The fact that Neurath could be busily pursuing his plans for far-reaching political reforms amid this level of insanity tells us something about his own irrationality and foolishness. The Munich revolutionaries were a laughingstock around Germany at the time, and for us today certain events bring to mind Monty Python skits—with the difference that the Bavarian Soviet Republic had deadly consequences. Many people lost their lives in these events, on both sides.
While some of the revolutionary leaders were imprisoned for years or executed, Neurath got off with a relatively short sentence of eighteen months and a more lenient incarceration (at a so-called “fortress”). He served only a small part of his sentence.
Neurath was lucky to be treated so kindly. Defending himself in court, he had argued, ridiculously, that he was not involved in politics at all.3 The court rejected this outright and in its verdict insisted that “with his high intelligence he must have been aware that through remaining in his high government office, instead of stepping down, he was in fact aiding and abetting this treasonable government” (Nemeth & Stadler 1996, 20–21). So the court linked Neurath’s guilt to his being smart: He should not have allowed his reason to go on holiday. He himself admitted his responsibility in a lecture he gave in Vienna in 1920: “Though I had not intended support of the Soviet Republic I should have known that my behavior did in fact give such support” (Neurath 1973, 27). Yet some philosophers claim there was little reason to identify Neurath with the Bavarian Soviet government itself (e.g., Rudolf Haller in Uebel 1991, 26).
In Vienna in the 1920s, Neurath and the artist Gerd Arntz developed a method of visual presentation of statistics, which was later to be called ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education). The main idea was to use pictures to simplify information and to present facts in a way that practically anyone could understand.
In September 1929 and February 1930, Neurath contacted VOKS, explaining the advantages of his pictorial statistics for the Soviet Union.4 In an internal memo, VOKS concluded that Neurath’s graphs would certainly be of great use for their propaganda abroad, but for the time being his asking price remained a sticking point (Köstenberger 2013, 276–77). Eventually the Soviet government accepted Neurath’s overtures and invited him to establish and run an institute in Moscow that would apply his method to spread mass information in the service of the regime. The Institute of Pictorial Statistics (IZOSTAT) was born. Neurath was contractually obliged to spend two months a year at the institute in Moscow, which he did from 1931 till the end of 1934.5
As was usual in the Soviet Union, in addition to an administrative director IZOSTAT also had a so-called red director, basically a person appointed by the Communist Party to oversee the work and to be vigilant for the smallest signs of “counter-revolutionary activity.” In addition, the responsibility for IZOSTAT was very early assigned to the Central Executive Committee, the highest governing body of the Soviet Union at the time. In charge of “methodological direction” was a special commission headed by Avel Enukidze, the secretary of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and one of Stalin’s most trusted friends. Neurath was completely okay with all these arrangements, which left no doubt that he and members of his team would be kept on a tight leash by the Communist Party.
In a way, Neurath was the right person for the job because, like his employers, he believed statistics to be an instrument of class struggle. In an article from 1927, “Statistics and Proletariat,” he wrote: “Statistics is a tool of proletarian battle, statistics is a necessary element of the socialist system, statistics is a delight for the international proletariat struggling with the ruling classes” (quoted in Mayr & Schreder 2014, 137).
It appears the leaders of the Communist Party had put great faith in IZOSTAT. In Neurath’s own words: “Our method met with exceptional success in the Soviet Union. In 1931 the Council of People’s Commissars decreed that ‘all public and co-operative organizations, unions and schools are directed to use picture statistics according to the method of Dr. Neurath’” (quoted in Cartwright et al. 2008, 71).
And indeed, the graphs produced under Neurath’s directions soon appeared everywhere: in railway stations and theater foyers, on postcards, and in magazines. And, most importantly, they appeared on a daily basis in newspapers like Izvestia and Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Stadler 1982, 217).
What was it the People’s Commissars especially liked about “pictorial statistics”? Perhaps the illustration in Figure 2.1 (from Arntz et al. 1979) can help explain this.
As Chris Chizlett (1992, 303) pointed out about this and many other graphs produced by IZOSTAT, it is noteworthy that no source is given for the information presented. In fact, according to the testimony of Gerd Arntz, Neurath’s main collaborator at the time, the statistical data were simply provided to IZOSTAT by the Soviet authorities and it was impossible to check their veracity (Sandner 2014, 231).
The particular graph reproduced in Figure 2.1 is supposed to represent the increase in crop spraying in the Soviet Union from 1931 to 1934.6 The pictorial representation is indeed extremely simple and appears to leave no doubt about what it says, namely that there was considerable and impressive progress in crop spraying over this three-year period. The size of the sprayed acreage in the whole country first more than tripled and then increased another 40 percent. Splendid!
FIGURE 2.1: Praising successes of Soviet agriculture during the Holodomor
But a closer examination leads to a very different conclusion. First, notice that the year 1932 is skipped in the graph. Why? And second, the output for the year 1934 is not about what really happened but only about what was planned.7 So although the picture manages to create a belief in steady and remarkable improvement, this is basically sleight of hand.
But the graph is a lie in a much more troubling way. The years that it covers include the infamous period of the great famine in the USSR. It took an especially big toll on Ukraine, where it is often referred to as “Holodomor” (murder by hunger). Scholars agree that the number of people who perished in the famine across the whole Soviet Union was at least 6 million (Courtois et al. 1999, 159; Naimark 2010, 70).
Hence it turns out that Neurath worked for the Soviet government and prepared graphs showing the wonderful successes of crop spraying at the very time when millions of people were starving, as a direct result of the actions of that very government.
This seems so bizarre and inhumane that the question must be raised whether he was possibly unaware about what was going on around him (in the country, let us recall, in which he lived two months a year). Ignorance as an excuse appears to be suggested by what Marie Reidemeister, Neurath’s future wife, allegedly said to him some time after they had left the Soviet Union for good: “Tell me, how can you explain that they made such fools of us in Moscow? For we had not noticed anything of all those scandalous states of affairs” (quoted in Neider 1999, 330).
It is very hard, however, to square the ignorance hypothesis with what was generally known at the time, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. There were many