'UNOFFICIAL RUSSIA, THE DISSENTERS AND THE WEST', KAREL VAN HET REVE, AND 'FROM MAO AND MARCUSE TO MARX', KLAUS MEHNERT, ENCOUNTER, FEBRUARY 1974

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100780001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: November 17, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 7, 2000
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 1, 1974
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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INISHGILL story)
3
Mary Sullivan
UNOFFICIAL RUSSIA
12
Karel van het Reve
MAN ASHAMED
23
Erich Heller
COLUMN
31
R
MEN Et IDEAS
ANDREY SINYAVSKY
34
Henry Gifford
POETRY
Jenny Joseph ii, D. J. Enright 19, Philip Larkin 20,
R(y Fuller 22, Frank Ormsby 30, Charles Causley 38, Alastair Reid 47,
Peter Porter 70, Laurence Lerner 87
NOTES Et TOPICS
FROM MAO & MARCUSE TO MARX
39
Klaus Mehnert
BEYOND THE FINZI-CONTINI GARDEN
42
M. van Creveld
BOOKS Et WRITERS
THERE'S A HOLE IN YOUR BECKETT
49
Allan Rodway
EVERY SENTENCE CARRIES A
GOVERNMENT WARNING
54
R. W. Burchfield
MAN OF GENIUS
57
,Jolin Bowle
WORLD ENOUGH, AND TIME
61
Clive Jordan
THE LONG AND THE SHORT AND THE ...
66
Douglas Dunn
EAST & WEST
WHERE CHINA BEGINS
71
David Afarkish
POINTS OF THE COMPASS
A GERMAN DILEMMA
76
Helmut Schelsky
AUTHORS ft CRITICS
POLITICAL POLLSTERS
88
Mark Abrams,
Humphrey Taylor,
R. H. S. Grossman
DOCUMENTS
Letter from New York (Sidney Hook) 44, True Answers or Easy Answers (C.A.R. Crosland) 94,
Thoughts on the Nobel Peace Prize (Hans Habe) 96
LETTERS 93
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Unnofficial Russia
The Dissenters & the West
FOR MANY LONG YEARS I almost con-
sidered myself to be the only Western
scholar who was interested in and believed in the
existence of an unofficial Russia. I read official
Soviet books, I met official Russians, I listened to
lectures given by official Russian scholars,
writers, politicians, historians-and all the time I
kept believing that behind this official Russia
there must exist an unofficial Russia. I even kept
believing for many years that the official intona-
tion of the Russian sentence, which I heard on
Moscow Radio and on meetings with official
Russians, could not be the real sentence intona-
tion of the Russian language, a language which,
I firmly believed, must exist somewhere. There
must be water in this desert, I believed: In the
desert a fountain is springing ....
Never for a moment did I believe that the
Soviet system had created a new kind of creature,
der Sowjetmensch, Soviet man, as he was some-
times called by Western scholars, a Soviet man
who liked being bullied and silenced, who adored
standing in line, marching in demonstrations,
taking part in elections with only one candidate,
and who did not mind withering away in con-
centration camps. Nor did I believe that it followed
from the existence of the regime that people with
any brains at all should believe that one of the
most important discoveries in the history of
mankind is the discovery that quantity changes
into quality, that consciousness is determined
by social conditions, and that an important
characteristic of matter is its materiality.
There must be people in Russia, I kept believing,
who react to the regime and to the statements of
the regime exactly in the way I react to them.
Whatever Klaus Mehnert and Alexander Werth
and all those other experts write, I thought, surely
normal human beings must live in that country.
What I especially disliked in the West was the
habit of our Sovietologists of taking the declara-
tions of the regime seriously, their belief that ones
could understand the Soviet Union by trying toil
understand what the regime was saying. Some';
analysts go even further and maintain that you;!
can understand the Soviet Union only if your
look at it from a Marxist point of view. Ifl
that were true, only a National-Socialist would)
be qualified to study Hitler's Germany, and one'i
would have to be consumptive to be able to make
a genuine study of tuberculosis. It is interesting
to note that this habit lasts only as long as suchi
a regime remains in power. Nowadays many)
scholars study the Germany of Hitler, but few)
of them think that a prior qualification is thej
mastery of the doctrine of National-Socialism.'i
Nevertheless, when Hitler was in power serious!
scholars studied Nazi ideology just as assiduously,
as they studied Soviet ideology-until recently. i
Before Pasternak, Daniel, Sinyavsky, Solzhenit-I
syn, Amalrik, Brodsky, Chukovskaya, and)
Nadezhda Mandelstam were known in the West,
students of Russian literature actually read the
verbatim reports of the Congresses of the Union)
of Soviet Writers. They seriously believed that by~
studying them one could learn what was goings
on in the Russian literary world. In Western
books about modern Russian culture, Mandel-
stam received as many lines as Sholokhov got'
pages. Why? Because scholars like Struve and)
Lettenbauer thought that since nothing was said)
by official Russia about Mandelstam and millions
of pages were filled with words by and about
Sholokhov, Sholokhov must surely be and
important writer.
