Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  But there was a third element in the revolutionary convictions of Party communists. What awaited them on the road to the millennium was tragedy. In the Second World War communists were vastly over-represented in most resistance movements, not simply because they were efficient and brave, but because they had always been ready for the worst: for spying, clandestinity, interrogation and armed action. Lenin’s vanguard Party was born in persecution, the Russian Revolution in war, the Soviet Union in civil war and famine. Until the revolution communists could expect no rewards from their societies. What professional revolutionaries could expect was jail, exile and, quite often, death. Unlike the anarchists, the IRA or movements of Islamic suicide bombers, the Comintern did not make much of a cult of individual martyrs, though the French CP after liberation appreciated the attraction of the (true) fact that during the Resistance it had been ‘le parti des fusillés’ (the party of those executed by firing squad). Communists were undoubtedly the quintessential enemy for almost every government, including even the relatively few which allowed their Parties legal existence, and we were constantly reminded of the treatment they could expect in jails and concentration camps. And yet we saw ourselves less as sufferers or potential casualties than as combatants in an omnipresent war. As Brecht wrote in his great 1930s elegy on the Comintern professionals, An die Nochgeborenen:

  I ate my meals between battles I lay down to sleep among the murderers.

  Hardness is the soldier’s quality, and it ran even through our very political jargon (‘uncompromising’, ‘unbending’, ‘steel-hard’, ‘monolithic’). Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the bolshevik. It was the necessary response to the times. As Brecht wrote:

  You, who will emerge from the flood In which we have perished Remember also When you speak of our weaknesses The black times You have escaped

  But the point of Brecht’s poem, which speaks to communists of my generation as no other does, is that hardness was forced upon the revolutionaries.

  We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves.

  Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.7 Nobody could anticipate the scale of human suffering in the Second World War until it happened. However, it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or wilful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side. In any case, we were not liberals. Liberalism was what had failed. In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves. Since we were not in power, or likely to be, what we expected was to be prisoners rather than jailers.

  There were Communist Parties and functionaries, such as André ś Marty, who appears in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who took pride in their necessary ‘steel-hard’ bolshevism, not least the Soviet Communist Party, where it combined with the absolutist tradition of unlimited power and the brutality of everyday Russian existence to produce the hecatombs of the Stalin era. The British CP was not among them, but Party pathology appeared in more masochistic and peaceful forms. To take a case in point: the late Andrew Rothstein (1898–1994). Andrew was a rather boring, round-faced petit-bourgeois figure, who defended whatever needed defending in the Soviet Union, the son of a more dramatic Russian old bolshevik, Theodore Rothstein, who had once been a Soviet diplomat and had written a pioneering book of Marxist labour history. We shared a cold bedroom once at a conference of the Association of University Teachers, and I still recall him carefully unpacking his toilet set and slippers. Possibly I was mandated to protest against the failure of the University of London’s School of Slavonic Studies, where he taught Soviet Institutions, to renew his time-limited contract as a lecturer. A founder member of the British CP, and obviously with good Russian connections, he had been a leading figure in the Party in the 1920s, but in 1929–30 his opposition to the Comintern’s ultra-left course, not to mention his vitriolic temper and lack of proletarian bona fides, led to his fall. He was exiled (minus his wife and children) to Moscow, his Party membership transferred to the CPSU. Luckily for his survival he was soon allowed back into Britain and the British CP on condition that for the rest of his career he occupied only local functions in the Party. Yet he remained a totally loyal, totally committed communist. Indeed, I had the impression that for him, as for others like him, the test of his devotion to the cause was the readiness to defend the indefensible. It was not the Christian ‘ credo quia absurdum’ (I believe it is because it is absurd), but rather the constant challenge: ‘Test me some more: as a bolshevik I have no breaking-point.’ When the British CP finally went out of existence in 1991, he became, at the age of ninety-three, the first member of the tiny hard-line Communist Party of Britain which succeeded it.

