PERSONAL COLUMN

The gadfly stings again

TIBOR SZAMUELY

The Soviet mentality is without doubt one of the great mysteries of our age. Many have tried to penetrate its recesses : psychologists have written learned treatises on the dread effects of baby swaddling, historians have combed the past in search of some secret traditional for- mula, marxists and pseudo-marxists (hard to tell the difference) have juggled around with forces of production and productive relation- ships, diplomats have braved the perils of a thousand cocktail parties in the hope of finding the key at the bottom of the last vodka bottle— but all in vain. One by one the experts retreated, leaving the cypher unsolved. Even Churchill— usually the last man to admit defeat—was re- duced to some vague remarks about 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.' And there it has more or less remained: one can't really understand the Russians, old chap, they're a rum lot.

Rum indeed. Some of the things they do seem barely rational, to say the least—yet there is always an explanation, however crazy it may sonnd. I am not referring to acts of Grand Policy—all great powers tend to make fools of themselves from time to time, and I suppose the Soviets' record is no worse than anybody elSe's. No; what concerns me here are the un- predictable reactions of the communist authori- ties to things which nobody else would even begin to take seriously.

The latest seemingly inexplicable outbreak of Soviet paranoia has been caused, oddly enough, by ..a recent 'Personal column' of mine in this journal. Faithful readers of the SPECTATOR may recall the piece in question : entitled 'The Gad- fly-and the Spy,' it dealt light-heartedly-with the implications of the incredible fact—dug up acci- dentally by Mr Robin Bruce Lockhart—that the greatest fictional revolutionary hero of the u§s.a, The Gadfly,' had been based upon the real life character of the famous British spy and anti-Soviet conspirator, Sidney Reilly—an ex-lover of the book's English author, Mrs Ethel Voynich. Fairly innocuous stuff, one might think : would anybody in this country be distressed to discover that Richard Hannay had been modelled on, say, Grigory Zino- viev?

But in the USSR the Gadfly affair has caused a politico-literary scandal for which there are few parallels. Moscow Radio's internal services have broadcast several talks on the subject, /zvestia and Literaturnaya Gazeta have pub: lished articles and interviews. The Agitprop Department has assigned the demolition of this latest monstrous imperialist falsehood to two good comrades and true : Mr Boris Polevoi and Madam Yevgenia Taratuta. Their names, singly and in conjunction, appear under all the com- muniques ossued by the heroic Gadfly Libera- tion Forces of the Union of Soviet Writers.

Boris Polevoi needs no introduction : a fine, upright specimen of Soviet writerhood, much loved by western fellow-travellers and profes- sional 'friends of the USSR,' not least for his forthrightness. It was Polevoi who in 1955 assured Howard Fast that he had seen the Jewish poet Lev Kvitko alive and healthy a few days before—a statement which was to puzzle poor Fast when it transpired that Kvitko had been executed as long ago as 1952. His partner,

Madam Taratuta, is the leading Soviet Voyni- chologist and proud owner of a unique collec- tion of 123 editions of The Gadfly.

Yet the arguments of this Dynamic Duo, backed by all the massive resources of fifty years of Soviet VoynichoIogy, are singularly unimpressive. True, they bring my statistics up to date : it appears that The Gadfly has been printed not in four but in five million copies, and made into not one but three operas. I stand corrected. But alas! Not a single fact have they produced that could conceivably weaken the case for Reilly as the proto-Gadfly.

Polevoi opened the campaign in his bluffest and heartiest style. What ignorant twaddle, he declared : why, Reilly was only thirteen or fourteen when the book was written, and although 'no doubt he was a bit of a lad even then, as they say (chuckle, chuckle!),' at that tender age he could hardly have captivated Mrs Voynich. Within a day or so it became clear that the luckless Polevoi bad got all his facts muddled : in 1896, when The Gadfly was written, Reilly had been twenty-two (Polevoi even managed to give the date of Reilly's execu- tion as 1917 or 1918, after numerous Soviet novels and plays had gloatingly described his arrest in 1925). Madam Taratuta hurried to the rescue: Reilly was twelve not when the novel was actually written, but only when Mrs Voynich had conceived the idea. Not a very convincing proof, but it has one inestimable advantage : there is no earthly way of checking it. You either take it (if you are a decent, pro- gressive person) or leave it (if you happen to be an imperialist running-dog).

Forsaking the tricky matter, of dates rather hurriedly, the two experts got down to estab- lishing the 'true' prototype of the Gadfly. Polevoi plumped for Mazzini; Taratuta favoured the Russian revolutionary Kravchin- sky-Stepniak. But as neither real-life candidate bore the slightest resemblance to the fictional Gadfly, the two Voynichologists pooled their resources and announced a unanimous decision: no single prototype existed.

These were, however, only secondary con- siderations. The basic Soviet argument is beauti- fully simple : it is obviously completely im- possible that the villainous Reilly, who became an anti-Bolshevik twenty years later, could have served as the model for the noble, heroic and revolutionary Gadfly. 'I can hardly bring myself to mention these two names together,' shudders Madam Taratuta, clearly in a state of deep ideological shock.

At the risk of wounding the lady's feelings still further I must point out that neither she nor her partner has even attempted to deny the essential fact of the liaison between -Reilly and Mrs Voynich in the year when The Gadfly was actually written; in their final communique they tacitly acknowledge its truth, and even admit the existence of a string of coincidences between the early lives of the 'Gadfly' and Sidney Reilly. 'But of course,' they conclude after listing some of them, 'none of this is of any relevance to the hero of The Gadfly.' Of course.

The Taratuta-Polevoi combine have done their selfless best, and it is not their fault if the best is not good enough. One question

remains to be answered: why have the Soviets raised this fearful row? After all, the SPEC- TATOR has, I fear, only a limited circulation in Russia, and even the BBC, which mentioned my article in a Russian-language broadcast, can have reached only a fraction of the population. So why couldn't they have kept quiet and thus preserved the Gadfly's immacu- late reputation? This is all the more surprising because the usual Soviet attitude to unfavour- able foreign comment is one of disdainful silence.

As I have said, there is always an explanation, however bizarre, eyen for what seems to be the most irrational communist behaviour. In this case it is provided by the essentially religious nature of the Russian communist world-out- look. Theirs is a profoundly religious system of beliefs, based on a God (or, rather, a Holy Trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin), major and minor saints, archangels and angels, and demons of various degree. If one criticises the worldly, political activities of the Soviet govern- ment—the sphere of the profane, so to speak— one merely becomes an enemy and an im- perialist agent. But when one violates the world of the sacred—then one commits the supreme crime of blasphemy. As in any deeply religious society, blasphemy must not only be punished.: it must be seen to be punished, and, even more important, the sacrilegious abominations must be publicly refuted. When I defiled the saintly. Gadfly with profane hand and impious levity,. I too, committed blasphemy. The only solutioi,. was a public service of rededication—per- formed by Polevoi and Taratuta.

Still, knowing that the ordinary Soviet news- paper reader invariably assumes that anything denied by the authorities must be true, perhaps they would have done better to keep mum. Because, after the Agitpriests have done their job, the Gadfly is really finished as a revolu- tionary hero, once and for all.