Those were the times when the belief in that'I
existence of der Sowjetmensch was extremely
strong, and accordingly, the belief in the existence
of an unofficial Russia was dxtremely small.
When Andrey Sinyavsky's essay on socialis
realism was first published a well-known Soviet
ologist (the late Alexander Werth) was absolutely)
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convinced that this essay could not possibly be
the work of a Soviet citizen.
WHAT DO I MEAN by "unofficial Russia"? Let me
first explain what I do not mean. I do not mean
those utterances by Soviet citizens that are dif-
ferent from the official Soviet statements but are
nevertheless inspired by the regime. The people
who produce these statements constitute perhaps
the semi-official Russia. It is this vocal group that
Western journalists, writers, scholars, diplomats
and tourists meet most often. The more rigid a
regime is (and the more idiotic its official state-
ments are) the more deeply impressed a foreigner
is when he meets a citizen who does not behave
according to the official standards-a man who
can possibly be bribed, who is interested in old
issues of Playboy, who knows how to tell
amusing anecdotes about Brezhnev. It is a fami-
liar, bunch: the Soviet journalist who mingles
with Western journalists in Moscow or Washing-
ton, the Soviet composer one is apt to encounter
at an Embassy dinner. He wears dark glasses,
speaks French, and calls the Austrian Ambassador
by his first name-the Yevtushenko-type of
Russian traveller abroad.
These unofficial representatives of the regime
go about their job in a discernible style. They
expediently drop a number of official theses.
They will not, in personal contact with a foreigner,
start a serious talk about the great wisdom of
the Leninist party, although this wisdom is
officially considered to be an essential factor in
the history of the USSR and indeed in world
history. Not only will they shrewdly scrap a whole
chunk of official dogma, they will also silently
accept a number of critical views about the
regime. And then they will disclose one or two
sentiments that are favourable to the regime and
unfavourable to its opponents. Such a semi-
official Russian will say, for instance, that
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is, of course, a great
writer, and that the government should have
permitted the publication of Cancer Ward, but
he, alas, suffers from a number of vices such as
megalomania and even anti-Semitism. It was, of
course, morally wrong to invade Czechoslovakia,
but weren't the military forces of Western
Germany (Franz-Josef Strauss!) on the verge of
invading Czechoslovakia? Andrey Sakharov, of
course, has every right to express his opinion,
but, entre nous, isn't what he says terribly naive?
It is wrong, of course, for the regime to persecute
samizdat, but-let's face it-most of it is just
graphomania and of precious little literary
importance. The way the Jews are treated is
regrettable, but Western protests against that
treatment will only make "the situation worse"
(Western translation: "will be counter-produc-
tive") and besides, the Jews are the only people
in the Soviet Union who can and do emigrate.
The dissidents should shun all contact with
Western press, radio, and television, or Senator
Henry Jackson because those contacts "com-
promise" them irredeemably in the eyes of the
Soviet public. Western scholars and journalists
should not take seriously an hysterical old man
like General Grigorenko, or "shady characters"
like Andrey Amalrik ("probably a KGB agent").
I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not
consider the persons who make these remarks to
be ardent, convinced followers of the regime.
Most of them dislike it. I do not think that Yev-
geni Yevtushenko or Konstantin Simonov, or
even Alexei Surkov, are altogether enthusiastic
about censorship in their own country. In their
way these men detest the regime. They defend
the regime the way Nikolai Grech defended the
regime of Nicholas I against the indictment of
the Marquis de Custine: not because they like it,
but for quite other reasons.
EVERY BODY AG RE ES that much has changed
in the Soviet Union since Stalin died.
On the other hand, many things have not changed.
Present-day Russia-in its newspapers, ideology,
and institutions-differs amazingly little from the
Russia of 1935 or 1955. Is there any industrially
developed country in the world that has changed
so little in the last forty years? The festivities,
slogans, congresses, leading articles, prize-
winning novels, public heroes, official speeches
resemble those of 1935 or 1955 like peas in a pod.
I would be inclined to say, exaggerating only a
little, that the Soviet Union of today is the same
as the Soviet Union of twenty, thirty, forty years
ago-minus the terror and the hysteria. And there
is one other difference.
