The new and old anti-Stalinism
Howe, Irving
Tose of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories...
...A mere handful, the anti-Stalinist left was scorned and isolated...
...Look, we would be told, at the dreadful things that have been done in the name of anticommunism...
...As we put it in the language of that time, if the masses of workers and the bulk of the intelligentsia accepted the identification of Stalinism with socialism, then the hope for any decent socialist future was at an end...
...We would muster whatever patience we had in order to explain that the left throughout the world had entered a phase of apocalypse which required—it was an elementary moral obligation— that we make clear that between Stalinism and our idea of socialism there was an unbridgeable gulf...
...Walter Duranty sent slimy dispatches from Moscow to the New York Times all but openly sanctioning the Stalin regime...
...But I do not feel gratified...
...Yes, that is true...
...For a while, some of us supported Trotsky's political ideas, failing to recognize that he had little of value to say about American politics and that his rigid defense of Leninism compromised his critique of Stalinist methods...
...I wondered whether "the old man" had gone too far, yielding to personal rage...
...A few, like Sidney Hook and Meyer Schapiro, had for some years been staunch left-wing critics of Stalinism...
...There was no choice...
...Even the occasional "good thing" done by the Soviet Union is done from above, by party decree...
...In a few years we found out that the happenings in Moscow were very much our business...
...It will be many years, if ever, before the whole story comes out...
...But the simple truth is that a large part of the American intellectual community either accepted the trials—could the Beloved Leader, so wise and genial, be guilty of a hideous frameup...
...No one had a sufficient imagination of disaster to take in the full meaning of the Gulag, though some wrote sharp exposures of it long before Solzhenitsyn...
...Some important writers became its allies: Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos...
...But at the time this didn't matter very much, since Trotsky's was one of the few voices on the left providing factual and intellectual criticism of the Stalin dictatorship...
...The wrongs of the past are never made good...
...And will anyone remember Julian Martov, the left Menshevik who in the early 1920s predicted the disaster awaiting Bolshevism once it eliminated all rival parties...
...And in any case, what I really want is beyond anyone's reach: that all the victims be brought back to life, that the oceans of blood spilled by Stalin be unspilled, that the shame of it all should never have happened...
...The battle for public opinion was never quite won by the anti-Stalinist left...
...J...
...If you read the not-verybrilliant but historically important novel by the Soviet writer Anatoly Rybakov, Children of the Arbat, which describes the years 1933-34, when the terror was germinating, you will see that the charges made by the anti-Stalinist left have been utterly vindicated...
...It would take several decades before the myth of the Beloved Leader could be shattered...
...Let the Soviet government reveal the truth, let it beg forgiveness from Bukharin's widow and other survivors of the victims' families, but that is as far as it has a moral right to go...
...Perhaps a few aging survivors of the anti-Stalinist left, perhaps a few historians of modern Russia, perhaps some young intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad curious about the fate of their country...
...An elementary moral obligation, but it also had a political purpose: to rescue the vision of socialism, if possible, both from those who, accepting the trials and all they represented, had turned "socialism" into a horror and from those who rejected the trials because they thought the trials proved socialism to be a honor...
...And who will care...
...Tose of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories of our lives...
...In retrospect it seems obvious that, if anything, he wrote too mildly...
...They mattered, of course, but only in our more abstruse discussions and leisurely moments...
...Nice people, those who had not yet absorbed the "bad news" of our century, would ask why we didn't concentrate our attention on, say, William Randolph Hearst or Congressman Bilbo, why we were so obsessed in our attacks on Stalinism...
...And if Trotsky, who will remember the victims of the Menshevik trial in 1931 (which even Trotsky accepted as valid, though in time he acknowledged his mistake...
...This enormous political-intellectual undertaking is far from completed...
...It is not even clear that it ever will be...
...There remain, in any case, the names, perhaps even the memories, of a vast number of other victims...
...The Nation and the New Republic printed solemn defenses of the frameups...
...It no longer costs anything...
...It was only natural that in those days we should have admired Trotsky...
...Hook especially fought like a tiger...
...Well, says a voice, "That's history...
...A little while back Nikolai Bukharin, Christian Rakovsky, and several other victims of the third Moscow Trial (1938) were "rehabilitated" by a commission of the Gorbachev regime...
