Antidote for Wishful Thinking
MEYER, PETER
WRITERS and WRITING Antidote for Wishful Thinking Reviewed by Peter Meyer European Communism. By Franz Borkenau. Harper. 564 pp. $6.00. Co-author, "The Jews in the Soviet...
...Only one was not mentioned: leftist adventurism in international affairs...
...Spring Book Number May 10...
...The most dubious of Borkenau's interpretations is his explanation of Tito's defection...
...But Hitler's accession to power accelerated the process...
...The Bolsheviks should have known this from their own experience, for their original cadres had been preponderantly "petty-bourgeois" in origin...
...This process also removed the last tenuous tie between the Soviets and the interests of the Western working class...
...There was nothing a Communist could not say or do when ordered by the party...
...Tito belonged to the Zhdanov group...
...Neutralists swarm by the thousands around the old fly-trap of "peaceful coexistence...
...And it explains the reasons for shifts in the "line" in each period...
...The confirmed anti-Communist, Giuseppe Saragat, recommends inviting the Italian Fierlinger, Pietro Nenni, into the Cabinet...
...What were the issues...
...There was only one cardinal sin--disobedience...
...Here, for the first time, emerged the now-famous fellow-traveler, crypto-Communist, infiltrator, front organization, CP-controlled business chain, etc...
...But, even in the nineteenth century, nationalism was an expression of very real interests...
...On the other hand, Borkenau is excellent in his characterizations of political personalities he has known or whose careers he has followed...
...The United Front tactic of the Twenties was based on the assumption that the working class was the main force of the world revolution and the only reliable ally of Soviet power abroad...
...Abroad, they chased from the Comintern all intellectuals who tried to use their intellect, and promoted to leadership ignorant workers who could be easily manipulated by "professional revolutionaries" from Moscow...
...This only serves to remind us how many reliable studies a la Rossi must be written before a general historian of the Communist movement can find sufficient trustworthy material...
...Some leaders may have gone under with the discarded policy, but most of those who obeyed in time were able to go on serving Moscow...
...When one reads Belgrade's protests against the arrogance of the Soviet "supervisors," their inflated salaries as compared with those of Yugoslav ministers and generals, and the MVD's attempt to check on Yugoslav officials, one knows the real reasons for the Tito-Stalin break...
...But a contributing factor seems to be that ample material has been collected, sifted and evaluated by such authors as Ruth Fischer and Angelo Rossi...
...He often fails to grasp local background factors and confuses different stages in party history, mixing up "right" and "left" deviationists...
...But now Yugoslavia belongs to them--reason enough for patriotism...
...According to Borkenau, it had nothing to do with Yugoslav nationalism...
...It is not only a comprehensive history of European Communism (outside of Russia) but also a critical manual of Communist strategy and tactics...
...For those people who are capable of learning from experience, Franz Borkenau's book is an invaluable instrument of education...
...They became centralized, conspiratorial organizations of blindly obedient Soviet agents...
...Borkenau has a keen eye for their meaning...
...The conceited ignoramus Ernst Thael-mann, the "completely colorless true-blue proletarian party bureaucrat" Maurice Thorez, the super-clever opportunist Palmiro Togliatti come alive in the pages of this book...
...Of course, the Titoists were not concerned about Yugoslavia so long as they were powerless outlaws...
...Borkenau's knowledge of Communist types helps him interpret the Communist policy shifts and intra-party struggles, especially in the twilight period when an old "line" has already been superseded by new faits accomplis of Soviet foreign policy but orders from Moscow are slow in...
...Even when one does not agree with the author, he raises interesting questions...
...contributor to "Commentary" It is astonishing and exasperating how little people learn from dearly won experience...
...But they suppressed the memory of this original sin which so contradicated Marxian theory, and it took 20 years of bureaucratic rule before Stalin and Molotov began to speak, at the Eighteenth Party Congress, about the "Soviet intelligentsia" as the new elite of the nation...
...The MVD does not like to have a case spoiled by a retracting defendant--that can cost the investigators their heads...
