Post-Soviet Memoir
WOLIN, SIMON
Post-Soviet Memoir Betrayal of an Ideal. By G. A. Tokaev. Indiana Univ. 298 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Simon Wolin Author, "Communism's Postwar Decade"; former ideological analyst. Voice of...
...The author tried to imply that the workers had won nothing in the Revolution, but the man rejected this personal approach...
...Once a follower of Lenin, then a pupil of Bukharin and a member of his underground opposition group, later a convinced anti-Stalinist, he now opposes Stalin's successors because at present there is "an apparent shifting of landmarks, but the climate is the same...
...From a peasant boy, he rose to become a teacher at the Moscow Air Academy, and a bright career seemed assured to him...
...This practice he condemns strongly...
...Tokaev records a conversation with a Caucasian who looked like a beggar rather than a worker...
...Until this is done, Stalin's successors will never be short of men and women who out of profound, honest conviction will act as cynics, scoundrels and informers...
...Are we not building an underground railway in Moscow...
...None of them knew how to read or write...
...Whatever this may mean, he writes with disdain about "classical anti-revolutionary anti-Communists" and admits that he fled to the West "in sheer self-preservation...
...And is the butchery of Hungary an outgrowth of Lenin's worship of power or of the "monstrous concept"—or both...
...To them, the Revolution was not class struggle and compulsion, but everything that was "bright, fine, beautiful, friendly, brotherly...
...He was a typical "second-generation man of the Revolution...
...The orgy of farm collectivization gave him his first doubts about Stalinism, though not about the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...In seeming contradiction to his favorable view of Communism's doctrine, as allegedly distinct from its practice, the author observes that the task of anti-Soviet propaganda is "to prove to [the Soviet people] that the whole monstrous concept is false...
...A considerable asset to Soviet domestic propaganda is the palpable success of industrialization, which naturally produces creative enthusiasm in its participants...
...In this case, it is not the theory that is wrong, but the practice...
...Has your personal position improved...
...By drawing a sharp distinction between "true" Leninism and the "monstrous concept" of Stalinism, the author places himself in the familiar category of people who, while criticizing the Soviet regime, render it invaluable service by confusing the main issues of Communism...
...Are we not building the Moscow-Volga Canal...
...He spent two years in the Pioneers, six in the Komsomol, and 16 in the Party before he defected to the West...
...Disillusionment came later...
...Moreover, he finds that Soviet institutions are "very fine indeed—I say this having had ample opportunity to compare them with those of the Western countries...
...This provides an escape from the boredom of politics and the drabness of Soviet life...
...the author insisted...
...The author describes himself as a "revolutionary democratic liberal...
...But it was in this atmosphere prevailing in his native village that the author became an ardent Communist...
...Voice of America When Lenin died, mourning gripped the peasants of a small village lost on the slopes of the Caucasian mountains...
...Tokaev's well-written description of the men and the inner mechanism of the Party would have gained a lot had he realized that in this century, whenever the roads of revolution and democracy part, revolution inevitably degenerates into totalitarianism...
...Are Stalin's heirs entirely wrong in their anxious efforts to present themselves as true followers of Lenin...
...Lenin was the embodiment of the national self-determination so dear to the hearts of the small Caucasian minority...
...It has fallen far short of its goal, he maintains, but to consider 40 years of its skilful, consistent and monopolistic efforts a complete failure would be a great mistake...
...Therefore, Mr...
...Of course, it is improving...
...Tokaev, on the basis of his long experience, cautions against the complacent view that nobody in the USSR believes Soviet propaganda...
...But the imprint of youthful revolutionary ardor is not easily obliterated...
...Is it not the supreme proof that the "concept" is an inherent characteristic of Leninism in power...
...They developed as he and people around him were subjected to physical and mental mistreatment by the NKVD...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 8
