Letter to a Friend in the West

...One is decaying while the other is being kept from decay by political and police measures...

...Not until you have thought over the meaning of all this can you say that every society has its own evils and its own advantages...

...Re-creating life in the sea merely involves great technical difficulties, while re-creating the life of a society and liquidating a one-party monopoly is a task that has not yet been achieved anywhere...

...Yet you undoubtedly regard as advantageous, in contrast to the West, the seeming absence in these countries of pornography, advertising, drugs, gangsterism, and the like...

...bewilderment would not torment me and it would be very easy to respond...

...Before doing that, however, try at least to consider the following: It is possible for you and every Italian to publicly express your opinions in the newspapers (be they liberal, Communist, Christian, Rightist, etc...

...Be it a personal dictatorship, or dictatorship by an administrative-party oligarchy, the regime regards organized crime as its own prerogative and will not stand for competition...

...In any event, you feel the West is headed toward catastrophe and can be saved only by a radical change of direction...

...Do you think that she would have understood what at that time was clear to the millions of concentration camp inmates and other Soviet citizens...

...For you the Berlin Wall symbolizes the division of almost equally unjust worlds, and in your opinion, were the society in the West healthy there would have been no wall, so the East is no more responsible for its erection than the West...

...One might even say that a society is free communication, and that what you call the decay of the West suggests the presence of a growing number of inwardly un-free people...

...This is their sole advantage...

...Why are there so many inwardly unfree men in still relatively free societies?-that is the basic question you and I should ponder over...

...In addition, even the opinions of non-Communist people in the West about the East are quite often full of illusions and exhibit a total lack of understanding...

...But you are wrong, dear Quadrelli, the whole point being that there is no society at all in the Communist countries...

...It can be met only in a democratic society, for the one thing required to solve it-the human spirit-has been crushed in totalitarian countries...

...One cannot make a man free by any coercion...

...You insist that the Communist system is at least not experiencing the social decay observed in the West, and that where it is in control the ecological tragedy is less noticeable...

...I don't know if you have read that book, but especially you in Italy should read it...

...Your own letters serve as an illustration of that fact...

...And that means by the abolition of freedom, by the absolute power of the Partv...

...I doubt it very much...

...Let me begin by summarizing the basic tenets of your two letters...

...Besides, you evidently do not read Soviet newspapers and therefore are not aware of the heedless destruction of woods, the total annihilation of fish in the rivers of the Soviet industrial regions, and the pollution of even the Baikal, the deepest lake in the world...

...Communism, according to you, is the religion of the earthly life and has a deep justification, although its justification has been distorted...

...Every extremely dictatorial regime rather successfully deals with organized crime...

...For you as a writer this should be crucial...

...A society exists only where there is free communication among people...

...If your own life, the world you live in, the books and newspapers you are able to read, produce in you judgments I regard as deeply mistaken, what importance could my answer have to you...

...You open your first letter with the explanation that you are writing to me because I, unlike other opposition writers from Communist countries, do not regard the West as the Promised Land...

...This seems to be all that I want to tell you...

...Were you my ideological enemy, everything would be all right...

...That, by the way...

...What you are saying is this: There is the capitalist society and the Communist society...

...And you close your second letter with the assertion that if I do not agree with you, it only shows that each of us can see better the evil in his own society and finds it more difficult to understand somebody else's predicament...

...The essence of every totalitarianism, of every one-party dictatorship, is precisely the alienation of people...

...The girl escaped from Fascist Italy to the "motherland of all workers" before World War II, naturally ended up in Stalin's torture chambers, and was seen by the author in the prison's freezing cellar at the moment they were water-hosing her...

...And so when everything that represents the spiritual essence of a man is being mercilessly destroyed each day on one half of our planet, namely in the totalitarian Communist countries, to regard the depressing destruction of flora and fauna as a tragedy is, to cite a Russian proverb, "to mourn the hair after the head is cut off...

...Even more, I keep asking myself, why should I write at all...

...The ecological problem is connected to our technical-industrial culture, not to our social systems...

...But there is also no society...

...Communication among people is possible only as a contiguity of the depths of "I" of every man-that is, of the foundation of a person, of the soul, of that spiritual beginning which does not belong to the visible physical reality...

...You start by noting that two socioeconomic systems exist in today's world, each having its own advantages and defects...

...Then, of course, you have such liberties as the right to travel abroad, to read the books and newspapers you choose, to take part in political and religious organizations, and many, many other things, including such trifles as being able to buy items for personal use...

...Do you really think that there are today no concentration camps with millions and perhaps tens of millions of prisoners in China...

...That is why...

...If all the fish living in the Mediterranean were destroyed, that would be a lesser tragedy than the introduction of a one-party totalitarian system in Italy...

...Thus to see Communism as a cure for Western social decay is like regarding death as a cure for cancer...

...But you are not my enemy, you are my friend, so I have been confronted with the problem of how to show you (not convince you, but show you) something that is self-evident to me and that you cannot see...

...no matter what ideology stands behind the dictatorial monopoly being established...

...Tn his Diaries, published recently in Paris, Edvard Kuznetsov writes: "It appears that during the Fascists' rule, the Mafia ceased to exist...

...I hope you will agree with me that human thought, human spirit, is much more precious than, for instance, individual parts of the human body...

...Or let's take another comparison: In strict prisons there is no pornography, no advertising, no narcotics, no thievery-In a word, no decay...

