After Hungary

...For the first time, the entire country is being stirred to its depths, particularly the younger generation...

...How absurd, how mistaken is the supposed total reabsorption of man in the economy...

...Everyone knows that the Italian CP devoutly respects the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the partv and a remarkable and often original essayist...

...Read what Gyula Hay, an on-the-spot-observer, has to say of the matter: "For years I thought that our regime was a socialist regime—with deviations and errors...

...The false theory of spontaneous orthodoxy and voluntary unanimity is indeed the Gate of Hercules beyond which no Communist, no fraction, dares to venture...

...It is time to do away with intermediaries in our relationships with truth and with the people...

...He uses his intelligence particularly in thinking up shrewd alibis during the dangerous moments in the shifts of Russian policy...

...Moscow has granted Toglialti...

...All that, if ever it did exist, has simply flowed into the Danube, under the Budapest bridges which are being guarded by Russian troops...

...They had foreseen it, had even announced it...

...In the postwar years, Nen-ni's slogan, which aimed at justifying the close alliance of his Italian Socialist party with the Italian Communist party, was: "One class, one policy...

...Having been recalled to order by the June 30 declaration of the Central Committee of the Communist Part)' of the USSR, he has not faltered since...

...That is why it is advisable to reduce the number of prisoners, particularly the intelligent and thoughtful prisoners...

...People were therefore surprised, in view of the general poverty of Marxist studies in our time, that the publishing houses of the sister parties did not bring out translations of Gramsci's philosophical and literary writings...

...I therefore do not share the naivete of some of my friends who think that the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks constitutes the supreme test of good faith and the final separation of the good from the wicked...

...In order to start learning to think honestly once again, we must first tidy up our language...

...As if the economy itself did not demand a choice at every moment...

...And this holds for all the other pairs of supposed identifications...

...How often (after the great trials of 1936, after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, etc...

...Can we give more weight to considerations of tactics, strategy, patriotism and organization than to the deep impulse that forces us to recognize the primacy of factual truth...

...Their perplexity is quite understandable...

...I no longer think so...

...De-Stalinization corresponded to an urgent need of Russian society...

...In reality, the soviets disappeared from Russia as early as 1920, and the only soviets that exist in the world are the Hungarian revolutionary committees...

...The leaders have destroyed the party...

...What would be left for men who did not take their stand on a people or on a class or on a community, and who did not believe in an idea...

...the Communist party, as everyone knows, "is identified" with Soviet Russia and the people's republics, which, of course, "are identified with History...

...And that brings to mind a confidence imparted by Jean-Paul Sartre: During his last stay in Moscow, he learned from students at the School of Letters that certain of his early works, which were strictly prohibited by the Soviet censors, were nevertheless circulating sub rosa...

...This is as brief and clear as an epigraph...

...Unfortunately, we cannot project our own emotion into other people...

...At the moment, the situation is not simple...

...However, during the two dizzy months that followed the publication of the Khrushchev report through the intermediary of the State Department, Togliatti declared in a report to this Central Committee: "Gramsci is certainly the greatest modern thinker of Western Europe...

...Sometimes, however, these entertainers slap the tyrants so hard that the smack resounds forever...

...for him, merely the memory of an unhappy blunder...

...But it is sad to see men fall short of their own creations...

...For example, why the devil do we keep referring to the Russian army as the Soviet army...

...When the time came, they did not hesitate between the Party and the people, between ideology and truth...

...At the same time, there was the exciting news that groups of Russian soldiers had gone over to the Hungarian insurgents...

...No country is spared the crisis of our age...

...did I have the same hope, but my hopes were always vain...

...That's what is important right now...

...The political powers then imagine that these writers have no other concern but to serve or amuse them...

...Speakers at lectures on the international situation were bombarded with questions about Hungary...

...Is it still possible, after all these fraternal massacres of Communist fractions, to believe and utter such untruths...

...Citizens should be able to think as free men, for the thinking of the entire people would thereby become sounder...

...The debate is now open...

...What is the reason for this unwonted negligence...

...The worst reply of all was Sartre's, with its unhappy formulas about "identifications...

...Kronstadt and Barcelona followed upon each other with the speed of special editions of a popular newspaper...

