Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam, but nothing moved. Poor Freddie … It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin … Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Good-bye boys, good-bye Tedy.³

Freddie did not die, though she has spent the rest of her life with legs amputated below the knees. At the time it would not have struck any of us as surprising that the last words of a dying Party member should be for the Party, for Stalin and for the comrades. (In those days among foreign communists the thought of Stalin was as sincere, unforced, unsullied by knowledge and universal as the genuine grief most of us felt in 1953 at the death of a man whom no Soviet citizen would have wanted, or dared, to call by a pet name like ‘Uncle Joe’ in Britain or ‘Big whiskers’ [baffone] in Italy.) The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return, we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity.

The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it’, as we were expected to. For, unlike fascism, which demanded automatic abdication and service to the Leader’s will (‘Mussolini is always right’) and the unconditional duty of obeying military orders, the Party – even at the peak of Stalin’s absolutism – rested its authority, at least in theory, on the power to convince of reason and ‘scientific socialism’. After all, it was supposed to be based on a ‘Marxist analysis of the situation’, which every communist was meant to learn how to make. ‘The line’, however predetermined and unchangeable, had to be justified in terms of such an analysis, and, except where circumstances made this physically impossible, ‘discussed’ and approved at all levels of the Party. In Communist Parties outside power, where members were not too scared to pursue the ancient left-wing tradition of argument, the leadership had to go through the process of repeating its case for the official line until there was no room for doubt about what we were expected to vote for. (The technical term for this process was ‘patiently explaining’.) After the vote, ‘democratic centralism’ required that argument should give way to unanimous action.

We did what it ordered us to do. In countries such as Britain it did not order us to do anything very dramatic. Indeed, but for their conviction that what they were doing was saving the world, communists might have been bored by the routine activities of their Party, conducted in the usual ritual of the British labour movement (comrade chairman, branch minutes, treasurer’s report, resolutions, contacts, literature sales and the rest) in private homes or unwelcoming meeting rooms. But whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. After all, most Soviet and Comintern cadres in the period of Stalin’s terror, who knew what might await them, followed the order to return to Moscow. If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so. After 1933 the German Party in exile ordered Margaret Mynatt (later the inspiration behind the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels) to go to England from Paris, since they needed someone in London and, as known German communists were not admitted, a comrade with valid British documentation was needed. Without a moment’s hesitation she abandoned the love of her life (or so she later told me) and went. She never saw him (or was it a her?) again. Party dues in Auschwitz, I was told after the war by a former inmate, were paid in the inconceivably precious currency of cigarettes, and it says something about the Party’s capacity for collective resistance that they could procure them.

To have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable. Admittedly, since Party members were also apt to be emancipated in their attitude to sex, it is to be supposed that not all militants eschewed completely apolitical sex, but even for the Comintern agent in Brecht’s wonderful poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later), his casual couplings (‘der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos’) were yet another proof that the Party’s work came before everything that was personal. I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the Party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a communist in the full sense of my youth.

It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history. Even the image – if there was one – of the wonderful hopes we had for human life has been overlaid by the range of goods, services, prospects and personal options which are today available to the majority of men and women in the incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the West. Marx and Engels wisely refrained from describing what communist society would be like, but most of what little they said about what individual life would be like under it, now seems to be the result, without communism, of that social production of potentially almost unlimited plenty, and that miraculous technological progress, which they expected in some undetermined future, but which is taken for granted today.

Rather than reconstruct in my eighties what made us communists, let me quote from shortly after the 1956 crisis, when I was closer to the convictions of youth. I wrote that even the most sophisticated revolutionaries share ‘that utopianism or ‘‘impossibilism’’ which makes even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical pain at the realization that the coming of socialism will not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all problems’. I observed that ‘revolutionary movements … appear to prove that almost no change is beyond their reach’.

Liberty, equality and above all fraternity may become real for the moment in those stages of the great social revolutions which revolutionaries who live through them describe in the terms normally reserved for romantic love. Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice …Theirs is at such times a miniature version of the ideal society, in which all men are brothers and sacrifice everything for the common good without abandoning their individuality. If this is possible within the movement, why not everywhere?

By this time I had recognized, with Milovan Djilas, who has written wonderfully well of the psychology of revolutionaries, that ‘these are the morals of a sect’, but that is precisely what gave them such force as engines of political change.⁴

It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed. However, three further elements distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations to a new society. First, Marxism, which demonstrated with the methods of science the certainty of our victory, a prediction tested and verified by the victory of proletarian revolution over one sixth of the earth’s surface and the advances of revolution in the 1940s. Marx had shown why it could never have happened before in human history, and why it could and was destined to happen now, as indeed it did. Today the foundations of this certainty that we knew where history was going have collapsed, notably the belief that the industrial working class would be the agency of change. In the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ they looked firm.

Second, there was internationalism. Ours was a movement for all humanity and not for any particular section of it. It represented the ideal of transcending selfishness, individual and collective. Time and again young Jews who began as Zionists became communists because, obvious as the sufferings of the Jews were, they were only part of universal oppression. Julius Braunthal wrote, describing his conversion to socialism in Vienna at the start of the century: ‘I felt sorry for my Zionist friends whom I had deserted; but I hoped I would be able to persuade them one day to understand that the smaller aim has to give way to the bigger.’⁵ With retrospective bitterness disguised as cynicism my New York colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller describes her conversion to communism in a Hungarian Zionist work camp in 1947 at the age of eighteen:

We lived in community, we felt we belonged together. We needed neither money nor the rich … I didn’t like the