A Criminal History of Mankind (93 page)

POLITICAL GANGSTERISM

At the time the victors of the First World War were quarrelling about the apportionment of the spoils, Russia was divided by a murderous civil war; it ended in 1920. In that year, the year Prohibition came to America, Russia prepared to begin an extraordinary experiment: to put Karl Marx’s theory of socialism into practice.

From the beginning, the Bolshevists had shown that they had no intention of wasting time on old fashioned democratic procedures. It is true that they had suggested a parliament - a constituent assembly - before the revolution; but when they won only about a quarter of the votes, they used force to break it up. By 1921, most of the people of Russia were sick of the communists and their slaughter of opponents - they had inaugurated a terror like the one that followed the French Revolution - and fourteen thousand sailors on Kronstadt Island - off Petrograd - constituted themselves spokesmen for the peasants and demanded a socialist government without the Bolshevists. Lenin sent in troops, and most of the sailors were killed. In 1922, he re-imposed censorship of literature, its purpose being to prevent publication of counter-revolutionary works. By 1924, with the civil war over and the loyalists - the Whites - defeated, Lenin decided that it would be too much to attempt to impose Marxism -state ownership of all resources - in one swoop. His New Economic Policy declared that only large industries would belong to the state; the small businessmen and farmers could continue to operate as before. Lenin, in fact, showed every sign of being a realist who would apply Marxism cautiously to see how it worked. But he died in January 1924. His place was taken by a triumvirate: Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin - the latter being the General Secretary of the Party. Almost immediately, a struggle began between Stalin and Leon Trotsky, the Party’s most distinguished theorist (and the man most responsible for winning the civil war) about whether Russia should attempt to spread communism throughout the world, or should be content to try to make it work within its own borders. Trotsky thought the Party should work for international communism; Stalin, more realistic, believed Russia should concentrate on its own problems. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party in 1927, and his subsequent banishment, was a triumph for Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev also came under heavy criticism from the Party. Stalin was now virtually the dictator of Russia.

In 1929, the year of Trotsky’s exile, Stalin decided to make the Party an instrument for the ‘revolutionary transformation of society’. What this meant, in effect, was that everyone of influence was to swallow the Marxist dogmas about ‘collectivism’. (Stalin had already ended Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the previous year.) There was to be no more backsliding towards capitalism or individualism. According to Marx, the proletariat had to be allowed to take control, to become the true leaders of the new society. The bronzed tractor driver should finish his day’s work and go to the local Party meeting to learn about the teaching of Marx and Lenin, or to the local opera house to see an opera about the revolution. Artists and intellectuals had to abandon personal problems and begin to think in political terms. It was their job to educate the masses to recognise their own destiny. Writers who brooded on the nature and destiny of man were wasting their time; when they had achieved mystical union with the proletariat, they would suddenly understand human destiny.

In fact, Russian literature and art had been flourishing since the revolution. The first reaction to the downfall of the tsar was euphoria; the intellectuals saw communism as the defender of freedom. ‘Modernism’ flourished in art and in the cinema (Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin
was the sensation of 1925); the poetry of Mayakovsky and Essenin actually reached the masses; so did Sholokov’s
Tales of the Don
and
Babel’s Red Cavalry
(the latter containing nightmare descriptions of the cruelty of the civil war). In the theatre, Meyerhold’s productions created their own revolution. The first symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich (1925) was soon being played all over the world, while his satirical opera
The Nose
appealed to intellectuals and workers. But even at this early stage, many writers expressed their reservations about communism and the ‘brave new world’ it was trying to force into existence. Olesha’s novel
Envy
dramatises the problem of the old fashioned individualist who feels out of place in this society of commissars and ‘comrades’. It seemed to take a critical attitude to the envious individualist; but the underlying feeling is a profound distaste for ‘collectivism’. Zamyatin’s
We
is an astonishing anticipation of Orwell’s
1984
, about a future state in which all freedom has been crushed in the name of collectivism.

