Paz+on+Solzhenitsyn

CONSIDERING SOLZHENITSYN: DUST AFTER MUD by Octavio Paz

I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. -Montaigne

In 1947 I was reading, with a chill in my soul, David Rousset's book on Hitler's concentration camps, The Days of Our Death. Rousset's book impressed me for two reasons: it was the account of a victim of the Nazis, but at the same time a lucid social and psychological analysis of that separate universe, the twentieth- century concentration camps. Two years later Rousset published in the French press another declaration: the industry of homicide was flourishing in the Soviet Union as well. Many received Rousset's revelations with the horror and disbelief of one who suddenly discovers a hidden leprosy in Venus Aphrodite. The Communists and their comrades responded angrily: Rousset's allegations were a crude invention of the CIA and the propaganda services of American imperialism. "Progressive" intellectuals behaved no better than the Communists. In the magazine Les temps modernes Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty adopted a curious atti- tude (see issues 51 and 57 of that magazine, January and July 1950). Neither philosopher attempted to deny the deeds nor to minimize their seriousness, but both refused to draw the conclu- sions which the existence of the camps compelled on reflection: to what degree was Stalinist totalitarianism the result-as much as or more than of Russia's social backwardness and autocratic past-of the Leninist concept of the Party? Were not Stalin and his forced-labor camps the product of the terrorist, antidemocratic practices of the Bolsheviks from the time they took power in 1917?

Years later, Merleau-Ponty attempted to answer those ques- tions in The Adventures of Dialectics, a partial corrective for a book which, at the end of his life, he very much regretted having written: Humanism and Terror. And Sartre: we know his views. Even in 1974 he asserts, though he deplores it, the inevitability both of violence and of dictatorship. Not of a class but of a group:

. . . violence is necessary to change from one society to another but I do not know the nature of the order which, perhaps, will replace the present society. Will there be a dictatorship of the proletariat? To tell the truth, I don't believe so. There will always be a dictatorship exercised by representatives of the proletariat, which is something entirely different. . . . (Le monde, 8 February 1974)

Sartre's pessimism has one advantage at least: it puts the cards on the table. But in 1950, trapped in a dilemma we now know was false, both French writers decided to condemn David Rous- set: in denouncing the repressive Soviet system in the major bourgeois newspapers, their old companion had become a tool of the cold war and provided weapons for the enemies of socialism.

In those years I lived in Paris. The polemics on the Russian concentration camps moved and shook me: they put under interdict the validity of an historical enterprise that had kindled the minds of the best men of our time. The 1917 Revolution, as Andre Breton wrote some time before, was a fabulous beast similar to the zodiacal Aries: "Though violence nested between its horns, the whole of springtime opened in the depths of its eyes." Now those eyes observed us with the vacant gaze of the murderer. I made a summary and a selection of documents and testimonies which proved, without grounds for doubt, the existence in the USSR of a vast repressive system, founded on the forced labor of millions of human beings and integrated into the Soviet econ- omy. Victoria Ocampo, the distinguished editor of the Argentin- ean magazine Sur, learned of my work and revealed her ethical consistency and integrity once again: she asked me to send the documentary evidence I had collected for publication in Sur, along with a brief explanatory note (see Sur, number 19, March 1951).

The reaction of progressive intellectuals was silence. No one mentioned my article, but a campaign of insinuation recurred, along with misleading suggestions initiated some years earlier by Neruda and his Mexican friends. It was a campaign that dogs me even today. The epithets change, but not the reproach: I have been successively a "cosmopolitan," "formalist," "Trotskyite," CIA agent, "liberal intellectual," and even a "structuralist at the service of the bourgeoisie"!

My commentary on the facts advanced the usual explanation: the Soviet concentration camps were a blemish that disfigured the Russian regime but did not amount to an inherent flaw in the system. To say that, in 1950, was a political error; to repeat it now, in 1974, would be something more than an error. What most impressed me, and the majority of those who in those years took an interest in the matter, was the economic function of the forced-labor camps. I believed that, unlike the Nazi camps-real extermination camps-the Soviet camps were a wicked form of exploitation, not without analogies to Stakhanovism. One of the "spurs of industrialization." I was wrong: now we know that the mortality rate in the camps, shortly before the Second World War, was 40 percent of the interned population, while the productivity of a camp laborer was 50 percent that of a free laborer (see Hannah Arendt, Le emetsys totalitaire, p. 281, Paris, 1972).

The publication of Robert Conquest's work on the great purges (The Great Terror, London, 1968) completes the accounts and testimonies of the survivors-the majority of them Communists-and closes the debate. Or, better said, opens it on another plane. The function of the camps was something else.

