My Brushes with The Party

For a decade or so starting in my late teens I fancied myself a leftist – perhaps even a revolutionary. I might’ve been brought up in a bourgeois home, but I could transcend it, I believed. I would be tough, and unsentimental. I would be loyal to an idea. I would disown my Jewish family. I would go to the newly revolutionised Cuba and be assigned manual work. I even bought a “Teach Yourself” book and started learning Spanish.

Now, 60 years later, I wonder why this was such an attractive proposition for me. Recently reading “Shashenka” by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I found that the main character seems to have been similarly attracted, albeit 40 years earlier and on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.  

One of the issues Montefiore addresses in the novel is one that has puzzled me for years: during all those purges of the Stalin era, why did loyal Party members confess their guilt? Ok, you could’ve put it down to the unbearable pain and humiliation of torture, the desperate need to escape it, the threats to loved ones and having no place or person to turn to. But why did the secret police and the dictators who ruled the Party want this particular script? It wasn’t as if the prisoners would be saving themselves – they knew they would be executed as traitors. Why did the state need them to confess?

It is my belief that the Soviet state needed huge masses of people to live in terror so that they could be manipulated. It was ostensibly to create a new kind of being – one that would hold the collective as being more important than the individual; replacing capitalist greed with collective endeavour. The Party would inform you or question you if you strayed from the Common Good.

In retrospect I think (maybe naively) this attitude was contemptuous of human beings, overrating their “false consciousness” and selfishness and underestimating their ethics. There are many examples in a more benign society of people simply choosing to put the common good ahead of their own individual interests – they don’t always have to be coerced.

In Montefiore’s story, a loyal member in the upper echelons of the Party is tortured and her torturers want her to confess. She knows she is innocent. She tries to second guess them. In her almost delusional state after many days of incarceration and torture, she finally understands. The Party (i.e. Stalin) needs enemies and traitors. That is how terror is perpetuated. When friends were arrested in the past, she believed the Party by definition was correct, and that they must have been traitors. But now she sees what is expected: she knows that although she is innocent, her loyalty requires her to sacrifice herself. This is the ultimate test. She can try to save her loved ones but she must confess i.e. tell a bunch of ridiculous lies. The torture will stop, she will be executed but she will have done her duty. Of course no-one will know that except her – by lying she will have remained true to her beliefs.

Why were so many of us, including myself to some extent, duped by this? We knew there were terrible crimes committed – people killed in purges, murdered during forced collectivisation, public confessions at show trials. But there were justificatory sayings for this which were supposed to lull you into continuing to be a believer: “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and the worst one ever: “the end justifies the means”.

Orlando Figes in “The Whisperers” writes that many of the people in the NKVD (the secret police) came from state orphanages. These were the children of Party members who had been executed or sent to the Gulags. You were told that your parents had been “Enemies of the State”. So whatever good memories you may have treasured of them were systematically poisoned. Good became Bad. Ambivalence and nuance were discouraged; paranoia was encouraged. Love was to be avoided. 

Well that was in the Soviet Union and we were living in apartheid South Africa. What had seemed to be normal growing up, began, as I grew older and met black and brown students of my own age, to be completely unacceptable. What kind of society would be acceptable? I cut my political teeth during the UCT bus boycott of 1959, when the buses serving the campus were required to be segregated like every bus in Cape Town. The Communist Party had been banned in 1952. It had gone underground. Its activities were secret but the security police knew who had been members when it had been legal. These “former” Communists were attractive to me in a subversive kind of way. They had wonderful parties (The Buntings' party in Camps Bay on New Year's Eve was famous) and it seemed as if you could belong to something exciting, whose members believed passionately in forging a different kind of society. I joined one of the front organisations i.e. the Modern World Society. 

One had to learn a whole new language – a kind of Marxist-speak. Marxists talked as if the revolution had already happened or was happening now. It was hard to know which tense you were supposed to use. But getting it right would give you entry into this world. The collapse of capitalism and the revolution were supposed to be inevitable. So all it required was for there to be a correct Marxist analysis of the current situation. The revolutionary order of events, which were apparently already happening, would be revealed and you would know what action would next be required. Dialectical Materialism came into this somewhere. The revolution had a Vanguard. Who constituted the Vanguard? This seemed to be very important. Was it the proletariat? In the South African context who was that? Were the black and white proletariat going to unite? An unlikely story. It hadn’t happened under the leadership of the SA Communist Party during the 1922 miner’s strike. This was a source of much argument. So was the order of events. Was a national revolution in South Africa needed before the socialist revolution? The Congress Movement said yes. The Trotskyists argued against this, labelling them “Stalinists”. This issue seemed to underpin most of the major debates on UCT campus in the late 50’s. At that time, the Struggle, already engaged, had yet to be fully waged. I found the Trotskyists persuasive – one permanent revolution was better than two stages of revolution, surely? But the local so-called (by Trotskyists) “Stalinists” of the Modern World Society were more comfortable for me to be with in terms of class and culture. My boyfriend at the time was one of them. I had met him at a bus boycott party in 1959. However, in my undergraduate years, I also met Archie Mafeje. Under his mentoring, I began to be critical of my “Stalinist” friends.