...The Comintern sections ceased to be political parties in any meaningful sense...
...In dealing with other parties and periods, the author is not only sketchier but sometimes also less reliable...
...it follows Communist policies through all their twists and turns...
...There are many indications that the Zhdanov-Malenkov struggle actually occurred, but where are the proofs that this was the main reason for Tito's defection...
...There are significant differences reflecting basic changes in the various Communist parties' role in the Soviet drive for world power, and Mr...
...Interesting chapters on Spain, the wartime policies of the British Communists, and the party histories of Yugoslavia and Albania are added as major excursions...
...He proves on every page that the despotic, terroristic and expansionist character of the Communist movement never changes...
...The Indian Praja Socialist party, an anti-Communist group, concludes an electoral alliance and united-front agreement with the Communists...
...The Popular Front of the Thirties was quite different from the old-style United Front...
...The dogs were now so well trained that the organizational leash of the Comintern could easily be dispensed with when it became necessary in 1943...
...And all this is happening after 36 years of watching the Communists in action...
...All the frantic turns of the first Comintern years could not resolve this contradiction and ended by discrediting and isolating the organization...
...Of course both Stalin and Tito were totalitarians...
...At the same time, the Yugoslavs never accused the Stalinists of rightist opportunism--which, while bad policy, would have been a probable first spontaneous reaction at the time of the break if Borkenau's theory were correct...
...And though Tito might have had a vested interest in eliminating allusions to his leftism at a time when he was dependent on Western benevolence, Stalin would certainly not have helped him cover his traces...
...But Communist parties will continue to exist in all countries where they can achieve influence, and the Communists will fight for their legality tooth and nail...
...After years of experience, the masters of the Kremlin discovered that not the proletariat but rather certain strata of the middle-class intelligentsia were most useful for the transmission of Soviet influence abroad...
...When Stalin finally decided against Zhdanov and the latter's faction was liquidated, Tito saved himself by deserting the Soviet orbit...
...I have tried to summarize one aspect of the development of Communist policy...
...At the same time, the Communists were now not only permitted but ordered to conceal and deny their final aims...
...It was a struggle in terms of twentieth-century totalitarianism, not of nineteenth-century nationalism...
...In all stories about the break, the Belgrade as well as the Moscow version, there is no evidence of a struggle between a radical and a moderate wing of the Cominform and the Politburo...
...The latter is being rather superficial when he says that the conflict between Stalin and Tito was "totalitarian in content" though "nationalist in form...
...As Mr...
...In Borkenau's opinion, there were two factions in world Communism...
...The book concentrates on two Comintern sections: the German party in the period before, and the French party in the period after, Hitler's rise to power...
...But the Communists were no longer choosy about who these allies should be...
...For example, it is hard to believe that the MVD arranged Traicho Rostov's surprising plea of not guilty in open court in order to give greater weight to the anti-Tito material in his confession...
...If they openly proclaimed their aims and constantly attacked their allies, they were condemned by Moscow as sectarian and inefficient--left-deviationism...
...Everyone who does not want merely to be "against" Communism, but to know what it is and how it works, should read this book...
...Sometimes, however, his imagination misleads him, and some of his conjectures are rather startling...
...The whip, in the form of subsidies and underground apparatuses, remained, of course, in Moscow's hands...
...One, directed by Zhdanov, favored a quick offensive against the Western world after World War II...
...Political writers today compare the "realistic" and "conservative" Malenkov with the "fanatical" and "revolutionary" Stalin in exactly the same terms used to compare the "realistic" Stalin with the "dogmatic" Lenin thirty years ago...
...It describes every trick used by the Kremlin's agents...
...It was a long time before these changes were officially recognized by Communist doctrine...
...The strategic aim was still to deceive, capture and finally destroy the party's allies...
...Countless times, we have seen Communist parties change strategy overnight at a nod from Moscow...
...The issue of Yugoslav independence "was a subordinate element in a struggle for much wider issues...
...But not all periods and countries are equally well handled and documented...
