October 12, 2014 – The Russian Reader

In the mid-1990s, I used to remark, only partly in jest, that Russia was the greatest country in the world because there were more Nirvana albums for sale here than in any other country. The country’s kiosks and shops were then flooded with a dizzying number of bootlegs of recordings by many of my favorite bands. It often seemed then that the Russian bootleggers were having a ball reinventing and re-imagining their discographies.

In a similar but much less innocent vein, in more recent years some Russian publishers have repackaged and retitled translated works of nonfiction by non-Russian authors in response to perceived ideological demand.

You might not guess it from the cover and the description, below, but this is a new (authorized?) Russian edition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States:

American Empire: From 1492 to the Present Day
Howard Zinn

ISBN: 978-5-4438-0662-4
Year of Publication: 2014
Publisher: Algorithm
Series: Mankind’s Greatest Empires

Description
Howard Zinn, a leftist intellectual of Jewish descent, was along with Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag one of the most consistent critics of American foreign policy. The well-known American political scientist, author, and doctor of historical sciences, taught at Boston University, Paris, and Bologna. His book, reprinted several times in America and across the Atlantic, contains a view of the most important events in American history from colonial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century that largely differs from traditional American historical science.

It is packed with unusually vivid and interesting facts, enabling the Russian reader to better understand our potential enemy in the past [sic] and, quite possibly, in the near future.

This work will certainly attract the attention of not only professional historians, sociologists and political scientists but also anyone interested in the history of the United States.

For those over 16 years of age.

Further information about the publication:
Hardcover, 752 pages
Circulation: 1,200 copies
Format: 60 x 90 cm/16 (145 x 215 mm)

source

A big thanks to Comrade VT for the heads-up.

UPDATE. It might not be clear to readers outside of Russia or unfamiliar with Algorithm publishing house that this repackaging is something akin to Mormon baptisms for the dead, who against their already unknowable will are converted to Latter-Day Saints. In this case, Howard Zinn has been made after death to serve the Russian neo-imperialist/neo-Stalinist cause. That this is the prevailing tendency at Algorithm is apparent from their September 2014 catalogue, which features such titles as Russia’s Eurasian Revenge, by the now-ubiquitous fascist warmonger Alexander Dugin; The West versus Russia, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (who never published a book with this title in his lifetime), described as “a unique collection of incisive polemical texts about the standoff between western civilization and Russian civilization by Dostoevsky, one of the most widely read Russian classic authors”: Stalin’s Wolfhound: The True Story of Pavel Sudoplatov; and A Future without America, by Lyndon Larouche (this is another book whose title, at least, seems to exist only in the Algorithm universe).

Rich white Americans have so much fun. Here they are thrilling to the duo of Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner in Nantucket this past spring.

This is Russian soft-powerism of the highest order. It is strange (or is it?) that Pozner somehow thinks (or does he?) that he went from being a Soviet “propagandist” (as he admits in this conversation) to being a real “journalist” in the post-Soviet era.

And it is amazing that the otherwise skeptical and cranky Donahue has bought into this self-flattery. It is one thing to be more critical of the actions and policies of one’s own government: that is how it should be for any intelligent person anywhere, and especially for Americans, whose country bears more responsibility than most other countries for the world’s current saggy, miserable, often vicious shape. But here Donahue plays second fiddle to the virtuoso Pozner, who by the end of the talk seemingly has everyone in the tent convinced, especially his old TV buddy and the event’s moderator, that the US also bears sole responsibility for the current hyper-reactionary regime in Russia. Pozner accomplishes this with a spiel seamlessly woven from home truths, sentimental journeyings, and charmingly delivered lies or fudges: for example, about how everyone in the Soviet Union were true believers except for a miniscule and thus meaningless dissident movement or that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the West engaged only in relentless humiliation of the new “democractic” Russia under Yeltsin.

As Russia’s hook-line-and-sinker self-submersion into extreme right-wing nationalist hysteria continues, expect more of this kind of song and dance from certain Russian liberal and leftist intellectuals. The thought that Putinism 3.0 is entirely their own fault (if only because they have signally omitted to do almost anything about it) or that not all societies in the world today are equally bleak pits of the blackest political reaction, is nearly unbearable to them. Hence, their frantic need to revive the Cold War paradigm or, via Brahminical critiques of its alleged illicit and opportunistic resurgence on both sides of the old divide, their equally frantic attempts to imagine that the choice between the “free” West and the “internationalist” Soviet bloc back then, during the real Cold War, is somehow comparable to a choice nowadays between a bloody mess with occasional breaks in the clouds and a system that already long ago had no redeeming features whatsoever and seems hell-bent on getting much, much worse very quickly.

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The first “spacebridge” or “citizens summit,” between Leningrad and Seattle in 1985, moderated by Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donahue:

Day: October 12, 2014

“Howard Zinn, a Leftist Intellectual of Jewish Descent”

“In the Breast of Mother Russia Speaks a Kind and Loving Heart”