While the official Russia of today resembles
nothing so much as the official Russia of the
1930s and '50s, the unofficial Russia has changed
considerably. Whereas in the 1950s (or '40s or
'30s) everybody seems to have been a true
believer in Stalin, in Marxism-Leninism, in
Socialism, nowadays believers in the official
doctrine are exceedingly hard to find. There may
well be a sociological law to the effect that a
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dictatorship which is revolutionary, terroristic,
and anthropophagic stands a better chance of
finding enthusiasts than a dictatorship which is
merely a conservative police state. A regime that
kills millions in order to attain some state of
millennial bliss, a tausendjahriges Reich, gains
more sympathy, at home and abroad, than a
regime that persecutes only persons that really
oppose it, and only then to preserve a status quo.
More Western intellectuals were (or are) enthu-
siastic about Hitler or Stalin or Mao than about
Brezhnev or, say, the Greek colonels. It suggests
an interesting question (and I do not know the
answer): How long can a revolutionary, terroris-
tic regime go on existing after it loses its revolu-
tionary fervour and its terroristic hysteria?
Perhaps for hundreds of years.
UT MY POINT Is the difference between the
unofficial Russia of 1935-55 and the un-
official Russia of today. In the '30s, '40s, '50s
there were very many true believers. Even the
apparat of the regime itself included not a few
enthusiasts and loyal defenders. Nowadays not
only the apparat, but also the country itself has
undergone a profound crisis of belief, a deep loss
of faith. A portion of these non-believers belong
now to the opposition, or the resistance, or the
"dissenters" as we call them in the West.
One thing must remain clear. Every single
member of the Soviet intelligentsia is in the pay
of the regime, and, accordingly, is employed by
the apparat through which the regime maintains
itself. Some intelligenty are quasi-members of the
apparat: diplomats, party organisers, party
orators, journalists, and the like. Others-like
teachers, economists, translators, scholars-serve
the regime to a more limited extent. Among all
those people the number of those who admire and
support the regime is relatively small-smaller,
I would dare to suggest, than the number of
people in the USA who admire and support
Richard Nixon.
But we should not forget that an American who
hates Nixon is a species of political animal quite
different from a Russian who hates Brezhnev.
What an American hating Nixon really feels-
compared to what many Soviet citizens feel
towards their leaders-is a certain dislike,
perhaps an obsessive irritation. One simply
cannot compare the two phenomena. Can one
even compare the feelings of many Soviet citizens
with what many of my Dutch countrymen felt
towards the Nazis in 1940-45? How many people
were killed by the Germans in Holland in those
years? 300,000? 500,000? An Estonian, a Latvian,
a Lithuanian, a Russian laughs at these figures.
Is hatred the right word? No, hatred is too
active a word; it has combative connotations of
revenge and punishment. But there is something
that remains after all the vindictive feelings of
rage have died down. It is a feeling, as I sense it,
much blacker and deeper than hatred.
D URING THE LAST five or ten years Western
"Sovietology" has developed a certain
interest in this unofficial Russia. More Mandel-
stam is read and discussed, and less Sholokhov.
People are beginning to realise that if you want
to know what is going on in the Soviet Union the
underground journal Politicheski dnevnik, printed
in the West in 1972, gives more information than
Kommunist or Bloknot agitatora.
Of course, the authors of dissident literature
do not represent unofficial Russia. Many people
in Russia, as elsewhere, remain utterly indif-
ferent towards all political issues. The official
statements and announcements of the regime do
not appear to touch them; other messages simply
do not reach them. Very few are spontaneously
interested in le bien publique. One should not
forget that most people (there, as elsewhere)
are only concerned about public affairs because
radio, television, and newspapers continuously
tell them that they are, or should be, concerned.
If we take the words "unofficial Russia" to
mean those Soviet citizens who do take some
interest in public affairs, then this unofficial
Russia can, like Gaul, be divided into three parts:
1. The opposition, the dissenters, the few
thousand people who actually oppose the
regime.
2. Their sympathisers, their constituents, their
reserves: the thousands who read samizdat and
sympathise with the opposition, the reservoir
from which the opposition replenishes its ranks;
3. Those people who are not in favour of the
regime, but are not in favour of the opposition
either.
This last group is an interesting group-and I
have met many of its representatives. In a democ-
racy this group is relatively small. If you are
against the Government, you usually have some
sympathy for the Opposition. The fact itself that
you are "against the Government" makes you in
a sense a member of this Opposition. In a dicta-
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torship this is quite different. The best way to
explain this difference is perhaps to compare the
situation in Russia with that in Holland during
the Occupation.
