A Guide to the USSR for Ex-Marxists
TICKTIN, HAROLD
RETRIEVING THE INCONVENIENT A Guide to the USSR for Ex-Marxists BY HAROLD TICKTIN The great problem with most touring is that the country visited cannot be experienced politically. The Soviet...
...The trial goes on and the courtroom is being cleaned...
...How could he also have been in charge of an international enterprise...
...No, not at all...
...The inconvenient is practically inaccessible, too, because it requires persistent inquiry and the process is definitely not encouraged for any citizen, permanent or temporary...
...This was one she seemed not to have heard before...
...Stalin made several more mistakes before he was finished, and the inconvenient category now extends from 1924 to 1964...
...From the moment he applies for a visa and his proposed itinerary is approved, he must contend with the system...
...This was brought home to me a second time at the Lenin Museum, where every hour on the hour a fascinating film is presented...
...Still distraught, the manager shouts: "All people who do not live in this precinct, please leave...
...To my right, our Intourist guide murmured, "Yes, I know of him...
...It is as if in the United States we were to drop from all public discussion the years 1964-74, never mention the wrong decisions made or the Presidents who made them, and to assert that the "government" (instead of the men in it) knew what it was doing at all times...
...In the Soviet Union, it must be understood, clean courtrooms have a higher value than open ones...
...This makes it impossible to let a Russian relative or friend know in advance where he will be staying and can be a formidable barrier between foreigner and resident...
...Lenin and his faction stand in the light and dominate the picture, while the demonic-looking Trotsky whispers obviously counterrevolutionary sentiments to his fellow Mensheviks, Martov and Dan, in a dark corner...
...It doesn't make sense...
...You know, Ludmilla...
...I didn't say it made sense, but it's what happened...
...The Party line was that it would hasten the death throes of capitalism if the Nazis took power...
...the inconvenient is generally glossed over or omitted, and must be specifically retrieved...
...Ah, then the trial has been postponed...
...No, you cannot," answered an official...
...It actually happened that a group of sympathetic Jews, who had been assured a certain political trial would be "open," arrived at the courtroom and asked if they might enter...
...Yet it's really the best...
...The man answers, "I am a Party member and I also live in this precinct...
...He prevented the German Communist party from working with the Social Democrats to oppose Hitler...
...They are perhaps the only political escape valve available to the populace, and they multiply endlessly...
...And she knew the forbidden and how to deal with it effectively...
...Poor Zinoviev, along with the others we ex-Marxists fancied—Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, the whole panoply that makes early Bolshevism so romantically intriguing—is barely salvageable from oblivion...
...He was one of those who opposed the Bolshevik uprising...
...Yes," replies a bureaucrat, "and that is the secret...
...The manager approaches him and asks, "Why do you stay...
...His hotels are chosen for him without consultation by the authorities (the Intourist Agency), and are not revealed until he is delivered to them by a designated taxi or bus driver...
...He could not do everything he wanted...
...It was Zinoviev...
...Without any hesitation, he replied "Lenin.' After some of the other absurdities in the Museum, I was finally ready to protest what seemed a palpable error: "That's impossible...
...You're quite right...
...Well, you see, the courtroom is being cleaned...
...The grave site is being cleaned...
...The Soviet Union, however, can only be experienced politically...
...In addition to learning to cope with the lack of freedom, the Western newcomer has to adjust to a certain Soviet style that will unfold throughout his trip and will seem to characterize all behavior, from the most important legal and political decisions to the smallest detail of shopping...
...This understanding is required whether the subject is crops, history or the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...One current story describes a large group queued in front of a store that was supposed to have oranges for sale...
...At one point, we see what the museum guide described as the very first session of the Comintern, in July 1919...
...A former Party member who had undergone "re-schooling" was asked to define in his own words the meaning of a People's Republic...
...For Russian Communism it is always 1925, the year after Lenin's death...
...Mislabeling is bad business—look at what Stalin did in 1932 in Germany...
...Throughout the tour she reeled out the permitted, as she was supposed to do...
...But before long the traveler finds that many of them stay close to their homes, awaiting unannounced arrivals...
...the forbidden doesn't exist...
...Her name was Ludmilla, and she was so thoroughly indoctrinated that she could not entertain my remark that Zinoviev must not have been too badly tainted for Lenin, who, after all, placed him in the highest council of the Party and appointed him to his Comintern post after he opposed the Bolshevik coup...
...The response to the most gingerly reference to that virtually unmentionable name, was a sneering, "He only worked for himself...
...A story I was told in Moscow illustrates the application of the first two categories...
...Thus, in attenuated form, Stalin's purges continue to function...
...On the one hand, it is an irreversible commitment to peaceful coexistence (the older phrase) solidified by trade relations...
...Noticing a familiar face presiding over the busy delegates that I could not place for a moment, I asked the guide who the head of the Comintern was then...
...That's ridiculous,' she said...
...The permitted is what one actually sees and hears...
...In footage dating from 1917-24, we are shown the Founder (in some sequences "actually speaking") as he lays the basis for the State, sturdily rebuffs opponents, and displays a kindly side to coworkers and laborers...
...however, if it is permitted, it is mandatary...
