Growing Up in the Brezhnev Era. There is some interesting reporting here and there among the pieces but not anything particularly new. It just comes across as nostalgia for a good idea that went wrong.

There is a backstory which makes this Red Century series even more puzzling. The New York Times is infamous for its Moscow Bureau Chief, Walter Duranty, and his misleading reporting from the Soviet Union 1922-36. Duranty was noted for his praise and admiration of Stalin, for his cover-up of the mass-starvation in the Ukraine, his excuses for the show-trials, his rationalizing of labor camps, etc.

Subsequent research and the opening of the Soviet archives after perestroika makes it apparent that his reporting was not a function of ignorance. He knew what was going on but did not ever steer too far from official Soviet propaganda. Since that time, historians have argued and disagreed on what might have been the reasons for his gross misreporting. Suggestions have included that he was a communist sympathizer, that he was being blackmailed by the Soviets over sexual peccadillos, that he was gullible, that he was lazy, and so on. There is, as far as I am aware, no consensus.

Anyone only relying on Duranty and the New York Times in the 1920s and 1930s would have the impression of a worker's paradise, making occasional mistakes but struggling under enormous odds against a global capitalist system. An awareness of mass murder, mass starvation, brutal repression, and systemic failure depended on having other sources of news.

This failure on the part of Duranty and the New York Times has been known for many decades. You would think that an institution with such a well-known failure of such startling magnitude and duration would be careful to not fall into a trap of appearing to be apologists for communism. But apparently not.

I have no real way to interpret the New York Times and what they are doing with The Red Century series. There is no scenario that makes sense. It is simply profoundly perplexing. But, then again, these are The Crazy Years. Things don't have to be rational to be true.

UPDATE: A first hand view of Soviet communism, distinct from the New York Times view: The Real Housewives of the U.S.S.R. by EdgeoftheSandbox.