My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  The riffraff is not the same as the people, writes André Maurois in his History of France, whereby he clearly seeks to emphasize the difference between an individual’s social origin and his behavior. Collaborationist and totalitarian regimes, however, usually call the riffraff the people and rule only on their behalf.

  Self-Criticism

  With the development of science and the method of its speculation, the notion spread that the knowledge of each one of us is limited by both our abilities and the overall level of understanding. It is therefore accepted that most of our conclusions will most likely not be eternally valid; we might be mistaken. We are willing to admit, even publicly, our mistakes.

  Such a way of thinking was, of course, until recently unique and condemned. Our forefathers not only possessed a firmly established set of values but also professed firm and eternally valid truths. Even Socrates was accused and condemned for not recognizing the gods that were recognized by the community, and for thereby corrupting the youth. According to the Evangelists, Jesus was accused of blasphemy because he did not deny that he was the Son of God before the high priest and predicted he would be “seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

  The majority of the most widespread religions oblige believers to accept the truth proclaimed in the recognized and immutable canon. There is one God, the creator of the earth and the heavens and all of creation. His Son, with whom he and the Holy Ghost form a unified entity, is the savior of all who believe in him.

  There is one God, and (only) Muhammad is his prophet. Immutable and obligatory rituals were established. The Christian faith even conducted wars to determine whether believers could consume wine and bread as a symbol of the blood and body of the Lord or whether only the priests enjoyed that right. Other religions established how their temples or mosques could be situated and how one behaves in a house of worship.

  For entire centuries in our lands, the Bible determined not only fundamental moral norms but also fundamental truths about history and the origin of the world and of life. (To be more precise: Those who arrogated to themselves the right to interpret the Bible determined which of the ideas of ancient pre-Christian philosophers and scholars could be reconciled with biblical tidings and what was necessary to reject and perhaps destroy.) Those who doubted their conclusions were pronounced heretics. For centuries, it was an indubitable truth that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it. Not too long ago, it was thought that some women could be proved to be witches, that they flew around at night and participated in sinful sabbaths, that the devil traveled around the world trying to seduce people to sin, that it was possible to buy one’s way out of eternal damnation. Then, one of the most serious sins was to doubt the truths of established power. For centuries, the church ruled over people’s thinking. It introduced confession; it offered spiritual relief because it assumed the right to forgive the sins of all who humbly admitted to breaking the commandments. At the same time it ensured that the priests knew the thinking and disposition of their parishioners, their lesser and greater offenses, as well as any skepticism regarding the established truths.

  At the end of the fourteenth century, the Roman Catholic church organized the Inquisition, whose mission was to make sure that Christians did not deviate from the truths or the practices the church had pronounced as immutable and infallible. Punishment for skeptics was sometimes exile, sometimes imprisonment, sometimes immolation at the stake. Tens of thousands of men and women were murdered for heresy, which sometimes consisted of casting into doubt the actions of the ruling church but often consisted of no offense related to the immutable truths. It was based only on confessions compelled by torture. Every institution, even the Inquisition, needs to prove the legitimacy and necessity of its existence. The inquisitor needed to fight heresy, and if he did not find it, it had to be invented.

  At the same time, each person accused of heresy was offered the opportunity to recant what was called his error, to do penance, to loudly espouse the canonized truths. In a lengthy trial in which Jan Hus defended his teachings, even after he was condemned, he was offered the chance to recant. The proposed recantation read: I have never held nor preached these articles of faith, and if I had, I would have been acting against the truth for I pronounce them as erroneous and swear that I would neither hold nor preach them.

  For the authorities, a heretic who recants is always more valuable than one who perishes in protest. The subjugated heretic is living proof of the invincibility of the one and only truth.

  Two centuries later, Galileo Galilei recanted his teaching concerning the movement of the heavens and thereby saved his life. The Catholic church, despite wide acceptance of the fact that the earth rotates on its axis and orbits around the sun, rehabilitated Galileo only in 1992.

  Totalitarian states, which derive their legitimacy from some modern ideology, likewise require faith in the immutability of proclaimed truths. Perhaps it was precisely this that increased their attractiveness; in the complicated modern world, with its crumbling traditional values, many people were enticed by a world in which values were once again established.

  The sole truth became whatever the dictator proclaimed, whether it was Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Furthermore, Communist ideology offered its holy writ in the classic works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. (The collected works of these holy books stood in the libraries of all secretariats as well as the offices of university professors; no one read them, just as few Nazis read the entirety of Adolf Hitler’s tome.) It was not necessary to read the books (those interested could get their hands on the most important extracts, so-called Red Books, and selected quotes). The dictator was also the highest priest who interpreted the word; he alone could give the eternal truths their obligatory form according to the demands of the moment. Because these truths mostly concerned everyday reality, which they unilaterally described or distorted, in addition to enthusiastic and infatuated followers of this new faith, skeptics could be found. It was necessary to uncover these modern heretics, incriminate them, and condemn them, sometimes to exile, at other times to prison or to death. (Over the course of the several decades of totalitarian rule, their number exceeded many times over the number of heretics condemned throughout the centuries of the Inquisition.)

