DIALOGUE WITH A GERMAN COMMUNIST
LASKY, MELVIN J.
Dialogue With A German Communist . . . By Melvin J. Lasky THE IRON CURTAIN rusts a little on Its Western side. And that's not journalistic imagery, but, as those who have been close enough to...
...Scholarships have been narrowed down, girls and boys are separated not only in the (irst school years but also in their mature technical studies...
...What we knew constituted no dogma, and we were always ready to put its correctness to the test, to take on all challenges...
...Can we protest politically...
...How can we give up the ideals of our youth, a whole lifetime devoted to progressive effort, to return to the point of departure, the point we originally abandoned in order to help build a better, more just world...
...But with the leveling of the wages came a leveling of workers' initiative and output...
...in America for the raising of living standards in backward areas, for the extension of rights to the Negro people, for the defense of individual and minority liberties...
...I can still remember when there ware wage-ceilings for party members...
...There are lees to be paid above the eighth school year...
...Among them are men and women who have spent five or eight years in Soviet concentration camps...
...There are no model societies...
...We'll print what you write, without changing anything, without revealing who you really are...
...But perhaps a few remarks now would serve to "continue the debate" and to raise the discussion on to new and possibly higher levels...
...Add to that a certain law of inertia which maintains the human link to any religion...
...One spoke up, "I'm 70 and have all my faculties," To which Dewey replied brightly, "Oh, I was talking about Aunt Minnie, not Uncle Bill...
...I have been a Communist now for 25 years, and I can very well remember the times when we thought that we were perhaps the only ones who thought for themselves, whose spirits were independent...
...No one is surprised any longer at the spectacle of a factory director, a high Soviet officer, or a Party functionary, with his wife dressed in the latest "foreign-capitalist style," spending in an evening in a luxury restaurant more than what a Russian worker earns in a month...
...That's how sensitive the President and his family are to reactions from labor...
...But then everything w»s so clear and so correct...
...Still, the old.routine catches us, and we go on to say, "Of course, there are many shortcomings and weaknesses...
...In the early Soviet days there was co-education, schooling was free, scholarships were plentiful...
...Sanator Taft's campaign fund Is so swollen by contributions from corporations all over the country that chunks of this money are being shipped into neighboring states, notably Missouri, to help the Republican candidates there...
...This is the very first time that I have put such thoughts—previously literally "unthinkable"— on paper...
...That was the general sense of your remarks, and I was, frankly, hit hard...
...When the union bartender arrived, he found the guest of honor was Margaret Truman...
...Try to understand these "opportunists"—think for a moment that all these , undeniably talented proletarians, now sitting in so many high offices In the East, would never in any of the west-European lands have had the opportunity to rise out of their original stations...
...They have their friends, small and great, in all the centers of the West, and among peoples everywhere where liberty and the dignity of man are cherished...
...Soviet women have long ago been delivered once again into the hands of the quacks, and there are thousands of women in labor-camps on criminal charges of "attempted abortion...
...Ewing readily agreed but all kinds of difficulties and objections were raised by Bevin...
...But that's the way it is...
...Can we group ourselves with our friends and do something on our own, without official permissions, to change the status quo...
...A world without social injustice, in which the working man could live decently and the enormous economic differences would disappear...
...American Guild of Variety Artists (AFL) has just put the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus on the unfair list because of an unsuccessful organizing drive...
...at our inability to come to a decision—for before us there is still the terrible prospect of choosing another road to hell...
...As accomplished an orator as he may be...
...But millions...
...We were the ones who defended our convictions against the whole world, against contempt, chicanery and persecution...
...And this is what troubles us most deeply...
...Democratic gubernatorial nomination), was asked in London by CBS Correspondent Upward Smith to do a broadcast with Ernest Bevin...
...We have, most of us, remained blind to the fact that we have wandered off our original path, that nothing of our ideals remains but idle phrases, that out of our proud independent thinking a dogma has been cast...
...Dewey explained that it was due to an increase in the number of patients admitted and then, jocosely, added that wherebs in earlier days old folks were taken care of at home, today when "Aunt Minnie reaches 70 years and begins losing her mind," her children try to get her committed...
...But the most important factor, the decisive ona...
...Astounding dents have been made in the totalitarian ideology...
...No, the struggle is not between "socialism" and "capitalism...
...We thought, "Man is good" and we searched for friends...
...Ex-Senator Bob Reynolds, u>ho once ron the American Vindicators, asked LLPE Director Joe Keenan for a $20,000 contribution to finance his comeback drive in North Carolina...
...We supported all that was progressive and new in art, literature, theater, architecture...
...And that's not journalistic imagery, but, as those who have been close enough to see the chips and the flakes know —its just plain down-to-earth political metallurgy Here in Berlin, for example, despite the splitting of the city and the police-and-spy network, there continues to be East-West contact...
