by Clive James
Kolakowski’s combination of critical rigour and humane sympathy is yet another reminder of what we owe Poland. If history could begin again, Poland’s contribution and sacrifice would both be too much to ask of any nation of so small a size. (For Poland to escape its fate, geography would have to begin again: between Germany and Russia was simply the wrong place for a smallish country to be.) Poland gave us too many examples of what the twentieth century could do when all its destructive forces were unleashed at once. Some of the losses were our gains. Poland gave us a set of glittering literary exiles: Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz and my personal favourite among all the world’s literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. But, in his best-selling autobiography Mein Leben, Reich-Ranicki reminds us about the Polish literati whom we never got to hear of even vaguely. One of them was Julian Tuwim, a poet of “incomparable many-sidedness” who, while he escaped being murdered, did not escape oblivion—the world still hasn’t heard of him. Unnamed young Polish mathematicians gave us the first clues to the Enigma machine, and thus to the Ultra secret that saved Europe from Nazi domination. Other losses were dead losses: the world gained nothing except cautionary tales. Poland gave us Bruno Schulz, perhaps the single most unbearable modern example of talent laid waste in midlife. It gave us the Katyn massacre: a whole generation of gifted young men wiped out at once, and buried without even the opportunity of rest, because one of the only two forces physically capable of such a deed spent decades befouling the air by trying to pin it on the other. (The Russians did it; the Nazis accused them of it; and for decades the Russians were exonerated because it was the Nazis who did the accusing.) But as Michael Burleigh reminds us in his essential book The Third Reich, we should not always be looking at the talented.
In Poland the whole of ordinary life was distorted: everything that had given rise to a civilization and helped to sustain it was rooted out. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there was a general expectation in the West that there would be a sudden cultural efflorescence in the East. It was thought that Poland would produce a dozen young versions of the film director Andrezj Wajda, for example. Only gradually was it realized that things don’t work that way. A figure like Wajda was never a precursor of a free-market future: he lived in an air pocket of the liberal past which had somehow managed to hold itself together in the surrounding miasma. The films that made him famous were made in the rare periods when the grip of the regime relaxed. (By the time that I first watched Ashes and Diamonds in the late 1950s, the comparatively tolerant conditions that had allowed Wajda to make the film were already hardening again into orthodoxy.) The merit of Kolakowski is that he tells us where the miasma came from. Karl Popper, Raymond Aron and the other sociological analysts show how Marxism affected everything at the practical level. Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how it affected everything at the mental level. Except to the extent that a clear explanation always offers a kind of encouragement, volume 3 of Main Currents of Marxism makes depressing reading: but it can be recommended for all those of us who grew up in sheltered circumstances. It was an encouraging sign, towards the end of the twentieth century, that Kolakowski’s conclusions got into the general conversation about politics—and especially about constitutional politics, in which the effect of his sceptical view of holistic intellectual innovation was to encourage a salutary dab on the brake pedal.
“We rebelled by criminal methods against the joyfulness of the new life.”
—LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI QUOTING BUKHARIN AT HIS TRIAL, IN Main Currents of Marxism, VOL. 3, P. 82
Kolakowski is surely right to pick this confession by the Old Bolshevik Bukharin as the definitive moment of the 1938 Moscow show trials. Onlookers who fell for Bukharin’s big moment would fall for anything. There were sharp onlookers who did, however. Dorothy Parker, the once and future drama critic and lifelong analyst of bogus language, thought that the trials were authentic. More interestingly, there were sceptics who still fell some of the way. Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon was really based on the Bukharin case, thought that Bukharin could have told such a lie only out of the belief that it might benefit the cause. Koestler’s novel, nominally dedicated to discrediting the Soviet Union, thus held out a crumb of comfort to its admirers in the West: there must have been a cause to believe in. The crumb of comfort helped to sustain sympathizers for another eighteen years, until Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, revealed that no such sophisticated interpretation of Bukharin’s performance had ever been necessary. The Old Bolsheviks’ ludicrous confessions had been beaten into them. (Bukharin, apparently, did not need to be tortured: a threat to the lives of his wife and little son was enough to do the trick.) After Khrushchev blew the gaff, the international left intelligentsia had no choice but to give up on the idea that the terror in the late 1930s had been at some level a necessary stage in the building of socialism. But there was still, and still is, a reluctance to believe that the Soviet Union had been like that from the beginning. Bukharin had always been well aware of the horrors that underlay the joyfulness of the new life. During one or another of the Party purges, Brecht delivered himself of the opinion that the more innocent the Party members were, the more they deserved to suffer. The charitable, and probably correct, interpretation of his remark is that he meant there was no such thing as an innocent Party member: if they had faithfully done their duty, they were necessarily guilty. (An uncharitable interpretation must follow the charitable one: if Brecht realized that the Party conspired against the people, why did he support it?) Though Bukharin’s lifeless prose style pioneered the langue de bois that Stalin would later bring to an eerie perfection, he was certainly a shining light of humanism compared with the rest of the top echelon of the Old Bolsheviks. Surviving members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia thought he might intervene for them or their relatives if only he could be reached. But he helped to build the nightmare, whose countless innocent victims have a far better right than he does to be spoken of in tragic terms.