  I doubt whether any communist of my generation would have been inspired to join the Party, or stayed in the Party, by the career of Rothstein. And yet we had our heroes and models – Georgi Dimitrov, in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 who stood up alone in the Nazi court, defying Hermann Göring and defending the good name of communism and, incidentally, of the small but proud Bulgarian nation to which he belonged. If I did not leave the Party in 1956, it was not least because the movement bred such men and women. I am thinking primarily of one such figure, barely known in his lifetime, un-remembered except by comrades and friends today. I still recall him, small, sharp-eyed, quizzical, as we walked on a Sunday morning through the sun-dappled and carefully marked footpaths of the Wienerwald hills, among occasional couples of hiking acquaintances, white-haired men and women, who had organized illegal Party and socialist meetings in the remoter parts of those woods before they survived the concentration camps. The open air had always been the characteristic environment of Austrian revolutionaries. There is probably no man for whom I have a greater admiration.

  In mid-August 1944 he had written his last words in cell 155 of block 2 and cell 90 of block 1 of Fresnes prison in Paris:

  Franz Feuerlich, communist Franz Feuerlich, Austrian will be executed 15 August 1944 On the eve of liberation?8

  But Ephraim Feuerlicht (1913–79), whom we all knew by his Party name Franz Marek, was lucky. The liberation of Paris saved him. He had been a leading figure in the French Communist Party’s MOI (Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée) organization, under the Czech Artur London (later victim of the Stalinist trials), whose Spaniards, Jews, Italians, Poles and others played such a disproportionately large and heroic part in the armed Resistance in France. (Those whose image of Jews under fascism is that of eternal victims, should remember the fighting record of socialist and communist Jews, from the 7,000 who fought in the International Brigades to the MOI and their equivalents in other occupied countries.) Among other things Franz was in charge of work with the German troops themselves. He did not talk about those times, except once to our son Andy, then about ten, who wanted to know what sort of things you did in the Resistance. He said that mostly you kept out of the way of the people who wanted to arrest you, but that he had had a few narrow escapes. Born in Przemysl, which is today in the Ukraine, brought up in the deepest poverty in interwar Vienna – Franz claimed that he never had a new jacket and trousers until he became a professional revolutionary – he became politicized as a Zionist at the age of fifteen, but converted to communism from the most Marxist of the Zionist groups, the Hashomer Hazair, though he did not join the Communist Party until after the Austrian civil war of 1934. Not surprisingly, it was the immediate consequence of a few months spent wandering round pre-Hitler Germany in 1931–2. He became a professional almost from the start, having demonstrated what were clearly exceptional abilities for clandestine work to the comrade sent to instruct the Austrians in the unaccustomed situation of illeg
ality. Though he insists that the secret of such work was punctuality and pedantry about details, in short, the strict bolshevik ‘rules of conspiracy’, as a man in his early twenties he enjoyed the romantic side of the work. He liked to recall that he occupied what had once been the office of Dimitrov in the ninth district – Vienna had always been the International’s centre for the Balkans. Soon he was setting up a Vienna office for the Romanian CP (all 300 of them) and organizing its participation in the forthcoming Seventh World Congress, before being promoted to head the ‘Apparat’ of the illegal Austrian Party – communications, safe houses, frontier crossings, and the provision and distribution of literature – and later its entire agit-prop activities. No doubt it was this that brought him to Paris after the Anschluss.

  He returned to Austria after the war as a member of the Austrian CP’s Political Bureau, wrote a brief and luminous book on France, and edited the Party’s theoretical journal. In 1968 he briefly succeeded in decoupling the Austrian CP from the USSR after condemning its invasion of Czechoslovakia, but Moscow soon reasserted itself. Marek was expelled, but continued as editor of an independent left-wing monthly the Wiener Tagebuch and (together with myself and some others) planner and editor – his only regular income now came from it – of Giulio Einaudi’s ambitious Storia del Marxismo. He fell to a long-awaited heart attack in the summer of 1979. He died a communist. The Italian Communist Party was represented at his funeral. What he left at his death, give or take a few books, could be packed into two suitcases.