If the economic usefulness of the camps is more than doubtful, their political function presents peculiarities at once strange and repugnant. The camps are not a weapon in the battle against political enemies but an institution of punishment for the vanquished. The person who ends up in a camp is not an active opponent but a defeated man, defenseless and unable to offer further resistance. The same logic rules the purges and purifications: they aren't incidents in political and ideological battles but immense ceremonies of expiation and punishment. The confessions and self-accusations turn the defeated into the accomplices of their executioners, and thus the grave itself becomes a rubbish collector. Saddest of all, the majority of the internees were not (and are not) political opponents: they are "delinquents" from every level of Soviet society. In Stalin's time the population of the camps came to exceed fifteen million human beings. It has diminished since the liberal reforms of Khrushchev and today it varies between one and two million persons, of whom-according to the experts on these melancholy matters-only some ten thousand can be considered political prisoners, in the strict sense of the word. It is incredible that the rest-a million human beings- should be made up of delinquents, at any event in the sense we in our countries give to that term. The political and psychological function of the camps becomes clear: it is a matter of an institution of preventive terror, for lack of a better expression. The chronicle of Diorama de la cultura, probably with the intention of defending Solzhenitsyn against the snapping of the rabid pack, recalled that Lukacs had, at the end of his life, considered Sol- zhenitsyn a true "socialist realist." I quote that paragraph:

Lukacs presents the author of The First Circle as the most achieved exponent of socialist realism who has, socially and ideologically, the chance of discovering all the immediate and concrete aspects of society, and representing them artistically according to the laws of their own evaluation.

In the speech he wrote accepting the 1970 Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn spoke a few words which can summarize what Lukacs meant by socialist realism, something quite distinct from those propaganda texts disguised as novels which are not realistic and much less socialist:

Literature is the memory of peoples; it transmits from one generation to the next the irrefutable experiences of men. It preserves and enlivens the flame of a history immune to all deformation, far from every lie.

Before this strange opinion, two comments occur to me. First: since its origins in 1934 "socialist realism" has been a literary- bureaucratic dogma of Stalinism, while Solzhenitsyn, a rebel writer, is more an heir to the realism of Tolstoi and Dostoevski, pro- foundly Slavic and Christian. Second: even if Solzhenitsyn were a "socialist realist" who does not know he is a "socialist realist," The Gulag Archipelago is not a novel but a work of history.

The Gulag Archipelago is not only a denunciation of the excesses of the Stalinist regime, however atrocious they may have been, but of the Soviet system itself, as it was established by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. There are two dates that form an essential part of the title of the book and its content: 1918-1956. The work extends from the origins of the Soviet system of repression (the establishment of the Cheka in 1918) to the beginning of Khrushchev's regime. We know, moreover, that in other volumes not yet published the Russian writer concerns himself with repression in the contemporary period, that is, the period of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Solzhenitsyn's opinions are, of course, open to dispute. See for example Roy Medvedev's criticism from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian historian agrees that it would not be honest to conceal the serious errors of Lenin but thinks that those errors do not compromise entirely the Bolshevik historical project. Medvedev's position isn't very far from that which Merleau-Ponty and Sartre assumed in 1950, though he does not concur in the bigotry of the pious legend of the Bolsheviks. ("In Lenin and Trotsky," declared the editorial in Les temps modernes 51, "there isn't a single word that isn't sensible.") Halfway between Solzhenitsyn and Medvedev we find Sakharov, the great physicist and mathematician. His condemnation of Leninism is more decisive than Medvedev's, but in his criticism there is neither Slavophilia nor Christianity as in Solzhenitsyn's work. Sakharov is a liberal intellectual, in the true sense of the expression, and is closer to Herzen and Turgenev than to Dostoevski and T olstoi.

This brief description reveals the variety of the Soviet dissidents' attitudes. A really remarkable feat is the survival-or more correctly, the continued vitality-of intellectual and spiritual currents predating the 1917 Revolution, and these, after half a century of Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, reappear and inspire men as different as the historian Andrei Amalrik and the poet Joseph Brodsky. Amalrik's historical analyses owe little to the Marxist method, and Brodsky's thought is profoundly marked by the naitsirhC-ciaduj philosophy of Leon Chestov. In fact, we are present at the resurrection of the old Russian culture. I indicated above the liberal and Europeanist affiliation of Sakharov, in the tradition of Herzen. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn's thought is part of the tradition of that philosophical Christian current which Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) represented toward the end of the last century. The position the Medvedev brothers adopt is, too, an indication that a certain "Western Marxism," a social- democratic Marxism, closer to the thought of the Mensheviks than the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, did not perish in exile with Plekanov and Martov.