...One could, of course, argue: never could all that have been built up, the cities of the Taiga, in the high north, in the far east, in the steppes of Karaganda, the gigantic constructions, the dams, the railroads, the fantastically-paced industrialization, without an army of forced laborers...
...23 elections will give Labor 320 seats, the Conservative bloc 280, the Liberals 20, the Independents and Communists 5. * * * What's the jurisdictional dispute between Local 32-B, Building Service International Union, and Arnold Zander's Municipal Workers over New York's Sanitation Department workers...
...Everyone should have enough...
...yes, even some who were turned over by the NKVD to the Gestapo and still somehow managed to survive...
...Many of us who have been in Soviet Russia are convinced that among those who have been convicted are persons who didn't even have any "differences...
...And quickly goes our head into the sand...
...Is reform possible...
...At the conclusion of an evening's talk recently with an East-German Communist — Iwenty-five years in the Party, twelve years in Soviet Russia--I said: "Look here, why don't you put on paper what you've been saying here...
...No organization or group has a monopoly on the truth or on idealistic goodwill...
...Doubts are cropping up everywhere, reinforced by dangerous western ideas and logic—about such things as "slavelabor," "one-party dictatorship," "Stalinist imperialism," the importance of "political democracy," etc...
...We failed to realize how we, "the avant-garde of humanity," have become the stumblingblocks to the world's progress...
...Today it's all very different...
...It is between a closed society, where each individual is a function of the dictatorial state, and an open society, where the struggle in behalf of individual ideas and ideals is possible...
...WHERE SHALL WE GO...
...Should we give up our old program ("It's necessary to strengthen socialism against capitalist enemies") and suddenly go over to the position that "Capitalism is better...
...Recently the AFL Bartenders Union in New York got a phone call for a union man to come up to a swank little East Side spot to serve drink* at a private party...
...You're all helpless when you have to stand alone and think for yourself...
...But why continue, you and I both know the story...
...It looked like an international incident was in the making until It was explained by a Bevin aide that Britain's Foreign Secretary has terrible mike fright...
...William Phillips, the Partisan Review co-editor, is back from Europe...
...recently appointed minister to our Embassy in Paris...
...It became increasingly difficult, and we had no end of terrible shocks...
...Germany...
...No one knows better than a Communist once liberated from the dark dialectic of the party-line, how evil the East-totalitarian system is, how many crimes are committed, how much injustice— each day, to friends, to party comrades, to plain innocent people, in Leningrad, or Budapest, or Prague, or Leipzig—keeps piling up...
...Our critics and our opponents were always with us—and it would have beer, absurd to think that debates, criticism, counterarguments should be forbidden...
...And yet all this has led to a situation in which the social inequalities in the Soviet Union are as great as those under capitalism...
...Or don't you have the courage to spend a minute looking in the mirror any more...
...our ideas were free, our demands were just...
...Here, then is the nub...
...MayT remind you how many of the 'best moderns" were either Communists or sympa"uiizers...
...But where is the right road...
...Wherever they are, whether they "flee to the West" or remain behind the Iron Curtain, and whoever they are, whether doubting, troubled ex-Communists or simple citizens longing for a life without party propaganda, state commands, and secret police, there is one thing they can be certain of—they are not alone...
...is something else...
...changing the world—for tha worse...
...How that is to be done, and with whose soppcrt and cooperation, cannot be answered with A name and* an address...
...I am not thinking of those cynical trade conferences where shiny Mercedes limousines from the Ruhr park on the Stalin-Allee outside Soviet Economic Missions...
...More than that, the whole inner world which this organisation has built up, its own thought-processes, way of life, even its own language (for what outsider can really understand the rhetoric of our resolutions, plenary sessions, our whole terminology...
...2. It is incorrect to think that the alternative to the Soviet myth of the Communist revolution "changing the world" is resignation and do-nothingism...
...It is still another reminder, I think, of how much can truly be done to fight totalitarianism short of war—if only we take the troub!a to stop carrying a big stick and start carrying on a good argument...
...Quota* shrunk, production foil off...
...None of us was a traitor, but still the revolution has been betrayed...
...Or straight to the Americans...
...Are all persons who have some differences with us really "enemies" who deserve no better than to be destroyed...
...To Tito...
...the Induatrialliatton program was endangered...
...Several weeks later from Leipzig in the heart of the Soviet Zone, or the "Soviet German Republic," I received the following letter, to which J have appended an answer of my own...
...In the Red Army of the early days there was no saluting, no shoulder insignia, no march-step for parades...
...We moved along, step by step...
...It is at the same time our reminder to ourselves: "Oh, what a fall was therel . . ." It is, of course difficult to determine exactly how and when the degeneration took place...
...Incidentally, pro-GOP advertiaing agencies are circulating money-raising chain letters for Taft...