  A man of strong, lucid intelligence and remarkable learning, he could have been a thinker, a writer, an eminent academic. But he had chosen not to interpret the world but to change it. Had he lived in a larger country and in other times, he might have been a major political figure in a humanized communism. He continued on this road to the end, resisting the temptations of a post-political refuge in literature or graduate seminar. In his way, he was a hero of our times, which were and are bad times.

  II

  I have so far written about communists outside power. What about the Party members I have known who faced the very different situation in communist regimes, where it brought not persecution but privilege? They were not outsiders but insiders, not opposers but rulers, often of countries most of whose inhabitants did not like them. The police was not their enemy but their agency. And for them glorious future after the revolution was not a dream but now.

  They did not have the advantage, which maintained our morale, of enemies who could be fought with conviction and a clear conscience: capitalism, imperialism, nuclear annihilation. Unlike us, they could not avoid responsibility for what was being done in the name of communism in their countries, including the injustices. This is what made the Khrushchev Report of 1956 especially traumatic for them. ‘If ‘‘the laws of history’’ could no longer take the blame for these terrors, but Stalin as a person, then what about our own co-responsibility?’ wrote an exiled Czech reform-communist of my acquaintance. 9 He had been in the public prosecution service in the 1950s.

  In my lifetime there were three generations of such communists who had crossed this threshold of power: the pre-Stalinist ‘old bolsheviks’, few of whom survived the 1930s and none of whom I knew; those who made or experienced the great change – the interwar and resistance generations of communists; and those who grew up under the regimes which collapsed in 1989. There is nothing to be said about the last of these. By the time they joined what was a public elite, they knew the rules of the game by which their countries lived. Nor is there anything I can say about the Soviet Union. I have real personal acquaintance with only one member of the Soviet generation, though he was not a Russian but a second-generation foreign communist brought up in the USSR before returning to his own country, the late Tibor Szamuely of Hungary.

  He was a very bright, squat, ugly and witty historian, nephew of one of the most eminent figures in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had been brought up in the USSR, where his father was executed and his mother deported. He himself, after almost starving in the siege of Leningrad, claimed also to have had the usual spell in a camp during the dictator’s final lunacies. He returned to Hungary after Stalin’s death, cynical, but officially communist, and Party secretary in the university history faculty, where his line was ultra-hard, but somehow no students or colleagues were expelled or penalized. However, when I first met him in London in about 1959 he made a beeline for the most anti-communist contacts. Like so many central European Jews, he was a passionate anglophile. Perhaps he was already preparing to jump ship as a freedom-lover, which he did a few years later, becoming an anti-communist publicist for Conservative publications and a close friend of the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis, equally reactionary and funnier but notably less intelligent. In spite of what he must have regarded as my illusions we liked one another and got on extremely well. It was through him that I first went to Hungary in 1960, though, as a high official – I think he was then vice-rector of the university – he was not pleased at my insistence on visiting the great Marxist philosopher George Lukács, who had recently been allowed by the Russians to return to Budapest. Lukács had been seized and exiled after the 1956 revolution and now sat in his apartment above the Danube once again like an ancient high priest in civilian clothes, smoking Havana cigars. It was in Tibor’s flat that I had the memorable Christmas dinner with the master spy. It was to our flat in Bloomsbury that he chose to come directly from the airport with wife and children

  1. Three sisters Grün: (left to right) Mimi, Nelly, Gretl (Vienna, 1912)

  2. Three brothers Hobsbaum: (left to right) Percy, Ernest, Sidney (Vienna, early 1920s)

  3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum in Egypt, c. 1917

  4. Second mother: Aunt Gretl (England, c. 1934)

  5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter, EH outside alpine TB sanatorium (Austria, 1930)

  6. Camping in England with Ronnie Hobsbaum (1935)

  7. School-leaving photograph (sans EH) of my class at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium (Berlin, 1936)

  8. Paris 1936: the Popular Front government celebrates Bastille Day. EH (top right) and uncle Sidney (centre) on French Socialist Party newsreel truck