The first sign of the resurrection of Russian culture, at least for us foreigners, was the publication of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. The reader will perhaps recall that in the early chapters there are allusions to the ideas and even to the persons of Soloviev and Vyacheslav Ivanov. The figure of Lara, a fusion of Russia and woman, instantly calls to mind the erotic-religious-patriotic vision of Soloviev and the cult of Sophia. Pasternak's fascination is not unique. In his youth Soloviev had so impressed Dostoevski that some of his characteristics reappear in Alyosha Karamazov.

Later on the philosopher was to leave his mark on Aleksandr Blok and today he influences Solzhenitsyn. But the Russian novelist aligns himself more closely with the tradition of exalted religiousness and Slavophilia of a Seraph of Sarov and of a Tikhon Zadonsky, rather as the Patriarch Zosima is its incarnation in Dostoevski's novel (d. The Icon and the Axe, James H. Billington, New York, 1968). In Solzhenitsyn there is no Russian imperialism; but there is a clear repugnance for the West, its rationalism, and its materialist democracy of soulless businessmen.

On the other hand, Soloviev never concealed his sympathies with Roman Catholicism and European civilization. His two masters are, however strange it may seem, Joseph de Maistre and Auguste Comte. The actuality of Soloviev is extraordinary. Doubtless readers of Plural will recall the essay by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz about one of his works: Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of the World, with a Brief History of the Antichrist and Supplements (Plural, 12 September 1972). In that celebrated work Soloviev prophesies, among other things, the Sino-Soviet conflict, a conflict in which he saw, not without rea- son, the beginning of the end.

To explore relations between the spiritual history of Russia and the contemporary dissidents is a labor beyond the limits both of this essay and of my ability. Nor have I set out to describe the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, still less to defend or attack them. The temper of that writer, the depth of his feelings, and the uprightness and integrity of his character awake spontaneously my admiration, but that admiration does not imply an adherence to his philosophy. True, as well as a moral sympathy, I feel a certain affinity with him too, a spiritual rather than an intellectual affinity. Solzhenitsyn is not only a critic of Russia and Bolshevism but of the modern age itself. What does it matter if that critique proceeds from presuppositions different from mine? Another So- viet dissident, the poet Brodsky, said to me recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "It all began with Descartes." I could have shrugged my shoulders and replied, "It all began with Hume . . . or Kant." I preferred to remain silent and reflect on the atrocious history of the twentieth century. I don't know when it all began; I ask myself, when will it end? Solzhenitsyn's critique is neither more profound nor more true than Thoreau's, Blake's, or Nietzsche's.

Nor does it invalidate what, in our days, the great poets and rebels have said. I think of those irreducible and incorruptible figures-Breton, Russell, Camus, and a few others, some now dead, others surviving, who did not yield and have not yielded to the totalitarian blandishments of communism or fascism or the "comfort" of the consumer society. Solzhenitsyn speaks from another tradition, and this, for me, is impressive: his voice is not modern but ancient. It is an ancientness tempered in the modern world. His ancientness is that of the old Russian Christianity, but it is a Christianity which has passed through the central experience of our century-the dehumanization of the totalitarian concentration camps-and has emerged intact and strengthened. If history is the testing ground, Solzhenitsyn has passed the test. His example is not intellectual or political nor even, in the current sense of the word, moral. We have to use an even older word, a word which still retains a religious overtone-a hint of death and sacrifice: witness. In a century of false testimonies, a writer becomes the witness to man.

Solzhenitsyn's ideas-religious, political, and literary-are disputable, but I will not dispute them here. His book raises issues which go beyond, on the one hand, his political philosophy and, on the other, the ritual condemnation of Stalinism. This latter issue concerns me. The Bolshevik program, that is, Marxism- Leninism, is a universal program, and from that derives the in- terest, for non-Russian readers, of Solzhenitsyn's book. The Gulag Archipelago isn't a book of political philosophy but a work of history; more precisely, it is a witnessing-in the old sense of the word: the martyrs are witnesses-to the repressive system founded in 1918 by the Bolsheviks and which survives intact down to our days, though it has been relatively humanized by Khrushchev and does not today display the monstrous and grotesque traces of Stalinism.

THE TERROR OF THE JACOBINS was a temporary, emergency measure, an extraordinary recourse to meet the challenge of internal insurrection and external aggression at the same time. The Bolshevik terror began in 1918 and endures today: over half a century. In The State and Revolution, a book written in 1917, shortly before the attack on the Winter Palace, Lenin opposed the ideas of Karl Kautsky and the theses of the Second International-those tendencies seemed to him authoritarian and bureaucratic-and delivered an exalted eulogy of political liberty and of self-government by the workers. The State and Revolution contradicts many of Lenin's earlier opinions and, more decisively and significantly, all his practice from the time that his Bolshevik Party took power. Between the Leninist concept of the Bolshevik Party, "the vanguard of the proletariat," and the ardent semi- anarchism of The State and Revolution there is an abyss. The figure of Lenin, like all human figures, is contradictory and dra- matic: the author of The State and Revolution was also the foun- der of the Cheka and the forced-labor camps, and the man who initiated the dictatorship of the Central Committee over the Party.