I SPENT FM YEARS in Amsterdam under the Ger-
man occupation, and I spent one year in Moscow
under Brezhnev. I was impressed by certain
similarities, even if there were, of course, great
differences. As a Dutchman, you were not sup-
posed to be in favour of the Nazi regime. As a
Soviet citizen, you are officially supposed to be
in favour of the regime. But what struck me
especially was the attitude of the people towards
the regime and towards the resistance movement;
and here I found some illuminating parallels.
During the Occupation the Germans did some
horrific things in my country. Very few Dutch-
men approved of those things, not more than
possibly some 8 % of the population. The rest of
the population of Holland was "anti-German"
or, as it was then called, "good." These
"good" people were in a rather difficult position.
They could either try and fight the Nazis one way
or another, thereby risking their lives, or confess
that they were.frightened of so doing. Now the
strange and interesting thing is that very few
people will admit to being afraid when moral
issues are at stake. It is easy to concede that one
would be afraid to make the trip to the moon, or
to go to the dentist, or to cross the Atlantic in an
open boat, or to take an evening walk in Central
Park. But it was very difficult to confess that one
was afraid to render assistance to the Dutch
Je ws who were all-adults and children, healthy
and sick, male and female-being killed at the
rate of a thousand a week.
There is, however, an escape hatch. The way
out consisted in saying (and thinking) that by
resisting the Germans one was not really helping
those Jews, that one was only making things
worse, that one was only provoking German
reprisals. Weren't many of those so-called resist-
ance people more or less mad or irresponsible?
Didn't everybody know somebody who was
using the Resistance only as an excuse not to
sleep at home? These are what I call the Murarka-
Brien arguments, a dialectical ploy named after
the present correspondent of The Observer in
1 For Alan Brien it seemed important to warn, in
the Sunday Times, against "the false friends" (in the
West) of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. One would have
thought it more urgent to warn against "the true
enemies" of these two Russian resistance fighters.
Moscow and the traveller for the Sunday Times
in Russia. They summarised and advocated the
Russian variant of these arguments very aptly in
recent articles in The Statesman and The Times.
If what the Resistance does is "counter-
productive", then it is no longer disgraceful to
keep aloof from and even shun what the resist-
ance is doing. The "Murarka-Brien1 arguments"
are not even difficult to defend. Most of what any
Resistance movement does has only symbolic
or, if you will, metaphysical meaning. For every
Dutch Jew saved, I suspect that some ten Dutch
resistance people were executed; from the hard-
nosed practical view of statistics, their fight made
no sense at all.
On the one hand, the Resistance people are
admired because they express what everybody
feels. On the other hand, they are resented
because they do what everybody should do but is
afraid to do. The more a dissident remains
within the bounds of general loyalty, the more
he is admired. Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward seems
to be so much more satisfying as a novel written
for Novy Mir and then not accepted, than as
a book published abroad and accompanied by
harsh pronouncements by its author about the
lamentable state of Soviet cultural affairs. When
Andrey Sakharov's first Memorandum was pub-
lished without his knowledge or consent, it was
easy for the average Soviet economist or scientist
or historian or journalist to praise him. Sak-
harov said what they all were thinking, what they
almost put into their own memoranda, or tried
to speak about, or were asked not to speak about.
But as soon as Sakharov began to fight, as soon
as he began to oppose the regime actively,
these same intellectuals had to choose between
joining him or finding reasons why they should
not join him. And that meant finding reasons why
Sakharov was wrong in doing what he did and
saying what he said.
H OW DOES this unofficial Russia look at
the West? In general one can say: with con-
siderable sympathy. Four items of Western life
are very popular in the Soviet Union: that a citi-
zen of a Western capitalist country can freely
travel abroad; that such a citizen can, if he has the
money, buy anything he wants anywhere and
almost at any time (whereas in the Soviet Union
there is hardly any place where one can buy
something, and hardly anything one wants can
be bought). Then there is the fact that in many
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countries in the capitalist West you can say and
write what you want, and you can choose your
own government by helping to vote one or the
other political party in or out.
But it is precisely here that the difficulties
begin. There is a difference in the appreciation of
these things between the unofficial Russian and
the liberal Westerner. (I speak here of the liberal
Westerner because the unofficial Russian feels
that if he ever receives any "help from the
West", that _ help must come from the liberals,
from the "effete snobs", and not from the
Nixons and Agnews whose sleep is as little
disturbed by the plight of the Soviet intellectual
as the sleep of Brezhnev and Kosygin is by the
plight of the American Negro or the Chilean
communist.)
