I have already said that the spiritual crisis of the Russian intelligentsia after 1968 can be compared only with the crisis set off by Vekhi. The present crisis, however, is deeper and graver. It has been produced by the combination of two interacting processes of disintegration — the crisis of the pseudo-Communist official ideology and the crisis of Communist reformism, a sort of spiritual bankruptcy of both government and opposition. Isaac Deutscher wrote that almost all those who broke with Stalinism did so, in the first place, in the name of ‘true Communism’:
Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of Communism, the heretic goes on to break with Communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow. He no longer defends socialism from unscrupulous abuse; he now defends mankind from the fallacy of socialism… He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a Communist he saw no difference between Fascists and Social Democrats. As an anti-Communist he sees no difference between Nazism and Communism. Once, he accepted the Party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the ‘greatest illusion’, he is now obsessed by the greatest disillusionment of our time.168
Those prophetic words were uttered in 1955, before the Twentieth Party Congress, the Hungarian Revolution, the ‘Prague spring’ or the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. People shaped by Stalin’s totalitarianism are often unable, despite all their efforts, to get rid of the birthmark of Stalinism. ‘Character and psychological make-up remain the same as a rule, whatever the changes in ideology’, wrote L. Kopelev.169
Stalin in his underground activity, in the civil war, and at the peak of his autocratic power, never lost the rhetorical style, the oily cunning and the boorish rudeness of the seminarist. Something similar is observable in our own day in the case of many deserters from Stalinism and Leninism. The more radical and fanatical their new views, the more firmly they retain many of the distinctive features of the world-view and moral consciousness — or, rather, subconsciousness — they acquired in Soviet schools and institutes.170
This was said about Maksimov, after Saga About Rhinoceroses. When Zhores Medvedev asked a mutual acquaintance to describe Maksimov to him in a few words, he got more or less the same reply: ‘Even after rejecting the ideology, symbols and sacred objects of the Stalin system’, Maksimov ‘fully retained the same method of thinking.’171
Plekhanov frequently reminded his readers that ideology cannot be understood in isolation from psychology. Stalinism suppressed reason, replacing it with irrational emotions and faith in absolute ideals. ‘This irrational emotionalism dominates the evolution of many an ex-Communist’, wrote Deutscher.172 To Maksimov and to many opponents of the system we may apply the words of this British historian, written in 1955:
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.
Sometimes, to cover themselves, they claim that things are ‘better’ in El Salvador or in Chile than in the Soviet Union. That is, frankly, a lie: socialist oppositionists, Christian democrats and liberals are murdered in their dozens every day in Latin America.178 To justify these murders by reference to the Stalin terror is sacrilege, but it is a fully logical procedure. The Stalinists always considered that repressions in their own country could be justified by repressions elsewhere. Here again the New Right is imitating the Stalinist type of thinking, without considering that no political murders can be justified.