Would Lenin, had he survived longer, have accomplished the democratic reform of both the Party and the regime itself? We cannot know. In his so-called Will he suggested that, to avoid a bureucratic dictatorship, the number of members of the Central Committee of the Politburo should be increased. Rather like ap- plying a poultice to cure a cancer. The evil was not (and is not) only in the dictatorship by the Committee over the Party but of the Party over the country. In any case, Lenin's suggestion was not taken up: the Politburo of 1974 is composed, like that of 1918, of eleven members, over which a Secretary General reigns.

Nor did the other Bolshevik leaders reveal an understanding of the political problem, and all of them confused in a common scorn what they called "bourgeois democracy" and human liberty. Thanks perhaps to the influence of Bukharin, Lenin adopted a political program called NEP, which saved Russia from the great economic crisis which followed the civil war. But neither Lenin nor Bukharin thought of applying the NEP's economic liberalism to political life. Let's listen to Bukharin: "Among us too other parties can exist. But here-and this is the fundamental principle that distinguishes us from the West-the only conceivable situation is this: one party rules, the others are in prison" (Troud, 13 November 1927). This statement is not exceptional.

In 1921 Lenin said, "The place for the Mensheviks and Revolutionary Socialists, both those who admit to it and those who conceal it, is prison. . . ." And to clear up any confusion between the economic liberalism of the NEP and political liberalism, Lenin writes to Kamenev in a letter dated 3 November 1922: "It is a big mistake to believe that the NEP has put an end to terror. We will have recourse to terror again and also to economic terror." The majority of historians believe that the road which led to the Stalinist perversion began with the change from the dicta- torship of the Soviets (councils of workers, farmers, and soldiers) to the dictatorship of the Party. Nonetheless, some forget that the theoretical justification of that confusion between the organs of the working class and the Party constitutes the very marrow of Leninism. Without the Party, Lenin said, there is no proletarian revolution: "The history of all nations shows that, by its own efforts, the working class is not capable of evolving beyond a syndicalist conscience." Lenin turns the working class into a minor, and makes the Party the true agent of history. In 1904, Trotsky commanded these ideas and anticipated the whole process, from the phase where the Party is above the proletariat to the phase in which the Central Committee is above the Party, and afterward to the phase in which the Politburo is above the Committee, until we reach the phase in which a dictator is above the Politburo.

Later Trotsky succumbed to the same aberration he had denounced. With his habitual clarity and coherence, in Terrorism and Communism (1920), he applied the Leninist ideas of the function of the "vanguard" of the Party:

We have been accused more than once of substituting the Party dictatorship for the dictatorship of the Soviets. Nonetheless, we can affirm without risk of error that the dictatorship of the Soviets has not been possible without the dictatorship of the Party. . .. The substitution of the power of the working class by the power of the Party has not been a fortuitous or chance occurrence: the Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. . .. But, some cunning critics ask, who guarantees that it is precisely your Party that expresses the historical evolution? In suppressing or repressing the other par- ties, you have eliminated political rivalry, the source of positive contention, and thus you have deprived yourselves of the possibility of verifying the soundness of the political line you have adopted. . .. This critique is inspired by a purely liberal idea of the course of the revolution. . . . We have crushed the Men- sheviks and the Revolutionary Socialists, and that judgment is enough for us. In any case our task is not to measure each moment, statistically, the importance of the groups that rep- resent each tendency, but to make certain of the victory of our tendency, which is the tendency of the dictatorship of the proletariat. . ..

To justify the dictatorship of the Party over the Soviets, Trotsky substitutes the quantitative and objective criterion-that is, the democratic criterion which consists in "measuring" what ten- dencies represent the majority and what the minority-with a qualitative, subjective criterion: the supposed ability of the Party to interpret the "true" interests of the masses, even if against the opinion and will of these.

In the last great political debate within the Bolshevik Party which ended with the destruction of the so-called Workers' Op- position (Tenth Party Congress, 1921), Trotsky said:

The Workers' Opposition has made fetishes of democratic principles. It has placed the right of the workers to elect their representatives above Party, to put it in those terms, as though the Party hadn't the right to impose its dictatorship, even if that dictatorship were temporarily to oppose the changing tendencies of workers' democracy. We must remember the historical revolutionary mission of the Party. The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship without bearing in mind the ephemeral fluctuations of spontaneous reactions among the masses and even the momentary vacillation of the working class. . ..

