“How much do their leaders believe in communism?” That was the first question Ronald Reagan asked Suzanne Massie, the recently passed Soviet and Russia expert, during their meetings while Reagan was president.
Without ever having known Reagan, the question sounds like something he would have asked. By all accounts Reagan was a true believer, as in he knew communism would fail simply because communism ran counter to human nature. Reagan presumably asked the question given his skepticism that Soviet officialdom could actually believe in something so at odds with nature.
It turns out Reagan’s question was correct, or that perhaps he sensed Massie’s answer before she gave it. Massie explained to Reagan that the Communist Party bosses were referred to as “Big Bottoms.” She meant that “They only care about their chairs, their place.” Exactly. No doubt some were truly evil, but logic dictates most were trying to get by within a country and economic system defined by collectivism, and the corruption and pull that are an effect of collectivism. It’s human nature to work in order to get, and a lot of getting could be achieved in the former Soviet Union based on one’s chair and place.
For the leaders to have believed in communism would have amounted to willful blindness on their part. To see why, consider what Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane wrote in 1981, and upon return from a visit to the Soviet Union with his Cato co-founder, industrialist Charles Koch. Crane observed a near total lack of economic activity, of unfree, miserable, hunched over people trying to get by in a country where getting for the masses was illegal.
Of course the Soviet leaders didn’t believe in communism. What rational person with two eyes could have? Except that what Reagan intuited, and what Massie and Crane saw up close, was not accepted wisdom. To the Left at the time, and to an economics profession that begs to be thought less of than astrologists, the Soviet economy wasn’t too far behind the U.S.’s, if that. According to the Left, Reagan’s confident rhetoric about an ideology that would fall into the “dustbin of history” was the stuff of a simplistic actor.
Just the same, it’s apparent that many on the Right didn’t get what Reagan intuited, and that Massie saw. According to her obituary in the Washington Post (written by Brian Murphy), the more hawkish members of Reagan’s team like Caspar Weinberger (1917-2006) weren’t fans of Massie. According to Murphy, Weinberger regarded her views as “gauzy sentimentality.” The good news is that Massie didn’t back down, and came back one time with “I’m anti-Soviet but pro-Russian.” Precisely.
Massie, like Reagan, simply got it. She’d spent lots of time in the Soviet Union trying to understand the Russian “psyche.” What she grasped was that “Soviets are the officials,” while “Russians are the people.” Exactly. To judge a country by its leaders, particularly leaders who attained their “chair” and “place” through literal and figurative force, is just silly. The Russian people couldn’t and didn’t love communism or want to export it. Who would? And then the officials once again had to get, and getting was most doable from the right chair.
It’s worth thinking about now vis-à-vis China, and its Chinese Communist Party (CCP). If we ignore what’s obvious to those with eyes, that even the CCP isn’t any longer communist, we can’t ignore that the Chinese people most certainly aren’t communist. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in American politicians who express fear of Chinese exports allegedly directed to the U.S. in order to weaken us for the “inevitable” Chinese invasion.
Except that to export is to strengthen those exported to, not to mention that to export is to express a desire to import, which is a reminder once again that whatever the ideological lean of China’s leadership, the CCP is the officials while the Chinese are the people. And they want to get. Here’s hoping there’s a modern-day individual ready and willing to convey to Donald Trump and the U.S. political class what Suzanne Massie so courageously conveyed to U.S. leadership during the Cold War so that we can hopefully avoid another one.