By 1930, Stalin had decided that it was time to put a stop to all this individualism, which was basically a longing for the old bourgeois ideals. From now on, literature and art should be political: its aim, to glorify the masses. Experiment must cease, because the masses could not understand experimental works. ‘Revolutionary proletarian art’ was what was needed. Writers, who were willing to glorify the masses, and write about factories and collective farms, became honoured members of the Writer’s Union (RAPP); they were presented with country cottages where they could work, and had financial security, since their works were produced in vast editions by the state publishing house. Individualists such as Babel, Zamyatin and Olesha could be ignored and made to feel their isolation. Mayakovsky, who had been made to join RAPP, committed suicide. Zamyatin went abroad. Olesha dried up. Babel finally disappeared into a concentration camp. The same thing happened to Meyerhold, and his wife was brutally murdered soon after his arrest. Shostakovich was criticised for ‘formalism’, which meant that his work sounded too much like music and not enough like propaganda; he felt obliged to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, his finest work up to that date.

What had happened in Russia is what would have happened in France if Robespierre had been able to stay in power and become dictator. Stalin was not particularly intelligent; but he was cunning and brutal, and became increasingly paranoid. He was also a dogmatic Marxist, and was quite determined that anything that looked like private ownership or private enterprise should be abolished. The small proprietors - kulaks - were forced out, or simply arrested and shot; their farms were forcibly united into ‘collectives’. Food production dropped dramatically - although Stalin took care to suppress the figures. Having ordered this forced ‘collectivisation’, Stalin seems to have become alarmed at the resistance it aroused. He announced publicly that his officials were showing ‘excessive zeal’, and should slow down the process. In this way he managed to appear to be the defender of the peasants against his own officials, the benevolent father figure who was doing his best to keep everybody happy. But the policy of destroying the kulaks continued until millions had been executed or deported. Stalin was committing mass murder on a scale - and with a cool deliberation -that made Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible seem benevolent. Another ten million died as a result of the famines that swept the country between 1931 and 1933 because of collectivisation. In many areas, there was cannibalism.

All this caused widespread criticism amongst Party members. Some of them were passing the carefully suppressed facts on to Trotsky, whose newspaper quoted them and stated that a ‘fundamental change’ must soon take place in the leadership. In 1933, Stalin reacted by having thousands of Party members expelled. His former colleagues Zinoviev and Kamenev were exiled to Siberia.

In ancient Rome, Stalin would have been murdered. In Soviet Russia, his secret police were able to surround him with a wall of security. But Stalin’s wife, who had become increasingly concerned about the Terror, committed suicide in 1932. Stalin, a typical Right Man, was deeply shaken by this, and at a meeting of the Politburo, offered to resign. There was a long silence - no doubt the members could hardly believe their luck, yet were afraid to show any sign of enthusiasm. Finally, Molotov broke the silence by declaring that Stalin had the Party’s full confidence. Stalin never again repeated his offer.

But his paranoia increased. Surrounded by people who wished him dead, he may have felt that the best form of defence was attack. In 1934, the Party secretary, Kirov, was murdered. Stalin decided it was time to get rid of anyone who might harbour the slightest opposition to his dictatorship - particularly older Party members. After the trial of the Kirov assassins, a commission was told to ‘liquidate the enemies of the people’. Soon, sixteen leading Party members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, were on trial, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government. All were found guilty and executed immediately.

What astonished the rest of the world was that many of the accused admitted their guilt in court. And this continued to be true in later ‘show trials’ that continued for the next two years, until 1938. The ‘confessions’ seemed absurd - and, in fact, were later shown to be absurdities. The general view was that the accused had been tortured, or kept for long periods without sleep, to induce confession. But in
Darkness at Noon
, Arthur Koestler dramatised a theory that later proved to have some foundation in fact: that these older revolutionaries were caught in a trap of their own Marxism. They had fought for the revolution; now it had come, and they were superfluous. They were being asked to make a final sacrifice for the revolution. If they refused, and went to their death denouncing Stalin, they were handing a weapon to the capitalists and undermining the revolution. In effect, Stalin was behaving like a gunman who grabs a hostage as a living shield; if the old communists dared to shoot, they risked killing communism.

