Most of the books in this series have to be argued with line by line. This one is largely correct, and that is what makes it worth reading closely.
In the Grip of Terror is a short book — a hundred and fifty pages — issued by Progress Publishers in 1982 in the series "Imperialism: Acts, Facts, and Records", and it has a single subject. In January 1981 the incoming Reagan administration announced that international terrorism would replace human rights as the central concern of American foreign policy, and that the Soviet Union was behind it. Alexander Haig said so within days of taking office. Claire Sterling's The Terror Network appeared two months later to supply the evidence. This book is Moscow's answer. It sets out to show that the charge is false, that the campaign is a cover for intervention, and that the terrorism actually being committed in the world is overwhelmingly the work of the far right and of states allied to the United States.
On the first three counts it is right, and it was right at the time on evidence any reader could check.
The author is worth knowing about. A. S. Grachev — Andrei Serafimovich Grachev, born in Moscow in 1941, a graduate of MGIMO — was not a hack. He worked in the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU from the mid-1970s, rising to deputy head, which is to say he wrote for the apparatus that managed the Soviet relationship with foreign Communist parties. That is exactly the readership this book is pitched at: it quotes L'Humanité, L'Unità, Georges Marchais, Gian Carlo Pajetta, Alfredo Reichlin and Gus Hall far more often than it quotes Pravda, and its arguments about the Red Brigades are the arguments the Italian party was making in its own press. It is an export product for the Western left. Nine years later the same man was Mikhail Gorbachev's press secretary, and it fell to him to speak for the Soviet presidency in its last weeks. He went on to write about that collapse for Western publishers. The apparatus that produced this book contained the people who would dismantle the state it defends.
Say what is true in it, at length, because the bulk of it is.
The core claim — that the "Soviet terror network" was a fabrication — was correct, and Grachev makes the case largely by quoting Americans. He reproduces Haig telling L'Express that "International terrorism bothers us terribly. Be sure that in the immediate future it will be our No. 1 priority. We were restrained by the lack of reliable information. But it surely exists. We have to go out and search for and find it." He reports, citing Le Monde of March 1981, that the CIA had told members of Congress it had no tangible proof and was in "total discord" with Reagan and Haig. He notes that the new Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism under Jeremiah Denton adopted a definition of terrorism so wide that, as The New York Times observed, it "would also seem to include some wars of national liberation."
All of this held. William Casey commissioned a Special National Intelligence Estimate to prove the Soviet connection and was told by his own analysts that the draft could not support it; he was also advised, and pushed on anyway, that a great deal of what had impressed him in Sterling's book was material the Agency had itself planted abroad and was now reading back as independent confirmation. Melvin Goodman, who ran the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs from 1976 to 1987, has said as much publicly. Grachev's flat assertion in 1982 that "Most of the facts cited in Sterling's book came from this source" was a guess that turned out to be close to the literal truth. He was also right about the State Department's February 1981 White Paper, Communist Interference in El Salvador, which he calls "a third-class, crude forgery". Its principal author, Jon Glassman, conceded to Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in June 1981 that parts of it were "misleading" and "over-embellished" and contained guesswork — four months before this book went to press.
The Italian chapters are the strongest in the volume and they have aged best. Grachev sets out the sequence — Piazza Fontana in December 1969, the Italicus train in 1974, Brescia in 1974, Bologna station on 2 August 1980 — and insists, against the grain of most Western reporting at the time, that the dominant violence in Italy was black rather than red, that it was aimed at massacre rather than assassination because massacre produces panic, and that it enjoyed protection inside the state. He names the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei for Bologna. He names Licio Gelli and the P2 lodge, whose exposure had brought down the Italian government in May 1981. He notes that Piazza Fontana was pinned on anarchists and that the man who attacked Prime Minister Rumor in 1974 "was proclaimed an 'anarchist'" though he was trained by officers tied to the neo-fascist Rosa dei Venti. He quotes Newsweek of 18 August 1980: "while the Rome government has mounted a well-publicised crackdown on left-wing terrorists, the neo-fascists have largely been left alone."
Every substantive element of that survived. Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro of the NAR were definitively sentenced to life for Bologna in November 1995, in the same judgement that upheld convictions against Gelli and against officers of the military intelligence service for obstructing the investigation. Piazza Fontana was established by later Italian investigations as the work of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo, after an anarchist, Giuseppe Pinelli, had died falling from a window of the Milan police headquarters during interrogation. Grachev even reprints, from the Italian weekly L'Europeo of November 1976, the claim that NATO had instructed each West European country to form clandestine anti-invasion networks and that "Since the invasion could only come from the Communists in the East, the most reliable people to repulse them are the fascists." In October 1990 Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian parliament that such a network — Gladio — had existed. Andreotti denied it had any connection to terrorism, and that part remains disputed; but the existence of the structure, printed here in Moscow in 1982 and dismissed then as propaganda, was conceded by the Italian prime minister eight years later.
