Inside the Apparatus

...Fortunately, Leonhard is blessed with remarkable powers of perception and comprehension...

...Along with other Germans resident in European Russia, he was deported to Karaganda in September 1941, but was immediately permitted to enroll for the academic year at the Karaganda Educational Institute...

...Leonhard seeks "to depict for the benefit of the contemporary non-Soviet world how the new generation of trained Party officials in the Eastern bloc thinks and feels...

...they were rejoined in 1948 when the Soviet Government permitted some of its old-time German forced laborers to return home...

...Leonhard's book, whether he fully realizes it or not, demonstrates the fallacy of a popular thesis: Inexorable change (read: progress) in the structure of Soviet life is being brought about by the demand—which must inevitably be met—of the growing class of educated technicians and functionaries for greater freedom...

...Throughout these years, he had been living at one or another state-controlled Children's Home...

...At the end of April 1945, he was the youngest of the group of ten German Communists headed by Walter Ulbricht that was flown to Marshal Zhukov's headquarters near Berlin, with the task of recreating the Party and establishing Communist-controlled local and zonal governments...

...There he joined the Soviet Young Pioneers and was enrolled as a student in the Karl Liebknecht School, maintained by the Government for the children of German and Austrian political emigres...

...Its entire tone is thoroughly clinical...

...There is another sense in which "the apparatus does not work...

...where its critical faculty comes into play...

...These bare-boned itemizations are given flesh and blood in the many details of the book, the anecdotes and flashes of insight, the personal stories of friends and acquaintances, the brilliant capsule descriptions of men like Walter Ulbricht, Erno Gero, Jacob Berman and other leading Comintern personalities as Leonhard knew them...

...Throughout this long period be was subjected to a series of shattering experiences...

...His primary foreign language was English, but he also knew French, and by this time was speaking and reading Russian like a native...

...because, as Orwell would have known had he ever lived in Russia, the apparatus does not work...

...This is a third generation: the finished product of the system's apparatus...

...It is a singularly impressive description of the curriculum, training and atmosphere at this very important Soviet school, doubtless a counterpart of the most advanced Soviet academies...

...Within less than a year after their arrival in Moscow, his mother was arrested by the NKVD and deported to a forced-labor camp, one of the thousands of innocent victims of Stalin's great purges...

...The book is something of a rarity in the literature of defection, for it is neither a confessional nor a philosophical work...

...Leonhard emigrated with his mother to Moscow...

...But it is a mistake to expect that they must inevitably conform to that image...

...The infinitesimal proportion of hard-core defectors like Leonhard is sufficient evidence that it works...

...The life and instruction described there are a microcosm of the life of the Soviet-bloc elite...

...After two years of increasingly important work on Ulbricht's "general staff" he became an instructor at the Karl Marx Academy near Berlin, which provides extensive and intensive training for Party cadres from all over Germany...

...In 1935, at the age of 13 already a veteran of the German Communist party's loung Pioneers...

...Not since Eugen Kogonrs and David Rousset's books on Buchenwald, similarly based on personal experience, have we been presented with so meticulously detailed and valuable a case-study of a totalitarian structure...

...Child of the Revolution is Wolfgang Leonhard's personal account of his ten years (1935-45) as a youth and student in the Soviet Union, and an additional four years as a promising young servant of the Communist regime in East Germany...

...True, in the end the apparatus failed in Leonhard's case, though in very few others of his type...

...In an otherwise illuminating and perceptive introduction, Edward Crankshaw writes: '"Here is the complete apparatus of 1984—but without the spirit of 1984...

...but, though he broke with Stalinism in 1948, following Tito's expulsion from the Cominform, he remains very much a "political,' and this is consequently a political story...

...Reviewed by Mo she Decter Co-author, "McCarthy and the Communists' report on "Soviet Intervention in Hungary'' This is one of the most important documents on Communism to appear in the postwar period...

...With the "dissolution" of the Comintern in May 1943, he returned to Moscow and entered the Comintern apparatus there...

...The most fascinating and valuable section of the book is the long chapter on the Comintern School...

...The thesis is illusory because there is no "demand" for freedom...

...It is probable that most of the hard-core men do not exactly conform to the image of their ideal type...

...It is an extraordinary and fascinating political story, and it ought to be required reading for every responsible Western official who in the years to come will encounter the New Soviet Man, the professional Communist party functionary of the new generation...

...how it forms its judgments...

...It required the combined impact of the Khrushchev speech and the Hungarian Revolution to set in motion a slight softening process, which, however, has by now largely been reversed...

...Leonhard did not see his mother again for another twelve years...

...They need only—and do—conform to the demands of the apparatus, which teaches them the danger of doubt and provides the manifold compensations for stifling it...

...And that is sufficient unto the day...

...There are the cynics, the skeptics, the careerists, the doubters...

...however, his loyalty remained firm, despite recurring doubts, almost to the very end...

...They need not...

...In the last 25 years of Bolshevik history, exceedingly few hard-core cadre-men have defected...

...In July 1942, he left Karaganda and for nearly a year received an unusually intensive training at the Comintern School at Kushnarankevo, near Ufa...

...Two years later, he was transferred to a Russian school...

...Even this did not embitter him...

...Leon-hard tells here only what he himself saw and heard and did...

...One traumatic experience after another in the ensuing years raised doubts anew: the purges of Old Bolsheviks, the pact with the Nazis, the invasion of Finland, the deportation of the German emigres to Karaganda, the young idealist's first confrontation with the abject misery of ordinary people...

...A short review cannot do full justice to the textured richness of this account...

...Let Athens beware of Sparta...

...The following year, he was enrolled in the Moscow State Educational Academy for Foreign Languages...

...Doubts are submerged and loyalty is bolstered within the framework of an apparatus that combines the consequences of indoctrination, reward and terror...

...The Comintern was merely relocated at the anonymous "Institute No...

...soon most of his schoolmates and friends shared similar experiences, and joined in the common rationalizations of the crimes...

...In 1939, he joined the Komsomol and undertook a one-year training course at the Teachers' Institute for Foreign Languages...

...Each time, faith was restored and reinforced by rationalized justification of the regime's action...

...As far as young Wolfgang was concerned, she had just disappeared mysteriously, and it was many months until he learned vaguely of her whereabouts and fate...

...There, along with other members of the German section of the Comintern, he was for the next two years assigned to a variety of functions designed to prepare for future political tasks in Germany...

...In March 1949, after two years of growing doubts, he defected and escaped to Belgrade...

...What we must contend with is no longer a youth inspired by the revolutionary elan of Lenin's Bolshevism, or moved, as many undoubtedly were, by an intoxication with Stalin's industrialization and imperial expansion...

...A strange conclusion to draw from a book which demonstrates the very opposite...