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?
