Understanding Without Acquiescence

May 30, 1988
Lakeland

Musings, 1990

President Reagan has just delivered a passionate speech to “Refuseniks” in Moscow. Surely few can condemn him for his candor in the call for the Soviets to widen the areas of free choice and permission to leave the USSR if that is the wish of many.

But there is room for historical understanding, much as we can fairly charge the Soviet government with tyranny over minorities. The Bolshevik Revolution successfully overthrew the Czarist regime seventy years ago. That imperial government allowed no liberties and cruelly oppressed the Russian people. The succeeding governments, led in turn by Kerensky, Lenin, Stalin and their successors, allowed few liberties but the people were better fed and housed than before. The USSR was a union of numerous ethnic and religious peoples. They loved Mother Russia enough to fight off Hitler's armies at human and national cost of which we are still insufficiently aware.

Can we consider the beam in our own eye as well as the mote in the Soviet? Seventy years after our Declaration of Independence there were hundreds of thousands of slaves. Women could not vote. We..fought an unjustified war against Mexico in order to seize the golden lands of the West. We were in the process of decades of treaty-breaking with the indigenous Americans, the Indians. We massacred most of them. Others we shipped to our “Gulags” – reservations. Many of the great American fortunes were amassed from the sweat of ill-paid labor and repression of workers’ rights.

One cannot change history. One cannot readily acquiesce that another century may elapse before the Soviet peoples achieve the human dignity and freedom of which we proudly boast.

Nevertheless a measure of humility would be appropriate if we concede that the first seventy years of the the Communist revolution have many parallels with the first seventy years of our American Revolution. The parallels are both heroic and ugly, both inspiring and shameful, both encouraging and depressing.

“Judge not that ye be not judged.”