Now this liberal Western intellectual is apt to
remark that people who have little money can
travel very little; that poor people can buy less
than rich people; that the West produces too
much; that our production is aimed at profit,
whereas it should be employed (as it is in the
Soviet Union) for the benefit of mankind; that to
say and write what you want is of little help if it
does not change society the way you want it to be
changed; and what use is choosing your own
government when the government the people
choose consists of crooks and tax-evaders?
To this the Russian would answer: "Your
troubles I'd like to have. . . . Of course the poor
can buy less than the rich, and I am poor. Still,
I would like to be able to buy for my little money
the same amount and the same quality of goods
your poor can buy for their money. I would even
settle for half...." What use, the Soviet citizen
would answer, is production for the benefit of
mankind-if mankind does not benefit from it?
If such goods as are produced never reach the
average consumer? The Soviet citizen also knows
what only a few Western intellectuals appear to
remember: that when there is some freedom of
the press certain misdemeanours cannot be
perpetrated (or not for long) that can be when
there is no such freedom. They also know that a
democratically chosen government, to be sure,
contains a fair percentage of nitwits and scound-
rels, but that percentage is much higher in a
dictatorship!
O R TAKE ANOTHER SUBJECT on which there
is a communication gap between unofficial
Russia and the liberal West: Western dictator-
ships.
Towards the present regime in Greece the
average Western intellectual feels aversion and
disgust. The Russian intellectual, reading and
hearing about this disgust, is apt to ask himself:
what are those people so steamed up about? To
the Russian intellectual the regime in Greece
(the last one or the new one) appears to be a
regime of almost unbelievable liberality, compar-
able to the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. A Greek
ex-cabinet minister attacked the Colonels in a
legally printed Athens newspaper-in the Soviet
Union even a minister in office is not supposed to
ventilate any opinion of his own, let alone criticise
anyone except when and if the regime instructs
him to do so. And even then he cannot use one
single word that the r?gime has not approved for
usage. Thousands of Greeks are working in the
Netherlands-how many thousands of Soviet
citizens would love to work in the Netherlands!
One can buy the Herald Tribune in Athens, and
the Penguin copies of George Orwell-who can
buy either in Moscow? When I want to needle an
audience of my students I always answer the
question about "the future of Russia" with the
expression of my hope that in 10 or 20 or 30 years
Russia will be as liberal a country-as Spain is
now. This hope is, I am convinced, shared by
perhaps millions of Soviet citizens, but in the
West only a handful of people know what I am
talking about.
Let me offer a few other examples. There are
a number of official Soviet statements about
Soviet society that are not believed either by the
Soviet intelligentsia or by Western intellectuals.
That the Soviet Union is the freest country in the
world, that there is no censorship, that the Soviet
people revere their leaders, that a Communist
society will be established by 1980, that the
peoples of the Soviet Union love each other with
brotherly love, that there is no anti-Semitism in
Russia, that Communism is Soviet power plus
electrification, that history has rarely known a
body of men of greater wisdom and goodwill
than the leadership of the CPSU, etc. etc. On
these points Western and Soviet intellectuals see
eye to eye.
But there are other and more divisive theses.
Many people in the West believe that the standard
of living and the standard of learning in present-
day Russia would be fundamentally lower than
they are if Lenin had not seized power in October
1917. Many people in the West believe that Soviet
foreign policy is to a considerable extent influ-
enced by Soviet fear of German "revanchism", or
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that Russians are more interested in serious
literature than Frenchmen or Germans, or that
the son of a Russian cleaning-woman has more
chance of a university education than the son of
an English char. I would not be surprised if most
readers of the above believed at least one of these
statements to be true. This also causes a disorien-
ting communication gap between West and East.
ND THEN THERE Is that hoary old tan-
dem, "Left" and "Right." They may not
always be ideologically clear to the average
Westerner, but still we more or less know what
we are talking about when we speak about, say,
"leftist groups" in Austria or France. In Russia
these words are used in rather a different way.
A person who is against censorship, who wants
more freedom of expression, more right to voice
dissent, is in the Soviet Union called "a leftist."
Those who favour dictatorial controls are called
"the Right." The late Vsevolod Kochetov was
considered a Right-wing communist, Roy Med-
vedev is a leftist. Dubcek is taken to be a man of
the Left, Mao a man of the extreme Right. It is,
therefore, very difficult to explain to a Soviet
intellectual that revolutionary students carrying
portraits of Chairman Mao are in our part of
the world considered to belong to the Left.
One final instance. In the West, Marxism is
considered a body of thought of much interest
and importance, not only because of its influence
on history, but also for its own intellectual sake.
