STALIN'S FELLOW TRAVELLERS, PAST AND PRESENT

A new book by David Caute has touched some people on the raw, and they are squealing. One of these is Victor Kiernan, a historian, who wrote a full-page review of Caute's book in 'The Times' Higher Education Supplement (February 16, 1973).

Kiernan was himself once a Communist Party member, but like many others resigned at the time of the Khrushchev report and the soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956.

His review, of "The Fellow Travellers' (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £5.75) apart from a few gentlemanly references to it as 'interesting and informative' in parts, is pure venom.

Kiernan claims that 'regrettably, a great part of it could scarcely be worse. It reeks of prejudice against the Soviet Union'.

He concludes: 'Mr Caute has little to teach us.' The fact is that Kiernan goes to work to whitewash the Stalinist fellow-travellers.

Caute's book has its faults —it is too anecdotal, and it does not explain the essential question of how and why Stalinism is the opposite of Bolshevism—but it has done a very important job.

Canto hac documented the LauLc LIAL way in which a section of the 'left' middle-class intellectuals prostituted themselves to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

This role of the fellow-travellers was indefensible, from the working-class, Marxist standpoint, and Kiernan's decision to defend it against Caute is a warning that, for all the "liberal' noises some ex-Communist Party members may make, they are ready to play the same game again.

Kiernan himself is an interesting case in point. He is willing to acknowledge in passing that it was a perilous mistake to identify the advance of socialism and of socialist countries too closely with their leaders • .., but he wants above all to avoid any real facing up to what this meant, and he is especially concerned that those who begin to examine the history should not turn to the genuine Bolshevik tradition of struggle against Stalin, the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky.

Hence his complaint that Caute neglects the case of Isaac Deutscher '. •.. a fellowtraveller whose lite and work proved how a communist could turn against Stalin without either turning against communism or taking refuse with Trotsky' Deutscher conducted for many years a necessary and important defence of Trotsky at a time when that condemned him to isolation and calumny from the Stalinists.

He did not at all share Mr Kiernan's apologetic stance in favour of the 'left' fellow-travellers of Stalin. This Kiernan chooses to ignore.

We in the Trotskyist movement had deep differences with Deutscher.

We consider that his expressed hope of a future communist movement 'neither Stalinist nor Trotskyist' was not only wrong, but opened the door to a whole generation of intellectuals to run away from their revolutionary responsibilities. Mr Kiernan has seen this in Deutscher, and nothing else!

But let us look at Kiernan's statement once again.

What does he mean by 'take refuge with Trotsky'? Here is a very peculiar expression.

Kiernan knows very well that for a socialist intellectual to go to Trotsky's theory and the Fourth International was the very opposite of 'taking refuge'!

Trotskyists were on the receiving end, not just of vilification and abuse, but of a campaign of physical liquidaIn the years of World War II, this campaign was carried out by the fascist and imperialist states as well international Stalinism. It ill befits Kiernan, for so many years himself a Stalinist, to refer to Trotsky as a 'refuge'!

What is called for, from all those like Kiernan, is some political humility, in the sense of a revolutionary and class-conscious accounting with their own past from the Marxist standpoint, order to prepare as revolutionaries in Kiernan cannot do this because, like SO many who joined the Stalinist parties, he shares the very characteristics of the 'fellow travellers' which have been exposed by David Caute.

It is simply not true that Caute's book 'reeks with prejudice against the Soviet Union'.

It is Kiernan who identifies Stalinism with the Soviet Union. This enables him to dismiss as 'anti-Soviet' anyone who criticizes the intellectual handmaidens of Stalin.

RUTHLESS The vast majority of the fellow-travellers made a 'common sense' identification of the economic achievements of the first workers' state with the rule of the bureaucracy and Stalin. Caute exposes this ruthlessly.

It is because Kiernan does the same thing that he reacts so sharply.

Thus it is remarkable that in a very long review Kiernan at no time says where he stands on the basic question: the struggle between Stalin and the bureaucracy on the one hand, and Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the other.

Caute's summary of this is too short, but it demands an analysis from the reviewer. And he demonstrates irrefutably that the 'fellow-travellers' made a conscious decision against the revolutionary line of Trotsky. Kiernan chooses to ignore this, the most important question of all.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, those eminent Fabian fellow travellers of Stalin (they recognized him, they said, as a good Fabian!) opted against Trotsky, explaining that 'patient construction' triumphed over flamboyant iconoclasm' (Caute p. 88).

Anna Louise Strong reported that Trotsky had advocated 'adventurous escapades among the nations whose workers were not ready for Harold Laski burbled about the 'fire and audacity' of Trotsky, but considered Stalin right against Trotsky in the 'theory' of socialism in one country. He thought Trotsky lacked Stalin's skill in party These are the people nan chooses to defend.