...We must first make peace with truth and establish a direct relationship with it...

...The great Hungarian poets—and, in general, all the great poets of the world—were men who were endowed with a deep sense of community...

...But he had been ill-informed...

...It also appears that, since black November 4, huge reproductions of the same Picasso's "Korean War" have been set up on easels in the streets of Warsaw, right on the sidewalk...

...the working class, in turn, "is identified" with the Communist party...

...If there still exist such weak-minded individuals, let them explain, with the merest show of logic, the motivation of Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress of the Communist party...

...As for their own internal difficulties and those of their satellite countries, they regarded them as positive symptoms of growth...

...There is an old truth which says that the prisoner is cleverer than his jailer, for the prisoner concentrates fully on one thing only, his freedom, whereas the jailer has to think about a thousand things...

...As far as writing is concerned, it is no easy matter to support the Government—r and it never was, except perhaps during the brief perk...

...The question of the plurality of political currents is the touchstone among progressives...

...That, of course, is not a program...

...But allow me to explain: When I say "honest Stalinists," I mean in particular, and have meant for some time, young Russians and those in the satellite countries...

...No Communist can open a discussion of the legitimacy of the single party without breaking away from the theory and practice of the totalitarian party...

...Their conception of coexistence was based, among other things, on the conviction that the Western world is being undermined by contradictions which doom it to decay and disintegration...

...But, despite everything, I do not foresee a major movement back to the policy condemned by their 20th Congress...

...In short, he did all he could to get himself pardoned by Stalin for his earlier Bukharin-ism, and he succeeded brilliantly...

...This philological ambiguity is more or less at the root of all the other progressive cliches...

...With regard to the Hungarian insurgents, Togliatti has displayed a vulgarity and insolence that the Italian language had not known since the fall of Fascism...

...I approve of the idea...

...Djilas, even in prison, seems to us the man of tomorrow...

...How did it happen that this happy society, which ought never to have raised political problems or problems concerning the choice of a general orientation, witnessed the destruction of its revolutionary elite, the total extermination of five federated peoples and the creation of forced-labor camps with a prison population of 12 to 15 million...

...but none of these eminent persons has ever indicated exactly what the defective mechanism or faulty methods were...

...But what's been happening to the identifications...

...Within a period of two weeks, Budapest lived through February, October and July...

...Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that for years he was one of the most docile instruments of the Muscovite terror, the accomplice of the Rakosis and Geros in their most heinous crimes in Moscow and Spain, to wit, the liquidation of Bela Kun, of Remmale and of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist party...

...The Winter Palace...

...Tito himself has been left behind...

...I can be a humanist only in my own community, where I have the roots of my being...

...I have just learned that the relief packages which are being sent to the Hungarians from Poland all have the same identification mark: Picasso's dove weeping tears of blood...

...But no, in the mind of its inventor it claimed to be an observation of fact, a starting-point...

...It was not something that the present collective leadership invented, but rather something they submitted to...

...He had thought at the time that he was correctly interpreting the new directives of Stalin's successors, and, as usual, immediately made a show of zeal...

...Thus, even if an author is silent, the work still protests for him...

...it is only the expression of my feeling...

...If, however, he does dare to cross that frontier and if he admits the necessity of a plurality of political currents, if he admits discussion and free choice, then he is no longer a Communist...

...before becoming a Stalinist, he was a Bukharinist...

...Another question I should like to raise concerns intellectuals: Can we still associate the cause of human truth with that of a party, state and class, and accord them a blanket confidence as if, by their very nature, they could not fail in their "mission...

...for \crpowerful psychological reasons, a license to worship Gramsci, though it is strictly limited to the peninsula (and he has been largely recompensed for this by the fact that a number of young intellectuals, students of Croce, have joined the Italian CP...

...What, then, is to be done...

...Is there still among us a single honest person who can dare justify the one-party regime and the absence of an opposition press in the supposedly socialistic countries, with the false pretext that the (presumed) disappearance of classes has made any divergence of political opinions impossible in those countries, and that where such divergencies do appear they are simply the result of the evil influences of the outside imperialist world...

...Hie sunt leones...