Many people in the West hold that Marxism has
made substantial contributions to philosophy,
economics, history, sociology, and psychology.
It would not, I think, be difficult to make an
impressive list of well-known Marxists in the US,
France, Japan, Poland, England, Germany and
Yugoslavia. But could such a list be made of
Russian Marxists? The truth of the matter, and
it is strange to tell, is that in the Soviet Union
very few people are even remotely interested in
Marxism. In For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway
remarks of one of the characters that "he was a
Christian, something very rare in a Catholic
country. . . ." If one of these days General
Grigorenko were to die in his psychiatric ward,
one could say about him that he was a
communist-something very rare in the Soviet
Union. Recently in my own country, Holland,
one enlightened institution of progressive higher
learning placed an announcement in the Dutch
press asking for a lecturer in the field of "Building
Economics." The announcement added that
non-believers in Marxism need not apply.
While in the Western intellectual world the star of
Marxism has been (since, say, 1960) constantly
rising, in the Soviet Union it has been con-
spicuously on the decline.
A few months ago a friend of mine visited a
Russian intellectual family in Moscow. One
member of this family was a 99-year-old grand-
father. He was a retired professor, and had
known Lenin. While the old man made himself
presentable, his children and grandchildren
confided to my friend: "In a few moments you
will see grandfather. He is a nice man and he
likes to talk. There is one thing you should know.
He still happens to be a Marxist. Please do not
contradict him too much...." In 1900 or 1910,
in 1930 or 1950, such a conversation would have
been improbable in Moscow.
IT IS HARDLY a great exaggeration to say that
more university professors in Paris and Tokyo
are convinced Marxists than in all of Russia.
Two years ago a specialist in Soviet philosophy
told me the following story. He arrived in the
Soviet Union just after a new volume of the
Filosofskaya Entsiklopediya had been published.
His Russian colleagues asked him his opinion
on the volume. He made a few critical remarks
about the entry on KARL MARX. (Parenthetically
I must explain that Soviet scholars have a special
difficulty here, since Lenin wrote an article on
Marx for a Russian bourgeois encyclopaedia;
and with every new Soviet encyclopaedia the
same painful problem arises: not to reprint the
old Lenin article would mean conceding that the
composition of a better article on Marx than
Lenin had written is humanly possible. So this
old article is reprinted ad infinitum and ad
nauseam.) My friend made some comments
about it and then, to his astonishment, it appeared
that none of his colleagues had ever ventured to
look at that article-they were simply not inter-
ested in the subject of Marx. Now if a philosophi-
cal dictionary were to appear in Sydney or even
Staten Island, I am sure there would be many
readers who would immediately look up the
entry on KARL MARX. As a matter of fact I was
recently asked to contribute something on
MARXISM for a new Dutch encyclopaedia. The
editors told me that they planned the entry on
MARX and MARXISM to be the bulkiest article of
the whole encyclopaedia.
On such matters, clearly, the minds of East
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and West (unofficially speaking) do not meet. A
participant in the recent Salzburg conference on
"cultural exchange" expressed regret that his
Western students often returned from a stay in
the Soviet Union with a rather strong dislike of
the Soviet system. To our "unofficial Russians"
this prim note of regret is completely incompre-
hensible.
THIS BRINGS mE to the effects which the new
detente and the ambitious programme of cultural
exchange have on unofficial Russia. Of course,
many (if not all) unofficial Russians are in favour
of contact, relaxation, etc., if only because it
gives them a remote possibility of reading real
books, of travelling abroad, or talking to
foreigners. On the other hand, there can be no
doubt that unofficial Russia has in recent years
felt a certain apprehension, a certain fear. It
fears that the Soviet regime will use the Western
impulse towards detente to influence Western
public opinion in favour of the regime-all the
more so, because the Russian intellectual has the
impression that his naive Western colleagues
are rather easily fooled by official propaganda.
A Soviet citizen who believes what he is told by
the regime is called in Russian an Inturist; and
there is a memorable description of this type of
Westerner in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, where a
Mrs R (Eleanor Roosevelt) visits a Moscow
prison and is greatly impressed by the humanity
of the Soviet prison system.