What Caute shows is that they "fellow-travelled' not out of sympathy with or understanding of the October Revolution but through identification with • the bureaucratic 'planning' of Stalin, and were prepared to justify or ignore every atrocity committed by him along that road. The betrayal of the proletarian revolution in one country after another was a means to this end.

In their books and speeches the fellow-travellers sustained the lies of the Kremlin about 'socialist construction' in Russia and made themselves available to justify the purge trials both pre-war and post-war.

In their own countries they graced the platform and editorial boards the 'Popular Fronts' after 1934, instruments to disarm the working class of any political independence.

Caute neglects this question, and makes the most utter confusion of the problem of united front and 'popular front'. But Kiernan, predictabls, does not complain about There is no contradiction in the ability of the Webbs, bitter opponents of the 1926 General Strike, to become enthusiasts of the Stalinist regime in the early 1930s. Sidney Webb, eminent Fabian fellow traveller of Stalin. In 1936 he brought out, with his wife Beatrice, a two volume work, Soviet Communism, a New Civilization?' As Caute says "Trotsky's judgement was rough: the Webbs, he said, found in the USSR neither Chartism nor the October Revolution nor communism, they found only an administrative mechanism and a bureaucratic plan.' (p. 263.)

Kiernan sweeps aside the real Stalinist past and his own) with nice phrases. He can end his review: 'Only principles are beyond doubt'.

Presumably everything else is shrouded in obscurity, and no one need take any responsibility. Thus: Perhaps the peasantry underwent torments..• Perhaps?! Kiernan knows the results of the forced collectivization in millions of deaths and the near-ruin of Soviet agriculture.

His choice of 'perhaps' is surely a retention of the fellow-travellers' permanent get-out: we need not acknowledge criticisms of the USSR, there are plenty of capitalist spokesmen to do that. DISASTER It is not a question of opposition to collectivization. What happened was that Stalin and his clique turned empirically and brutally to collectivization in their ultraleft 'Third Period' because they had brought the workers' state to the brink of disaster with their earlier right-wing course to the peasantry.

If Kiernan I wanted to 'explain' Caute's comments and lay the basis for a more objective criticism of the fellow-travellers, why did he not refer to these historical questions?

The fact is that Kiernan shares the fellow-travellers' agreement with Stalin against Trotsky, against the proletarian revolution.

He caricatures Caute's case in order to maintain this stand. Consider for example this sentence, supposed to summarize Caute's version of the fellow-travellers gullibility: • sion of men and women, some with the finest endowments and highest ideals of the age, simplemindedly taken in by the cunning Bolshevik showman'.

Here it is Kiernan, who, by sleight of hand, identifies Bolshevism with Stalinism. Caute does no such thing.

But what were these 'fine endowments' and 'high ideals'? Hundreds of lawyers, writers, priests and endo amerits ets used their endorse and embellish and even bless the torture and forced confessions and judicial murder of the flower of the Russian revolutionary movement in the Moscow trials!

Kiernan knows he is covering up when he says they did not know what they were doing.

Many of them reconciled themselves to their actions with the excuse that it was necessary in the face of the fascist danger.

We are not concerned with their sincerity' or otherwise. The essential question is that they provided the sustenance bourgeois ideology to Stalinism which enabled it to politically betray the working class. This is what their "endowments' and 'high ideals' were used for.

Even the Spanish Stalinist leader Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionara') is defended from Caute by Kiernan, who compares her with Joan of Arc! This same 'La Pasionaria' as Caute records, said on August 9, 1938: "The Trotskyists must be exterminated like beasts of prey' (p. 171).

All this was justified (and is justified by Kiernan today) in the name of a Popular Front alliance and defence of the Soviet Union to 'save democracy'.

Caute's book confirms what was clear to every Trotskyist at the time.

The fellow travellers wanted to preserve their own place in bourgeois * democracyagainst fascism if they could, 'own certainly against their working class! And world Stalinism ensured them against that, by dealing (like *La Pasionaria') with the Trotskyists.

For the internal politics of the USSR, then, these 'Popular Front democrats' suspended their democratic consciences. a manner reminiscent of ba: The Webbs participated, mund Burke: 'An indulgence in unlimited freedom of discussion especially if accompanied by unlimited duration of debate, has the drawback that it is apt to militate against the effectiveness of corporate action.' It was this attitude which led Trotsky, years before to warn: 'In the sympathies of many lefts for the Soviet Union (alongside hostility to their own communists) there is contained a good deal of the deference of the petit-bourgeois towards d strong state power.' ('Problems of the British Revolution', p. 15.)

Lincoln Steffers (the American writer) is quoted by Caute as saying: am for them to the last drop, I am a patriot for Russia; the future is there. But I don't want to live there.' This was uttered from the Italian Riviera!

CONTINUED TOMORROW

March