Word: vlasov
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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George Fischer's study is undoubtedly a memorial to painstaking scholarship, especially since in the past its subject has been rudely buffeted about by the uninformed. Just a few years ago, for instance, people were muttering imprecations over General Vlasov and his cadres of anti-Stalinist Russians, pointing to their alliance with Hitler Germany and their treasonable assaults on our embattled ally. Recently, comment has changed in form, if not in error, with the public magnifying the numbers and effectiveness of this phantom army and the chances of domestic revolt it angures. Fischer has collected reams of facts, distilled them...
What is not so impressive is the tenuous connection between what the author is describing and what he is expounding. He has a thesis to advance, an incisive one. Organized resistance in Russia, he says, is as much a phantom as Vlasov's army; only a tremendous surprise attack on Russia can produce it. The basis for this assertion is something Fischer calls Inertness, the quality of the Russian mind which excludes initiative and makes action wholly dependent on minutely detailed orders from on high. The most interesting part of "Soviet Opposition to Stalin" is Fischer's exploration of this...
What leaves me puzzled, though, is the minor role his chronicle of the Vlasov movement has in these arguments. His detailed account of the movement's internal squabbles, its frustration by Nazi cynicism and brutishness, and the background of its sources of support contribute little to Fischer's broad thesis save the services of a none-too-satisfactory illustration. There is nothing, for instance, in the tragic gyrations of Vlasov's army that leads one to the all-important concept of Inertness. Nor did Fischer have to explain the expatriates' every motion to prove that, as a result of confusion...
...extent that Fischer's thesis depends on the Viasov movement, it is subject to all the frailties of a generalization based on but one instance (the Viasov movement is the only case of organized opposition under modern Russian conditions). Since so little of basic importance does depend on Vlasov, the appearance of an entirely different sort of rebellious group would not invalidate Fischer's main argument...