The dictatorship does not rest at every moment on the formal principle of workers' democracy.

In his Will Lenin reproaches Trotsky for his arrogance ("he has too much confidence in himself") and his bureaucratic tendencies ("he is too much inclined not to consider any but the purely administrative side of things"). But Lenin did not remark that those tendencies of Trotsky's personality had been justified in and nourished by the same ideas as his own on the relationship between the Party and the working classes. The same can be said of the personal tendencies of Bukharin and Stalin: Leninism was their common theoretical and political foundation. I do not wish to compare two eminent but tragically and radically wrongheaded men, Bukharin and Trotsky, with a monster like Stalin. I only point out their common intellectual affiliation.

The Leninist notion of political power is inseparable from the notion of dictatorship; and this, in turn, is conducive to terror. Lenin was the creator of the Cheka, and the Bolsheviks of the historic period were the first to justify the execution of hostages, the mass deportations, and the liquidation of whole collectives.

Before Stalin murdered the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky physically annihilated, by violent and lawless means, the other revolutionary parties, from the Mensheviks to the Anarchists and from the Revolutionary Socialists to the left-wing Communist opposition. Years later, in exile, Trotsky repented, though only in part, and conceded, in The Betrayed Revolution (1936), that the first thing that had to be done in Russia was to re-establish the legality of other revolutionary parties. Why only the revolutionary parties?

In Marxism there were authoritarian tendencies that had their origin in Hegel. Yet Marx never spoke of the dictatorship of a single party, but of something very different: temporary dictatorship of the proletariat in the period directly after the taking of power. Leninism introduced a new element: the notion of the revolutionary party, the vanguard of the proletariat, which implies in its name the course of society and history. The essence of Leninism is not in the generous ideas of The State and Rev- olution, which appears too in other socialist and anarchist au- thors, but in the concept of a party of professional revolutionaries which embodies the march of history. This party tends to turn itself inevitably into a caste, as soon as it conquers power. The history of the twentieth century has shown us time and again the inexorable transformation of revolutionary parties into pitiless bureaucracies. The phenomenon has repeated itself everywhere: dictatorship by the Communist Party of the society; dictatorship of the Central Committee over the Communist Party; dictatorship of the revolutionary Caesar over the Central Committee. The Caesar can be called Brezhnev, Mao, or Fidel: the process is the same.

The repressive Soviet system is an inverted image of the political system created by Lenin. The forced-labor camps, the police bureaucracy that administers them, the arrests without process of law, the judgments behind closed doors, the torture, the intimidation, the calumnies, the self-accusations and confessions, the general spying: all this is the consequence of the dictatorship of the sole Party and, within the Party of dictatorship, of one group and one man. The political pyramid that is the Communist system is reproduced in the inverted pyramid of their repressive system. In turn, the repression the Party exercises on the populace is reproduced in the heart of the Party itself: the elimination of external opposition is succeeded necessarily by the elimination of internal rivals and dissidents: the Bolsheviks followed the road of the Mensheviks, Anarchists, and Revolutionary Socialists.

President Liu-Shao-Ch'i and his old enemy Marshal Lin Piao lie now together, mingled in the same historical opprobrium. Recourse to bloody purges and cultural revolutions is no accident: how else can the middle and upper echelons of Party directors be renewed, and how else could political disputes and rivalries be resolved? The suppression of internal democracy condemns the Party to violent periodic convulsions.

EVE N I F we think economic structures are governed by us, it is impossible to ignore the decisive function of ideologies in historical life. Though according to Marx and Engels ideologies are mere superstructures, the truth is that these "superstructures" often outlive the "structures." Christianity outlived the bureaucratic and imperial regime of Constantine, medieval feudalism, the ab- solute monarchies of the seventeenth century, and the national bourgeois democracies of the nineteenth. Buddhism has revealed even greater vitality. And what of Confucianism? It will probably survive Mao, as it has survived the Han, the Tang, and the Ming. And, deeper than ideologies, there is another realm scarcely affected by historical change: beliefs. Magic and astrology, to call on two well-worn examples, have survived Plato and Aristotle, Abelard and Saint Thomas, Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud.

Thus, to explain the repressive Soviet system we have to bear in mind various levels or strata of social and historical reality. For Trotsky, Stalinism was above all a consequence of the social and economic backwardness of Russia: the economic structure determined it. For other critics, it was rather the result of Bolshevik ideology. Both explanations are, at the same time, exact and incomplete. It seems to me that another factor is no less important: the very history of Russia, its religious and political tradition, all that half-conscious, airy element of beliefs, feelings, and images that constitutes what earlier historians called the genius (the soul) of society.

