Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Heretics Of Communism There is always an element of nostalgic fascination in reading the type of book you once thought of writing yourself....
...This was the time when the workers and sailors of the naval base at Kronstadt had rebelled with the slogan: "Long live free Soviets...
...The sharp arguments in the highest Communist echelons over the seizure of power, over the attitude toward non-Bolshevik socialist parties and over the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty already belonged to history...
...A typical quip of this period runs: "To rob the peasants for the benefit of the workers...
...But there is no evidence that serious political differences of opinion have found organized expression in the Soviet Communist party for the last three decades...
...The Workers' Opposition, with its program attacking bureaucracy and special privileges for high officials, and calling for more genuine proletarians in leading positions and more participation of workers in running the factories, fell far short of advocating an end of the one-party system...
...The "Rights," like the "Lefts," had recanted or were in prison or exile...
...I recently enjoyed this experience as I went through the lucid, minute and scholarly account of the heretics and heresies of Soviet Communism, prepared by one of the most gifted of the ever-enlarging crop of American scholars in Russian affairs, Robert Vincent Daniels (The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Harvard, $10.00...
...And, after this was crushed by an increasing use of administrative repressive measures, plus the ineptitude of the opposition leaders themselves, came the "Right" opposition of Prime Minister Rykov, trade union chief Tomsky and leading theoretician Bukharin...
...A combination of the Rights and Red Army Generals at that time could have brought off a political coup that would have been applauded by nine-tenths of the Soviet people and would have changed the course of Russian and European history...
...And finally the 'dictator' is substituted for the Central Committee...
...Daniels has a good sense of perspective in distinguishing between the important and the trivial, and one finds in his book the high points of revolutionary drama, such as Trotsky's uncannily prescient prediction of what Lenin's insistence on a rigidly centralized party would lead to: "The party organization is substituted for the party...
...These men were shocked by the growing ruthlessness of Stalin's program of "liquidating" the more prosperous peasants, dragooning the others into collective farms and imposing tremendous sacrifices on the whole population for the sake of a fast pace of industrialization...
...But in the desperately bad physical conditions of that time Lenin regarded it as a germ-carrier of dangerous thoughts...
...By 1929 it was all over...
...The author is surely right when he spots, as a fatal weakness of almost all the oppositionists, their unwillingness to appeal to the Russian people outside the ranks of the Communist party...
...The author offers several convincing reasons as to why the heretics always lost...
...The Central Committee is substituted for the party organization...
...He believes Trotsky might have made himself the successor of Lenin in 1924...
...Making their struggle inside the Party, they were foredoomed to be politically smothered first, then physically destroyed by Stalin's terrorist apparatus...
...The subject of dissenting movements within the iron framework of the ruling Communist party began to appeal to me soon after I arrived in Moscow in 1922...
...It is my retrospective guess that there would have been a still better chance for an overturn in the bleak and hungry years that began in 1929, when the peasant heart of Russia was stirred to the depths by the outrages and excesses of Communist-imposed collective farming...
...that is the 'Left deviation.' To rob the workers for the sake of the peasants...
...that is the 'Right deviation.' The correct Party line...
...almost all the prominent leaders of both groups would be destroyed in the great holocaust of the purges during the '30s...
...Why was no such coup prepared...
...There were cliques and factionalism, both during and after Stalin...
...down with the Communist Dictatorship...
...One still heard faint echoes of the protests of the so-called "Workers' Opposition"—headed by the trade unionist Shlyapnikov and the aristocratic old Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai—on which Lenin clamped down at the 10th Congress of the Communist party, in March, 1921...
...To rob both the workers and the peasants for the sake of the bureaucracy...
...This was between two waves of heresy...
...Later came the "Left" opposition of Trotsky, joined by his former bitter opponents, Zinoviev and Kamenev, after they found themselves edged out of power by the wily Stalin...
...The Soviet state had become so completely totalitarian that organized heresy, even on a small scale, no longer existed...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 5
