So we swallowed our doubts and mental reservations and defended it. Or rather, because it was easier, we attacked the capitalist camp for preferring a West Germany run by old Nazis, and soon actually to be rearmed against the USSR, to an East Germany run by old prisoners of Nazi concentration camps; for preferring the old imperialism to the movements of anti-imperial liberation, and a USA which made Franco’s Spain its military base against those who had supported the Republic.
Even so, it was not easy. Being a communist in the West was no problem. The trouble was the experience of communism in the East. But I was soon to see this myself. There were the first signs of some slight thawing on the fringes of the frozen ice-cap of Stalin’s USSR. In 1952, even before the terrible old man died, the historian E. A. Kosminsky was allowed a brief visit to Britain with his wife for the first time since, long ago in the 1920s, he had worked in London on those problems of English manorial history in the Middle Ages that had made him famous in the world of historical scholarship. I took him to the British Museum, for he wanted to use the great round Reading Room again. Could he have a short-term ticket? A lady librarian asked whether he had ever used the library before. He had. ‘Ah,’ she said, looking his name up in the files. ‘No, of course there will be no problem. Do you still live in Torrington Square?’ It was a moment of great emotion for him. A few months later, after Stalin’s death but before post-Stalinism, he arranged for the Soviet Academy of Sciences to invite a group of British Marxist historians to the USSR. It was my first, but not quite my only, experience of the country of the October Revolution. I did not much want to go there again. That visit helped to prepare me for the crucial turning-point in the lives of all communist intellectuals, and in the world communist movement, which is the main subject of the next chapter: the crisis of 1956.
12
Stalin and After
I
I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who has actually seen Stalin; admittedly no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3in) by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, having so far (2002) resisted eleven post-Soviet years of attempts to remove him, Stalin was displayed only in the brief period between his death in 1953 and 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated ‘destalinization’ not many months later, was already occupying the post of General Secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow.
‘We’ were four members of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the academic Christmas vacation of 1954–5, as part of the still painfully slow process of extricating Soviet intellectual life from its isolation: Christopher Hill, already well known as a historian of the English Revolution, the Byzantinist Robert Browning, myself and the freelance scholar Leslie (A. L.) Morton, whose Marxist People’s History of England enjoyed the official imprimatur of the Soviet authorities. Probably only Robert Browning, a Scotsman of amazingly wide-ranging erudition and linguistic competence, who gave a paper on the recent decipherment of the Cretan Linear B inscriptions, realized quite how cut off Soviet scholars had been from literature in the English language. (Contacts with France had never been quite so decayed.) Since none of the visitors specialized in Russian history, where the real strength of our hosts naturally lay, on balance they probably benefited more from our conversations than we did.
What did we expect to find in the USSR? We were not totally dependent on the official guide/translators provided for us by the academy, for two of us knew Russian – Christopher Hill, who had spent a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had friends there, and the apparently almost accentless Robert Browning. Nevertheless, the USSR two years after Stalin’s death, and indeed for several years thereafter, was not a place given to informal communication with foreigners even in Russian. Not that an official ‘delegation’ invited by the academy, a body with considerable status and clout in Soviet society at that time, left much room for informal contacts or free time. For even the programme of entertainments and cultural visits was geared to the importance of the host organization and, by extrapolation, of its foreign guests. Outside buildings, our feet were barely allowed to touch the ground.
In short, as intellectual VIPs – an unfamiliar role – we almost certainly were treated to more culture than other visiting foreigners, as well as an embarrassing share of products and privileges in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for instance, be whisked straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow–Leningrad overnight train, to a matinée children’s performance of Swan Lake at the Kirov, installed in the directors’ box, to which, after the performance, the prima ballerina – I think it was Alla Shelest – was brought straight from the stage and still sweating, to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular importance who found themselves momentarily in the location of power. Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at the memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad prepared to go home and the – overwhelmingly Jewish – musicians filed out of the orchestra pit. It was not a good advertisement for communism. But of Russia and Russian life we saw little except the middle-aged women, presumably war widows, hauling stones and clearing rubble from the wintry streets.
What is more, even the intellectuals’ basic resource, ‘looking it up’, was not available. There were no telephone directories, no maps, no public timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be learned about Russia by visiting it in 1954 that could not have been learned outside.
Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing achievement of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s under one of the legendary ‘hard men’ of Stalinism, Lazar Kaganovich, a dream of a future city of palaces for a hungry and pauperized present, but a modern underground which worked – and, I am told, still does – like clockwork. There was the basic difference between the Russians who took decisions and the ones who did not – as we joked among ourselves, they could be recognized by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads, or had fallen out with the effort, the ones who didn’t could be recognized by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year’s Eve party at the Scientists’ Club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone suggested a contest in remembering proverbs – not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases about sharp things, such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ (needles) or ‘burying the hatchet’. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village wisdom about knives, axes, sickles and sharp or cutting implements and their operations until the contest had to be stopped. That, after all, was what they brought with them from the illiterate villages in which so many of them had been born.
It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves. Unlike the ‘peoples’ democracies’ and ‘really existing socialisms’ of the rest of Europe, where communists fighting oppression came from persecution to power at the end of the war, in the USSR we found ourselves in a country long governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which having a career implied being a member of that Party, or at least conform
ing to its requirements and official statements. Probably some we met were convinced as well as loyal communists, but theirs was an inward-looking Soviet conviction rather than an ecumenical one, although it is likely that we would have had more in common with some of those we asked to meet but who were ‘unfortunately prevented from coming to Moscow by problems of health’, ‘temporarily absent in Gorki’ or not yet returned from the camps. It was much easier to sense what the ‘Great Patriotic War’ meant, privately and emotionally, to the people we saw – particularly in Leningrad, survivor of the terrible wartime siege – than what communism meant to them. At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland Station in the marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I shall never get used to calling St Petersburg, what we thought about the October Revolution was not the same as what our guides from the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences thought.
I returned from Moscow politically unchanged if depressed, and without any desire to go there again. I did return but only fleetingly, in 1970 for a world historical congress, and in the last years of the USSR for brief tourist excursions from Helsinki, where I spent several summers at a UN Research Institute.5
The trip to the USSR in 1954–5 was my first contact with the countries of what was later called ‘really existing socialism’, for my visit to the 1947 World Youth Festival in Prague occurred before the Party had taken full power in the new ‘peoples’ democracies’. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia it had just emerged, with 40 per cent, as by far the largest party in a genuine multiparty general election. Apart from getting to know several of their historians personally, I made direct contact with the other socialist countries only after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet CP which inaugurated the global crisis of the communist movement, though in the case of my first visit to the German Democratic Republic in April–May 1956, before the publication of Khrushchev’s public attack on Stalin. But by that time everything had changed.
II
There are two ‘ten days that shook the world’ in the history of the revolutionary movement of the last century: the days of the October Revolution, described in John Reed’s book of that title, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (14–25 February 1956). Both divide it suddenly and irrevocably into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. I cannot think of any comparable event in the history of any major ideological or political movement. To put it in the simplest terms, the October Revolution created a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress destroyed it.
The world communist movement had been constructed, on Leninist lines, as a single disciplined army dedicated to the transformation of the world under a centralized and quasi-military command situated in the only state in which ‘the proletariat’ (i.e. the Communist Party) had taken power. It became a movement of global significance only because it was linked to the USSR, which in turn became the country that tore the guts out of Nazi Germany and emerged from the war as a superpower. Bolshevism had transformed one weak regime in a vast but backward country into a superpower. The victory of the cause in other countries, the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial world, depended on its support and on its sometimes reluctant but real protection. Whatever its weaknesses, its very existence proved that socialism was more than a dream. And the passionate anti-communism of the Cold War crusaders, which saw communists exclusively as agents of Moscow, welded them more firmly to the USSR.
As time went on, and especially during the years of the battles against fascism, the effectively organized revolutionary left had become virtually identified with the Communist Parties. They had absorbed or eliminated other brands of social revolutionaries. While the Communist Universal Church gave rise to one set after another of schismatics and heretics, none of the rebel groups it shed, expelled or killed had ever suceeded in establishing itself more than locally as a rival, until Tito did so in 1948 – but then, unlike any of the others, he was already head of a revolutionary state. As 1956 began, the joint strength of the three rival Trotskyite groups in Britain has been estimated as fewer than 100 persons. 1 In practice since 1933 the CPs had virtually cornered Marxist theory, largely through the Soviets’ zeal for the distribution of the works of the ‘classics’. It had become increasingly clear that, for Marxists, ‘the Party’ – wherever they lived, and with all their possible reservations – was the only game in town. The great French classicist J. P. Vernant, a communist before the war, broke with the Party by joining the Gaullist Resistance from the start against the then Party line, and had a most distinguished war as ‘Colonel Berthier’, and compagnon de la Libération, but he rejoined the Party after the war, because he remained a revolutionary. Where else could he go? The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, but in his heart a frustrated political leader, said to me, when I first met him at the peak of the communist crisis of 1956–7: ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.’ Unlike me, he never reconciled himself to the fact that he was politically significant only by having become a writer. After all, was not the business of communists changing the world and not merely interpreting it?