Stalin

 Nevertheless I actually felt disappointed that no-one ever tried to recruit me into the Communist Party – I might have refused but it would’ve been a kind of recognition of my activism and a way to belong. On the eve of Africa Day during the emergency that followed Sharpeville in 1960, the Coloured People’s Congress called a strike. The Modern World Society went out leafletting.

Illegal leaflet - calling for a strike during State of Emergency 1960

My boyfriend and I ended up in different cars. The people in his car were arrested and he spent about 6 weeks in Roeland Street gaol. In a small corner of my being I was jealous – I knew if I’d been arrested it would’ve been easy to become a member of the Communist Party. The women’s prison was full of ex-members and I would’ve been recruited. Occasionally I wonder how different my life would’ve been – would I have continued to delude myself about the truth, continuing a kind of Marxist double-thinking? Would I have become a persona non grata in my family? Would I have ended up in Cuba?

Ernest Mandel

Much later, in the late 60’s when I was living in New York, a different theory emerged with the New Left student uprisings in various countries. The Old Left had been discredited – not only had there been the excesses of Stalin and the betrayal of trade unions in many countries, but there had also been the invasion of Hungary and in that same year, the suppression of the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia. Ernest Mandel awarded the Vanguard mantle of late capitalism to the intellectuals! They would start the revolution – perhaps because they supposedly already had?

Between these two periods – UCT in the late 50’s and the New Left in the New York of the late 60’s – I visited the Soviet Union with my mother. I urged her to visit her sister in Moscow before either of them died. They corresponded occasionally through an intermediary in Poland. They hadn’t seen each other for almost 40 years and of-course - I wanted to see what the Soviet Union was like. Had it fulfilled the great utopian dream or was it as bad as the West described? OK, I could explain to myself the need for an Iron Curtain, but why did contact have to be so restricted? An uncle and aunt had however both visited separately in the late 50’s and early 60’s but I had dismissed their reports as being filtered through bourgeois prejudice.

It is only after reading Figes’ “The Whisperers” that I fully grasped what I had seen and experienced, and yet did not want to know. It was dangerous for our Moscow family to have relatives in the West. They had a Spoilt History because of us. In truth, it was arrogant and selfish on my part to have persuaded my mother to go. I was motivated because I thought it was in my mother’s best interests but I was also attracted to the forbidden and difficult e.g. we had to get special permission from the South African Security Police and visas from the Soviet embassy in London – there being no embassy in South Africa.

My first cousin Evgenia had joined the Party during World War II and had not said that he had relatives in the West. He had never met any of us and probably thought he never would. We came back to haunt him. Each time his mother had a visit, they were both interrogated. Our visit put the family in an impossible position. Of course they wanted to meet us but there were informers everywhere; on every floor of the hotel, the woman with whom they shared a kitchen and the Party member who kept watch in their housing block.

On our last day, the family took the risk of having us over for lunch. That way Evgenia could come home to meet us. A few months after we left, a letter came asking us not to write or visit again. Evgenia had been questioned at work. He had said these were his mother’s relatives; not his.

My mother, who understood Russian, did not have any inclination (as I did) to try to see anything positive in Soviet society. There was nothing blinding her to the harshness, pain and abject terror of her sister’s life. She was inconsolable once we were safely on the Aeroflot plane leaving Russia and continued to be so even when we arrived for our first evening in Warsaw.

Alexander Dubcek

My determination to put a different lens on events behind the Iron Curtain extended to the crushing of the Prague Spring in May 1968. For at least three days I could not believe the Western reporting of it. By then I was living in the belly of the beast – New York, USA – and I was sure the story of the invasion was simply propaganda. I don’t know which bit of evidence blew that fantasy – probably some interviews with actual named Czech citizens or pictures of Alexander Dubcek – the Czech President being forced to go to Moscow.

I wonder now what the cumulative effect of years of terror had on the millions of people throughout the Soviet bloc – the human cost seems as unimaginable as the Nazi killing machine. And yet, I remember Julia my cousin looking out the window of our hotel room and almost hugging the scene of her city spread below us. Despite all she and her family had endured, and like so many young people around the world who don’t know anything different, she had a deep pride and love for her country and its history. Like everywhere else, human beings lived, studied, worked, read, ate, pulled strings to survive, loved, had children, went on holiday, got ill and even died of natural causes sometimes.

 

.    S. Sebag Montefiore, Sashenka  (London 2008) Transworld   

O. Figes, The Whisperers. Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London 2008) Penguin.