...One might even venture to express the somewhat paradoxical claim that the existence of organized crime serves-In any case for the time being-as an unmistakable indicator of democratic society...

...I cannot avoid the temptation to quote Kuznetsov again: "The persecution of dissidents is more terrible than genocide, which takes human life...

...The process of decay you speak of in the West is completely finished in the Communist countries...

...even though they have no illusions about the West, they envy those living there-and faced with the chance, try to escape (which is the real reason the Berlin wall was erected...

...Communism is not the religion of the earthly life, as you wrote...

...it is impossible for me and all the millions of inhabitants of Communist countries to express any opinions other than the ones proclaimed at the last Party Congress or plenary session...

...Believe me, I have spent several years in prison and I know first-hand that prisoners spend all their time dreaming of freedom...

...How could they have such illusions when the very presence of numerous Communist parties in the Western European countries, of the New Left, of Western writers eulogizing the Communist system, and so much else that the Soviet press is always proudly boasting about indicates precisely that many things must be wrong with the West...

...Social evil is common, but this fact, it seems, is felt only by people in Communist countries...

...It is either free press plus porno or Pravda minus porno...

...Read the books of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, Pomerantz or any of the samizdat writers and show me their illusions about the Western world...

...This is why it is so tragic to see the present reintroduction of dogmatic Marxist conformity in all the spheres of life in Yugoslavia, the country that for years has been not only economically but also spiritually the least totalitarian of all the Communist countries...

...The people in the Communist countries know this very well...

...Obviously understanding nothing, the girl was shouting, "lo sono Comunista, lo sono Comu-nista"-I am a Communist...

...consequently, it is impossible to heal society with a one-party dictatorship...

...Point out to me one phenomenon in present-day China that did not exist in Stalin's USSR...

...I could not bring myself to write...

...After reading my answer you may still conclude that it is easier for one to recognize the evils of one's own society than to see those of somebody else's...

...The Lord's Prayer, which European humanity has been reciting for 20 centuries, also speaks about "our daily bread" and about the coming of the Lord's Kingdom "on Earth as it is in Heaven...

...The issue is not the soal but the means of achieving it...

...That is why it does not matter what Communism we are talking about -Soviet...

...And if the West is heading toward a catastrophe, it could suffer no worse fate than becoming totalitarian in the manner of Communist countries...

...Where there is political-spiritual monopoly there is death of societv...

...No, these are not the reasons...

...How about "ecological tragedy...

...The separation of a person from his fundamental "I" renders it impossible for him to communicate with another man: Freedom is precisely the unbroken bond with that "I...

...I am reminded of that young Italian Communist girl described in Eugenia Ginzburg's autobiography, Journey into the Whirlwind...

...First of all, I do not know of any samizdat writers (this term is better than "opposition writers") who are not aware of the evil existing in the West...

...but destruction of dissent infringes the spirit, which is the very essence of . . . life...

...It is easy to do so...

...Yugoslavia, in the words of visiting Czechs, is a "real America...

...bv the alienation of man from his "I," and finally bv the death of society...

...Allow me to fortify my claims, and simultaneously to illustrate the fact that people in Communist countries do not have the slightest illusions about the West yet continue to thirst for it, by quoting a samizdat author who is at present serving a 15-year concentration camp sentence for attempting to escape from behind (to put it symbolically) the Berlin Wall...

...The effort to diminish the expenses of democracy and in the process not to be transformed into unfreedom is the eternal care of a democratic society...

...True, you acknowledge that the process of decay in the Communist countries is impeded not by ethical means but by means of political pressure...

...But Communism wants to bring about that "Lord's Heaven on Earth" or the "Kingdom of Freedom," to use Marx's terminology, by force, by oppression, by the "dictatorship of the proletariat"-In other words, by the dictatorship of that "avant garde of proletarians," the Communist party...

...On the contrary, one is startled by the fact that men who have never been in the West, who for decades have been cut off from every source of information from the West, who day after day have been subjected to a flood of propaganda, can so realistically judge the capitalist world...

...If somebody had attempted to explain what was what to her before her flight from Fascist Italy and before her Soviet concentration camp experience, do you think she would have begun to see the truth...

...But in order to do this one first has to understand that Communism is the last stage of the very disease of separation, not its cure...

...I have started an answer several times and put it aside...

...I don't think I am wrong in assuming that you would rather be without legs than be an idiot...

...Even Yugoslavs still travel to Trieste to shop...

...That is why I have not been able to bring myself to write you: It is not somebody's letters, it is personal experience that opens one's eyes to the realities of this world...

...since here, in contrast with other Socialist countries, passports are refused only to open dissidents...

...Organized crime, just like pornography and many other things, is the income tax for the blessings of democracy, its unavoidable expenses...

...where there is no free communication there is nothing to decay...

...Respectfully yours, MlHAJLO MlHAJLOV...

...MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV'S Letter to a Friend in the West Novi Sad Dear Friend, Ihave been slow in answering your letter, not because the circumstances of my life are unfavorable for a spiritual-ideological correspondence (although they are), or because I agree with the thoughts you express (I don't...

...Chinese, Cuban, or possibly Italian...

...Nevertheless, to clear my own conscience, and also because many people in the West probably share your opinion, I am answering you...

...is to be expected...

...However, you are not certain whether this distortion is inherent only in the Soviet Union or throughout the Communist world...