...How many Russian soldiers went over to the Hungarian rebels...

...I have no objections to make to it...

...He has, in this field, an extreme sensitivity which has made it possible for him, and him alone, to survive many a shipwreck...

...Events are not the same for everyone...

...of the common struggle of revolutionary writers ancl political revolutionaries in their efforts to establish a new world...

...Unity of time and placc...

...What artful humbug...

...Apart from that, I am willing to admit, as far as rank-and-file Communists are concerned, that there may still be honest Stalinists...

...As for the leftist intellectuals among us, it is hard to imagine a more sterile "alienation" than the one they have experienced as a result of placing their confidence and hopes in identifications that did not exist...

...This formula could still have an ideal meaning if it were intended to indicate a program, a dream, a goal...

...The fact is that the rebellious Communist intellectuals of Poland and Hungary did not receive from their former Western spiritual guides the aid for which they had publicly appealed...

...Having experienced the temptations of heresy and having sacrificed them to the needs of his career, he is often cynical, cruel and pitiless, especially toward the intellectuals of his party who refuse to be tamed...

...I must admit that I ascribe to these episodes an importance far exceeding that of the General Assembly of the United Nations...

...It is rather a philosophy of human activity that leaves quite a number of doors open...

...It is perhaps worthwhile for me to point out a particular aspect of Togliatti's fundamental ambiguity, one having to do with ideology...

...The Swedish Expressen of November 4 stated that, according to eye-witnesses, in the first few days of the revolt there were two to three hundred in the city of Budapest alone...

...For all their realism, they can judge and forecast only from the point of view of their doctrine, which, unfortunately, is highly summary and schematic...

...A writer who is really alive cannot but be, of course, in favor of progress...

...Rodolfo Mondolfo, the reformist socialist, and it is not a verv materialist philosophy...

...Not weep, not laugh, but understand...

...Thus, as in a sleight-of-hand trick, all at once the most complicated problems (problems still open) appear to be solved...

...When the counter-order arrived, he must have bitten his tongue...

...But if it was not clashes of ideas, interests and groups that set Stalin first against Trotsky, then against Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov and Tukhachevsky, and that later caused the downfall of Rajk, Slansky, Beria, and only recently of Rakosi and Gero, then what was it...

...Despite this...

...I don't know what name sociologists will give to the type of regime that we've been subjected to, but I do know that in that system deviation was everything and socialism nothing...

...We, in Italy, have suffered enough in the political sphere from a particularly absurd form of this obsession with identifications...

...The discontent of rank-and-file Party members at being kept in the dark was reflected in the results of elections to Party commissions and bureaus held at local branches...

...But of what use would it have been...

...Veres said this in September...

...Just a few days ago, I read the text of a speech by Peter Veres at a meeting of the Hungarian Writers' Union...

...Frankly, all things considered, we Italians would rather thave Thorez...

...An ideological literature is justified...

...Socialism, yes...

...There are," says Veres, "writers who adapt themselves...

...As a result of their tremendous experiences, they were already far ahead of them...

...We must recognize the fact that there is no one ultimate experience for everyone...

...As a matter of fact, one finds in Granisci a conception of shop-committees and of the workers' state that was directly influenced by the ideas of the American trade-unionist Daniel rle Leon...

...We know that he kept his promise...

...An unexpected "frost" might produce "Hungarys" inside Russia itself...

...According to other sources, several thousand Russians went over to the insurgents (in small isolated groups, in all cases...

...Why should it not he possible for workers in the same enterprise to have several opinions about the same subjects...

...On the days that followed, although the prolongation of the Hungarian struggle seemed hopeless, Russian soldiers continued going over to the insurgents with their tanks (Observer of November 4, Neue Ziircher Zeitung of November 8...

...But he must realize that in modern times progress "is identified" with the working class...

...Just imagine: He had to make people forget his Stalinism...

...Nor has anyone ever explained to us why—bv virtue of that mysterious natural or social law—doubt, hesitation and uncertainty as to the choices that life demands of us at every step should automatically disappear in the "homeland of socialism...

...Their present confusion is obvious...

...It may be the harbinger of the unhoped-for springtime...

...Tibor Dery, speech at the Petofi Club, June 17, 1956...

