Bias and Prejudice Inherent in Soviet Historical Scholarship
One of the main 'objective' Soviet historians is the "Alger Hiss Chair" at Bard College, and was, or is, funded by George Soros
In a prior post about the Katyn Forest massacre, I mentioned the academic Jonathan Brent.
Brent has been a Soviet historian since 1991. His background is in Literature.
After the fall and collapse of the Soviet Union, Brent was one of the first American academics to get access to the Soviet archives.
Brent has published multiple works about the Soviet archives and Soviet history, including:
More notably than his own two personal works, however, Brent is the Executive Editor of the “Annals of Communism” series. Brent had this position as having been the Executive Editor at the Yale University Press.
There are 22 titles in the “Annals of Communism” series.
Brent is listed in the leadership of the “Victims of Communism” organization. In addition, he leads a group called YIVO: The Institute for Jewish Research as their Executive Director and CEO.
In his biography, Brent notes that he has made three documentaries:
I think it’s more than fair to say that Brent is one of the leading academics of Soviet History. And in many ways, having secured the initial access to the available Soviet archives, is perhaps one of the most important academics in opening those archives.
By the mid-90s, many of those once-opened archives, were then closed again. Access has become limited, restricted, and outright denied.
The opening of the Soviet archives is probably the most significant influx of previously unseen historical documents since the end of the Second World War. And even then by comparison, it might be more significant since so many WW2 documents were kept under lock and key by the Allies.
Brent was wise to quickly obtain the necessary funding for these purposes. Even though he was just a Literature professor. By Brent’s own admissions, he had no idea who Molotov was before going in January 1992 to sift through the Soviet archives.
“Fake it till ya make it.” - Joseph Stalin
Brent is framed as some sort of neoconservative or sensible liberal I suppose. He writes occasionally for the New Criterion, the New Republic, and for Commentary.
Brent, in an interview, discussed how he managed to convince a wealthy patron to support his work and to take advantage of the unique opportunity afforded by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now I know what you’re thinking… you’re thinking this doesn’t exactly say that George Soros funded his expedition to the Soviet archives.
So I’ll just let you read Brent say exactly that in his 2008 book, page 51 of “Inside the Stalin Archives”
There was another institution seeking access to the Russian archives in the early 90s, primarily the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
So you’re probably saying right now, so what? So what if George Soros has a lot of money and funded this, perhaps it was just benevolent charity. Oddly, conservative National Review publisher William Buckley was promoting donations to Brent’s efforts at Yale five years later, in March 1996.
Leftist Soros and center-right Buckley agree: fund Brent’s scholarship in the Soviet archives!
Perhaps it was all innocent. There’s no evidence Brent hid any evidence after all.
And on that point, you would also be wrong. From a 1997 interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
But there in the corner, under the window is a squat Sentry safe with a combination lock.
“I have some documents I don’t want anybody to see,” he explains."Yes, related to the ‘Annals’ series.” What about? “I don’t want to be coy, but they have to do with World War II.” He will say no more.
So we know that Brent was covering something up. Speculation is truly limitless as to what those suppressed documents might be. The most obvious and innocent explanation would be that they were source material for later books.
So the Soviet archives opened for this kind of once-in-a-millenium historical opportunity, and closed shortly thereafter, thank goodness George Soros sent Jonathan Brent to document all these Soviet crimes, right?
Well that depends on really questioning who Brent is, and whether he might be subject to a certain bias or prejudice in his scholarship.
And I already know what you’re thinking here too, and that’s not where I’m going with this.
Brent’s academic connections during his life has been:
1949 - Born
1971 - BA - Columbia
1973 - MA, (1980) PhD - UChicago
1981-1991 - Editorial Director, Northwestern University Press - Northwestern
1991-2009 - Professor, Executive Editor of Yale University Press - Yale
2004-Present - Visiting Professor - Bard College
Brent described receiving the initial access to Stalin’s personal archives as “like being handed the Dead Sea scrolls.”
Brent somewhat charitably interprets characters like Stalin and murderers like Nikolai Yezhov, specifically saying these men were not thugs, they were not gangsters, and Brent combats the narrative framing of another Soviet academic Robert Conquest for suggesting the Soviet leaders were like a bunch of gangsters.
This is despite Stalin’s bodyguard Alexis Rybin, and Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva saying that Stalin and his cohort were essentially gangsters.
But these minor deviations aren’t critical. But it’s interesting that someone with access to the Soviet archives, with the original primary source material, has something wrong such as the demeanor and disposition of the criminals whose memos he’s pouring over.
Reading, for instance, the execution order for the Katyn Forest massacre, where 22,000 Polish POW’s are executed for made-up reasons, and all the senior Soviets are signing off on the matter, it takes a strange disposition to say that those people are bookish, learned, leaders of a strange character versus just saying quite plainly that they are gangsters.
Gangsters is the easy answer. It’s an answer that requires very little mental gymnastics.
So naturally, one wonders what Jonathan Brent has to say about the Cold War’s biggest case of espionage in America: Alger Hiss.