The same is true of most of chapter six. The figure of forty thousand killed in El Salvador between October 1979 and March 1982, attributed to the army and allied death squads, is close to what the UN Truth Commission would find in 1993, when it assigned some eighty-five per cent of the violations it documented to state forces and their allies. Ambassador Robert White really did testify in January 1981 that "the chief killers of El Salvadoreans are the government security forces", and he really did lose his post. The Church Committee material on Lumumba, quoted here at length and accurately, is quoted from the published report. Guatemala under Lucas García, Chile after 1973, the Phoenix programme in Vietnam, South African raids into Angola: the numbers vary in reliability, some come from partisan commissions, but the picture is not invented, and a reader who comes to it expecting Soviet fantasy will be disappointed.
So the correction to be made is not to the facts. It is to the definition.
Grachev defines terrorism twice, and the two definitions between them cover the world without touching the Soviet Union. The first is Leninist and concerns method: individual terror is the recourse of a party cut off from the masses. He quotes Lenin — "The history of the Russian revolution shows that a party always resorts to individual terror when it does not enjoy the support of the masses" — and again, "without the working people all bombs are powerless, patently powerless." The second concerns the state, and is borrowed, with evident pleasure, from Haig himself: a terrorist government is any government which instigates, perpetrates or is involved in terrorist acts. Grachev then applies it to the United States, Israel, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala. What he never does is apply either definition to a state that calls itself socialist, because by construction neither can reach one. Revolutionary violence is "popular resistance to the violence of exploiters, aggressors and colonialists" — a different substance, not a different degree.
The load-bearing sentence comes near the end, in the section headed "Who Gains by the 'Hand of Moscow'?":
The USSR, as a democratic socialist state, rejects in principle the use of terror in international relations and all other forms of interference in the domestic affairs of other countries. The Soviet Union has been a principled opponent of the theory and practice of terrorism. Throughout their entire history, the activities of the CPSU and the Soviet state have not had any relation with terrorism and political violence.
Throughout their entire history. This is a book of some thirty-eight thousand words, published in Moscow, about terror. The word Stalin does not appear in it. Neither does Cheka, nor Yezhov, nor 1937, nor Kirov, nor Katyn, nor collectivisation, nor famine. The phrase "Red Terror" appears twice, both times meaning right-wing propaganda about Latin America. The word "concentration camp" appears — for Chile, and for Long Kesh. Nothing here is denied, because nothing here is mentioned. Khrushchev had told the Twentieth Congress in 1956 that the Party's own leadership had been destroyed by mass arrest, torture and execution; that admission had been on the record for twenty-six years when this book was printed, and the sentence quoted above was still written, and printed in English, for foreign readers. The definition is doing the work that the argument cannot.
The silences elsewhere are just as precise. Poland gets two sentences: "Recently, Poland has been the subject of particular scrutiny by the CIA. The imperialist subversive services and their agents spare no effort in trying to destabilise the situation in the country." That is all. Martial law had been declared on 13 December 1981; Solidarność, a trade union of roughly ten million members, had been suspended and then banned; thousands of its members were interned. The book was still being written the following summer — it discusses the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of June 1982 — so this was not a matter of the printer's schedule. It is a choice, and it collides directly with the book's own conclusion, which argues that "It is the particular responsibility of the left-wing democratic forces to initiate the struggle against terrorism, as it is the working-class movement and the revolutionary parties of the working class which are resolutely and consistently defending democracy, civil and political rights and freedoms that are the first targets of terrorist attacks." In December 1981 the largest working-class movement in Europe was broken by a general acting for a ruling Communist party, and the book that says the above cannot see it. Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 do not appear at all; Czechoslovakia's single mention in these pages is in a list of countries named in a 1951 US appropriations bill.
Afghanistan is treated at length, and here the method is not silence but inversion. The Soviet intervention of December 1979 appears once, in a subordinate clause — "Several months before the limited contingent of Soviet troops was moved into Afghanistan on the request of its government" — and the rest of the section, several pages long, is devoted to American, Chinese, Egyptian, Saudi and Pakistani arming of the mujahideen. Much of that account is accurate. It is also the whole of what the reader is given about a war in which the Soviet army was, at the moment of writing, the largest armed force in the country. It is instructive to set this beside Nikolai Yakovlev's CIA Target: The USSR, published by Progress in the same year and covered elsewhere in this series: Yakovlev's book does not mention Afghanistan at all, and it is entirely given over to the Soviet citizens the state was then prosecuting. Grachev's book does not name a single Soviet dissident — not Sakharov, not Orlov, not Shcharansky — and never uses the word Helsinki. Between them the two volumes cover the whole of Moscow's 1982 case against the West, and the file has been neatly divided.
