Web Letters: The Ice Forge

Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, Patty Hearst and the SLA, Ruckus in McGruder's "Boondocks"; the plea of "let me be one of you," from the abused to the abuser(s), is, sadly enough, all too common.

Marvin Hampton

Portland, OR

Having read The Whisperers, I found it hard to recognize the book from Hellbeck's review. Hellbeck's claims that Figes is nostalgic for pre-revolutionary times are presumptuous and absurd. I was also baffled by his claim that Figes fails to recognize his subjects' fear of social exclusion and their faith in the Communist system because this was one of the book's strongest themes. And how can Hellbeck claim to have the correct view of Simonov when, unlike Figes, he has not worked in his archives? It seems to me that Hellbeck would have liked to write this book, and that his review attempts to show that he would have written it better. Embarrassing.

Gennady Faber

Munich, Bavaria, Germany

How can one have nostalgia for prerevolutionary Russia, when peasants were treated like animals? Also, many of the Kulaks were opposed to the Soviet government and tried to sabotage collectivization.

Sean Mulligan

Alpharetta, GA

Ronald Suny and Jochen Hellbeck are bravely trying to find mitigating circumstances for the Stalinist terror. And they generally succeed in showing, as the egregious Stalinist apologist Arch Getty has not, that there was more to Stalinism than madness and violence. Many features of Soviet society contributed to it. Still one notices the lack of attention to the remarkable book by Yuri Slezking, The Jewish Century, which shows how much Soviet Jews gained during the Bolshevik and Stalinist years.

Jews, peasants, workers, and others found it easy enough to conform to Stalinist requirements in exchange for recognition and integration. Lots of Germans found conformity to Hitlerism also possible. We need to understand more clearly how ordinary people can accept horrors.

Norman Ravitch

Savannah, GA