The Soviet Party and the Body Social
GOLDHAGEN, ERICH
The Soviet Party and the Body Social A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By John Reshetar. Praeger. 3.31 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Erich Goldhagen Contributor, “Soviet...
...But pluralism restored to the Party is likely to spill over into society, unfreezing the enforced monolithic unanimity into its hitherto muted sectional, class and ethnic components, and thus eroding the totalitarian texture...
...In discussing the difficulties attending the establishment of collective leadership in the Party, he writes: “It is doubtful whether there can be genuine collective leadership under Communism...
...For under the banner of ideology the Party could claim the full plenitude of power on which it insists...
...The ordinary reader who comes to the book innocent of the subject is not likely to gain a clear notion of the methods and instruments used by the Party to exercise its rule, of the problems it encountered in imposing its will on industry, agriculture, the Army and the world of art, science and literature...
...Genuine collective leadership would sooner or later lead to the emergence of factions, each espousing divergent views...
...Individuals can serve as scapegoats, while the Party itself cannot...
...But nourished not by the timeless problems of the human condition—the perennial source of all supernatural religions—but by transient historical circumstances, its appeal fades once the social sources from which it springs have dried up...
...In transforming society the Party transformed itself...
...and when he died the loudest sigh of relief came from the upper echelons of the Party...
...Its levers of power penetrate into the innermost recesses of the body social, controlling it, harnessing it to Party purposes and guarding lest the manifold life of society burst the seams of the fixed mould...
...The Party which had set out to subdue the whole of society by fire and sword, which had destroyed its opponents and liquidated entire social classes on the authority of a presumed mandate of history, in the end became the victim of its own designs...
...Soon the Party would be astir with division and controversy...
...Nor does the author offer a coherent outline of the anatomy of the Party...
...The Party was thus cast into a “dialectical” role...
...And what a master it was...
...The relationship between Party and society was reciprocal...
...The current urgent endeavor to breathe life into the desiccated ideological body bears witness to the seriousness with which the Party views this problem...
...In 1917 Marxism-Leninism could move mountains, and during the next decade The Communist Manifesto could still serve in Russia as a powerful source of inspiration...
...It has remained its animator as well...
...it was at once master and servant—master of society and servant of the dictator...
...Perhaps no other single group in Soviet society was so exposed to the capricious wrath of the dictator...
...It built a new industrial empire...
...whose earlier writings—especially the history of the “Ukrainian Revolution”—revealed him an able historian, has unfortunately conceived his task in narrow terms...
...Indeed...
...Increasingly losing their force as a living gospel, the sacred texts of Marxism assumed the character of historical documents—sacred, boring and often incomprehensible...
...without it, its levers of power, stripped of sanctified doctrinal vestments, could still command obedience, but would cease to inspire devotion...
...Yet, the Party, if it is to divest itself (as it must) of blame for failures, must perforce find convenient scapegoats...
...It tore the peasants from their traditional ways, driving them to submit to an alien and oppressive mode of existence...
...All these obstacles may be subsumed under the heading that freedom is indivisible in Soviet society...
...Those who rule by terror will almost inevitably be haunted by it...
...By the 1930s it had been subdued by the dictator who, rising at first almost imperceptibly in its midst, converted it into an instrument of his will, terrorizing it and bleeding it white...
...But how many members of the Communist party today would derive inspiration and guidance from it...
...Surely an outline of the Party’s structure should have fallen within the range of a volume whose blurb boldly proclaims it to be “comprehensive in scope and definitive in treatment...
...Within the constricting limits, he writes with knowledge and insight...
...But the Party was more than a mere creator of this vast social complex...
...The new tasks demanded new skills...
...Collegial authority in decision-making assumes collegial responsibility for failure...
...John Reshetar reminds us, “it is an established fact that in no country have so many Communists been physically destroyed and morally assassinated and humiliated as in the Soviet Union...
...The fiery orator gave way to the calculating administrator, the idealistic visionary to the Tatsachenmensch, and the impassioned sloganeering that once moved men to heroic deeds turned into mechanical phrasemongering...
...It was not a traditional ruling elite, content with the enjoyment of power and privilege...
...Reviewed by Erich Goldhagen Contributor, “Soviet Survey,’’ “Problems of Communism” THE HISTORY of the Communist party of the Soviet Union provides a striking illustration of the work of Nemesis...
...It is a pity that Reshetar has chosen thus to delimit his task, for he is a competent scholar...
...For Marxism is a creed which flourishes best in a soil astir with social ferment, capable of kindling a faith whose ardor could match that of any religion...
...His narrative unfolds in the outer confines of the Party’s life without exploring the umbilical cords that link Party and society in a symbiotic community...
...By condemning society to “unfreedom,” the Party has fettered its own inner life...
...This is probably one of the many obstacles in the way of an enduring collegiate rule...
...Animated with a Faustian creed, it set out in the manner of the legislators of Greek mythology to shape a new societal design with the bloody tools of social engineering...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 39