...Single party, compulsory unanimity, no...

...Be it recognized, to the honor of the Hungarian Communist writers, that the ordeal did not take them bv surprise...

...Is it still possible to speak, at the present time, of the class that is identified with the party, of the party that is identified with the revolution, of the revolution that is identified with History...

...Yet Togliatti has never dared quote Gramsci in a speech or article intended for foreign Communists...

...Perhaps this is our great duty, now, after the Hungarian Revolution...

...The Russians whom we have always loved are thus beginning to awaken: the grandsons of Herzen, Tolstoy, Bakunin, Vera Figner, the students who have in their blood the tradition of underground activity, the peasants who shelter and feed runaway prisoners...

...Abstract humanism is not worth much...

...Gyula Hay has proposed "an offensive and defensive pact with truth...

...One could give a course in the history of socialist ideas and methods merely by relating the successive episodes of this Hungarian Revolution...

...they are soviets in the most genuine sense of the word—open, elementary and improvised forms of the people's power in a country where autocracy has prevented the organizing of political parties...

...Now, the historical importance of the recent Hungarian Revolution lies, as everyone knows, in the rejection of the totalitarian lie...

...They did not foresee that the strain would provoke a centrifugal movement of such scope among the satellites...

...He is therefore more flexible than Thorez...

...In addition, he learned his philosophy of praxis from his teacher...

...That's the kind of thing that should now interest intellectuals more than anything in the world...

...In the course of those weeks, the world watched in amazement an unfolding of all revolutionary ideas, even those that were thought to be most antiquated, even Blanqui and Sorel...

...His famous declarations in Nuovi Argumenti after the Khrushchev report are...

...The revolutionary movements in Poland and Hungary were probably a bitter surprise for the Russian rulers...

...This frontier has now moved into each individual country...

...What is my attitude toward the CP to which I have belonged for so many years...

...In any case, our General Assembly ought even now to be giving the example of a future functional democracy so that writers may truly become the forerunners of social progress...

...In this connection, I should like to say that to us Italians the admiration that the Italian CP still enjoys in some countries is a subject of amazement...

...All that we know of the rapid ideological evolution of Communist intellectuals in Budapest leaves not the slightest doubt about it...

...There is no longer a geographic frontier of peace, freedom and truth...

...I have been noticing symptoms which prove that Russia can no longer avoid the awakening that is now shaking all of Eastern Europe...

...Let us not forget that the new era of Russian life by no means began with the 20th Congress of the Party, but with the strikes of the forced laborers at Vorkuta...

...The true spirit of revolution has always sought for differences and not identifications...

...Yes, Togliatti is an old-timer...

...The entire "system," with all its weight, rests on this very pivot...

...A series of news items in the New Statesman of November 24 proves that Russian public opinion is beginning to manifest itself: "On the eve of the November 7 celebrations, there was an unexplained interruption in the sale of foreign newspapers in a number of cities and there were wild scenes at the kiosks in Leningrad when the Polish and Yugoslav papers eventually arrived...

...The "camp of peace" was also regarded as the happy country "without classes" and without political divergencies...

...Do you recall the refrain...

...We must learn from the people what their truths are, and must let them know ours...

...We have not forgotten that Tito, Togliatti and Gomulka had given us to understand that the long period of Stalinist terror was obviously explicable only by defects in the "system...

...It no longer exists...

...The official theoreticians of Moscow had no difficulty in discovering that these writings teem with grave heresies...

...They thought they were marching with the youth of the world, in the vanguard of History, whereas, poor wretches, they were merely flies buzzing about a gruesome hearse...

...As Jacob Burckhardt warned us, it is the great simplifiers who lead to dictatorship...

...No break with the honest Stalinists—we have duties to them...

...For—to consider only the first link of the chain—in asserting the identification of the class with the party, one gives as indefinitely solved a problem of relations which, in actual fact, is never entirely solved since it arises anew each day under another aspect...

...Very simple...

...The worst tyranny of all is that of words...

...which had seemed an artifice of classical tragedy, governed the rhythm of the events...

...Let there be no illusions: The democratic reform of Communism that some people speak of is a decoy, the return to the roots an impossible dream...