And Brent has kind of an odd read of the Hiss case. Here is what he said in 1997’s Chicago Tribune:
So it’s hard to know exactly what Brent is saying here. He’s saying “there are no simple answers” and refers to a “tragic situation.”
But on another level it just feels like deflection sophistry to avoid and evade Communist culpability for their crimes.
It’s hard to find, even in the Soviet archives, hard proof of many alleged Communist crimes. So in that sense, there are no simple answers. Brent cites to Kafka in his speeches a lot, and Kafka’s stories are often challenging stories about the nature of guilt.
So it’s revealing that during the long history of Communist infiltration and subversion, that several individuals came forward to tell the truth. They did so in opposition to their relationships, their conditioning, and frankly against their better sense. Those people include Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, but also includes other people I’ve written about such as Howard Rushmore, and Hede Massing, and also lesser-known names like Benjamin Gitlow and Louis Budenz.
The Soviet archives have never revealed a serious lie or deception from these individuals.
Yet the hard-left continues. They have metastasized on college campuses for many generations.
One such professor with hard-left beliefs was Joel Kovel, who taught at Bard College.
Kovel was hired by Bard College’s President Leon Botstein, who was close friends with Alger Hiss. Kovel set up the endowed Alger Hiss Chair of History at Bard College, and in 1988 named Joel Kovel to be the named faculty member.
It seemed odd that Leon Botstein would be so enamored with Hiss, especially since Botstein’s family of Polish-Jewish doctor parents emigrated in 1948, when Hiss was embroiled in the Hiss-Chambers affair before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
So, digging around a bit more, I found that Leon Botstein’s first wife was Jill Lundquist. Lundquist’s father is the one who introduced Leon to Bard College, Leon got the job from his father-in-law Oliver Lundquist. Oliver helped design the UN logo as one of the participants at the first United Nations Conference on International Organization. The Chair of that meeting, the Secretary General, was Alger Hiss.
Interestingly, Lundquist is also given credit for designing the Q-Tip box.
I know what you’re thinking at this point: Is every article he writes somehow related to Alger Hiss? Yes, yes it is.
Here is Joel Kovel’s rundown on his term and firing as the Bard College Alger Hiss Chair.
Hiss was a family friend of the Botsteins. With his career ruined and time on his hands, he had helped Leon, the youngest college president in US history, steer Bard from a brush with bankruptcy into more prosperous and seemingly serene waters. Botstein showed loyalty in assembling an endowed chair to honor his mentor and courage in getting it accepted by a dubious world. Originally, the post had been constructed on a rotating one-year basis. But the well of suitable candidates willing to deal with the obloquy of being associated with someone so controversial soon dried up--until Botstein found me, who positively reveled in being the "Alger Hiss Professor at Bard," and was eager to make it a permanent post....
Kovel stopped being the Alger Hiss Chair in 2009. Kovel was fired after 21 years for, what Kovel contends, is due to his Anti-Zionist political activity.
In 2009, Joel Kovel’s replacement as the Alger Hiss Chair of History at Bard College was… Jonathan Brent.
Brent is the current Alger Hiss Chair at Bard College.
Kovel, angry about being fired, wrote about his time and term as the Hiss Chair. In it, he contended that when Kovel was appointed, he met a certain need for Botstein and Bard to help engage more campaign-related activity. This was important, in small part, because of Botstein’s cultivation of new major donor at Bard College… George Soros.
Here’s Kovel’s words to that effect:
“Leon's attitude was consistent with an announcement made at a faculty meeting earlier in the semester that, owing to the growing influence of people like George Soros, the school was leaving behind its relaxed countercultural identity and joining the world of democratic activism.”
So it would seem to reason that billionaire George Soros has been a patron for both Bard College, but also Jonathan Brent. Soros is a likely funder of both Brent’s 1992 access to the Soviet archives, but also Brent’s naming in 2009 to the position at Bard College.
Bard College’s Alger Hiss Chairs:
1988-2009 - Joel Kovel
2009-Present - Jonathan Brent
If I become a billionaire, I am definitely spending whatever amounts necessary to control the academic presses of ivy league colleges. The return on that investment is positive at any level of funding support.
Brent presented for many years as a quasi-conservative, but of course he was militantly anti-Trump. Brent held a 2017 event comparing Trump to Stalin.
I will say one nice thing about Jonathan Brent, and it is that having gone through the Soviet archives he declared that Elizabeth Bentley was telling the truth about her claims about managing a Soviet espionage apparatus.
“We now know that Elizabeth Bentley was telling the truth when she testified to the FBI in 1943 about Whittaker Chambers about the merging of NKVD and COMINTERN networks, we found the documents…”
But much of what the west knows about Soviet history has been controlled and managed by a George Soros-financed Literature Professor who has admitted to secreting away and suppressing certain WW2 documents.
It’s a major consideration when analyzing Soviet history that we are doing much of it through the prism of Jonathan Brent.
I emailed Dr. Brent at his Bard College email to see if I could get any details out of him about either the Alger Hiss issue, or about the secret documents in the safe issue. I will report back if I hear from him.
I thought you were a bit off your rocker on this one at first. Then I saw Brent’s “Trump = Stalin” hootenany. Damn.