  Just like heretics, the contemporary skeptics were afforded the opportunity to repent, to recognize and recant their errors. Such repentance was called self-criticism.

  In 1928, the Soviet dictator Stalin published a long article on self-criticism.

  The slogan of self-criticism must not be regarded as something temporary and transient. Self-criticism is a specific method, a Bolshevik method, of training the forces of the Party and of the working class generally in the spirit of revolutionary development. Marx himself spoke of self-criticism as a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution.

  In a society where freedom of expression did not exist, where any attempt to place into doubt the canonized truths—or even the ruling party and its leadership—was considered a crime, self-criticism was accepted as an intellectual or even societal exercise. The action of self-criticism was supported in every permitted organization. Upon the orders of their superiors, it was undergone by functionaries even at the lowest levels, factory foremen, and members of individual organizations or trade unions.

  Artists (always suspected of kowtowing to some decadent trend) were also prompted to perform this ritual act, as were scientists, who were predisposed to being misled by the decadent science of the West. Even the leading party functionaries subjected themselves to self-criticism, usually when the dictator considered it necessary to strengthen his power. Even Stalin himself saved his career at its beginnings through self-criticism.

  Self-criticism became a ritual that had nothing in common with critical self-reflection or even with examining the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the ideas one espoused or actions one performed.

  The not-very-long history of the
Communist movement abounds with the self-abuse of prominent people. The leaders of the movement recant yesterday’s assertions and repent of their previous deeds; writers apologize for their books; philosophers reject, in the name of the ingenious classics of Marxism, those other philosophers whom they recently praised as giants. Because the dictator sometimes changes his opinions, people often recant words spoken and deeds done when they were following orders. Their repentance is supposed to affirm the dictator’s infallibility, and therefore it is accepted. Whoever submits to it heads off his condemnation, but the suspicion clings to him, nevertheless, that in the depths of his soul he has remained a heretic; at the very least he was at one time susceptible to dangerous opinions or skepticism.

  Condemned Communist politicians in the Soviet Union, along with those residing in lands conquered by it, even before they were placed before a court, performed self-criticism in which they recanted and pledged loyalty to the dictator and everything he advocated and carried out. Such self-debasement was merely a desperate attempt to save one’s life.

  At the height of Stalin’s terror, the logic of penitence, as it was understood, resulted in the most perverse form of self-criticism. During the political trials in which the accused, subject to long torture, submissively admitted to deeds they had not performed and to crimes they had not committed, they themselves even asked for the harshest punishment. Because they had in the past conducted self-criticism and promised atonement, their new repentance was no longer mitigating, and they were hanged as a warning to all.

  Without the ritualized act of self-criticism, however, it is difficult for the dictatorship to resist the onslaught of doubt and distrust until the moment finally arrives when the fallacious principles on which it was built are cast into doubt even by those who are paid to endorse and defend it.

  (Secret Police)

  In his History of France, André Maurois writes, Robespierre was all-powerful, and he was undone. For he lost all sense of proportion.

  The three great European revolutions were bloody, and their leaders indeed lost all sense of proportion. Each of them captivated at least a part of his citizens with magnificent plans and promises for a new and better arrangement of society. Among them were followers and admirers in the intelligentsia, workers, and people from the countryside, as well as people from the streets, the rabble, informers, and unreserved administrators of the dictator’s will.

  The dictators murdered their real and presumed opponents; they sent to death even their closest collaborators—Robespierre sent Danton and Hébert; Hitler sent Röhm; Stalin sent practically everyone who had helped him achieve power and perpetrate crimes. The number of victims during Nazism and the Bolshevik Revolution was much greater and the bloodshed worse than during the French Revolution.

  Robespierre’s dictatorship lasted less than two years, and he died on the guillotine. Hitler’s lasted twelve years, until the moment when the führer, defeated in a war he had unleashed, committed suicide. Lenin’s and Stalin’s dictatorship endured for more than thirty-five years until each dictator, at the summit of well-organized ovations and all-encompassing adulation, had died, whether felled by a stroke or by a well-concealed murder.

  What were the differences between Robespierre and these other dictators? Robespierre failed to organize the boisterous rabble, to bring the street completely into his service and under his control. He did not create a secret police force that would surround him with an impenetrable shield and would carry out his plans without bothering about the number of dead left behind.

