The Thinking Reed

Karyakin aimed the point of his criticism at Stalin’s heirs. First and foremost he had in mind the Maoists in China, but his general theoretical conclusions were of a rather wider application. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made him remember what Marx wrote about barracks-Communism. In those words he saw the theoretical key to the understanding of the Stalinist phenomenon. Marx did not live to see his opponents in power, but what had happened in Russia proved once again the rightness of his humanist and democratic approach to socialism, and the justification of his fears. ‘In their pretensions,’ wrote Karyakin,

the supporters of barracks-Communism are comic, but once they have obtained even a little power, let alone all power, they become terrible: their farce is fraught with tragedy for the people… And if you scratch a man who, ‘in the name of Communism’, employs Jesuitical means, you will find that he conceives the aims of Communism in a perverted way.200

The formula for the political practice of barracks-Communism, according to Karyakin, is given in One Day. The camp is the Stalinists’ ideal of the new society: ‘A step to right or left is considered an attempt to escape and the escort has orders to shoot without warning.’201 That is the first and fundamental principle. Under Stalinism the people do not exist; there are only zeki [prisoners] — some in camps, others ‘in freedom’. Stalinism can be explained, wrote Karyakin, ‘but it cannot be justified we must not accept its victory as fatally inevitable, nor must we reduce to this the complex history of a whole people over many years.’202 There had been many different experiences in that life, including successes, but the victories won were won not thanks to Stalinism but in spite of it.

The defenders of Stalinism are spiritually sterile. They can only suppress ideas; they cannot create them. In place of the social sciences they engage in demagogy, whereby ‘to conceal their striving to usurp power over the Party and the people’.203 Their mentality is ‘a secular variant of the religious mentality’. ‘Lack of confidence in the masses,’ Lakshin wrote in this connection,

self-satisfaction and boasting, if allowed free exercise, lead to self-deception, to the formation of an illusory, invented picture of life. What is desired is first presented as really existing, and then taken to be real by the phrasemongers themselves. A vicious circle is formed.204

The best description of the situation is the biblical phrase about ‘the blind leading the blind’. ‘The worst enemy’, wrote Karyakin,

cannot do as much harm to the ideas of Communism as is done by those who transform these ideas into a variety of religious dogma (nourishing thereby the arguments of many anti-Communists). What can be more contrary to nature than a blindly believing Communist and a Marxist who bows down before an idol?205

The anti-Stalinists sought, above all, to draw support from Lenin’s criticisms of bureaucracy and dogmatism. ‘As a writer,’ wrote Lakshin,

Lenin was hostile to the evasiveness of platitudes, cautious reservations and the abstract treatment of subjects… Lenin’s articles, by their method of analysis and their freedom from clichés, wage war in their very form against what they attack in substance — against narrow-minded dogmatism, against thought which had gone to sleep, against sectarian deification of formulas.206