...On the other, detente is not seen as restricting the Kremlin from participating in national liberation wars (the Yom Kippur War), fomenting radical change abroad (Portugal) or retaining military dominance over sovereign countries (Poland, Hungary and, above all, Czechoslovakia...
...She was puzzled...
...But in the USSR such experimentation should avoid the obvious—it is too gauche...
...Also to the point is the bizarre, but effective, "cleaning ploy...
...The guide was taken aback by such a specific objection, thought for a moment, and then conceded, "You're right...
...When a troublesome temporary citizen stirs the waters by asking about the actualities of those lost 40 years, every question of his is met with the same bland assertion of "Stalin's error," in a tone implying the impossibility of recurrence...
...The four decades that followed are not for public consumption or debate...
...It was one of Stalin's mistakes...
...Detente itself is an example of creative ambiguity in the political sphere...
...But why...
...But because of the cleaning process, no one goes in...
...Harold Ticktin, a past contributor, practices law in Cleveland...
...This was dismissed with, "Well, Lenin was not all-powerful...
...The distraught manager comes outside and announces: "All persons who are not Party members, please leave.' A goodly number remain...
...When the Russian is a dissident, the problems multiply: Dissenters' telephones are often disconnected and their mail interfered with...
...Ludmilla ran into trouble only in the area of the inconvenient...
...To a young Russian raised on a long diet of peaceful coexistence and detente, there appeared to be something wrong with this formulation...
...It is said that shortly after Nikita Khrushchev was buried, a number of people who went to the cemetery to pay their respects were turned away with the words, "You cannot enter...
...The name of a figure like Grigory Zinoviev, an old Bolshevik liquidated by Stalin, no longer forbidden yet certainly inconvenient, does not rise easily to the lips of even the most knowledgeable representatives of the regime...
...But in an unfavorable context, Zinoviev is more accessible —witness how easily our demure, 26-year-old Intourist guide placed him as someone who had crossed the Party once and therefore remains forever cursed...
...Ludmilla illuminated all three kinds of Soviet history...
...Not where you'd like me to, Ludmilla," I replied...
...He replied, "In a People's Republic, many things are forbidden...
...To my amazement, a day or two later, in the Space Exhibit at the Exposition of Economic Achievements, she quietly said: "You were right about 1932...
...Ticktin, where do you stand politically...
...They are, in a word, too inconvenient...
...By official lights, there is simply no reason to chronicle in detail the lives and regimes of Stalin and Krushchev...
...I soon learned that there are three kinds of history in the USSR: permitted, forbidden and inconvenient...
...Too centrist, too much of a Social Democrat for your tastes, I'm afraid...
...Lenin was too busy running a threatened State in 1919...
...And the same may hold true in the case of cemeteries...
...One day, for instance, she turned smilingly to me and said: "Tell me, Mr...
...He took the view that the Social Democrats were objective social fascists and worse than the Nazis...
...For Jews, there are more novel applications of creative ambiguity...
...As a result, the history that temporary and permanent citizens are exposed to consists essentially of seven years, the period from the Revolution in 1917 to the death of Lenin in 1924...
...Social democracy is a fraud.' She sounded like Greta Garbo in Ninotchka...
...One man is left...
...This is as it should be, because most people (particularly ex-Marxists like myself) go to the USSR not to swim, sunbathe or saunter, but precisely to get the feel of a society under Communism...
...Once again I leapt into (he fray...
...The meandering path of the Party line—long recognized by ex-Marxists like Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and Howard Fast—is particularly interesting to those of us who carry our radical pasts around as a kind of intellectual barometer for testing the political atmosphere...
...In all, a perfect Soviet cameo...
...Indeed, I believe she enjoyed it when my old Right-wing deviationist impulse moved me to politely contest her: Local functionaries don't get to discuss dialectics or the economic theory of history with Americans very often...
...It has to do with the way the government reconciles the people to the irreconcilable and can best be described as "creative ambiguity": The good Soviet citizen, including the temporary one, must understand that any event, however contradictory it is to what might have been promised, was originally intended by the powers that be and is therefore satisfactory...
...The manager glares and emphatically states, "If you were a good Party member, you would have realized we had no oranges in the first place...
...I checked...
...Since happily this is not about to happen in a free society, it becomes especially fascinating to watch in a controlled one...
...The wry jokes that can be heard everywhere in the USSR are a means of dealing with the constantly shifting Party line...
...One hears of a technican who has been waiting for permission to leave for Israel protesting to the OVIR (the Soviet emigration authority) that his television electronic skills, now eight years obsolete, cannot be termed "secrets" because "everyone knows that Russian television is 10 years behind the West...
...I gained little, for example, by pointing out to a guide that it was Trotsky who negotiated Brest-Litovsk, the peace treaty with Germany that took Russia out of World War I. Trotsky remains outre in the Soviet writ: He was mentioned only in passing by the tour leader at the Lenin Museum, as we viewed a heroic painting of the 1903 Brussels-London Congress (the birthplace of the Bolshevik party...
...Traveling in the Soviet Union, in fact, makes the visitor think of himself more as a temporary citizen than a tourist...
...Moreover, looking at history this way allows the present—represented by the rather unobtrusive Leonid I. Brezhnev—to validate itself by a seemingly direct link with the revered Leninist past...
Vol. 59 • August 1976 • No. 17
