Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin A Polish Emigre Views Russia WHEN THE TURKS took Constantinople 500 years ago, one of the favorable results was a flight to the West of learned...
...perhaps his most significant personal comment is the following: "Particularly important, in my opinion, is the undeniable fact that, during her thousand years of life, Russia never succeeded in establishing any institution which was able to defend the rights of the individual or of the community against the overwhelming power of autocracy...
...One likes to remember the Decembrists, the aristocratic rebels of 1825, as they were depicted in Pushkin's poem which ends with the beautiful lines: "The heavy hanging chains shall fall, The walls shall crumble at the word, And freedom greet you with the light And brothers give you back the sword...
...Three indisputable facts, not mentioned by Mr...
...But the truth was more human and less idealistic...
...But his scholarship is so profound that no one can read his book without learning a great deal about the cultural atmosphere in Russia and Poland in the nineteenth century...
...The autocracy was not only physically but morally too strong for the Decembrists, who "repented," confessed and informed on each other just as the veteran Communists who had defied the Tsar's police crumbled in the fashion depicted so vividly by Koestler in Darkness at Noon...
...An unsophisticated reader, unfamiliar with postwar Germany, could easily get the impression from this article that East Germany is the magnet for people in West Germany, rather than the other way around...
...First, during the nine years since the end of the war, not counting the many millions of Germans forcibly expelled in 1945, almost two million former inhabitants of the Soviet Zone have fled to the West...
...The million or more human beings who "chose freedom," rather than live under Communist rule after the Bolshevik Revolution, represent one of the most highly educated groups in the world...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin A Polish Emigre Views Russia WHEN THE TURKS took Constantinople 500 years ago, one of the favorable results was a flight to the West of learned Greeks...
...An excellent representative of these people is Professor Waclaw Lednicki, one of the greatest living authorities on Russian and Polish literature, now Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California...
...The fall of the long-decadent Byzantine Empire contributed to the flowering of the classics and humanities in Italy and other European countries...
...The work suggests many historical parallels...
...The author has omitted the historical and political aspects of Soviet-Polish relations, concentrating his attention on the ideas of these and other prominent Polish and Russian intellectuals...
...Professor Lednicki lets his historical and literary research speak for itself, as a rule...
...Third, the political parties in the Federal Republic, as well as the Western powers, have consistently pressed for free elections in the Soviet Zone, and the Soviet Government has just as consistently refused...
...Wohl but extremely important, should dispose of this profoundly misleading impression...
...As against this flood of people running away from Communism (and, despite minor alleviations in the Soviet Zone, 300 fugitives were reaching West Berlin every day last summer), there is the merest trickle in the opposite direction...
...Our own age has witnessed a similar development...
...There are so many discouraging developments in international affairs that it seems pointless to thicken the gloom by crediting Communism in Germany with a magnetism which, for the vast majority of Germans, it clearly does not possess...
...Professor Lednicki has just published a new work, contrasting Russian absolutism and the Western ideal of individual freedom, as illustrated in the writings and personal experiences of such outstanding literary figures as Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Chaadaev, Dostoyevsky and Blok (Russia, Poland and the West, Roy Publishers, $5.00...
...It is one of the pleasing un-totalitarian features of THE NEW LEADER that its contributors are free to disagree among themselves...
...The same holds true for the political exiles from the Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain...
...Totalitarianism, in its Communist, Nazi and lesser forms, has driven from their native countries large numbers of intellectuals, who have enriched the lives of the free countries where they found new homes...
...I would like to enter a brief dissenting opinion, based on my recent visit to West Germany and West Berlin, on the article "Why Germans Go East," by Paul Wohl, in THE NEW LEADER of September 13...
...Second, while there is no unemployment in the Soviet Zone (any more than there is in Sing Sing), virtually none of the 190,000 registered unemployed in West Berlin ever go to the East Sector of Berlin to ask for a job...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 40