...How is that possible...
...Today they are once again party workers...
...I am trying to recall What we were fighting for in those days, and what the point of our whole activity was...
...The two man of great responsibility for our Soviet policy wara George Kennan, now on laava from the Department with some sabbatical travels planned for South America...
...NULL, Heard on the Left POST HOC PROPTER HOC...
...One reason is the strength of the •motional tie which binds people to an organisation to which they have belonged from the beginning...
...The Stalinists are indeed...
...whether in the hands of private businessmen (checked by powerful trade unions) or in the hands of a socialist state (supported by the friendly workers' movement) there are problems, miscalculations, reforms that still need to be pushed through...
...r -Melvln J. Lasky is editor of Der Monat, Berlin...
...The slogan of "vigilance" hadn't occurred to anybody yet...
...To be sure, even for the forced laborer there is an explanation—"the penetration of the land of socialism by its capitalist enemies...
...There are innumerable examples...
...Is now an adviser to General J. McCloy at Bonn and a shift to a mora innocuous post impends for G. Frederick Reinhardl, acting deputy director of the Office of Eastern European Affairs...
...Our party was an organization df friends, with similar :ieals and similar rights, working in mutual zmi\dence...
...If we weren't so anxious to shut our eyes, perhaps we should have read what only a few days ago a Communist paper wrote in a vigorousve4itorial against Tito: "What is decisive is not that the means of production have been nationalized, but who controls the nationalization and how...
...In France, for the Improvement of conditions • in the colonies and ultimate liberation...
...And perhaps now it will be all the more difficult to explain why in spite of everything we still go along...
...for not a few the recent Berlin Blockade or the Berlin Railroad strike...
...and Charles Bohlen...
...But the struggle has a wide front...
...in England for greater educational and medical facilities for the mass of people...
...to justify it, to reconcile it with the great hopes we carried in our hearts...
...We had no idols, and hero-worship ran against our grain...
...You must understand our motives...
...Up in Connecticut, this wisecrack is making the rounds: "Benton & Bowles are back in business...
...Elbridge Durbrow, another counsellor at our Moscow Embassy, is now with the War College...
...How well we know it...
...One item in the budget which aroused some discussion was the increase in appropriations for mental hygiene institutions...
...We remain on, and in our decision there is, perhaps, a deep resignation, a great weariness...
...One could argue: every sacrifice must bo made for the fulfillment of our great ends...
...Neither the democratic socialism of England nor the democratic capitalism of America have, for example, avoided mishaps in attacking the problem of Coal and Steel production...
...In a land of no unemployment, people would simply never have volunteered for such trying, climatically unattractive jobs...
...simply a long evening of conversation, some duelling and debate, a bitter argument or two, but then a feeling at the end that it's not all as dark and hopeless as we sometimes think...
...Nothing official, nothing world-shaking...
...because in all these years we tried in every way to explain it...
...And it was that way in the early days of the Soviet Union...
...DEAR —: The questions and problems which your letter raises are important ones, and they cannot be answered easily in a conversation or in a few short paragraphs...
...You see, when we've gone that far, then surely we can remain exactly where we are...
...You're not quite right about it, and I'll try to explain...
...There are ,of course, also economic and selfish factors—one doesn't abandon an organisation easily after it has come to power, has become a slate-power, and one can so easily, so deservedly get a good Job...
...there was no pay-off: the man in the plant could not quit* bo convinced of "goodness" and "nobility...
...Leipzig...
...Neither France nor West-Germany, neither the United States nor England, has seized upon the magic formula which will produce "happiness for the masses...
...It may be that not all of this has become crystal clear to each one of us...
...Wasn't tho solution of 1930/31...
...It isn't easy to build a new social order...
...You have no right to smile...
...That was good, even noble...
...The Whip...
...There is no box-office where qne can get a ticket to just the right theater of actio^i...
...3. It is most incorrect, even tragic, to believe that by doing nothing and remaining where one is, one is at least avoiding the risk of committing some new and greater error...
...There are imperfections everywhere...
...An example: we were against wage differences...
...We were afraid of no one, were far above trembling over the loss of a job...
...If we give up our efforts, to change the world, to build something better, then we certainly don't have to get off our beaten path, then we don't have to leave the party, because it certainly isn't building anything better...
...ForgiVe me for reminding you—but I am also trying to remind myself...
...But isn't one reminded here in Berlin that somebody else tried to argue that way, too...
...Embassy clerk In Moscow, as "anti-Soviet conspirators" and "spies...
...How many evils of the old society that we passionately rejected came to be justified ingeniously in the so-called new society...
...In the West there is not only the abstract possibility of change and reform and improvement, there is also the actual practice — there are political parties, trade unions, newspapers and magazines, great and small, all engaged in vital day-to-day activities...
