This is particularly clear among intellectuals, for the prevailing conventions of rational thinking about society are rooted in the rationalist eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. As the political right has never ceased complaining, this has made intellectuals inclined to sympathize with such causes as liberty, equality and fraternity. Even my friend Isaiah Berlin, with his visceral commitment to a non-negotiable Jewish identity, which made him defend, or at least try to understand, the critics of the Enlightenment, found it impossible not to behave like an Enlightenment liberal. Outside Germany a secular intellectual tradition suitable to the right hardly existed. In the first half of the past century, the left visibly attracted far more intellectuals than the right. Even in the major creative arts, where rational thinking is less relevant, anti-fascism prevailed On this question the last word has been said with admirable brevity by ‘Simon Leys’, the pseudonym of an eminent Belgian sinologue with an unparalleled record as a deconstructor of the myths of Maoism: ‘All of us in the intellectual world know people who have been communists who have changed their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?’ The truth is, whether they changed their minds or not after the war, there simply were never that many.
This does not mean that communism attracted a particular type or types of personality open to extremism, authoritarianism and other ‘undemocratic’ traits, although in the Cold War era this was argued by authors anxious to demonstrate the similarity of communism and fascism, but politically angled social psychology need not detain us. In any case there is little base for the liberal belief in a fundamental affinity between ‘extremisms’ of right and left, which made it easy to pass from one extreme to the other. Since the British CP was small, communist workers and students, at least in the late 1930s, were exceptional but they were not untypical. I can detect no common personality traits among my Cambridge contemporaries who joined the CP that distinguished them from those who did not join, except perhaps a greater intellectual liveliness. Indeed, in later years, as I met some former comrade again in his post-communist existence as a respectable – though rarely Conservative – middle-class professional, I would sometimes say to myself: ‘To think that I once recruited him and fellows like him into the Party!’ It is less surprising that the workers who joined the Party were, in Britain at least, young, livelier than most, but otherwise typical of their class and trades – mainly engineering, building and in some regions mining. Between the 1930s and 1950s, before A-levels and higher education came within reach of their class, the way in which bright young apprentices or the dynamic young workshop activists would get their political and intellectual education was through the Party. It formed the future national leaders of British trade unionism, and, of course, provided the Party itself with capable working-class cadres, which a consciously ‘proletarian’ party insisted on. Contrary to common opinion, intellectuals as such played no significant part in the Party leadership, until the educational revolution removed the potential exam-passing youth from workshop to college, which therefore became the way into politics or better jobs – and not only in Communist Parties.
Communism was therefore not a way of picking out ‘extremists’ from ‘non-extremist’ personalities, although both poles of the political spectrum may sometimes attract the same clientele, namely persons, usually young, who have a natural taste for adventurous operations or political violence, the sort of people to whom terrorism or direct action appeal. Perhaps Rambo-types have been more attracted to the extreme left since the rise of street confrontation and small-scale armed groups in the aftermath of the student revolt of 1968, with its rhetoric of ‘streetfighting men’. Nevertheless, a life devoted to making revolution is not the same as a life that gets its thrills from irregular warfare or adventure.
Given the tradition and importance of clandestine activities in the Communist Parties, which, with the rarest exceptions (such as Great Britain) were illegal for at least some of their history, there was obviously scope for the life of adventure in the international communist movement of my times, but bolshevism, whose motto was ruthless efficiency rather than romance, did not favour the culture of the bank-robber or commando-raid. It invented the supremacy of the ‘political commissar’ (i.e. the civilian) because it distrusted the impulses of the soldier. It was hostile in theory to individual terrorism. Lenin’s own reaction to such gestures was utterly typical. He could not understand why in 1916 the social democrat Friedrich Adler had publicly shot dead the Prime Minister of the Habsburg Empire as a protest against the First World War. Would it not have been more effective for him, as secretary of the Party, to circulate the branches with a call for a strike?
