Child of the Revolution, by Wolfgang Leonhard

[p034] Child of the Revolution, by Wolfgang Leonhard (Collins, 25s.) IN these memoirs, first published in western Germany in 1955, Mr Leonhard portrays the uncertainties of existence among the middle strata of the Soviet bureaucracy. a milieu in which he spent the most formative decade of his life. That he emerged virtually unscathed from this experience is a tribute to his tactical shrewdness . . . and a testimony to the fact that if not unduly encumbered by principles or theory a man may survive in the most hostile of environments. Leonhard’s mother was a personal friend of Rosa Luxem- burg and Karl Liebknecht, a member of the illegal Spartakus- bund, a member of the German Communist Party from 1918 and the author of a book, published in 1921, on revolutionary literature in Germany during the war years. She visited the Soviet Union in the difficult days of 1924 and returned to Germany, where she continued underground work after the Nazis came to power. In 1935 she escaped to Sweden, where, with the help of Soviet ambassadress Alexandra Kollontai, she obtained permission to settle in the USSR with her 13-year- old son. Impeccable credentials, one would have thought. Un- fortunately this was the era of Stalin’s henchmen, and a revolutionary past could almost guarantee a visit to Vorkuta. She was arrested during the first wave of the purges, for alleged ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity’, and spent the next twelve years in various concentration camps. When freed in 1948 she described her experiences in a moving book, ‘A Quarter of My Life’. Young Wolfgang entered politics through a very different door. His formative years were spent in the sheltered atmos- phere of the ‘apparatus’. He was fed Stalinism as others are fed porridge—and thrived on it. His career in the USSR pro- ceeded, with only minor jolts, along the path of conformism. It provides a text-book account of the formation of a party bureaucrat. Leonhard first stayed at a special home in Moscow for the children of German émigrés. This home ‘had nothing in common with the usual children’s homes in the Soviet Union’, the inmates being ‘almost as highly privileged as members of a delegation on a conducted tour’. He attended the Karl Liebknecht day school (which unexpectedly closed down in 1938, following the arrest of most of its teaching staff). He joined the Young Pioneers and later the Komsomol. When, in September 1941, the German political émigrés were suddenly rounded up and sent en masse to Karaganda in central Asia, young Leonhard decided to travel with them (having first secured, by various manoeuvres, a certificate exempting him from compulsory deportation). His special permit saved him from the extreme hardships endured by the other German anti-fascists and deportees. He talked his way out of the settle- ments, proceeded to the Educational Institute of the nearest town, and continued his studies. He even established a position for himself in the local organization responsible for political émigrés! In June 1942 he was selected to attend the Comintern School at Ufa, in the Bashkir republic. Vv Leonhard escaped the rigours of the war. His progress after the dissolution of the Comintern School in May 1943 was ‘quite impressive. He was installed at the Lux Hotel in Mos- cow, where he worked for the National Committee for Free Germany. After the collapse of the Wehrmacht he was among those specially chosen to fly to Berlin with Ulbricht, in April 1945, there to set up a provisional administration. He worked for the occupying authority, and with the secretariat of the Socialist Unity Party, and must have been deemed reliable, for in 1947 he was appointed instructor at the Karl Marx Party Academy at Liebenwalde, near Berlin. In 1949 he broke with orthodox Stalinism and escaped to Yugoslavia. where he spent nearly two years, writing and broadcasting for Tito. His ire expened, he then settled in the West. Throughout the period of his rise in the ‘apparatus’ young Leonhard kept his eyes wide open, his wits about him and his mouth shut. He made many shrewd observations and it is these rather than his attempts at interpretation—that give his book its unusual value. How does a Stalinist functionary rationalize his disagreements and reservations? How are isolated criticisms prevented from connecting and giving an understanding of the system as a whole? These are important points for those who would save for Marxism the best elements in the Communist Parties. Leonhard tells us of his first impressions on reaching the Soviet Union in 1935—the intense, spontaneous interest of young people in politics, their eagerness to study and their wish to understand. He mentions his surprised discovery, within a few months, of the ‘blotted-out paragraphs’ in books and journals—even in the publications of foreign Communist Parties. He tells of his mother’s sudden disappearance in October 1936, of the dissolution without explanation of the Society of Old Bolsheviks, of the growing tempo of the purges, of the arrests of several of his teachers and even of some of his teen-age schoolmates, of the atmosphere of terror. He describes the attempts of the young people, with- out books or documents, to assess the social causes of the crisis. to look beyond the official explanations, to see the elimination of the Leninist Old Guard in some kind of his- torical perspective. He mentions the secret discussions about Jacobinism and 1793. He tells of the effect upon him of first reading, at this time, John Reed’s ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’. One of the most revealing parts of the book is the account of the intensive indoctrination Leonhard received at the

[p035] LABOUR REVIEW Comintern School during 1942 and 1943. If any reader of Labour Review doubts the consciously counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the way it miseducates the youth, he should make a particular study of these passages. In this section Leonhard also describes how he surreptitiously read a copy of the American Trotskyist journal The Militant, discovered while sorting out some Comintern archives. He states he ‘could not have been more startled if [he] had found a packet of dynamite’ but that he read on, despite the guard outside the door, ‘for the Trotskyists wrote in our own lang- uage using our own terminology and were dealing with things about which I had already had doubts of my own’. Vv A remarkable close-up of Stalinism in action is provided by his account of what happened following the entry of the Red Army into Berlin. Anti-fascist committees had arisen more or less spontaneously in many areas, committees of overwhelmingly proletarian composition and often inspired by former rank-and-file members of the German Communist Party. They were all bureaucratically dissolved. However vigorous or healthy the initiative from below, the appoint- ment of the local administration had to proceed according to the prescriptions of the apparatchiks. In many cases, speci- fic instructions were issued to appoint bourgeois officials. Leonhard describes a search for this sort of political animal. among the ruins and chaos of East Berlin. He gives a well- documented account of the conflict between the old class- conscious communist cadres and the generation of Moscow- trained ‘professionals’. The manoeuvres behind the formation of the Socialist Unity Party are exposed. Several years later . Leonhard came to see that all this was no constellation of misguided policies but that ‘it was impossible for Stalinism to permit the creation by independent initiative from below of anti-fascist, socialist or communist movements or organiza- tions, because there was the constant danger that such organ- izataions would escape its control and try to resist directives issued from above’. Yet for all its interest one is left, on finishing the book, with a sense of something missing. Here is a volume of 430 pages devoted to the day-to-day life of the greatest ‘communist’ party in the world. And yet at no place in the narrative does one even sense the existence of the Russian working class. There is only an enormous network of functionaries. From time to time, it is true, there are hints of shadows in the background, barefoot children in the streets of Leningrad in 1935, helpless deportees in Karaganda, an angry peasant woman near Ufa complaining of the people’s hunger and contrasting it with the life of students and officials of the Comintern school. But these are isolated occurrences, intru- sions from another world into the sequence of discussion, doctrine, dogma and double-talk which seem to make up the intellectual life of the party official. That Leonhard defected is not surprising. He had brains and they must finally have rushed to his head. Unlike his predecessors Petrov and Kravchenko he did not desert to the flesh-pots of the West. But neither, unfortunately, did he quench his thirst at the source, and follow the example of Ignace Reiss. It is doubtful if he has grasped as yet the full meaning of the workers’ struggle. GRACCHUS