  The absolute power of the three modern dictators consisted precisely in the ruthless, illegitimate authority of a substantial police force and special guards whose activities were controlled to the very end by the dictators themselves.

  In Russia, just as in Germany, such a police force existed even before the violent change of affairs. Because prerevolutionary Russia was swarming with agents attempting to overthrow the tsarist regime, the political police—called the Okhrana—was large, even by Russian standards, as well as efficient. It monitored revolutionaries not only at home but also if they ventured abroad to more democratic countries. Most scholars agree that the tsar’s Okhrana was the largest and most efficient secret police force of its time (it employed around fifteen thousand agents). As a result of its activities, hundreds of opponents of the tsarist regime spent part of their lives in prison or Siberian exile. On average, seventeen opponents of the tsar perished on the scaffold every year. Among them was Alexandr Ilyich Ulyanov—who planned an assassination of the tsar—the older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who later assumed the name Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, therefore, had a personal reason to detest the Okhrana, but he also recognized its usefulness for safeguarding the state. The architects had to guard vigilantly the postrevolutionary regime and at the same time condemn the police methods it employed. According to the classics of Marxism, all repressive roles of the state would cease to exist after the Socialist revolution. In his extensive study, The State and Revolution, Lenin attempts to lay out, with many citations from Marx and Engels, his opinion of the repressive role of the state after the revolution.

  According to him, the consummation of the proletarian revolution would be the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat. Marxists, claims Lenin, will recognize that it will be necessary for the proletariat to smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, they will shatter it to its very foundations, they will destroy it to the very roots, and they will replace it with a new one.

  *

  The necessity of state terror was theoretically justified. And who better to effect long-term terror than a well-organized police force?

  Later, after Lenin had seized power, he founded a political police force (first it was called Cheka—All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Over the course of three years, under the command of the Polish Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky, this revolutionary police organization, whose task was to liquidate political opponents and essentially everyone who somehow represented the previous regime, employed around a quarter of a million fanatics resolved to carry out the dictator’s will. The number of murdered exceeded ten thousand victims a month. At the same time, immediately after the revolution, the Cheka began organizing the first concentration camps. The Cheka was renamed and reorganized several times, but it continued to serve as a ruthless instrument of the dictatorship. During Stalin’s reign, the number of murdered grew along with the number of concentration camps. After World War II, according to the Soviet model and under the direct leadership of Soviet advisers, affiliated organizations were founded in all countries where Communists had taken power.

  The Nazi dictatorship could avail itself of traditions established by the Bolsheviks and the Italian Fascists, and even the German tradition itself, which had its own semimilitary organizations and associations.

  A few years before the Nazi takeover, Hitler had at his disposal a million-strong organization called the SA, led by the retired artillery captain Ernst Röhm. His fanatical disciple, Heinrich Himmler, commanded a much smaller, but more elite, body: the SS, which he planned to employ as the political police. From the beginning, the members of the SS carried out their orders with ruthless, blind obedience. They committed appalling crimes, from the torture of prisoners to inhuman medical experiments to mass murder in gas chambers.

  One of the leading Nazis, Hermann Göring, had commanded an eighty-thousand-member corps of the Prussian police. He then established the gestapo, based on that model, one of the most efficient secret police forces in the world. In outright cruelty, it was not far behind the state police in the Soviet Union.

  Because the Nazis were the only political party that commanded such large armed units with members willing to do anything, their coup took place incredibly smoothly and much more quickly than the Bolshevik coup (certainly the fact that it took place in the middle of peaceful Europe played a role). On the ver
y first day of the takeover, the police arrested more than fifteen hundred Communist functionaries, who were on a previously drafted list; later they started arresting the functionaries of other political parties. Because there were so many of these and they couldn’t all be crammed into the existing prisons, on March 21, 1933—less than a month after the coup—Himmler established the first concentration camp not far from Dachau in an abandoned munitions factory. Originally it was intended only for five thousand people arrested for interrogation, but after a few years its population swelled to twelve thousand at a time.

  The Nazis had been thoroughly prepared for the coup, so they easily seized absolute power in just a few weeks. Himmler’s SS units quickly penetrated the highest ranks of the secret police, which also assumed control over a growing number of concentration camps.

  In terms of the number of victims, one cannot compare the terror of the first years of Nazi rule to the Bolshevik reign of terror. Nevertheless, the Nazi terror afflicted tens of thousands of German citizens and in the end culminated in the extermination of six million Jews.

  During the brief period in Czechoslovakia between the end of the protectorate and the Communist coup in 1948, the Communist Party did not have its own (at least, not its own legal) armed contingent; however, a Communist named Václav Nosek headed the Ministry of the Interior.