...No, I want to say again that wrong and even foolish as the anti-Stalinist left was on many counts, it was right about one essential question: it was right about Stalinism...
...As usual in the Soviet Union, the result was announced but neither the proceedings nor the membership of ' this commission was made public...
...In the late 1930s, when the symmetrical rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism made Max Weber's prediction of a new ice age seem a mere statement of fact, the small and scorned groups of the anti-Stalinist left devoted much of their energy to exposing Stalinism...
...and why did the defendants confess?—or with a fine show of American provincialism declared that all those curious happenings in Moscow weren't any of our business...
...Right or wrong, he always fights hard...
...Segments of conservative opinion, chortling over the obscene spectacle to which the heirs of the October Revolution had been reduced, also lent their approval...
...I see no ground for acknowledging the moral authority of the Soviet dictatorship, even in its somewhat milder Gorbachev version, to "rehabilitate" the victims of Stalin...
...Today, fifty years later, "everyone" is an anti-Stalinist (including some who might better be called Stalinists...
...they are only forgotten...
...Recent academic studies, recycling the passions of one generation into the dissertations of the next, have paid attention to the "New York intellectuals" around Partisan Review, and the sheer accumulation of this material could easily give the false impression that the anti-Stalinist intellectuals were stronger and more numerous than in fact they were...
...Yet it would remain a point of distinction within the New Left, as also to this day in the pages of the Nation, to refuse the label of "anticommunist" (as if there were only one kind...
...It wasn't the rightness of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution or of Bukharin's ideas about the Soviet economy that we were fighting about...
...One of the speakers was its chairman, John Dewey, the great philosopher who in old age had accepted the thankless task of establishing the truth even though politically he cared almost as little for Trotsky as for Stalin...
...The bulk of liberal and leftist opinion accepted the Moscow Trials as authentic...
...I gather that those who, half a century ago, fought against Stalin's frameups—the Moscow Trials were only the most visible—should feel gratified...
...There was also an immediate task, and that was to expose the Moscow Trials for the frameups that they were...
...Yet fewer than a thousand people showed up, mostly old, familiar faces...
...What mattered was to demonstrate that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Old Bolsheviks—agree with SUMMER • 1988 • 373 their ideas or not—were not and could not be the "agents of fascism" that Stalin's prosecutors charged...
...The "rehabilitations" in Moscow—too little, too late, and far from honest...
...He alone stood firm and proud, defying Stalin and his thugs...
...The anti-Stalinist left was weak, isolated...
...I remember feeling somewhat uneasy after Trotsky published his essay "Thermidor and Anti-Semitism" charging that anti-Semitism had become widespread within the Soviet bureaucracy...
...You cannot imagine, unless you lived through those years, how different the political atmosphere was...
...And so, 374 • DISSENT asks another, "What do you want...
...As against the particle of truth leaked out in Moscow, vast injustices continue to be hidden...
...A medal...
...If Bukharin, then why not —it makes good sense to ask—why not Trotsky...
...Of course, we don't suppose our lives to be especially interesting in themselves...
...When the commission to investigate the Moscow Trials came back from hearing Trotsky's testimony in Mexico, a meeting was held in New York to hear its report...
...We feel ourselves driven to interrupt wedding feasts and other such happy occasions...
...but we want to talk about what we have witnessed, at first or second hand, things that are . . . mere history, sad events of long ago...
...But in 1937...
...M. CAMERON, New York Review of Books, March 17, 1988 The "strange impulse" about which Professor Cameron speaks has been known to visit some of us who are not yet seventy years old...
...People burdened with memories have a right to be bitter...
...Decent people, knowing its entanglements to be inescapable, still try to keep a certain distance from it...
...But in 1937 or 1938 it was hard to grasp the terribleness of it all...
...but look also at the dreadful things that have been done in the name of anticapitalism...
...What?— anti-Semitism in the country we (foolishly) called "a degenerated workers state...
...Not obscure "doctrinal differences," but a struggle to the end...
...Looking back now at what Trotsky and others like him—Boris Souvarine, Anton Ciliga, Victor Serge—wrote at the time, I am persuaded that they actually understated the case against Stalinism...
...History is a bully and a cheat...
...Immediately at stake, as we put it a little melodramatically though not mistakenly, was the honor of socialism...
...Today of course "everyone" (even, Lord help us, Alexander Cockburn) chimes in against Stalinism...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