I have known several communists whose career would interest, and in some cases has interested, the writers of thrillers, but on the whole their ideal of clandestinity, however dangerous, was not buccaneering or self-dramatization. Let me compare the character of Alexander Rado, the head of the extremely important Soviet spy network in wartime Switzerland and the only master spy with whom I have ever spent a somewhat bizarre Christmas in Budapest, and that of his radio operator Alexander Foote, apparently a British double agent, as described in the literature. Foote ‘had not become a secret agent in the first place for ideology, money or patriotism. He made very little money out of spying, abstract political ideas bored him, and M15 did not regard him as a patriot when he eventually returned to Britain. But he was a born adventurer …’2 Rado did not look like a man thirsting for action, but like a comfortable middle-aged businessman whose natural leisure habitat was a central European café śtable. When I met him in 1960, returned to a chair at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest after several years in Stalin’s camps, he was what he had always wanted to be, a geographer and cartographer. He had spent his entire political life since 1918 in and out of clandestine or unavowable activities, always returning to this vocation. Neither fighting – he was the organizer of the armed workers’ brigades destined to head the (aborted) German revolution of 1923 – nor running spy networks diverted him. No doubt he also enjoyed the thrills of that kind of life, but he did not strike me as a man who chose it for that reason. He did what needed doing. ‘When we were young,’ he told me, ‘Rakosi [the former Hungarian communist leader and dictator, at the time of this conversation retired in exile in the USSR] used to say to me ‘‘Sandor, why not become a full-time professional revolutionary?’’ Well, look at him and look at me. It was a good thing that I had a proper trade and never gave it up.’ Communist Parties were not for romantics.
On the contrary, they were for organization and routine. That is why bodies of a few thousand members – like the Vietnamese CP at the end of the Second World War – could, given the occasion, become the makers of states. The secret of the Leninist Party lay neither in dreaming about standing on barricades or even Marxist theory. It can be summed up in two phrases: ‘decisions must be verified’ and ‘Party discipline’. The appeal of the Party was that it got things done when others did not. Life in the Party was almost viscerally anti-rhetorical, which may have helped to produce that culture of endless and almost aggressively boring and, when reprinted in Party publications, sensationally unreadable ‘reports’ which foreign Parties took over from Soviet practice. Even in operatic Italy the young postwar red intellectuals made fun of the traditional style of speech at the great public meetings on which the faithful still insisted. Not that we were unmoved by powerful oratory, and we recognized its importance on public occasions and in ‘mass work’. Even so, speeches are not a major part of my communist memories, except for one in Paris in the first months of the Spanish Civil War by La Pasionaria, large, black in widow’s weeds, in the tense emotion-charged silence of a packed Vel d’hiv indoor arena. Though hardly any of the audience knew Spanish, we knew exactly what she was telling us. I can still remember the words ‘y las madres, y sus hijos’ (and the mothers, and their sons) floating slowly from the microphones above us, like dark albatrosses.
The
Leninist ‘vanguard party’ was a combination of discipline, business efficiency, utter emotional identification and and a sense of total dedication. Let me illustrate. In 1941, pinned down by a fallen beam, our comrade Freddie thought she would die in the fire set off by the only enemy bomb that hit Cambridge during the Second World War. My friend Tedy Prager, who vainly tried to free her until the fire services came – he lived in what had been my old cottage in Round Church Street, almost within arm’s reach of the explosion – tells the story:
My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam, but nothing moved. Poor Freddie … It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin … Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Good-bye boys, good-bye Tedy.3
Freddie did not die, though she has spent the rest of her life with legs amputated below the knees. At the time it would not have struck any of us as surprising that the last words of a dying Party member should be for the Party, for Stalin and for the comrades. (In those days among foreign communists the thought of Stalin was as sincere, unforced, unsullied by knowledge and universal as the genuine grief most of us felt in 1953 at the death of a man whom no Soviet citizen would have wanted, or dared, to call by a pet name like ‘Uncle Joe’ in Britain or ‘Big whiskers’ [baffone] in Italy.) The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return, we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity.
The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it’, as we were expected to. For, unlike fascism, which demanded automatic abdication and service to the Leader’s will (‘Mussolini is always right’) and the unconditional duty of obeying military orders, the Party – even at the peak of Stalin’s absolutism – rested its authority, at least in theory, on the power to convince of reason and ‘scientific socialism’. After all, it was supposed to be based on a ‘Marxist analysis of the situation’, which every communist was meant to learn how to make. ‘The line’, however predetermined and unchangeable, had to be justified in terms of such an analysis, and, except where circumstances made this physically impossible, ‘discussed’ and approved at all levels of the Party. In Communist Parties outside power, where members were not too scared to pursue the ancient left-wing tradition of argument, the leadership had to go through the process of repeating its case for the official line until there was no room for doubt about what we were expected to vote for. (The technical term for this process was ‘patiently explaining’.) After the vote, ‘democratic centralism’ required that argument should give way to unanimous action.
