The Memoirs of a Dutiful Follower

This book, Post-war Years; Vol VI of Men, Years—Life (MacGibbon and Kee, 45s.), has not been an easy one to review for a special reason. It is one of those rare autobiographies written by one who has spent his life under a dictatorship—where he still remains. The reviewer, reaching for the knife, must always in fairness keep asking himself the question: “How would I myself have acted if I had had to live my life under the heel of a Stalin?” And having answered that as best he may, he must then also wonder how free the author was to tell his story even under the milder tyranny of Stalin’s successors. The fact that only recently two Russian authors, Sinyavsky and Daniel, have been condemned to harsh sentences in labour camps for writings that would have been regarded as mild criticisms and certainly permissible in any country with the slightest pretensions to freedom or democracy, tells its own tale.

Equally, one must not fall into the trap of leaning over so far backwards that one can write anything as stupidly naive as the dear old Guardian whose reviewer (quoted on the dust jacket) says we should be “grateful to find such courage and moral purpose in so readable a form.” Whatever else one can accuse Ehrenburg of, courage and moral purpose must clearly be left out of the indictment. The whole book, interesting and even fascinating though it is in parts for its insight into some of the darker chapters of Russian history, is the opposite of courage; it is the apologia of one who has succeeded in living through decades of Red Terror when his friends and colleagues were being slaughtered. His only “defence” (like that of Sieyes after the Terror in the French Revolution) amounts to nothing more than “I survived”.

There are not really any lessons to be gleamed from the book that were not, at least in substance, if not in detail, already known. But the detail can still be illuminating. For example, how often were we told in the Stalin era that one facet alone proved that Stalinism could never be as bad as Hitlerism, namely the respective attitudes to antisemitism? Well, it is doubtless true that Hitler was unique in his “final solution” of the Jewish question—as six million corpses in the gas chambers will testify. But even apart from Stalin’s own exercises against whole peoples like the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans (there is no evidence in this book that Ehrenberg was at all concerned with such trivia), the sustained persecution against Jews which is given great prominence throughout the story shows that even this alleged mark of superiority of the Russian regime was spurious. All the talk about the Russian Constitutions guaranteeing freedom from persecution was, as was obvious at the time—just talk.

Ehrenburg goes out of his way to give prominence to the fate of a leading Jewish intellectual called Mikhoels who was apparently a close friend. This man was used by Stalin during the war to go on deputations of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee to England and America where they raised huge sums of money from Jews and others for aid to Russia. After the war, he like so many others, was butchered in one of Stalin’s purges. The author found this all very sad. At the same time he tells us about his visit to (of all places) Sheffield for one of the endless series of so-called Peace Conferences about which he goes on at great length throughout the book. What he forgets to mention is that whilst there he was closely questioned by reporters from the English Jewish press about the fate of Mikhoels and other prominent Jews. Ehrenburg told them he knew nothing but would make enquiries when he got back to Russia and let them know. Of course he never did let them know. Nor did he make enquiries; it is clear from the book that he was lying in Sheffield; he knew quite well what was going on. Perhaps we should make excuses for him. He did not dare to say what he knew. But what about now, when Stalin has been dead for over a decade? The reticence on every page of this book makes it quite clear that he is still afraid to say what he knows. What a reflection of this alleged Socialist society, this workers’ paradise fifty years after the revolution! And why does Ehrenburg bother to write his memoirs at all if he is unable to tell the truth? Better silence than lies. But then, a regard for truth has never been a virtue of the Communists.

As mentioned above, the book is very largely taken up with accounts of the “Peace” Conference that the Communists were running in countries all over the world in the decade after the end of the war. They were of course a gigantic fraud having nothing whatever to do with peace and everything to do with acting as a propaganda front for the foreign policy of Russia in the worst days of the Cold War. It is just possible that people like Ehrenburg really imagined they were achieving something for peace in their constant travels around the globe (he seems to have visited practically every country you can think of); there is not the slightest sign that this so-called Communist intellectual ever stopped to think that perhaps the competitive jungle known as capitalism in the west, which was just as much capitalism in Russia, produced’wars as surely as a hen lays eggs. So that no amount of peace conferences which left the social system unchanged could possibly have any effect.

Still, it at least enabled Ehrenburg to enjoy his globe trotting and meet “intellectuals” (ill-defined creatures, to be sure) of his own ilk. And the book is full of stories about these famous friends he made — Picasso, Matisse, Einstein, Cassals, Joliot-Curie et al, ad nauseam. It was, of course, one of the “peace” movements aims to enrol these famous names whose influence in their respective countries would serve such a useful propaganda purpose for the policies of Russia. It is indeed pathetic to see how such gifted individuals would allow themselves to be used in this shameful way. The truth is, of course, that they have no more notion of the workings of capitalism and of what Socialism is really about than the mass of workers in England or Russia or anywhere else. Or than Ilya Ehrenburg, if the evidence of this book is anything to go by. But they are pretty vain creatures and were easy meat for Communist flattery and liked to be regarded as princes of peace as they sat on platforms in front of admiring audiences of thousands of working-class dupes. And of course this game goes on still and people still pay regard to the views of such as Bertrand Russell (who wanted to drop an atom bomb on Moscow in 1947) or (believe it or not) Vanessa Redgrave. And although a lot of these people are like children (Einstein, it seems, persuaded Roosevelt to make the atom bomb but never thought it would be used), some of them must (or at least should) have realised what was what. For example, we are told, here that when Matisse was told that the Russian people were forbidden to see his paintings which were hidden away in cellars he just laughed. Perhaps it is funny that the regime you support, and which wants you for your works, regards those works as unfit for human consumption. It is less funny to know that artists like Matisse but, unlike him in living in the west in freedom and wealth, were hounded in Russia and even executed like Mikhoels and his friends.

But of course the real trouble with Ehrenburg, as with so many others both in Russia and the west, is that he never seems to question the basis of his creed. In 1918 the SOCIALIST STANDARD made it clear that whatever else Lenin and his Bolsheviks might achieve Socialism (or Communism — they are synonymous terms) was out. A dictatorship of a so-called Communist Party was fastened on the necks of the Russian people so that the workers there have been exploited under a tyrannical system of state capitalism. Ehrenburg talks, with every appearnce of sincerity, of “the Soviet people, whose concepts I cherish”. It never occurs to him to ask himself: what people? what concepts?

All we have now is the rule of a minority group who exploit the Russian workers for their own benefit and that of their hangers-on like Ehrenburg. The time has still to come when the workers of Russia, like those of England or America or China, will show that they indeed have a concept of what the world could be like under a free system of society where the means of life will really be owned in common. The fact that the emancipation of the working class of the world is still to come is the fault of the workers themselves. But the Ehrenburgs of the world have a lot to answer for. It might be as well to conclude with a mention of a quotation from another work of this author taken from our companion paper the Western Socialist a year or two ago in which he urged the Russian soldiers to “kill, kill, kill, my brave Red Armyists” and “break the power of the German women” — a brutal incitement to slaughter of the civilian men of Berlin and the rape of their womenfolk. A not untypical contribution to international working-class solidarity from a self-styled Communist intellectual. Needless to say, none of the reviewers in the posh papers, A. J. P. Taylor and all, seem to have been aware of this side of the picture.

A. P.