III
Why did Khrushchev’s uncompromising denunciation of Stalin destroy the foundations of the global solidarity of communists with Moscow? After all, it continued a process of managed destalinization that had been advancing steadily for more than two years, even though other Communist Parties resented the familiar Soviet habit of suddenly, and without previous information, confronting them with the need to justify some unexpected reversal of policy. (In 1955 Khrushchev’s reconciliation with Tito particularly exasperated comrades who, seven years earlier, had been forced, almost certainly against their will, to hail his excommunication from the True Church.) Indeed, until the leaking of the Khrushchev speech to a wider public, including that of the Communist Parties, the Twentieth Congress looked simply like another, admittedly rather larger, step away from the Stalin era.
I think we must distinguish here between its impact on the leadership of Communist Parties, especially those who already governed states, and on the communist rank-and-file. Naturally, both had accepted the mandatory obligations of a ‘democratic centralism’, which had quietly dropped what measure of democracy it might originally have contained.2 And all of them, except perhaps the Chinese CP which nevertheless acknowledged the primacy of Stalin, accepted Moscow as the commander of the disciplined army of world communism in the global Cold War. Both shared the extraordinary, genuine and unforced admiration for Stalin as the leader and embodiment of the Cause, and the well-attested sense of grief and personal loss which communists unquestionably felt at his death in 1953. While this was natural enough for the rank-and-file, for whom he was a remote image of poor people’s triumph and liberation – ‘the fellow with the big moustache’ who might still come one day to get rid of the rich once and for all – it was undoubtedly shared by hard-bitten leaders like Palmiro Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at close quarters, and even by his real or prospective victims. Molotov remained loyal to him for thirty-three years after his death, though in his last paranoiac years Stalin had forced him to divorce his wife, had her arrested, interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing Molotov himself for a show trial. Anna Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania, wept when she heard of Stalin’s death, even though she had not liked him, had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to be thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, agent of Truman and Zionism. (‘Don’t cry,’ said her interrogator. ‘If Stalin were still alive you’d be dead.’3) No wonder that the impassioned attack on his record, and on the ‘cult of personality’, by Khrushchev sent shockwaves through the international communist movement.
On the other hand, much as their leaders admired Stalin and accepted the ‘guiding role’ of the Soviet Party, Communist Parties, in or outside power, were neither ‘monolithic’, in the Stalinist phrase, nor simple executive agen
ts of CPSU policy. And since at least 1947 they had been told to do things by Moscow, often politically prejudicial, which they, or at least substantial sections of their leadership, would never have done themselves. While Stalin lived and the Moscow leadership and power remained ‘monolithic’, that was the end of it. Destalinization reopened closed options, especially since the men in the Kremlin patently lacked the old authority, and still faced strong opposition from the old Stalinists. Because Moscow was (briefly) no longer under monolithic rule. In short, the cracks in the structure of the region under Soviet control could now open. Within a few months of the Twentieth Congress they did so, visibly, in Poland and Hungary. And this in turn aggravated the crises within the non-governmental Communist Parties.
What disturbed the mass of their members was that the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds came, not from ‘the bourgeois press’, whose stories, if read at all, could be rejected a priori as slanders and lies, but from Moscow itself. It was impossible not to take notice of it, but also impossible to know what loyal believers should make of it. Even those who ‘had strong suspicions … [about the facts revealed] amounting to moral certainty for years before Khrushchev spoke’4 were shocked at the sheer extent, hitherto not fully realized, of Stalin’s mass murders of communists. (The Khrushchev Report said nothing about the others.) And no thinking communist could escape asking himself or herself some serious questions.
Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that at the start of 1956 no leadership of any non-state Communist Party seriously thought that destalinization implied a fundamental revision of the role, objectives and history of such Parties. Nor did they expect major troubles from their membership, since the people who remained Party members were those who had resisted the propaganda of the cold warriors for ten years. Yet, probably because of their very confidence, this time they failed to carry a substantial number of their members with them.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 25
