With Eric Foner we are in a different world entirely. Like Furet, Foner came of political age under the influence of communism, although for him it was more a family than a party affair, with Foner's father and uncle imbuing him with Marxism and the mystique of class struggle. But unlike Furet, Foner saw, and continues to see, no reason why events in the Soviet Union should cause one to reconsider communism as an ideological system, or why anyone could possibly consider America a positive "role model." In 1990, shortly after communist regimes had collapsed throughout Eastern Europe, Foner returned from teaching in Russia anxious to explain to Americans how the Russian people were being misled into thinking that life under Lenin and Stalin may not have been the best, or even the only, of all possible worlds. He also strove to explain why Russian students and scholars misunderstood American history and society:

"I delivered a talk at the Institute of World History on blacks and the American Constitution. I discussed how the Founding Fathers had written protections for slavery, such as the obligation to return fugitives, into the document; how even free blacks had enjoyed few legal rights before the Civil War; and how it had taken almost a century for the promise of emancipation and Reconstruction to begin to be fulfilled.

Nothing I said would have seemed particularly controversial to American historians. But my talk was not, shall we say, greeted with enthusiasm. Listeners praised my research but seemed puzzled by my 'oppositional' stance. One historian commented that although he did not agree with my interpretation, it was good for Soviet scholars to hear such views--as if my 'take' on the subject were hopelessly eccentric. Another remarked that my rather bleak account of the economic condition of black America in the 1980s seemed at odds with the current Soviet interpretation of the Reagan years, which sees the lot of all Americans, including blacks, as having improved markedly."

So the American historian wonders why Russians are not sufficiently appreciative of having lived under communism, and the Russians wonder why the American historian cannot appreciate a country that affords him and other "eccentrics" the freedom to speak and write as they wish.

Foner wonders why his Russian "students shared the current obsession with locating missed opportunities and roads not taken in the Soviet past." Where Furet saw the tragic consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution, Foner could think of no reason for Russians to reconsider their history at all. He wondered why the Russian "press and public officials now paint the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues" and he lamented the loss of Marxism as an interpretive paradigm. An analysis that assumes history is "evolving in a predetermined direction, that capitalism is declining and socialism on the rise, that class struggle is the motive force of historical change"--these useful perspectives, he complains, have been replaced by a new "study of the role of 'great men' in historical change", with "civilization" the new focus instead of class formation. Instead of economics, historians now pay "far greater attention to culture, religion, and other noneconomic aspects of historical development."

Foner's complaint grows more bitter the closer Russia comes to emulating America. The "concept of 'revolution' is being rethought--turned on its head, really." The new view is that "revolutions (like the French and the Russian) that attempt to abolish the existing order entirely should be deemed less radical than 'organic revolution' (like the American) which build on existing institutions rather than destroying them" and thereby respect property and "create more favorable conditions for economic growth." At the same time, the "traditional Marxist distinction between 'bourgeois' and 'socialist' ideologies has given way to a search for 'universal human values.'" In this account, the great tragedy of Russian history was not the prison of Bolshevik tyranny but the promise of American democracy. "This love affair with America can lead to some remarkable conclusions", writes Foner, noting a post-Soviet Russian view he regards as preposterous: "Since a socialist society is one that fully embodies 'universal values', one scholar has proposed, the United States is actually more socialist than the Soviet Union." At the very cusp of the Soviet collapse, Foner found it a pity than so many Russians looked upon America with curiosity and even envy. Once upon a time, he waxed nostalgically, Stalinist Russia had played up "America's ills: poverty, homelessness, racism, unemployment. Today, criticism is out of the question. America has become the land of liberty and prosperity of our imagination."

The views of Eric Foner require our attention because of the eminence and influence of a mind that cannot rethink what it had been taught. Foner has had the distinction of serving as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, presiding as the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and of holding the Dewitt Clinton Chair of History at Columbia University. All the while he has prided himself in being associated with such publications as the short-lived Marxist Perspectives and the long-lived Radical History Review. Foner's views parallel quite nicely those of the first version of the National History Standards (NHS) released in the early 1990s. Here, too, one encounters historical writing without any reference to what actually went on in Russia under Lenin and Stalin: nothing about the police terror, party purges, or the loss of more than 10 million lives in the forced collectivization policies of the Five Year Plans and in the avoidable Ukrainian famine. The original NHS draft emphasized class and social conflict, ridiculed the idea that "great men" shaped history, oozed with implicit anti-Americanism and explicit anti-capitalism, and scorned "organic" revolution for its conservative continuity with political and social traditions.

Ever vigilant, for decades Foner has attacked any historian who unearthed evidence critical of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss and Paul Robeson. Robeson was a brilliant actor and singer and by no means either a spy or a card-carrying communist. But he was a tragic figure (a cultural hero to me, whatever his misguided politics) so taken in by Stalin's Russia that he assumed American blacks could identify with the Russian masses because former slaves felt a common bond with peasants. For pointing out, in a review of a biography of Robeson, that the actor was hailing peasant culture at the very time Stalin was killing it with collectivization, I was denounced in The Village Voice as a "McCarthyite" by Eric Foner. (McCarthyism was the best thing that ever happened to American communism. It provided a ready-made therapy of denial, saving the denier from the sobering shock of skepticism. "By exposing the absurdities of other systems", wrote David Hume, "every voter of every superstition could give sufficient reason for his blind and bigoted attachments to the principles in which he had been educated." With Joseph McCarthy ranting and raving, the mind of the pro-communist Left remained as closed as a lock without a key.)

But if the reality of the old Soviet Union could not be faced for fear of acknowledging a doctrinaire theory that failed, the reality of the United States cannot be faced for fear of acknowledging an "experiment" in the "new science of politics" that succeeded. Why does Foner claim that American liberty and prosperity are not real but part of "our imagination"? His answer is telling:

"Writing in Moscow News, one [Russian] historian declared that since Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Americans have valued 'freedom of the individual over everything else'--a statement that certainly would have surprised Jefferson's hundred slaves, to say nothing of the millions freed only by the Civil War."

Liberal America, it seems, must remain forever corrupted by slavery while Bolshevik Russia remains, even in the historical past tense, forever free of tyranny. Foner as hedgehog is both an unabashed apologist for the Soviet system and an unforgiving historian of America. Foner applies to the plight of African-Americans in the United States an analysis he refuses to apply to the plight of Russians and others in the USSR. In both countries workers were subjected to conditions of forced labor. But while those conditions are made manifestly clear in regard to the plantation South in both the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras, they disappear when post-Sixties historians write about Soviet Russia.

America's "Unfinished Revolution"

Foner's prize-winning 1988 book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-l877, is a magisterial narrative of the precarious status of African-Americans in a period of history that could have been a turning point, if history had only turned in the right direction. A political ideal appears most tragically in history when it is struggling to be born and suffers an early death. Foner offers a moving account of what should have happened but did not. The failure of America to allow an entire race to make the full transition from slavery to freedom meant that the "house divided" still stood. In Reconstruction Foner emphasizes repeatedly that freed blacks "failed to achieve economic independence" even with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and, after the end of the Civil War and the onset of Reconstruction, the political restoration of old southern ruling elites "forced them to return to plantation labor."

Essay Types: Essay