There is one falsification of the ordinary kind, and it is aimed at us. Discussing the terrorist milieu of the 1970s, Grachev lists "various extreme right, semi-fascist as well as anarchist, Trotskyist and Maoist groupings". Later he writes: "Following Trotsky's famous statement that 'war is the mother of revolution', modern extremists consider violence and armed acts as the only means to fight for social progress." That sentence carries no footnote. It is the only substantive attribution in the book that does not — Lenin is cited scrupulously by volume and page, a dozen times over; so are Marx, Engels, the Comintern congresses of 1928 and 1935, Sterling, Arendt, Clutterbuck, the Church Committee. The reason is straightforward: the attribution will not bear a reference, and the substance is the reverse of the truth.
Trotsky wrote what is probably the sharpest Marxist attack on individual terrorism in the literature. "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism", published in the Austrian social-democratic journal Der Kampf in November 1911, argues that individual terror "is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness", that it turns "their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come", and that if it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol, then the effort of building a class movement appears pointless. That is, almost word for word, the case Grachev makes against the Red Brigades a few pages after invoking Trotsky as their ancestor. He had the argument. He credited it to the wrong man, and abused the right one, because by 1982 the Soviet apparatus could not print the name except as an insult. Readers who want the anti-Stalinist left's position on terrorism should start there; nothing in seventy years of the tradition has departed from it.
That tradition also answered this book's subject as it happened, in print, and the record is easy to consult. Intercontinental Press, the weekly associated with the Fourth International, got to the counter-thesis before Sterling had published hers. On 1 December 1980 it carried "Ultrarightists in Europe Given License to Kill" by Christian Picquet, translated from the Paris fortnightly Inprecor of 30 October, which treats Bologna, the Munich Oktoberfest and the rue Copernic synagogue as one series — the same three bombings Grachev groups together — attributes them to the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, the Hoffmann Military Sport Group and the European Nationalist Fascists, and states plainly under the heading "Network of Rightist Terrorism": "An international network of the far right certainly exists, no matter what they call themselves (European New Order, World Union of Nationalist Socialists, World Anti-Communist League, Aginter Press), and whether or not they have a centralized structure." On the impunity that is Grachev's "right-eye blindness", Picquet is blunter than Grachev: "These men are especially dangerous since they have the benefit of total impunity." When Sterling's thesis reached its second stage — the claim that Bulgaria and the KGB were behind the shooting of the Pope — Margaret Jayko answered it in the same paper on 17 January 1983, noting that "the charges of Bulgarian guilt originated in a fantastic story by right-wing author Claire Sterling in Reader's Digest", that the evidence came from Mehmet Ali Agca, "a well-known member of the Turkish National Action Party, a fascist outfit", and that "transforming Agca from a fascist into a liberation fighter helps make the entire story of an international left-wing terrorist conspiracy a bit more plausible."
But the difference is in Poland, and it is worth setting the two texts side by side. On 18 January 1982 the same paper led with David Frankel's "Imperialists campaign on Poland", written five weeks after martial law. Frankel makes Grachev's argument about the West without hesitation: "Over the past several weeks the U.S. ruling class and its allies have taken advantage of the declaration of martial law in Poland to launch an anticommunist propaganda and action campaign." He is scathing about the sanctions — "If the imperialists want to implement sanctions, let them cut off their aid to the butchers in El Salvador and to the murderous Khmer Rouge gangs in Kampuchea." And then he says the thing this book cannot: the imperialists "have been able to take advantage of the criminal attack against the Polish working class by the bureaucratic regime there to advance their propaganda campaign around the Soviet threat and to push forward their overall militarization drive." His conclusion is the sentence Grachev's whole method exists to prevent anyone from writing: "There can be no genuine support for the Polish working class that does not put opposition to the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the context of opposition to imperialist oppression and support for the struggle for socialism."
Read this book, then, for the two-thirds of it that is a competent and well-sourced indictment of the Reagan administration's terrorism campaign, of the Italian far right and the state that sheltered it, and of American policy in Central America and Southern Africa — an indictment that has stood up better than most Western journalism of the same year. Read the remaining third for what it shows about the machinery that produced it: a definition built so that the state commissioning the book falls outside it, a silence where Poland should be, an inversion where Afghanistan should be, and an unsourced sentence about Trotsky doing the work of a citation. Grachev was arguing, correctly, that the powerful call their victims terrorists. He was doing it on behalf of a government that had spent the previous December demonstrating the point in Warsaw.