Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution

[p013] Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution The sensation created by Doctor Zhivago has died down, and Boris Pasternak himself died in May 1960. But interest in the case, and controversy over the book, continues— particularly on the cold-war cultural front. Laudatory evaluations, accompanied by the usual political overtones, have been legion in the West. Stalinist criticism has, at best, been mealy-mouthed, as could but be expected under the Khrushchev ‘enlightenment’. Isaac Deutscher’s review of Doctor Zhivago stands out in this welter of literary output for its Marxist clarity, for the historical perspective it establishes, and for its scrupulous objectivity. Although it first appeared in English in Spring 1959 (in the American Partisan Review) it is therefore well worth reproducing for British readers who have had no acquaintance with this point of view. For the distortion of the Pasternak issue has served political ends here as well as in the USA. (It is reprinted here by permission of the author) ISAAC DEUTSCHER THE most striking characteristic of Boris Pasternak’s date’ in two brief and hurried postscripts, ‘Con- Doctor Zhivago is its archaism, the archaism of the clusion’ and ‘ Epilogue’, the first covering thinly the idea and of the artistic style alike. The book has years from 1922 to 1929, till Zhivago’s death, and the been received, in the West, as part of the recent second jumping straight into the 1950s. The post- —ee— Russian revulsion against Stalinism and as its most consummate literary expression. Yet, Doctor Zhivago is nothing less than that—it is utterly unrelated to the Russia of the 1950s and to the experiences, troubles, and heart-searchings of the present Soviet generation. It is a parable about a vanished generation. Pasternak, now approaching his seventieth year—his formative period fell in the last decade before the October revolution—might have written this book in 1921 or 1922. It is as if his mind had stopped at that time, after the traumatic shock of the revolution; and as if nearly all that his country has since gone through had remained a blank. His sensitivity has remained unaffected, almost untouched, by the great and grim, yet not unhopeful drama of Russia’s last three decades. The actual story of Doctor Zhivago _ ends in 1922. Pasternak brings it artificially ‘up to scripts have almost none of the better qualities of the work but show all its weaknesses and incongruities absurdly magnified. ° Much of the climate and the local colour of Doctor Zhivago and many of its ideas can indeed be found in the poems and prose of Andrey Belyi, Zinaida Gippius, Evgenii Zamyatin, Marietta Shaginian, and other writers of the 1920’s, who were once pole- mically described as ‘ internal émigrés ’. ‘They were so called because they lived, worked (and published their works) under the Soviet regime, but in some measure shared the ideas and moods of the actual anti-Bolshevik émigrés. Some, like Gippius and Zamyatin, eventually went abroad and_ there voiced their opposition to the revolution without inhibition. Others adjusted themselves, assumed the postures of ‘fellow-travellers’, and eventually became

[p014] 12 \ Stalin’s court poets—Shaginian, for instance, was a Stalin Prize Winner. It is with the voice of that original, authentic ‘internal émigré’ that Pasternak has now spoken, equally unshaken in his hostility towards Bolshevism and his deep, physical and poetic, attachment to Russia. It is as if, in the course of nearly four decades, he had managed to preserve this his identity intact. His perception, his emotions, and his imagination have remained as if = Doctor Zhivago is a political novel par excellence; and so its appraisal must start with the analysis of its political message. The author puts the message into the mouth of his chief character, who is largely his own projection, and into the mouths of the other figures who all talk at great length about their attitude towards the revolution. They dwell on the revolution’s failure, on its inability to solve any problems, on the violence it has done to the human personality, and on the disillusionment it has brought in its wake. The plot is designed to bear out this critique. Nearly all the characters are driven to misery, despair and death; and love and humanity are defeated and destroyed by the ‘politics of revolution’. In the background there is Russia, shown as sense- lessly convulsed and tormented to no purpose, unless in mystical expiation of sin. Christianity remains the hope and refuge, a Christianity which need not be clearly defined but is recognizable in its humanitarian outlook, its humility, its acceptance of history, and its refusal to try and remake man’s earthly destiny. It is from this quasi-fatalistic Christianity that finally springs Pasternak’s ethereal note of reconciliation even with the revolution, the unexpectedly optimistic note on which the novel ends. It may be, the author suggests, that the great expiation has been accomplished and the deluge is over: its few survivors can already sense a * presage of freedom in the air’ and a ‘silent music of happiness’; and