...But the struggle between them reflected the inner conflicts of the Soviet system: the struggle of "native" bureaucratic nationalism in the oppressed nations against totalitarian imperialism...
...This is all true--Tito had certainly been the fair-haired boy of the Cominform...
...Edouard Daladier, alternately supported and denounced by the Communists a dozen times in the past, undertakes a pilgrimage to Warsaw with the same zeal with which he flew to Munich...
...Co-author, "The Jews in the Soviet Satellites...
...In this Procrustean bed, Communist leaders had little room for maneuver...
...Furthermore, why should one suppose that Communist bureaucrats would sooner fight for a global strategic concept than for something much nearer to them: power in their own country...
...But there the proof ends...
...It was aimed at the Socialist parties and the labor unions...
...And if they seriously tried to achieve unity of action with their partners, they were accused of opportunism and appeasemen of the Social Democratic "traitors"--right-deviationism...
...certainly the legal Communist parties in France or Italy are a tremendous asset to Moscow...
...A coalition with bourgeois parties, regarded as a mortal sin ten years earlier, was now the great objective...
...arriving...
...Nevertheless, in most countries the Comintern was able to preserve an organizational skeleton which, after the ouster of all independent leaders, right and left, was transformed into a not very efficient but completely malleable instrument of Soviet policy--any Soviet policy...
...There are good reasons for the concentration on these countries and periods...
...Willy Muenzenberg was allowed to organize "sympathizers"--intellectuals, professionals, and capitalists with a bad conscience--and, in spite of the humiliating treatment of these second-class participants in the Communist movement, the success was tremendous...
...The United Front of 1922 was not identical with the Popular Front of the Thirties and with the "national fronts" of today...
...Another, led by Malenkov, favored a more cautious course...
...Among other things, the middle class in dependent nations objected to being exploited and degraded into mere agents of some great imperialist power...
...We have no reason to doubt that Tito and his cohorts were prepared to make any necessary changes in the "line"--after all, they had to change much more when they jumped the Soviet ship...
...I see no evidence for his assumption...
...They will never put all their eggs in the "legal"basket, of course, and the crypto-Communists and infiltrators may play an increasing role...
...any coalition or cooperation with non-labor groups was unthinkable...
...Borkenau points out with much documentation, there was, at least in France, no limit on how far right the Popular Front might go...
...And it was limited by the rule that the Communists must always proudly proclaim their final aims: socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...They know how important these legal organizations are as a recruiting and training ground for the illegal apparatuses, and as means of creating an appropriate climate of opinion...
...Outside the party, however, even in the most "leftist" periods...
...But methods do change...
...But to give up real power in their country, just acquired and practically unlimited--that was another story...
...European Communism contains a mine of material on its many aspects...
...The Soviet leaders will, more probably, continue to combine legal with underground activities...
...In nationalization, elimination of opposition parties, dictatorship and terror, Titoland preceded and surpassed all other Eastern European countries under Soviet domination...
...Borkenau does not fall for the various theories that Communism is gradually developing into something more peaceful and democratic...
...Let me say, in conclusion, that I consider it a merit of Borkenau's book that it offers controversial interpretations...
...His withdrawal of his former confession could only compromise the entire trial and all its "revelations...
...Yugoslavia, to be sure, had been an exemplary satellite...
...Borkenau thinks that this development will finally lead to a situation in which the Communists will hide not only their aims but their personnel as well, and the legal Communist parties will completely disappear...
...In the twentieth century, the Communist bureaucracy in nations exploited by Soviet imperialism cannot help developing similar tendencies...
...Of course, this was not mere sentimental nationalism...
...The Cominform resolution expelling Tito charged him with every conceivable and inconceivable deviation...
...The Soviet leaders' unceasing struggle against "bourgeois" (read: bureaucratic) nationalism and separatism from Czechoslovakia to Kazakhstan proves that they understand this mechanism better than does Borkenau...
...He has a wealth of background information, in addition to a vivid imagination and a great talent for shrewd conjecture...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 14
