The Thinking Reed

His emotional reaction against his former environment keeps him in its deadly grip and prevents him from understanding the drama in which he was involved or half-involved. The picture of Communism and Stalinism he draws is that of a gigantic chamber of intellectual and moral horrors. Viewing it, the uninitiated are transferred from politics to pure demonology. Sometimes the artistic effect may be strong — horrors and demons do enter into many a poetic masterpiece; but it is politically unreliable and even dangerous. Of course, the story of Stalinism abounds in horror. But this is only one of its elements; and even this, the demonic, has to be translated into terms of human motives and interests. The ex-Communist does not even attempt the translation.173

Evidently Trotsky was not exaggerating when he warned that if such men as Stalin come to power, socialism will be compromised for ever. The spectacle of a revolution degenerated and of Thermidorian terror undermines faith in revolutionary ideals more than any hostile propaganda and more, even, than military or political defeat of socialism. Karl Radek was prophetic when he said in 1918:

If, contrary to expectation, the Russian Revolution loses its socialist character and betrays the interests of the working class, this blow will have the most frightful consequences for the future of the revolution in Russia and throughout the world.174

But of course, it is not only a matter of the compromising of an idea. The bureaucratic system deprived many, including our intellectuals, of the habit of thinking objectively, calmly and without prejudice. From tendentious exaltation of ‘true Bolsheviks’ in the sixties they hurtled in the seventies into no less tendentious anti-Bolshevism. After the publication of The Gulag Archipelago they started to talk about the Red Terror. That was indeed a terrible page in the history of the revolution. Lenin’s terror did really prepare the way for Stalin’s and it was no accident that such Marxists as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and L. Martov, regardless of the difference in their political views, all condemned the terror. Not to mention the terror, or to play down its importance, is dishonest, but those who wish to see in it the essence of the revolution show bias. After all, there was also a White terror, about which now the same people who were previously silent about the Red Terror prefer to say nothing. Their bias obliged the New Right to discard ‘unacceptable’ facts.175 They do not even try to answer the question: Why was Bolshevism victorious? (Was it not because the Whites showed themselves to be even worse than the Reds?) They are incapable of looking at events historically — that is, from a position above the contending sides of the past. Trotsky’s cruelties enable them, so to speak, to forget about the savageries of General Slashchev. The Red Terror is condemned not because it was terror but because it was Red. The humanist point of view is quite alien to the New Right, as Roy Medvedev points out: ‘They find Kornilov or Denikin preferable to Lenin and Sverdlov, White terror preferable to Red.’176 Hence the amazing statements by Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, Maksimov and even Brodsky177 concerning terror in Latin America. The atrocities of the military junta in El Salvador, which has turned the entire country into a real Gulag, can in their view be justified in the name of the ‘sacred’ cause of a struggle against Communism. The end justifies the means; of that they have no doubt, despite what history teaches us. The ends change; the means remain.