they ‘feel a peaceful joy for this holy city’ of Moscow. _A message of this kind is a matter of faith and hardly lends itself to rational discussion. Nor is it likely to be fruitful artistically. With nothing but these beliefs and convictions, Pasternak’s characters are from the beginning outsiders to the revolution, lacking all point of contact with it, and psychologic- ally static. The author evidently feels this and seeks to animate them, to take them ‘inside’ the revolution, and invest them with something like dilemmas. He presents Doctor Zhivago as almost a revolutionary at first, or, at any rate, a man sympathetic to the revolution, who suffers disillusionment and disinte- LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1961 closed to the many deep changes that have trans- formed his country beyond recognition and to some of the storms that have raged over it in the meantime. This testifies to the organic strength of his character but also to an extraordinary rigidity and limitation of his sensitivity. Doctor Zhivago is indeed an act of resurrection. But risen from the dead, Pasternak speaks the language of the dead, not of the living. grates in despair. In the same way he tries to complicate other characters like Strelnikov, the Red commander, and Lara, Strelnikov’s wife and Zhivago’s mistress. In every case, however, he fails. He tried to square a circle. From Christian rejection of the October revolution it might be possible for a Russian writer to produce perhaps a new version of Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, but not a true, coherent, and con- vincing image of the revolution and of the human beings who have made it or experienced it. How does Pasternak arrive at the rejection? Is his (and Zhivago’s) profession of sympathy with the origins of the revolution mere pretence? Certainly not. He is the victim of a genuine and in a sense tragic confusion. He himself reveals this when he describes Zhivago’s, that is his own, state of mind shortly before October, 1917: ‘Here too were his loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it, the revolution in the sense in which it was accepted © by the middle classes and in which it had been undér- stood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905.’ The revolution accepted by the middle classes in 1905, it should be recalled, had as its ideals either a Tsardom reformed into a constitutional monarchy or, as an extreme, a Liberal-Radical bourgeois republic. That abortive bourgeois revolution was implicitly opposed to the proletarian revolution of 1917. Pasternak-Zhivago is unaware that his ‘admiration and loyalty’ to the former must necessarily bring him in conflict with the latter. The confusion goes even deeper: the Zhivago of 1917 is as if unaware that even this his ‘loyalty to the ideas of 1905’ is by now only a fading memory. ~ ‘This familiar circle’, Pasternak goes on, ‘also contained the foretaste of new things. In it were those omens and promises which before the war, between 1912 and 1914, had appeared in Russian thought, art, and life, in the destiny of Russia as a. whole and in his own, Zhivago’s.’ The allusive reminiscence would convey to a Russian, if he could read it, far more than it can possibly convey to a Western reader. ‘Between 1912 and 1914’ Russia’s

[p015] PASTERNAK AND THE REVOLUTION middle classes, the bourgeoisie, had definitely turned their backs on their own radicalism of 1905, had taken their distance from the revolutionary under- ground movement, and were seeking salvation exclusively in a liberalized Tsardom. The mildly socialistic and radical intelligentsia, encouraged by a slight softening of the autocracy, spoke of the ‘liquidation of the illusions and methods of 1905’; and the Bolsheviks were already virtually alone in upholding the tradition of revolutionary action— outside their ranks only Plekhanov and Trotsky, and their very few followers, did the same. This then is the climate of opinion which Pasternak-Zhivago recalls in 1917, reflecting that ‘it would be good to go back to that climate once the war was over, to see its renewal and continuation, just as it was good to be going home’. Thus, even at this stage, on the eve of the October insurrection and well before his disillusionment had begun, Zhivago’s ‘loyalty and admiration for the revolution’ is nothing but a transfigured and glorified nostalgia for pre-revolu- tionary Russia. Latent and unconscious at the beginning, this “nostalgia comes into its own and bursts to the surface later. ‘I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century ’, says Lara to Zhivago. ‘It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right mm ‘Comme La Guerre et La Paix, le Docteur Jivago’, writes Francois Mauriac, ‘ne restitue pas seulement des destinées particuliéres, mais V histoire politique qui nait d’elles et qui, a son tour, les infléchit et leur donne une signification.’ Mauriac naturally finds himself in the warmest sympathy with Pasternak’s Christianity. But has he also based his opinion on a consideration of Doctor Zhivago’s merits as a novel? Even though Pasternak himself, through various imitative details of composition and style, evokes War and Peace, it is difficult to see how any novelist can make the comparison seriously. Tolstoy’s huge canvas is alive and crowded with a magnificently full blooded, richly individualized yet organically integrated, social milieu. In Doctor Zhivago a mere fragment of a milieu comes only partly alive, and this only in the opening chapters—the milieu of the pre- revolutionary intelligentsia, Platonically faithful to “the ideas of 1905’ but well adjusted in fact to the ancien régime and leading a smug existence on the fringes of the upper and middle bourgeoisie and of the Tsarist bureaucracy. After: 1917 this milieu disintegrates and disperses, as it was bound to do; and natural to do what your conscience told you. ... she adds (as if Russia had not lived in serfdom for most of that golden age, ‘the last century’, and in semi-serfdom for the rest of it!). ‘And then there was the jump from this calm, innocent, measured way of living to blood and tears, to mass insanity. ... You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration, how everything began to break down all at once—trains and food supplies in towns, and the foundations of home life and conscious moral standards.’ ‘Go on’, Zhivago interjects. ‘I know what you will say next. What good sense you make of it all! It’s a joy to listen to you.’ Pasternak’s recital of the broken pledges of October is thus based on a false premise: The October revolution had never promised to satisfy his nostalgia and to ‘ go back to the climate ’ of 1912-14, let alone to that of the nineteenth century. He rests his case on the fact that the October revolution was not a bourgeois revolution or rather that it did not content itself with a mildly reformed version of the ancien régime. Of all the charges that have ever been levelled against Bolshevism, this is surely the most archaic one. When it was voiced around 1921 it was still the echo of a fresh controversy. In 1958 it comes to us like a voice from the grave. land—as nothing takes its place—its membra disjecta, as individuals, are whirled furiously into a social vacuum, from which they hark back to their lost felicity. No histoire politique emerges there- fore from their private destinies, certainly not any histoire politique of the Bolshevik epoch. Tolstoy takes the characters of War and Peace straight into the centre of the great events of their time. He throws them right into the stream of history, which carries them until they are over- whelmed or come on top. Pasternak places his characters in the backwoods and backwaters. They do not participate in any single important event; nor do they even witness any such event. Yet, what would War and Peace have been without Austerlitz and Borodino, without the fire of Moscow, without the Tsar’s Court and Kutuzov’s headquarters, and without the retreat of the Grande Armée, all reproducd by Tolstoy’s epic genius? What signifi- cance would have had the destinées particuliéres of Pierre Bezukhov and André Bolkonsky without their deep and active involvement in these events? The drama of 1917-21 was at least as great as that of 1812; and it is far more momentous in its conse: 13 js

[p016] 14 quences. Yet Pasternak never manages to give us a single glimpse of its main theme, of its central occurrences, and-of its significant actors. It is not only that he lacks the gift of epic narration and has no eye for the historic scene. He runs away from history, just as all the time his chief characters flee from the scourge of revolution. We barely hear in Doctor Zhivago a grotesquely remote echo of the stormy prelude of 1905. Then, during the World War until September 1917, Zhivago serves as an army doctor in a God-forsaken Carpathian village and a Galician townlet on the Hungarian frontier, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the centres of the revolutionary upheaval. He returns to Moscow almost on the eve of the October insurrection and stays there during the insurrection. What he sees, experiences, and has to say about it consists of a few flat and meaningless sentences which do not add up to half a page. Throughout the rising, which in Moscow lasted much longer and was much bloodier than in Petrograd, he stays in his rooms. His child has a cold, his friends come, talk about the fighting outside, get stuck at the Zhivagos’ for three days, after which they go home at last. ‘ Yuri had been glad of their presence during Sasha’s illness and Tonya forgave them for adding to the general disorder. But they had felt obliged to repay the kindness of their hosts by entertaining them with ceaseless chatter; Yuri felt exhausted by it and was glad to see then go.’ This is all we hear or learn of the upheaval: not a single person appears that - - participates in it. On the next page we are told abruptly that Zhivago was ‘shaken and over- whelmed by the greatness of the moment and the - thought of its significance for centuries to come’. We must believe the author upon his word; we have seen no one ‘shaken and overwhelmed’. Zhivago did not even look at the event, so full of “significance for centuries to come’ through the window of his flat or even through the chinks of his shutters. The revolution had only added to the *‘ general disorder ’ in his household and exposed him to the ‘ceaseless chatter’ of his friends. What curious lack of artistic sense the author shows here, and what intellectual infantilism! There follow a few thin and incoherent pages in which we are shown how the revolution adds further to the ‘general disorder’ in the household. Then, Moscow succumbs to starvation, epidemics, cold; Zhivago himself falls ill with typhus and recovers. By now the author and his hero have began to brood over the breakdown of civilized life and the calamitous deterioration of human nature. ‘In the meantime the Zhivagos were tried to the limits of endurance. They had nothing and they were starving. Yuri went to see the party member he had once LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1964 saved, the one who had been the victim of a robbery. This man helped him as far as he could, but the civil war was beginning and he was hardly. ever in Moscow; besides he regarded the privations people were suffering in those days as only natural, and himself went hungry, though he concealed it.’ And so the Zhivagos pack up and leave for the Urals, hoping to recoup there and to enjoy some quiet well-being on what used to be their family estate. Thus we have left behind the famished, tense, and — severe Moscow of the early months of civil war, ° without getting even as much as a hint of the issues agitating it: war and peace, Brest Litovsk, the German threat to Petrograd, the move of Lenin’s government from Petrograd to Moscow, the attempts of the counter-revolution to rally, the hopes for the spread of revolution in Europe, the uprising of the Left Social Revolutionaries, the final dis- solution of the old army, the emergence of the new one, not to speak of the distribution of land among the peasants, workers’ control over industry, the beginnings of socialization, the attempt on Lenin’s life, the first outbreaks of the Red terror, etc., all occurring during the months of Zhivago’s stay in Moscow. We get no inkling of the severe pathos of these months, of the mass enthusiasms and the soaring hopes, without which the shocks to the hopes remain meaningless. We are hardly able to guess that Moscow is already being cut off by.the Whites from food and fuel bases in the south: and so famine and chaos appear as the results of an apocalyptic breakdown of moral standards. By coincidence I have read simultaneously with Doctor Zhivago the manuscript of memoirs written by an old worker who, himself an anarchist, took part in the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow. Without literary pretensions, very plainly, he describes the same period with which Pasternak deals; and he too is now bitterly disillusioned with the outcome of the revolution. But what a difference between the two pictures of the same city (even the same streets!) seen at the same time. Both writers describe the famine and the sufferings. But the old anarchist draws also unforgettable scenes of streets which, as far as he could see from a crossroads, were filled with Red workers, hastily arming themselves, and even with war cripples begging for arms; and then— the same streets changed into a battlefield; and he brings alive the inspired and tense heroism of Moscow’s working class, an atmosphere of which - Pasternak conveys not even a whiff. Again, it is aS if Tolstoy had brought Pierre Bezukhov to burning Moscow only to let him bemoan the hunger and the ruins, without letting him (and us) feel how the great and tragic conflagration illumines Russia’s past and’ present. To Tolstoy the fire of Moscow and the

[p017] PASTERNAK AND THE REVOLUTION 15 - cruel deeds and sufferings of 1812 are no mere atrocities—if they had been, Tolstoy would not be himself, and War and Peace would not be what it is. To Pasternak the revolution is primarily an atrocity. Zhivago’s resentment swells in him during his long and weary journey to the Urals. He travels in an overcrowded goods train, packed with human misery. Here are some of Pasternak’s best descrip- tive pages. The scenes and episodes are true to life —the literature of the 1920’s is full of similar descriptions. Zhivago’s chief preoccupation is still with his and his family’s well-being, although he tries to ‘ defend the revolution’ in a brief and rather lifeless dialogue with a deported anti-Bolshevik politician. He is finally overcome by disgust with the new regime, and with his time at large, in the Urals, when his expectation of satiety and quietude on the old family estate is disappointed, when he is torn between loyalty to his wife and love for Lara; and when eventually the Red partisans trap him on a highway, abduct him to their forest camp, and force him to serve them as doctor. The picture of the Forest Brotherhood is force- fully drawn. There is in it a sense of space, Siberian space, of the cruelty and mercy of nature and man, and of the primordial savagery of the fight. Still, we touch here only a remote periphery of the civil war, a forlorn and icy corner of Mother Russia. (Pasternak himself spent those years in the Urals, though not in any Forest Brotherhood.) The types or rather situations he depicts here are con- vincing, and at times (for