As the show trials continued, there were mass arrests all over the country. Workers, clergymen, civil servants, intellectuals, all were ‘interrogated’ in the prisons; one authority estimates that between seven and eight million people were executed between 1934 and 1938. These included enormous numbers of Party members - of the 140 members of the Central Committee who had been elected in 1934, only fifteen were still at large in 1937.

In fact, Stalin had struck a greater blow against communism than all its enemies put together. Marxism is basically a theory designed to explain the existence of evil in the world. Its explanation is that evil is due to capitalist oppressors, and that once they have been removed, the oppressed will heave a sigh of relief and live happily ever after. Soviet Russia was a living demonstration that evil has very little to do with economic circumstances, and a great deal to do with human self-assertion.

In the rest of Europe, the lesson was slightly less obvious - at least in the years that followed the Armistice. Long wars always leave behind them a longing for change. When the soldiers returned to their homes and found scarcity and hardship, there was a tendency to look towards Russia, where - according to the socialists - the world’s greatest experiment in social justice was taking place. The communist parties of Europe suddenly increased their membership dramatically. In Germany and Italy - where jobs were particularly scarce - it looked as if it could only be a matter of time before the workers took over the means of production. In 1920, the Italian workers anticipated the revolution by taking over six hundred factories. In Germany, Communist Party ‘cells’ spread over every major city. Everywhere crowds of workers were on the march waving red banners, or listening to socialist agitators outside the factories and docks. Benito Mussolini, a socialist who liked to think of himself as ‘the Lenin of Italy’, was heavily defeated in elections in 1919, but the riots and strikes of 1920 gave him his chance. His ‘combat groups’ -
fascio di combattimento
- helped to break the strikes by attacking communists, whom they regarded as unpatriotic extremists. The symbol of these groups was the fasces, an axe in the centre of a bundle of rods, an old Roman symbol of power. In 1922, the ‘fascists’ marched on Rome, and encountered no resistance. The king appointed Mussolini premier. Italian businessmen and bankers preferred a patriotic socialist to a communist.

In Germany, a corporal named Adolf Hitler came back from the war, in which he had served with distinction, and joined the German Workers’ Party in Munich. Communist revolutions had already broken out all over Germany, with councils of workers and soldiers seizing power. By Christmas 1918, a revolutionary group called the Spartacists - after the man who had led the gladiators’ revolt - had taken over Berlin. They had been formed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg two years earlier; now the Alexanderplatz was full of workers - two hundred thousand of them - waving red flags. The Free Corps, the German equivalent of Mussolini’s fascists, marched into Berlin and crushed the revolution, killing Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In Munich, Kurt Eisner organised a more successful revolution; the king fled, and Bavaria became a republic. Hitler, like Mussolini, detested these communists with their talk of international revolution, and it did not escape his attention that most of the communist leaders - including Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Eisner - were Jewish. He had already acquired a hatred of Jews in the pre-war years, when he was a half-starved art student in Vienna and Munich, and had observed how many Jews seemed to be in influential positions.

16 October 1919 was a turning point in Hitler’s life - and in European history. At a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in a cellar, Hitler made his first speech, and realised that he was a natural orator. He spoke for an hour; the crowd was fascinated. The next time he spoke, the audience had doubled. And it went on increasing.

The secret of Hitler’s appeal was the emotional force of his delivery, and the clarity of the ideas he put forward. These were as crude and simplistic as Marxist ideology. Germany had been betrayed into defeat by the politicians and the Jews. (There was a widely-held belief in Germany that the army had been strong and undefeated when they were ordered to surrender.) The Jews wanted international socialism because they had no country of their own and were envious of nations with deep roots. But the misery of Germany could be overcome by German courage. The people had only to seize the power from those who had betrayed them, and turn to the great traditions of Germany’s past...