When Winston Churchill announced to the
British public that England was going to conclude
an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to
fight together against the Nazis, he remarked that
if to resist Hitler he had to make a pact with
the devil, he would do so. . . . Now, to make
a pact with the devil is not difficult. It has been
done before. But the difficulty begins when one
has an alliance with the devil and still resolves
to acknowledge openly that he is indeed the
devil-and not the Archangel Gabriel. When
George Orwell wrote his Animal Farm during
precisely such an alliance, he had great difficulties
in finding a publisher for it, because British pub-
lishers were extremely reluctant to bring out a
book about the Soviet Union that totally lacked
any "Gabrielity"
THE INFLUENCE OF A DICTATORSHIP often
exceeds the limits of its actual power. The
Russian government never had any power of
censorship over books published in Russia. Yet
there was the historic Elizabethan case, with Giles
Fletcher's book, Of the Russe Common Wealth
(1591), being confiscated by Her Majesty's
government. When the first Dutch underground
newspapers were brought to England during the
Second World War, Holland's government-in-
exile in London was so timorous that they gave
orders to their radio stations, broadcasting from
London, not to mention the existence of these
newspapers. When in the 1930s a group of Ger-
man socialists held a conference in Holland, the
mayor of the little town where the conference was
held had the participants arrested and extradited
to Germany where they were subsequently killed.
And the German authorities had not even asked
for their arrest! When Andrei Amalrik wanted to
send his paper on the Norsemen and Kievan
Russia to a well-known Scandinavian scholar (it
was Professor Stender-Petersen) he brought it to
the Danish Embassy in Moscow. The Danish
Embassy thereupon gave it to the KGB.
A good example of the apprehension I men-
tioned earlier is the reaction of unofficial Russia
to the signing by the Soviet Union of the new
Geneva convention. When it became known that
the USSR was going to sign this international
copyright convention, the reactions in the West
were, for the most part, quite favourable. The
negative reactions came, at first, not from the
West, but from Russia-and, in my own view,
those unofficial Russians were right. By signing
the Geneva convention a country takes upon
itself the obligation to protect foreign authors
(if their country has signed the convention) in
the same way it protects its own authors. This
means that the Soviet government can make use
of the excellent copyright laws that exist in the
West, and can use the fact that judges in the
West are independent and that law in the West
is taken seriously, to exercise Soviet censorship
over all publications by Soviet citizens in the
West. Not only can the regime try to stop the
printing in the West of samizdat authors (copy-
right is, by its very nature, a right to prohibit), it
can also halt the publication in the West of any
work that has been printed in the Soviet Union
but displeases the authorities on second thought.
Do Western authors get anything substantial in
return? They are going to be protected not by
Western copyright laws, but by Soviet regulations
-and these happen to be something not quite
comparable. Judges in the Soviet Union make
their decisions on instructions from the regime,
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It will be very easy for the regime to make it
impossible for Western authors to withhold the
publication of their work in the USSR-and as
soon as you can not prohibit you are, for all
practical purposes, quite helpless. As to payment
of royalties the regime can take any decisions it
wants to take-it could even issue a law or a
ukaze saying that for translations no royalties at
all need to be paid. The signing by the Soviet
Union of this convention tends to rob the samiz-
dat authors of the protection that until now the
Berne convention gave them in the West; and
the officially-published Soviet authors are going
to encounter a second Soviet censorship after
their work has been published in Russia.
THF. REACTIONS OF UNOFFICIAL RUSSIA to the
cultural-political attitudes of the West towards
the Soviet regime range all the way from mild
amusement to bitter despair. The best-if perhaps
cruellest-way to illustrate them is by slightly
adapting the last paragraph of Orwell's Animal
Farm. The unofficial pigs look through the
window at the negotiations between their leaders
(the official pigs) and their enemies (the farmers).
Their leaders, the official pigs, look and behave
so much like farmers that the poor creatures on
the outside look from pig to man, from man to
pig, and from pig to man again; and it is impos-
sible for them to say which is which.
In our own days a similar difficulty has arisen.
The poor creatures (that is to say, the unofficial
Russians) look through the window at their
enemy, the Soviet regime, and at their friend, the
West. And sometimes the West behaves in such
a way that it becomes difficult for unofficial
Russia to say which is which.
NOTES & TOPICS
they see no danger here. Nor are there any fascist
ideologies which carry any weight.
The non-Soviet ideologies of the Left are.
something
uite differ
t
q
en
, no matter whether
Moscow & the New Left they are personified by communists like Tito,
From Mao &
Marcuse to Marx
By Klaus Mehnert
Mao, and Dubcek, or Western writers like
Jean-Paul Sartre or Herbert Marcuse. These
the Kremlin has taken to be genuine rivals
diverting the Left-wing stream into their own
channels to the detriment of the Moscow-
orientated Communist parties.
Until Stalin was challenged by Tito, Moscow
lived under the illusion that, apart from a few
tiny sects and one or two traitors, Communism
and Soviet Communism were identical, that the
Soviet Union was the "workers' fatherland."