We did what it ordered us to do. In countries such as Britain it did not order us to do anything very dramatic. Indeed, but for their conviction that what they were doing was saving the world, communists might have been bored by the routine activities of their Party, conducted in the usual ritual of the British labour movement (comrade chairman, branch minutes, treasurer’s report, resolutions, contacts, literature sales and the rest) in private homes or unwelcoming meeting rooms. But whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. After all, most Soviet and Comintern cadres in the period of Stalin’s terror, who knew what might await them, followed the order to return to Moscow. If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so. After 1933 the German Party in exile ordered Margaret Mynatt (later the inspiration behind the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels) to go to England from Paris, since they needed someone in London and, as known German communists were not admitted, a comrade with valid British documentation was needed. Without a moment’s hesitation she abandoned the love of her life (or so she later told me) and went. She never saw him (or was it a her?) again. Party dues in Auschwitz, I was told after the war by a former inmate, were paid in the inconceivably precious currency of cigarettes, and it says something about the Party’s capacity for collective resistance that they could procure them.
To have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable. Admittedly, since Party members were also apt to be emancipated in their attitude to sex, it is to be supposed that not all militants eschewed completely apolitical sex, but even for the Comintern agent in Brecht’s wonderful poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later), his casual couplings (‘der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos’) were yet another proof that the Party’s work came before everything that was personal. I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the Party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a communist in the full sense of my youth.
It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history. Even the image – if there was one – of the wonderful hopes we had for human life has been overlaid by the range of goods, services, prospects and personal options which are today available to the majority of men and women in the incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the West. Marx and Engels wisely refrained from describing what communist society would be like, but most of what little they said about what individual life would be like under it, now seems to be the result, without communism, of that social production of potentially almost unlimited plenty, and that miraculous technological progress, which they expected in some undetermined future, but which is taken for granted today.
Rather than reconstruct in my eighties what made us communists, let me quote from shortly after the 1956 crisis, when I was closer to the convictions of youth. I wrote that even the most sophisticated revolutionaries share ‘that utopianism or ‘‘impossibilism’’ which makes even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical pain at the realization that the coming of socialism will not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all problems’. I observed that ‘revolutionary movements … appear to prove that almost no change is beyond their reach’.
Liberty, equality and above all fraternity may become real for the moment in those stages of the great social revolutions which revolutionaries who live through them describe in the terms normally reserved for romantic love. Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice …Theirs is at such times a miniature version of the ideal society, in which all men are brothers and sacrifice everything for the common good without abandoning their individuality. If this is possible within the movement, why not everywhere?
By this time I had recognized, with Milovan Djilas, who has written wonderfully well of the psychology of revolutionaries, that ‘these are the morals of a sect’, but that is precisely what gave them such force as engines of political change.4
It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed. However, three further elements distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations to a new society. First, Marxism, which demonstrated with the methods of science the certainty of our victory, a prediction tested and verified by the victory of proletarian revolution over one sixth of the earth’s surface and the advances of revolution in the 1940s. Marx had shown why it could never have happened before in human history, and why it could and was destined to happen now, as indeed it did. Today the foundations of this certainty that we knew where history was going have co
llapsed, notably the belief that the industrial working class would be the agency of change. In the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ they looked firm.
Second, there was internationalism. Ours was a movement for all humanity and not for any particular section of it. It represented the ideal of transcending selfishness, individual and collective. Time and again young Jews who began as Zionists became communists because, obvious as the sufferings of the Jews were, they were only part of universal oppression. Julius Braunthal wrote, describing his conversion to socialism in Vienna at the start of the century: ‘I felt sorry for my Zionist friends whom I had deserted; but I hoped I would be able to persuade them one day to understand that the smaller aim has to give way to the bigger.’5 With retrospective bitterness disguised as cynicism my New York colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller describes her conversion to communism in a Hungarian Zionist work camp in 1947 at the age of eighteen:
We lived in community, we felt we belonged together. We needed neither money nor the rich … I didn’t like the rich, today I am ashamed of it. I abominated the black market dealers, the dollar speculators, the men of rapacity and greed. No problem! I’d stay loyal for ever to the poor. So, crazy chick that I was, I joined the Communist Party to be with the poor. 6
In practice, national or other collective or historical identities were far more important than we then supposed. Indeed, communism probably made its greatest impact outside Europe, where it had no effective rival in the fight against national or imperial oppression. Ho Chi Minh, the liberator of Vietnam, chose as his nom-de-guerre in the Comintern ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Chin Peng, who led the communist insurgency and jungle guerrillas in Malaya, though less successfully, began as a youthful patriot who first turned to communism when he abandoned hope in the ability of the Kuomintang Party to liberate China. He told me so himself, an elderly Chinese gentleman of intellectual interests looking most unlike a former jungle guerrilla leader, in the improbable environment of the Athenaeum’s Coffee Room. Nevertheless, even for those who began with limited aims, even for those who abandoned the wider hope when it disappointed the narrower one, like the many communist Jews who left the Party under the impact of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, communism represented the ideal of transcending egoism and of service to all humanity without exception.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 17