There is a clear continuity between the despotism exercised by Peter and Catherine and that of Lenin and Trotsky, between the bloodthirsty paranoia of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. Stalinism and czarist autocracy were born, grew, and fed upon Russian reality. The same must be said of the bureaucracy and the police system. Autocracy and bureaucracy are features which Russia probably inherited from Byzantium, along with Christianity and the great art. Other features in Russian society are Oriental, and others have their origin in Slavic paganism. The history of Russia is a strange mixture of sensuality and exalted spiritualism, brutality and heroism, saintliness and abject superstition. Russian "primitivism" has been described or analyzed many times, now with admiration and now with horror. It is, one must confess, a very un primitive primitivism: not only did it create one of the most profound, rich, and complex literatures in the world, but it also represents a living and unique spiritual tradition of our time. I am convinced that that tradition is called to give life, like a spring, to the drought, the egoism, and the decay of the con- temporary West. The stories told by the survivors of the Nazi and the Soviet concentration camps reveal the difference between Western "modernity" and Russian "primitivism." In the case of the former, the words ceaselessly repeated are inhumanity, im- personality, and homicidal efficiency; while in the case of the latter, besides the horror and bestiality, words like compassion, charity, and fraternity stand out. The Russian nation has pre- served, as one can see from the contemporary writers and intel- lectuals, a Christian foundation.

Russia is not primitive: it is ancient. Despite the Revolution, its modernity is incomplete: Russia did not have an eighteenth century. It would be useless to seek in its intellectual, philosophical, or moral tradition a Hume, a Kant, or a Diderot. This explains, at least in part, the coexistence in modern Russia of pre-capitalist virtues and vices such as indifference to political and social liberties. There is a similarity-as yet little explored- between the Spanish and the Russian traditions: neither they nor we, the Latin Americans, have a critical tradition because neither they nor we had in fact anything which can be compared with the Enlightenment and the intellectual movement of the eighteenth century in Europe. Nor did we have anything to compare with the Protestant Reformation, that great seedbed of liberties and democracy in the modern world. Thence the failure of the tentative democracies in Spain and its old colonies. The Spanish empire disintegrated and with it our countries too. Confronted with the anarchy which followed the dissolution of the Spanish order, we had no remedy but the barbaric remedy of tyranny.

The sad contemporary reality is the result of the failure of our wars of independence: we were unable to rebuild, on modern principles, the Spanish order. Dismembered, each part became a victim of the chiefs of armed groups-our generals and presi- dents-and of imperialism, especially that of the United States.

With independence, our countries did not begin a new phase: rather, the end of the Spanish world was hastened and achieved. When will we recover? In Russia there was no disintegration: the Communist bureaucracy replaced the czarist autocracy.

Like a good Russian, Solzhenitsyn would resign himself-he has said recently-to seeing his country ruled by a nondemocratic regime so long as it corresponded, however distantly, with the image that traditional thought created of the Christian sovereign, afraid of God and loving his subjects. An idea, I mention in passing, that has its equivalent in the "universal sovereign" of Buddhism (Asoka is the great )erplmaxe and in the Confucian idea that the emperor rules by heavenly mandate. The Russian novelist's idea may seem fantastic, and to a certain degree it is. Nonetheless, it corresponds rather to a more realistic and deeper vision of the history of his country. And we, Spanish-Americans and Spaniards, is it not time that we examined more soberly and realistically our present and our past? When will we evolve our own political thought? A century and a half of petty tyrants, pronouncements, and military dictatorships-has this not opened our eyes? Our failure to adapt democratic institutions, in their two modern versions-the Anglo-Saxon and the French-ought to compel us to think on our own account, without looking through the spectacles of modish ideology. The contradiction between our institutions and what we really are is scandalous and would be comical were it not tragic. I feel no nostalgia for the Indian King or the Viceroy, for the Lady Serpent or the Grand Inquisitor, nor for His Most Serene Highness, or the Hero of Peace or the Great Chief of the Revolution. But these grotesque, frightening titles denote realities, and those realities are more real than our laws and constitutions. It is useless to close our eyes to them and more useless still to repress our past and condemn it to live on in history's subsoil; the life underground strengthens it, and periodically it reappears as a destructive eruption or ex- plosion. This is the result of the ingenuity, hypocrisy, or stupidity of those who pretend to bury it alive. We need to name our past, to find political and juridical forms to integrate it and transform it into a creative force. Only thus will we begin to be free.