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
Alexandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai (1872–1952) was born and raised in comfortable circumstances in old St. Petersburg; rebelled against her privileges on behalf of women and the poor; and was exiled to Germany in 1908. During World War I she travelled in the U.S.A., preaching socialism rather in the manner that an American feminist like Naomi Klein would nowadays preach against globalization when travelling in Europe. Upon the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1917, Kollontai returned home, where she served the Soviet government first as a commissar for public welfare, then in a succession of foreign ministerial and ambassadorial posts. She was the regime’s recognized expert on women’s rights: special rights, that is, in a state where there were no general ones. She was thus the twentieth century’s clearest early case of the fundamental incompatibility between feminism and ideology. Feminism is a claim for impartial justice, and all ideologies deny that such a term has meaning. Kollontai managed to live with the contradiction, but only because she was unusually adroit when it came to aligning herself with the prevailing power. Her dogged service to a regime that condemned large numbers of innocent women to grim death has rarely resulted in her being criticized by left-wing feminists in the West. The pattern, alas, continues today, especially when it comes to the spurious alliance between feminism and multiculturalism, an ideology which necessarily contains within itself a claimed right to confine women to their traditional subservience. Against the mountain of historical evidence that left-wing ideology has been no friend of feminism, there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that fascism was even less friendly: Hitlerite Germany, in particular, did little to release women from their traditional typecasting. But it remains sad that women who seek a release for their sisters from the crushing definition of a biological role have always found so many bad friends among those theoretically wedded to the betterment of the working class. Readers of Spanish might care to look at a file of Cuba’s Bohemia magazine for 1959
, the year of Castro’s revolution. The yellowing pages are full of stories about the heroic women who fought and suffered beside all those famous beards for the liberation of their island from tyranny and backwardness. How many of those women ever became part of the government? At least Kollontai got a job, and perhaps she and the Soviet Union she so loyally served both merit a small salute for that.
The masses do not believe in the Opposition. They greet its every statement with laughter. Does the Opposition think that the masses have such a short memory? If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line, who else besides these prominent members of the Opposition were responsible for them?
—ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, “THE OPPOSITION AND THE PARTY RANK AND FILE,” IN Selected Writings, P. 313
AFAMOUS FIGURE AMONG the Old Bolsheviks, Alexandra Kollontai was a sad case, and sadder still because it is so hard to weep for her. Her career is a harsh reminder that feminism is, or should be, a demand for justice, not an ideology. It should not consider itself an ideology and it should be very slow to ally itself with any other ideology, no matter how progressive that other ideology might claim to be. Kollontai was an acute and lastingly valuable analyst of the restrictions and frustrations imposed on women by the conventional morality of bourgeois society. Fifty years later, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not say much that Kollontai had not said first, even if they said it better—as they were bound to do, because they were proposing feasible modifications to a society already developed, whereas she was trying to make herself heard over the roar of chaos. Armed with her hard-won awareness of how injustice for women had been institutionalized in the bourgeois civil order, she thought that the Russian Revolution, the universal solvent of all institutions, would give feminism its chance. She spent the next thirty-five years finding out just how wrong she was. From the viewpoint of the slain, the best that can be said for her is that she backed the regime for a good reason. Unfortunately she backed the regime no matter how murderous it became. This outburst from 1927 is really a declaration of faith in Stalin, making an appearance under his other name, “the masses.” “The Opposition” were those brave few among the Old Bolsheviks who still dared to question him, starting with Trotsky. As always, it is advisable to note that Trotsky, the butcher of the sailors at Kronstadt, was no humanitarian. Only a few years further up the line, he actually thought that Stalin’s treatment of the peasants sinned through leniency. But it was obvious at the time that any conflict among the leaders had nothing to do with principle: it was a power struggle, with absolute power as the prize. Kollontai was weighing in unequivocally on the side of an infallible party with an unchallengeable leader.