  9. Paris 1937: world student conference with Spanish Civil War posters. EH (seated) interpreting

  10. Red Cambridge: James Klugman (top row, centre of window) with Cambridge helpers and international delegates to Congress of World Student Assembly (Paris, August 1939). To his right are Pieter Keuneman (Sri Lanka) and P. N. Haksar (India)

  11. Red Cambridge: the photo of John Cornford (Cambridge 1915–Spain 1936) which stood on so many of our mantelpieces

  12. Moscow 1954: British Communist historians’ delegation under portraits of Stalin and Lenin. (left side, left to right) Christopher Hill, A. L. Morton, interpreter, EH

  13. USSR 1954: historians at Zagorsk. (second left to right ) Hill, Morton, interpreter, EH

  14. Italy: Rome 1958. Speaking at a conference on Gramsci Studies

  15. Italy: Genoa 1997. Eightieth birthday cake, modelling theatre where the occasion was celebrated and the author’s book. Inscription: ‘The century is short but sweet. Birthday wishes’

  16. Italy: Mantua 2000. Reading the leftwing daily Il Manifesto.

  when he had finally arranged (via a posting to Ghana) to get the whole family out of socialism for good.

  It was not the horrors of socialism that had finally driven him out, but excess of cynicism. For, though he was received in Britain as a victim of Soviet repression, in fact he had taken no part in the 1956 revolution. Indeed, after its defeat he reestablished the Party unit at the university. Szamuely’s career therefore advanced rapidly in the next years. Unfortunately in the course of those years, under the benevolent eye of the Kadar government, the sympathizers with the 1956 movement, that is to say the bulk of communist intellectuals and academics, quietly re-established their positions. The career of the Soviet collaborator who had risen so steeply after 1956 went into a decline. But, of
course, he had no doubt been as contemptuous of the illusions of the 1956 revolutionaries as of the Soviet regime. Taking another step away from the Party world of my youth, in subsequent years I successfully resisted the temptation to say anything in public about the 1956 record of the great freedom-lover. It was more than the reluctance to score what would have been, after all, no more than a passing political debating point at the cost of embarrassing a personal friend. Marlene and I recognized that there was a principle here: there are times when a line must be drawn between personal relations and political views. And yet, excellent company, charming and witty as he was, we and the Szamuelys drifted apart. Perhaps private and public lives are not as separable as all that.

  Czechs, East Germans and Hungarian academics were the Party members in the Soviet bloc I saw most of. Of the major political figures of the regimes I met only one or two briefly, notably Andras Hegedüs, the last Hungarian premier under Rakosi, who recycled himself as an academic sociologist after 1956, travelled, protected dissidents but said little, though allowing it to be understood that the quality of the Party leadership had declined after his day. None of my friends was a Party figure, although Ivan Berend turned down the offer to become a minister of education in his country, Hungary. He was and is a superb historian, President of his country’s Academy of Sciences under communism, whose merits were recognized, after the end of communism, by election as President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Almost all the Czechs I knew, some of whom dated back to the pre-war English emigration, became supporters of the Prague Spring of 1968, and some, such as my friend Antonin Liehm, played a notable part in it as editor of the leading cultural-political journal of the time, Literarny listy. We first met not through politics but as jazz-lovers at a Prague festival, but jazz, like the rehabilitation of Kafka, was an oppositional activity in the run-up to 1968, though I am not aware of any political background to the publication of my The Jazz Scene, the only one of my books translated into Czech under communism. After 1968 the Party reformers were either forced into emigration or into window-cleaning, coal-heaving or similar activities, if not old enough to be pensioners. Some, like Edward Goldstücker, a major figure in the Prague Spring as President of the Writers’ Union, had already been jailed for years in the Stalinist persecution of the early 1950s. (We saw him in 1996 in Prague shortly before his death: the authorities of the new Czechoslovakia had denied him the status of one persecuted by communism.) They lost their country for good for, when communism ended, nobody wanted them any more.