...That, however, didn't stop the AFL central body in Asheville, N. C, from endorsing Reynolds...
...I don't believe that there was really an '18th Brumaire...
...But great things have been done: the means of production and the land itself have been nationalized, there are no big capitalists and fat property-owners any more, there can be no exploitation of man by man...
...But they were allowed to "confess" to them...
...r No...
...But if we do not despair, if we want to hold on to our ideals of social justice, if we want to fight the forces of evil in behalf of progress, where shall we go...
...To the Trotskyists...
...It was the struggle for a better world...
...Bevin is paralysed at press conferences and before a microphone...
...But they are engaged in doing good and necessary things...
...You argue that it is all due to our habit of "not thinking," of having a partyline handed down to us...
...I remind you of all this to underline the strength of the bonds that tie us...
...We have to build with the same old human personality, and that can't be . changed overnight...
...And this is where we all pull back frightened...
...There are forces working for good and forces working for evil everywhere...
...Evert/ year Governor Dewey holds budget "school" at the Executive Mansion, several days in advance of publication of his budget proposals, for newspaper editors and executives...
...Something must be done to atop them, to defeat them, before they in their corrupt fanaticism push the world into war again...
...An End to Wage-Levelllngl" correct...
...Melvin J. Lasky is editor of Der Monat, Berlin...
...no one should wallow in plenty while others were in need...
...The introduction of wage-differentials, food privileges for engineers, special dining halls, were justified, just as was later the Stakhanov movement, Hennecke, and the premium system...
...During his European trip, Oscar Ewing, Fedsral Security Administrator (and the man to watch in the fight for the fi.Y...
...Why work harder, belter...
...In the army, we had been against imperialstyle dress, against blind obedience and Prussianism...
...Loy Henderson, our erstwhile counsellor in Moscow, is Ambassador in India...
...None will change the world overnight...
...1. It is incorrect to formulate the major issue in the world today as a struggle between "socialism" and "capitalism...
...Can we call attention to errors and evils...
...If we leave, where do we head for...
...Charles Thayer, an old Moscow hand...
...Is it coincidence that these five are singled out in the MVD-ghosted memoirs of Annabelle Bucar, the renagada U.S...
...Talent and promise were decisive...
...Write us a letter, record your doubts, defend what you still think is defensible, set down what you still believe in, explain why you're still a Communist today...
...A great majority of old Communisi&*are still in the ranks...
...To the extent that Tito Is resisting Stalin's brutalitarian hegemony {and not simply building up a similar system in his own name), exactly to that extent' is it a struggle which is helping to keep in check the main danger to the peace and liberties of peoples today...
...Two of the most important newspaper executives there were well over 70 and were visibly affronted by Dewey's gaff...
...Can we write and speak out our own mind...
...And still to be reckoned with is the great army of—let's say it—slaves...
...For some the Hitler-Stalin pact: for others the Moscow Trials of '37...
...The issue is between a world in which an absolute dictatorship iof the state has been established—where no man is free, not the Worker in the factory, nor the scientist in the laboratory, nor the writer at the desk—and another world where certain definite freedoms exist—the right of the worker to organize his own independent trade union and to strike, the right of the scientist and the writer and the professor and the student to hold and express his own opinion, the right to criticize, the right to travel...
...They work as free raejh and they receive a satisfaction which no Communist has had for decades, the satisfaction of seeing for themselves, judging for themselves, correcting their own errors and changing their minds, and then going on...
...PIPELINE-FROM-ENGLAND DEPT.: The Fab...
...I have overwhelmed myself a little...
...DEAR LASKY: You find it incomprehensible that so many of us still go along, although we all know how hopeless it is...
...the woman was told, "Your body belongs to you...
...I remind myself, too, how in the beginning we fought gainst the prohibition of abortions...
...Capitalism has been displaced in Russia, 'but poverty and social injustice have remained...
...Fine, we have recognized that the Soviet Union is not really a land of socialism, that the Party has betrayed our ideals, that our path was wrong, that we have to get off the train...
...Acheson...
...Keenan paid him no mind...
...culture," "peace" and all the other great yirtues...
...We didn't see how the fate of "free opinions" was really sealed in those camps of the eastern steppes...
...Shall we turn merely to desperation and leave the world the way it is...
...We have never doubted that even within Russia today there are many who know the madness of the Politburo and who are somehow helping...
...I mean honest get-togethers by people from the East — Germans, Poles, Czechs (although hardly any more SovietRussians) — with Western political personalities...
...Can you imagine the Soviet army today without these...
...L.M.K...
...The five top American diplomats who specialised in Soviet affairs for years and played' a major role In the postwar development of our "cold war" resistance to Soviet expansion, have been shifted within the State Department out of contact with Russian affairs...
...That is our story...
Vol. 33 • February 1950 • No. 7