A textual scholar might say that she was taking a conscious risk when she wrote: “If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line . . .” It is quite easy to imagine a Lubyanka interrogator asking her: “Oh yes, and what shortcomings are those?” But the interrogation never came. Kollontai managed to stay alive, partly by spending as much time as possible on diplomatic duties in Norway, Sweden and Finland. (Talleyrand said, “He who is absent is wrong.” In the Soviet Union, however, being absent was often the key to survival.) She died in 1952, shortly before her eightieth birthday, with two Orders of the Red Banner to her credit, if credit that was. The terrible truth was that the only real equality made available to women in the Soviet Union of her time was the equal opportunity to be a slave labourer. Her dreamed-of principle was “winged Eros,” love set free. The Soviet actuality of love set free was a one-size-fits-all contraceptive diaphragm, with the overspill taken care of by serial abortions. In her early writings—just as charmless as the later ones but a touch more personal—she was already exploiting the standard langue de bois technique of speaking as if she herself were the incarnation of the proletariat. She probably hoped that if she sounded like the Party line, the Party line might be persuaded to incorporate her views. A sample:
The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of “winged Eros” in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is. . . . The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interest of the proletariat.
In the event, she found winged Eros a hard taskmaster. In a touching forecast of the policy declared by Germaine Greer forty years later, Kollontai favoured the notion that a non-academic but suitably vigorous proletarian might be a fitting partner for a female high-brow. But either the muscular young lovers she chose for herself did not understand that in offering them freedom she required their respect, or else she found parting from them hurt more than it was supposed to. It would be cruel not to sympathize, and patronizing too: even while she was earning her decorations she was in fear for her life, and during the Yezhov terror in the late 1930s she thought every trip back to Moscow might be her last.
Our real sympathy, however, we should reserve for those who were not spared. An impressive proportion of them were women, even within the Party itself, where they were seldom given high office, but certainly had unhampered access to the status of victim. If Kollontai had been sent to the Gulag and somehow survived it, she might conceivably have written a book along the lines of Evgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, although it is hard to believe that any amount of deprivation and disillusionment would have given her Ginzburg’s gift for narrative. Kollontai wrote boilerplate even on the few occasions when she felt free to speak. Besides, she already had the disillusion: she didn’t have to be locked up to have that. A single week in the company of the regime’s high-ranking thugs and boors would have been enough to tell her that there was no hope. We should not go so far as to greet her every statement with laughter, but we should try to rein in our pity. Pity belongs to the countless thousands of her sisters who were sent to the unisex hell that lay beyond Vorkuta, where they aged thirty years in the first three months unless they were granted the release of a quicker death. Did she know about all that? Of course she did. Women always know.
HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVALY
Heda Margolius Kovaly (b. ca. 1920) could have been sent into history specifically to remind us, after we have read about an initially worthy but fatally compliant apparatchik like Alexandra Kollantai, that there really can be such a creature as an incorruptible human being, and that it quite often takes a woman to be one. The broad details of Kovaly’s life are outlined in the short essay below. Harder to evoke is the personality that sets its healing fire to every page of her terrible story. Reading Prague Farewell is like reading about Sophie Scholl, the most purely sacrificial protagonist of the White Rose resistance group in Munich in 1942; like reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope in its saddest chapters of resignation; like reading one of the interviews that the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali gave just after her friend Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a fanatic who took exception to her views about the subjection of women under Islam. Examples could be multiplied. Unfortunately, for some reason, they have hardly ever been codified: either the modern encyclopedia of feminist heroism has not yet been assembled, or else it has never been made popular. Almost certainly the reason is that ideology gets in the way. An uncomfortable number of the heroines achieved their true bravery by questioning the political cause they first espoused, and a chronicler who still espouses it is not likely to tell their story well, or at all. The real opportunity—to evoke a set of humanist values that lie beyond the grasp of any single political programme, and thus form a political and ethical ideal in themselves—remains untouched. Yet it would be a poor man who could finish reading Kovaly’s book without asking himself how an experience like hers could ever have been thought to be subsidiary. Why, he must surely ask himself, isn’t this the central story? If the world can’t be ruled by the values that come naturally to a woman like her, how can it be worth living in?
A few miles out of Prague, the limousine began to slide on the icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.
—HEDA MARGOLIUS K
OVALY, Prague Farewell, P. 180
GIVEN THIRTY SECONDS to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one. The life of Heda Margolius Kovaly is not to be envied. If we had to live a life like hers in order to come out of it with her spirit and dignity, we would be better off not living at all. But her life did have one feature that we can call a blessing. It dramatized, for our edification, the two great contending totalitarian forces, because they both chose her for a victim. As a Jewish teenager in Czechoslovakia she was fated to be swept up by the Nazis, and subsequently went right through the mill, starting with the Lodz ghetto and going all the way to Auschwitz, where she wound up in a block for young girls. Mercifully, in evoking her girls’ dormitory, she restricts herself to one scene. The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished the next morning for having tried to escape. Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed, so they had to hold each other up. In the morning, the recaptured escapee had her arms and legs broken in front of their eyes.
