Russian paradise lost
Nicholas Bethell
I know that this is Jubilee Year, but Alex Kitson's speech, with its cries of 'Long live the October Revolution' and 'Long live the Soviet trade unions', was quite ridiculous. One might almost imagine that last Monday was the Labour Party's and the Soviet Communist Party's diamond wedding.
Of course it is not quite as bad as that. There cannot be many in the Labour Party, even in the way-out National Executive, who agree with Mr Kitson's utopian remarks about Russia today. But a great many of his colleagues do, or did until recently, share his view that the sixtyyear-old Soviet experiment has succeeded, that it has done more good than harm. They may also believe that the Soviet government, although it did some bad things in the past, is firmly set on the path of reform and that in due course it will become not only socialist, but also humane and democratic, that in the end it will produce a socialist society not very different from what the Labour Party is aiming at.
After all, where would socialism be if it were not for Marx, Lenin and the Revolution? It was not Stalin's brutality that Winston Churchill had in mind when he set out to strangle the Bolshevik child in its cradle. It was the threat to the private enterprise system and the British Empire, two institutions that British socialists also wanted to dismantle. The war between the Reds and the Whites seemed to many of them a classic conflict between workers and bosses. This is why Ernest Bevin and other trade union leaders, men who were later to criticise communism harshly, ordered 'Hands off Russia!' and did what they could to end British intervention.
In its early years the Soviet government fulfilled some of its promises. It gave land to the peasants, independence to Finland and Poland. True, it invaded Poland in 1920, reached Warsaw and for a time seemed likely to join up with the German communists and sweep across Europe. But the Poles had started the war and only had themselves to blame. At the same time educated western socialists were attracted by what seemed an imaginative programme of social reform — divorce and abortion on demand, rehabilitation of criminals through constructive work — and by the stimulating cultural atmosphere of Moscow, exemplified by the poetry of Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Feminists were pleased to note the appointment of Alexandra Kollontai as minister to Norway. In the West women were not given such responsibilities. Genuine social evils like anti-semitism were outlawed and Moscow really seemed to be leading the way towards a world without class or national barriers.
During the 1920s and 1930s it was the communist parties who formed the frontline of the struggle against Oswald Mosley, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. It was this that induced men like Kim Philby and Donald Maclean to betray this country, the feeling that the British government's opposition to fascism was lukewarm, that if necessary it was prepared to use fascism to its own ends, while Moscow and the communists fought fascism tooth and nail, with guns in Spain and with fists in London.
Anyone who read Mein Karnpf could see that it was for Bolshevism, with world Jewry, that Hitler reserved his choicest vitriol. Unlike other countries, the Soviet Union realised the overwhelming danger of Nazism. Stalin made many overtures to Britain and France and it was their fault for rebuffing him, when in desperation he signed a pact with Hitler to give himself a breathing space. Then, when war finally came, it was the Red Army soldier who turned out to be the real hero, who fought the German Army to a standstill in Stalingrad, then chased him back across Europe and into Berlin. Only a socialist government could have asked for and gained such loyalty and self sacrifice — to be precise, twenty million lives.
And all this time the Soviet Union was the only important country to preach the sovereignty over society of men and women who worked with their hands and to acknowledge the simple moral truth that it is wrong for a nation to govern another nation against the will of its inhabitants.
Only a few years ago these views were widely held in 'progressive' sections of western society. It had yet to emerge that Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler did, that he was the last great imperialist, that he believed in equality no more than Louis XIV did. To be 'left' was to be pro-Soviet, to defend the purge trials and forcible collectivisation, to speak up for Stalin when he was Hitler's ally and urging our soldiers to mutiny, to justify the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
They passed through several stages. At first such was their faith that they did not believe that socialism and brutality could co-exist. It was all lies, just like the lies we told about German soldiers bouncing babies on bayonets during the first world war. The New Statesman announced that Lenin's old comrades really were German agents, they deserved to be shot. And as for the small number who, because of their origins, could not accept Stalin's rule, they were being decently and humanely reeducated under the most progressive penal system in the world. Even three years ago, before the publication of Solzhenitzyn's Gulag series, most westerners believed that killing, imprisonment and extermination were Stalin's inventions, that Lenin would never have done such a thing.
A few scales fell from a few eyes. Malcolm Muggeridge went to Moscow for a year in 1932 and wrote to his aunt, Beatrice Webb, that what he had believed was a noble society was in fact no more than a sham. Nevertheless, she and Sidney were able to write in 1935, 'It must be recognised that this liquidation of the individual capitalist in agriculture had necessarily to be faced, if the required increase in output was to be obtained.' So much for five million people.
The next stage was the argument in Lenin's favourite Russian proverb, 'If you chop the tree, the chips will fly.' By now their eyes and ears conveyed the fact of the cruelty to their brains, but their faith was still strong enough to let them accept that cruelty as tolerable. Anyway, they would not speak out against it, because if they did the capitalists would benefit and it was better to suppress or distort the truth than to allow that.
Some even reached a third stage. JeanPaul Sartre, his faith very much on the wane, already convinced both of the fact of the cruelty and of its intolerable nature, told friends that it was still his duty to keep silent, so as not to destroy the hopes of working men whose belief in communism remained intact. But now even he has taken the road to Damascus and appears on platform in Paris with Soviet dissidents. Other well-known gauchistes — Andre Glucksmann, Jean-Paul Levy and other darlings of the 1968 Paris events — have followed him away from Leninism.
So Lenin's diamond jubilee has not been a success in Europe. Young men and women who twenty years ago would have followed him are turning to other revolutionary apostles. The unity of the world's communist parties has never looked shakier. There was a scandal over Senor Carrillo. The tide of Eurocommunism is in flood. And whatever dangers it poses the West — and I for one would rather not risk the experiment — it really cannot please Mr Brezhnev and his colleagues to watch the rise of Rome as a rival to Moscow. And as for Britain, the furore that Alex Kitson's remarks have aroused is evidence of the collapse of this country's once strong proSoviet contingent, which in 1948 included an estimated forty totally loyal MPs. The believers have died. The great thinkers have lost their faith. The new recruits are looking elsewhere for their paradise on earth. In the House of Commons Moscow can now count only on the loyalty of a few cynics — Renee Short, Arthur Lewis, Ian Mikardo and a handful of others — the debris of a once strong and powerfully motivated lobby. Lenin must be turning in his dimly-lit glass box below Red Square.
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