When Reason Goes on Holiday. Neven Sesardic
Malcolm Muggeridge described what he saw with his own eyes and concluded: “The particular horror of their [Bolshevik] rule is what they have done in the villages. This, I am convinced, is one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible the people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened. . . . It is impossible to describe the horror of it” (Muggeridge 2010, 37–38). Pierre Berland, a journalist for Le Temps, one of the leading daily newspapers in France, wrote on May 31, 1932: “The catastrophe, the coming of which was obvious even to the blindest [emphasis added], and which we predicted a year ago, has gripped the country. . . . The food situation is surrounded by a kind of conspiracy of silence, but the catastrophic situation, nevertheless, is the secret of Polichinelle [an open secret].” William Henry Chamberlin, a Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor during the famine, wrote: “To anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and who kept his eyes and ears open the historicity of the famine is simply not open to question” (Chamberlin 1935, 432; emphasis added).
Furthermore, given that Neurath divided his time between Moscow and Vienna (his primary place of residence), there is simply no way he could have missed the persistent public campaign of Theodor Innitzer, the archbishop of Vienna, for assistance to the starving population in the Soviet Union. As we learn from Menger (1994, 195), Innitzer was greatly admired by many members of the Vienna Circle, who met him when he was professor of theology at the University of Vienna (Menger 1982, 98). Innitzer’s appeal for help received so much publicity that it reached the pages of the New York Times, which devoted an article on August 23, 1933, to his warning that millions of lives would be lost without foreign aid and that the situation was so desperate, cases of cannibalism had even been reported.
These facts all point to the conclusion that if Neurath was indeed unaware of the monstrosity of the regime he was serving, this must have been a case of willful blindness.8
In fact, Neurath and his IZOSTAT institute occasionally went beyond the call of duty and engaged in unabashed propaganda, as when they inserted in one of their graphs (see Figure 2.2, from IZOSTAT 1933, 51) a quotation from Stalin: “The period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism in the USSR is a period of flowering of national cultures, socialist in content and national in form.”
The terrible irony is that this graph celebrating the treatment of ethnic minorities by the Soviet regime was made at the time of the Holodomor, which is regarded by mainstream historians as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Another book that illustrates the ideological uses of Neurath’s institute is Pictorial Statistics and the Vienna Method which was published in Russian and was edited by one of Neurath’s closest Russian collaborators. The role of Neurath’s method is explained there in the following way:
FIGURE 2.2: The concern for minorities in the USSR
Izostatistics should become a powerful weapon of mass agitation and propaganda in the hands of the party and the working class in the period of building socialism. . . . the socialist statistics (yes, the socialist statistics, and not statistics in general) helps the party and the administration. . . . the usefulness of Neurath’s method for the purposes of our socialist class statistics (because statistics like any other science cannot be non-class) . . . the IZOSTAT diagrams acquire a special, extremely important agitation-propagandistic meaning (Ivanitsky 1932, 2, 4, 5, 33, 45).
It is hard to believe that the Austrian members of the IZOSTAT (particularly Neurath and Arntz) were unaware of what was said in such an important book that presented their work in the Soviet Union. And yet they gladly continued churning out new graphs and were apparently not bothered at all that IZOSTAT was explicitly and repeatedly described as producing propaganda for the Party.
A book coauthored by the distinguished philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright gives a curiously incoherent account of Neurath’s Moscow episode (72–73). Here are its four key points, each followed by my comment:
(1) “Neurath’s position in Moscow does not indicate full agreement with the political system he worked for.”
All right, but the fact that Neurath didn’t “fully” agree with Stalin certainly does not exonerate him from working for the Soviet government in the face of widely available information about its totalitarian nature and the massive crimes it perpetrated. Saying that Neurath did not support the Bolsheviks 100 percent sounds like a lame and desperate attempt to make him less culpable for his complicity.9 Besides, although Neurath’s support for Stalin’s regime may have fallen short of 100 percent, it nevertheless remained quite high. For it was during his stay in Moscow that, despite some specific criticisms, he still described the overall success of Soviet policy as “colossal” (Sandner 2014, 232).
(2) “At first it may seem that Neurath simply suspended judgment on the internal politics of the Soviet Union.”
Why would this seem “at first”? Why would anyone think Neurath would sign a long-term contract to work for the regime while suspending judgment about its nature? Isn’t it much more logical to presume that he committed himself to work for Stalin only after he formed a not-too-unfavorable opinion about his politics?
(3) “But early on Neurath also evidenced enthusiasm for the Moscow job.”
Indeed. He was initially “deeply impressed” with Soviet economic development. He wrote to Carnap that “it is a relief to be active [in Moscow]” and “not to be part of the decay.” Contrast Neurath’s Moscow excitement with his statement a year earlier that “the atmosphere in Vienna smells of putrefaction.”
(4) “It seems fair to conclude that once the nature of Stalin’s reign became clear Neurath suspended his previous suspension of judgment about Soviet Communism.”
This is a surprising leap. Recall that the hypothesis that when Neurath started to work for the Bolsheviks he suspended judgment about the Soviet Union was at the beginning introduced merely as something that “may seem to be true at first.” But then, after strong evidence to the contrary is presented, the hypothesized initial suspension of judgment is suddenly taken as an established fact.
It very much seems as if Cartwright and her coauthors are here trying to get Neurath off the hook, at least partially, for his collaboration with Stalin’s government. But their attempt does not succeed.
It is ironic that a man who, like his fellow logical empiricists, always insisted on the supreme importance of empirical evidence was nevertheless unable to perceive, or properly take into account, some simple facts that were there in broad daylight for all to see. Also, it is grotesque that someone who thought the true task of a philosopher is to build a better and more humane world ended up providing mendacious propaganda in the service of one of the most evil and oppressive political systems in modern history.
And yet the Vienna Circle is still highly and unreservedly praised for its political stance even by scholars who surely must be acquainted with these embarrassing facts. An expert on the early history of analytic philosophy writes: “With regard to their politics, however, the logical positivists were always on the side of the angels, in that they rejected both Nazism and Stalinism” (Glock 2001, 211).
On the side of the angels? Rejected Stalinism? Always? One of the leading logical positivists, and the author of their manifesto, signed a formal contract to work for Stalin’s agitprop operation! And for more than two years he discharged his obligations with due diligence. Moreover, I could find no record of any fellow logical positivist ever