Saturday 22 March 2014

The Fallen God!!!!



Hiranmay Karlekar wtites for The Pioneer

Communists across the world should explore how German Marxism became Russian Communism. What began as an ideology with Karl Marx eventually degenerated into a nightmare under Stalin

I first read The God That Failed in 1955 as a precocious first year student at Presidency College, now Presidency University, Kolkata. The Cold War was under way in all its icy antagonisms, and debates over the validity of Marxism and the character of communist states in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, dominated global discourse.
Finishing reading, I was filled with a profound sense of disquiet. Several developments, that had been worrying me deeply, suddenly fell in place. I stood by the grave of several tenacious illusions.

The other day, at our hill retreat, the book stared at me from the book shelf as I searched for another. I grabbed at it instinctively and, before I knew anything, I was reading it again.
First published in 1951, The God That Failed is an anthology of the accounts by six outstanding intellectuals and writers — Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Zide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender — of their journeys to communism and back, and the circumstances that moved them in both directions. If their accounts, with their insights and analyses of the events of 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, particularly with reference to the developments in the Soviet Union and the rise of the Nazis and Fascists in Germany and Italy, are riveting, so is the introduction by Richard Crossman, British intellectual/politician, dwelling on their accounts and the temper and events of the times.

Crossman writes of the six’s journeys, “they saw it [Communism] at first from a long way off — just as their predecessors 130 years ago saw the French Revolution — as a vision of the Kingdom of God on earth; and, like Wordsworth and Shelley, they dedicated their talents to working humbly for its coming. They were not discouraged by the rebuffs of professional revolutionaries, or by the jeers of their opponents, until each discovered the gap between his own vision of God and the reality of the Communist State — and the conflict of conscience reached breaking point.”

Why did they, highly sensitive, intelligent, well-read and well-informed people all, march blindly to communism ignoring multiple warning signs on the way?
According to Crossman, they “chose Communism because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice ‘bourgeois liberties’ in order to defeat Fascism. Their conversion, in fact, was rooted in despair — a despair of Western values.” If the Great Depression showed the vulnerability of capitalism to crises and impoverished the lower middle classes and the poor, the failure of the Social Democrats and elements on the right to recognise the dangers posed by the rise of Nazism and Fascism, enhanced the appeal of the communists who, in the 1920s and early1930s, were the only ones to confront both, besides presenting the grand dream of the proletarian revolution and the ultimate withering away of the State. On the one hand was the dream and, on the other, the nightmare of the real existence. The result was conversion. As Koestler points out in his essay, “Devotion to pure utopia”, and “revolt against a polluted society, are thus the two poles which provide the tension of all militant creeds.”

Ignazio Silone felt similarly. He writes, “For me to join the party of the Proletarian Revolution was not just a simple matter of signing up with a political organisation; it meant a conversion, a complete dedication.” He was repelled by the injustices he saw in the Italy of his youth while the hard life that became his as a communist following “the Fascist conquest of the State” convinced him of the validity some of the Communists’ political theses and drew him increasingly firmly into the party’s protective collective organisation.

Andre Gide was attracted by what he thought the Soviet Union stood for. As he states, “Who can ever say what the Soviet Union stood for me? Far more than the country of my choice, an example and an inspiration, it represented what I had always dreamed of but no longer dared hope — it was something toward which all my longing was directed — it was a land where I imagined Utopia was in process of becoming reality.”

To Louis Fischer, “The unique appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution was its universality. It did not propose merely to introduce drastic change in Russia. It envisaged world-wide abolition of war, poverty and suffering. In all countries, therefore, the little man, the labourer, and the intellectual felt that something important had taken place in their lives when the revolution took root in Russia. Actually, this general sympathy stemmed more from discontent with conditions in their own countries than from knowledge of conditions inside Russia.”

Disillusionment following their exposure to the conditions within Russia — the abject poverty of the peasants and the severely hard life of ordinary citizens while Communist Party leaders lived in luxury — played a major role in their break with Russia, as did Stalin’s purges, the mock trials and the mass execution of dedicated party functionaries. Yet they stayed back because Communism appeared to be the only bulwark against the Nazis and the Fascists and Russia supported the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, while Western democracies watched as Franco, aided by Hitler, won a savage victory.

Their God finally died when Russia signed what is formally titled Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and in effect sabotaged republican effort in the Spanish Civil War. Stephen Spender, who knew first- hand, was upset, among other things, by the communist control over the International Brigade and “slanderous attack against groups within the Republic who were unfriendly to Communism.” For Richard Wright, the cause was similar but different — the hypocrisy and lack of democracy in American communist party.

All this doubtless happened years ago, and Russia is not the nightmare the Soviet Union was under Stalin. There have been many books since then explaining why the experiment, which began amidst an explosion of hope in Russia in 1917, failed. Still, the book has a compelling relevance now when Islamist and other fundamentalist doctrines are casting a deadly shadow. It helps to understand why people are drawn to extremist ideologies and movements, ignoring the latter’s warts and disconnect with reality. Meanwhile, communists should explore how, with apologies to John Plamenatz, German Marxism became Russian Communism.

Tags:     

Tweet: The God that failed in more than one place Read
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)