The system of sending delinquents against the common order along with political prisoners to Siberia was not a Communist but a czarist invention. The infamous Russian penal colonies were known throughout the world, and in 1886 an American explorer, George Kennan, devoted a book to this somber subject: Siberia and the Exile System. The reader need not be reminded of Dostoevski's House of the Dead. Less known is Anton Chekhov's The Island, a Voyage to Sajalin. But there is an essential difference: Dostoevski's and Chekhov's books were published legally in czarist Russia, while Solzhenitsyn had to publish his book abroad with the known risks. In 1890 Chekhov decided to travel to the celebrated penal colony of Sajalin and write a book on the Russian penitentiary system. Though it seems strange, the czarist authorities permitted his journey, and the Russian writer was able to interview the prisoners with considerable freedom (except for the political prisoners). Five years later, in 1895, he published his book, a complete condemnation of the Russian penal sys- tem. Chekhov's experience under czarism is unthinkable in any twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regime.

As well as the circumstances of historical and national organizations, the place of individuals in the general order must be mentioned. Almost always these orders are interwoven with international realities and the national context. For example, in the case of Yugoslavia, Tito, as well as being the head of the Communist Party, led the nationalist resistance first against the Nazis and afterward against Stalin's attempts at intervention. Yugoslav nationalism contributed to the regime's relaxation of the terrible burden of the Russian and Leninist tradition: Yugoslavia humanized itself. It would be an error to ignore the beneficent influence of Tito's personality in that revolution. In each of the Communist states the Caesar imposes his style on the regime. In the time of Stalin, the color of the system was the rabid yellow and green of rage; today it is gray like Brezhnev's conscience. In China the regime is no less oppressive than in Russia, but its customs are not brutal or glacial: no Ivan the Terrible but Huang Ti, the first emperor. There is a striking resemblance between Huang and Mao, as Etiemble pointed out (see Plural 29, February 1974). Both rivals of Confucius and both possessed by the same superhuman ambition: to make time itself-past, present, and future-a huge monument that repeats its features. Time becomes malleable, history is a docile substance which takes on the kind and terrible imprint of the president-emperor. The first Cultural Revolution was the burning of the Chinese classics, especially the books of Confucius, ordered by Huang Ti in 213 B.C. Local variations on a universal archetype: the Caesar of Havana makes use of dialectics much as the old Spanish landowners used the whip.

THE S I MIL A R I TIE S between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes make it right for us to describe them both as totalitarian. That is the point of view of Hannah Arendt, but also of a man like Andrei Sakharov, one of the fathers of the Russian H-bomb: Nazism survived for twelve years; Stalinism twice as long. Besides the various common features, there are differences between them. The hypocrisy and demagogy of Stalin were of a more subtle order, depending not on a frankly barbarous pro- gram like Hitler's but on a socialist ideology, a progressive, scientific, and popular ideology which was a useful screen to deceive the working class, and to anesthetize the vigilance of the intellectuals and of rivals in the struggle for power. . ..

Thanks to that "peculiarity" of Stalinism, the most terrible blows were delivered to the Soviet people and their most active, competent and honorable representatives. Between ten and fif teen million Soviet citizens, at least, have perished in the dun- geons of the NKVD, martyred or executed, and in the camps for "Kulaks" and their families, camps "without right of correspondence" (those camps were the prototypes for the Nazi extermination camps), or dead of cold and hunger or exhausted by the inhuman labor in the glacial mines of Norilsk and Vorkuta, in the countless quarries and forest exploitations, in the construction of canals or, simply, from being transported in closed train cars or drowned in the "ships of death" on the Sea of Okhotsk, during the deportation of whole populations, the Tartars from Crimea, the Germans from the Volga, Calmuks and other groups from the Caucasus. (La Libertiletni lleutcel en URSS et La Coexistence, Paris, Gallimard, 1968)

The testimony of the celebrated Soviet economist Eugene Varga is no less impressive:

Though in Stalin's dungeons and concentration camps there were fewer cruel men and sadists than in Hitler's camps, it can be affirmed that no difference in principle existed between them. Many of those executioners are still at liberty and receive com- fortable pensions. (Testament, 1964: Paris, Granet, 1970)

However terrible the testimony of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Varga, and many others, it seems to me that a crucial distinction ought to be made: neither the pre-Stalin period (1918-1928) nor the post-Stalin period (1956-1974) can be compared with nazism. Therefore one must distinguish, as Hannah Arendt does, between totalitarian systems properly speaking (nazism and Stalinism) and Communist bureaucratic dictatorships. Nevertheless it is clear that there is a causal relationship between Bolshevism and totalitarianism: without the dictatorship of the Party over the coun- try and the Central Committee over the Party, Stalinism could not have developed. Trotsky thought the difference between communism and nazism consisted in the different organization of the economy: state property in the former and capitalist property in the latter. The truth is that, beyond the differences in the control of property, the two systems are similar in being bureaucratic dictatorships of one group which stands above class, society, and morality. The notion of a separate group is crucial. That group is a political party which initially takes the form of a gathering of conspirators. When it takes power, the conspirators' secret cell becomes the police cell, equally secret, for interrogation and torture. Leninism is not Stalinism but one of its antecedents. The others are in the Russian past, as well as in human nature.