instance the doings of the witch in the Forest Brotherhood) even fascinating; but they are only marginal. They represent the anarchic fringe of the Red Army which by now fights its battles against Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel—elsewhere, mostly far to the West, in -European Russia. There the human element, the problems, and the situations were different from those encountered in this Forest Brotherhood, although the civil war was savage and cruel every- where. The Forest Brotherhood, at any rate, forms, even in fiction, too slender a basis for any histoire politique of this period. It is there, in the partisans’ camp, that Zhivago’s final ‘ break’ with the revolution occurs. Abducted from the highway, he explodes in anger over the violation of his rights as an individual, the insult to his human dignity, and the breakdown of all moral standards. After eighteen months in captivity, during which at moments he feels almost closer to ‘the Whites than to the Reds, he manages to escape. If this were all, one could say that the story has its psychological and artistic logic and that the author has ‘taken it from life’. But Pasternak does not content himself with this, Not relying on objective narrative and portrayal, he incessantly idealizes his hero, his own projection, and leaves us in no doubt that he shares Zhivago’s thoughts and emotions and all his indignation. (Nearly all his characters do the same, because the author does not manage to set up any real contrast or counter-balance to Zhivago!) Politically and artistically Pasternak thus involves himself in a self-revealing inconsistency. Zhivago, we know, had, as doctor, spent several years in the Tsarist army; and all those years he behaved extremely meekly, never making any fuss over his sacred rights as individual and his offended dignity. Implicitly, he thus acknowledges the right of the ancien rég’me to press him into service—he denies that right only to the Red partisans. Yet they do exactly what the old army had done: they make the doctor look after the wounded. Unlike the Tsarist army, they had not sent him call-up papers by mail but had kidnapped him—they had not yet had the time to build up a military machine which would mobilize doctors and others in a ‘ civilized’ manner. Surely from the angle of Pasternak- Zhivago’s morality this should have been an irrele- vant detail: at any rate, it should not have made so great a moral difference to the idealistic and humanitarian doctor whose wounded soldiers he cured, those of the Tsar, of the Whites or the Reds. Why then does he only now feel so deeply insulted in his human dignity? The juxtaposition of these two situations in Zhivago’s life is significant in other respects as well. Near the Carpathian front, that cemetery of the Tsarist army, Zhivago had seen blood, suffering, death, and countless atrocities. Pasternak sparingly describes a few of these but he does not dwell on that side of Zhivago’s early experience. He pre- sents as an almost uninterrupted atrocity only that part of the story which begins with the revolution. Nostalgia for the ancien régime here too colours his entire vision, determines for him his horizon, and dictates even the composition of the novel. Unintentionally, Pasternak portrays his hero, the sensitive poet and moralist, as the epitome of callousness and egotism—unintentionally, because otherwise he could hardly have so_ insistently identified himself with Zhivago and lavished on him all the lachrymose love with which the novel overflows. The egotism is physical as well as intellectual, Zhivago is the descendant not of Pierre Bezukhov but of Oblomov, Goncharov’s character who, though not worthless, had spent all his life in bed, as symbol of the indolence and immobility of old Russia. Here is Oblomov in revolt against the inhumanity of a revolution that has dragged him out of bed. Goncharov, however, conceived Oblomov as a grand satirical figure; Pasternak makes of him a martyr and the object of an apatheosis, — in a er

[p018] 16 Willy-nilly one thinks of a fierce and ruthless, yet historically just passage in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, written in 1923, which appears to anticipate Zhivago. In truth, however, Trotsky did not anticipate him; he merely summed up a certain type that belonged to that time: “When a certain Constitutional Democratic aesthete, having made a long journey in a stove- heated goods wagon, tells you, muttering between his teeth, how he, a most refined European, with a set of superb false teeth, the best in the world, and with a minute knowledge of Egyptian ballet techniques, was reduced by this boorish revolution to travelling with despicable lice-ridden bagmen,! then you feel rising up in your throat a physical nausea with his dentures, ballet techniques, and generally with all his “culture” pilfered from Europe’s 1 Meshochniki, those who travelled with their bags in search of food or trading food. IV With the archaism of the idea goes the archaism of the artistic style. Doctor Zhivago is extremely old-fashioned by any standards of the contemporary novel; and the standards by which, being what it is, it has to be judged are those of the old-fashioned tealistic novel. The texture of its prose is pre- Proust, nay, pre-Maupassant. It has nothing in it of the experimental modernity of Pilniak, Babel and other Russian writers of the 1920’s. Obsolescence of Style is not a fault in itself. The point is that Pasternak chooses deliberately his mode of expres- sion which is the mode proper to the laudator temporis acti. In his diary Pasternak-Zhivago thus expresses his artistic programme: ‘ Progress in science follows the laws of repulsion—every step forward is made by reaction against the delusions and false theories - prevailing at the time. . . .Forward steps in art are made by attraction, through the artist’s admiration and desire to follow the example of the predecessors he admires most.’ Nothing is further from the truth. In art as well as in science progress is achieved by a combination of ‘repulsion’ and ‘ attraction’ and the tension between these two forces. Every step forward, as Hegel knew, is a continuation of tradition and at the same time a reaction against tradition. The innovator transcends the heritage of the past by rejecting some of its elements and developing others. However, Zhivago’s reflections have some relevance to Pasternak’s literary conser- vatism. LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1961 market stalls; and the conviction grows upon you ~~ that the very last louse of the most uncouth of our bagmen is more important in the mechanics of history and more, so to speak, necessary than this thoroughly “cultured” and in every respect sterile egotist.’ We recognize at once the ‘ Constitutional Demo- cratic aesthete ’—it was to him that the ‘ omens and promises of 1912-14’ had been the most congenial —and we have some idea even of his long journey. in a goods wagon, with despicable lice-ridden bagmen. ‘True, his specialty now is not Egyptian ballet techniques but the Old Slavonic Prayer Book; and his culture comes from native stores as well as from Europe’s market stalls. Perhaps so many years after the revolution our throats at his sight are less susceptible than Trotsky’s was to violent physical nausea. All the same we cannot help identify the same sterile egotist in Zhivago the moralist and humanitarian. ‘This is Pasternak’s first novel, written at the age of about 65, after he had been a poet all his life. His_ main formative influences had been the Russian Symbolist school, which flourished early in the century, then for a short time the pre-revolutionary Futurism, and finally, the ‘Formalism’ of the early 1920’s. These schools enriched the idiom and refined the techniques of Russian poetry, but often they also weakened its élan and narrowed its imaginative range. Within the Symbolist and the Formalist traditions Pasternak has achieved almost perfection. His virtuosity of form has made of him Russia’s most eminent translator of Shakespeare and Goethe. As - far as I can judge from his poems, of which some - are not easily accessible and others have remained unpublished, virtuosity rather than vigorous, inven- tive, and creative mastery distinguishes Pasternak. Yet as a poet too he is curiously antiquated com- pared with Mayakovsky and Yessenin, his contem- poraries. What prompted him to write his first novel at so advanced an age was the feeling that his poetry, or poetry at large, could not express adequately the experience of his generation. There is a touch of greatness in this admission and in the poet’s effort to transcend his limitations. However, for any writer whose gifts had, for nearly half a century, been attuned exclusively to lyrical poetry, it would, in any case, have. been risky to try his hand at a realistic and political novel. Pasternak’s poetic tradition has proved an insuperable obstacle to his literary metamorphosis. He has not been able to

[p019] Big Leap The Chinese-Communes, by Richard Hughes. The Bodley Head, 10s. 6d. The significance of the ‘ People’s Communes’ in China cannot be ignored by Marxists; the bourgeoisie, both imperialist and colonial, is paying them a lot of attention, though for different reasons. This compact book purports to give neither an all ‘black’ or all ‘ white’ picture of the Communes. The book is written in the style of a professional journalist (which its author is) rather than the method of a political economist. But the information con- tained in the book’s 90 pages is very useful. It includes, as an appendix, a translation, from the Peking Ta Kung Pao, of an article written in 1959 that analyses in detail a specific Commune in Honan Province. Hughes sees the Communes as the major point of contention between Moscow and Peking, because China is claiming the leadership of the Asian countries by its ‘ down-to-earth-and- blood appeal of the agrarian revolu- tion’. The Communes, he asserts, are ‘designed to meet the conditions - and problems of a nation which has a gross excess of population and a gross shortage of capital’. The Communes are a product of the extreme unevenness and_back- wardness of the economy inherited from the past. The economic blockade by US imperialism imposes upon the economy severe strains and a certain lopsidedness. The demands of the 5-year plans for capital industry (55.8 per cent of investments in 1955; only 7.6 per cent for agricul- ture, forestry and water conservancy !) meant the peasantry had to be satis- fied with only a relative increase in living standards. The inflation crisis of 1956 led to big investment cuts and the ‘rectification’ campaign of 1957. The peasantry was showing signs of restlessness (co-operatives declining, etc.). At first, concessions were made in favour of more individual ownership; but the regime took off into the ‘ big leap forward’ in industry. The first experiments in Honan of merging the co-operatives into larger units, in mid-1958, showed the regime the benefits of this type of organization. The Communes are widely different in. nature all over China. The ‘initiative came from the top; whether the peasants welcomed it or not is another matter. All agricultural co- operatives were merged into Com- munes. The work force was divided into production brigades, and sub- divided into production teams. All children were cared for in communal kindergartens; all food was cooked and served in communal dining -rooms; all available labour and energy was utilized — nothing — was wasted. No sooner had the Communes begun than at the Wuchang Central Committee meeting, in December 1958, the pace was slackened, after a factional fight in the leadership, on which Hughes provides some interest- ing theories as to who was on what side. In the early stages, peasants were paid money wages and given ‘free’ services, with the balance in favour of the ‘free’ services, (food, shelter, welfare, etc.). Later, though, it was found better to pay more money wages than to give ‘free’ services. Hughes makes some comments upon the alleged drive of the party to destroy the family in a manner which - reliable ’ 17 Book Reviews is surprising for one who has spent so much time in China. The patri- archal family was the foundation of dynastic absolutism and more recently the reservoir of reaction. The destruction of this type of social organization is absolutely necessary and justified. The liberation of women, literacy, etc., could not take place otherwise. Press tales of women deprived of their children and separated from their husbands are reactionary fantasies, and hypo- critical to the core. Only a dozen years ago, the ‘defenders’ of family life ideologically supported a system of child slavery, concubinage, prosti- tution and the degradation of women. Another important aspect of the Communes is the militia, which now totals 250 million men and women in the 26,000 Communes. While this entire fantastic number of people is trained in the use of weapons, Hughes points out that only the ‘ politically have actual weapons — in Hopei a Commune with 10,000 in the militia has only 2,000 equipped with rifles. ; But two things will remain even if the Communes are dissolved (which does not seem likely in the near future). The mass literacy and emancipation of women and youth (this will. tend to raise the political consciousness of the masses) and the mass military training of millions of peasants. There are undoubtedly divergent views in the party leadership on the Communes policy. The Chinese press for the past 12 months has been attacking ‘ bourgeois-rightists’ in the Communes and the party. Mao Tse-tung himself has stepped down from the chairmanship and Liu Shao-chi has taken over. Peng Teh-huai was replaced as Defence

[p020] 18 minister by Lin Piao, the veteran of the Long March, the conquest of Manchuria in 1945-46 and the Korean war. Lin Piao, himself supreme com- ~mander of the People’s Liberation Army, has had a new post created over him, which is occupied by the head of the security police! The differences really reflect the big problem of the revolution. Mao and company, under the banner of ‘uninterrupted revolution’, proclaim the Communes as China’s road to communism, or socialism in one country—China. For them the Com- munes are here for all time. . The others, the ‘rightists’, who appear to be a very widespread grouping, see the Communes as a temporary expedient to increase pro- duction in the countryside and raise the living standards of the peasants. They are fearful that if the ‘ emula- tion” is pushed too hard then the peasants will resist. ’ Marxists approach the Communes from the standpoint of our attitude to the political line of the Chinese leaders. The fantastic strivings of the peasantry are wasted as long as the Mao regime has a Stalinist foreign policy and not an _ internationalist one. The peasantry will give up its today, said Trotsky, for the tomorrow only up to a-point. The fate of the Chinese revolution does not lie in the State Statistical Bureau but in the world struggle against imperialism. To raise living standards is necessary, so as to strengthen the worker- peasant alliance, until the workers in the metropolitan countries (Japan, Britain, America, etc.) make successful revolutions that can bring material assistance to the Chinese masses. Meanwhile the Chinese Republic must pursue a foreign policy of assistance to colonial workers and others striving against imperialism. In this respect the Chinese Stalinists are a barrier to the ‘uninterrupted revolution ’. G.K. Those Generals