American Healthcare: What Would Stalin Do?
Bruce Parrott, Professor Emeritus of Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
(Declined by the NYT and Washington Post Op-Ed pages)
As a long-time Kremlin-watcher, I’ve been alarmed by recent news reports from Capitol Hill, but not just because they show a systematic Russian effort to subvert US sovereignty. It’s worse than that. Apart from revelations of Moscow’s interference in our elections, America’s own surge of home-grown alternative facts and mendacious political claims has disturbing parallels with the worst practices of the Soviet era. Stalin masterfully created and exploited an atmosphere of crisis to amass his tyrannical power. He also had a special technique for dealing with analysts who raised awkward questions about his plans; it’s called Kill the Messenger. Recently some Republican leaders have shown signs of favoring a similar approach toward the Congressional Budget Office’s warnings about the consequences of repealing Obamacare.
Is this comparison far-fetched? Not if you know the Soviet background. In the 1920s, before Stalin acquired the ability to murder his party rivals at will, the country was roiled by a debate over how to develop heavy industry and transform agriculture. The participants in this Great Debate included politicians and economists. Some of them wanted military-style industrialization; others wanted a more measured pace of development. The debate had grave implications not only for the survival of the Soviet regime, but also for the lives of the workers and peasants who would pay the human price of industrialization.
Stalin and his backers forced the adoption of a military-style campaign through bureaucratic coercion and the use of alternative facts. The moderate economists and officials who dared to question the irrational growth targets came under severe pressure and were soon silenced. In 1931 about twenty of them were prosecuted in a show-trial meant to intimidate other skeptics and make them scapegoats for the rural starvation caused by the industrialization drive. It was one of several show-trials staged to intimidate the independent-minded economists and engineers who questioned Stalin’s savage policies.
The rest, as they say, is history. Stalin got the First-Five Year Plan he wanted, and millions of Soviet citizens died in the violent collectivization of agriculture carried out as part of that plan. This period, incidentally, was also a turning-point for Soviet economics, which was transformed from a serious academic discipline into a propaganda tool tasked with churning out alternative facts. The resulting shortage of reliable economic data helped hamstring Soviet economic planning for the rest of the communist era.
Although the Soviet Union has disappeared into the dust bin of history, Soviet styles of thinking haven’t. In Russia the duplicitous enthusiasm for alternative facts has made a comeback under Vladimir Putin. More disturbing, however, is the appearance of the same malignant attitude on Capitol Hill. Some Republican leaders have scorned the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that as many as 23 million American citizens will be left without health care if Obamacare is replaced. Even worse, the head of Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget has threatened to slash the CBO’s legal mandate because it has allegedly published misleading projections of the destructive human effects of repealing Obamacare.
Still, you may ask, does this situation really resemble the dynamics of the Stalin regime? Of course there are differences as well as similarities. Most likely there will be no show-trials of the leaders and staff of the Congressional Budget Office. And if the Republican health plan is enacted, the number of American citizens who die as a result will probably be considerably smaller than the estimated 5–6 million peasants who perished as a result of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. After all, you say, this isn’t the Soviet Union. America is different — isn’t it?
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