Beyond Leninism is Marxism. I allude to the original Marxism, worked out by Marx and Engels in their mature years. That Marxism too contains the germs of authoritarianism-though to a far lesser degree than in Lenin and Trotsky-and many of the criticisms Bakunin leveled at it are still valid. But the germs of liberty which are found in the writings of Marx and Engels are no less fertile and powerful than the dogmatic Hegelian inheritance. And another thing: the socialist program is essentially a Promethean program of liberation of men and nations. Only from this point of view can (and ought) a criticism of the authoritarian tendencies in Marxism be made. In 1956 Bertrand Russell admirably summarized the stance of a free spirit confronting terrorist dogmas:

My objections to modern Communism are far deeper than my objections to Marx. What I find particularly disastrous is the abandonment of democracy. A minority which leans for sup- port on the activities of the secret police must necessarily become a cruel, oppressive and obscurantist minority. The dangers which irresponsible power engenders were generally recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but many, blinded by the external successes of the Soviet Union, have forgotten all that which was painfully learned during the years of absolute monarchy: victims of the curious illusion that they form part of the vanguard of progress, they have reverted to the worst periods of the Middle Ages. (Portraits from Memory, New York,1956)

The rejection of Caesarism and of Communist dictatorship does not in any way imply a justification of American imperialism, of racism, or of the atomic bomb; nor a shutting of the eyes before the injustice of the capitalist system. We cannot justify what happens in the West and in Latin America by saying that what happens in Russia and Czechoslovakia is worse: horrors there do not justify horrors here. What happens among us is unjustifiable, whether it is the prison detention of Onetti, the sredrum in Chile, or the tortures in Brazil. But nor is it possible for us to be blind to the misfortunes of the Russian, Czech, Chinese, or Cuban dissidents. The defense of so-called formal liberties is, day by day, the first political duty of a writer, whether in Mexico, in Moscow, or in Montevideo. The "formal liberties" are not, of course, all liberty, and liberty itself is not the sole human aspiration: fraternity, justice, equality, and security are also desirable. But without those formal liberties-of thought, expression, of association and movement, of saying "no" to power-there is no fraternity, no justice, nor hope of equality.

On this we ought to be unswerving and denounce implacably all equivocations, confusions, and lies. It is inadmissible, for ex- ample, that people who even a few months ago were calling the freedom of the press a "bourgeois trick" and were encouraging students, in the name of a radicalism both hackneyed and obscurantist, to violate the principle of academic freedom now form committees and sign manifestos to defend that very freedom of the press in Uruguay and Chile. Recently Gunter Grass was put- ting us on our guard, recalling the pseudo radical frivolity of German intellectuals in the period of the Weimar Republic. While there was democracy in Germany, they never ceased to scoff at it as an illusion and a bourgeois plot, but when, fatally, Hitler came, they fled-not to Moscow but to New York, doubtless to pursue there with increased ardor their critique of bourgeois society.

The moral and structural similarities between Stalinism and nazism should not make us forget their distinct ideological origins. Nazism was a narrowly nationalist and racist ideology, while Stalinism was a perversion of the great and beautiful socialist tradition. Leninism presents itself as a universal doctrine. It is impossible to be unmoved by the Lenin of The State and Revolution. Equally, it is impossible to forget that he was the founder of the Cheka and the man who unleashed terror against the Mensheviks and Revolutionary Socialists, his comrades in arms.

Almost all Western and Latin American writers, at one point or another in our lives, sometimes because of generous but ignorant impulses, sometimes out of weakness under the pressure of the intellectual milieu, and sometimes simply to be modish, have allowed ourselves to be seduced by Leninism. When I consider Aragon, Eluard, Neruda, and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages in the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith. How could they have shut their eyes to the horrors of capitalism and the disasters of imperialism in Asia, Africa, and our part of America?

They experienced a generous surge of indignation and of solidarity with the victims. But insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves become tangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits, and perjuries, until they lost their souls. They became, literally, soulless. This may seem exaggerated: Dante and his punishments for some wrongheaded political views? Who nowadays anyway believes in the soul? I will add that our opinions on this subject have not been mere errors or flaws in our faculty of judgment. They have been a sin in the old religious sense of that word: something that affects the whole being. Very few of us could look a Solzhenitsyn, or a Nadejda Mandelstam, in the eye. That sin has stained us and, fatally, has stained our writings as well. I say this with sadness, and with humility.

Mexico, March 1974