T HE IDEAL SITUA- Then, however, came the post-War disillusion-
TION of a single merits. Dr Kurt Schumacher, the German
world-wide coordin- Social-Democratic leader, managed to mobilise
ated ideology (it the German workers against Moscow; Tito, a
would, of course, be communist, asserted himself in face of Stalin;
Soviet Communism) Mao, another communist, asserted himself in
has so far proved un- face of the Khrushchevs and Brezhnevs of this
attainable. In the eyes world. Finally arrived the New Left, Marcuse and
of the Russian leaders his "werewolves."
P. all other ideologies, What an ironic situation! At last, at last, a
among which they revolutionary mood had emerged in the capitalist
include the various countries. Academic youth, the pride and pillar
religions and creeds, of the Western world, was raging in its univer-
are basically enemies, sities; bearing red flags they were marching on the
even when this is not White House or even-how encouraging!-on
+ admitted or when that den of lions known as the Pentagon; they
tactical reasons re- were tearing up and burning their draft-cards;
tions with some of than into barracks. Lenin's dream of the world-
them (the Moham- wide flowering of communism seemed to be
medans, the Buddhists, or certain Christian coming true.
groups, for instance). But what a disillusionment! None of this was
But there are differences. Many of the foreign happening at the bidding or to the glory of
"ideologies" are taken seriously, others rather Moscow nor to the profit of the Communist
less so. The Soviets have no fear of the synthetic parties in these Western countries; they were
"bourgeois-liberal" or conservative-type ideo- either ignored or used as targets for violent
logies produced by the West (People's Capitalism, criticism of "totalitarian Soviet communism."
die formierte Gesellschaft, Gaullisme, and so forth). More often than not, quotations from Marx or
They have a healthy respect for the West's Lenin were used against Stalin and his suc-
military strength and they look with envy upon cessors, referring in the same breath to Bakunin,
its standard of living and its far greater measure Marx's anarchist enemy and opponent, or-
of personal opportunity; ideologically, however, worse still-Rosa Luxemburg and her critical
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comments on Lenin's authoritarian methods.
Necessarily, therefore, an ambivalent attitude
was adopted. On the one hand, Moscow wel-
comed the revolt of Leftist youth in the West
as a symptom of the approaching end of the
capitalist system. On the other hand, horror
was expressed not only at the anarchistic, but
also the anti-Soviet, trend of-this revolt and at its
refusal to cooperate with or subordinate itself to
the Communist party. Moscow was forced to
stand by and look on while the youthful rebels
drew totally different conclusions from their
analyses of Western society, similar though the
analyses were to those of Soviet communism.
The emergence of the New Left, therefore,
contributed a further degree of fragmentation to
an already fragmented communist world.
0 F COURSE IT COULD BE SAID that the New
Left-with Dr Marcuse's assistance-had
at least reached the ante-chamber of Marxism
and would one day find the road to true Soviet
Marxism. Many Soviet ideologists comforted
themselves with this hope when wrestling with
this tortuous Left-wing Western intelligentsia.
In fact why should not the path to Marx lead
via Mao and Marcuse (in other words, via the
second and third Ms to the first and only true
Such a development is not outside the bounds
of possibility. In fact the New Left-Mao and
Marcuse, for instance-base themselves on
Marx and Lenin. But the history of the great
schisms in the past does not point in this direc-
tion. Four-and-a-half centuries have passed since
Wittenberg and the Reformation, and the
Protestants have not returned to the Vatican nor
have the various sects to which they have given
birth looked homeward to Rome. For Brezhnev,
however, Mao is more dangerous than Luther
ever was to the Pope. Throughout the world of
today the Trotskyists are more implacable foes
of the Kremlin and more numerous now than the
tiny handful of disciples who venerated the
"Old Man" until his murder in Mexico.
Among the New Left, crowded with innumer-
able groups all professing socialist ideals, there
will undoubtedly be some who will one day tire
of the internal left-wing conflicts and will desert
to their own country's Communist party and the
haven of Soviet communism, the sole source of
bliss. Many of them will become faithful apparat-
chiks; others, accustomed to intellectual freedom,
will cause the Party some headaches by their
indiscipline. This will not alter the over-all
trend-the decline in Kremlin authority. Few
Soviet writers now express confidence that in
course of time the New Left will become a
reliable ally of Moscow; usually they only give
vent to a pious hope.
The long hair and tasselled jackets of the New
Left, its grotesque, farcical, disorderly, unkempt,
Bohemian, hippy-like attitude, in short its drop-
out atmosphere, are as abhorrent to Moscow as
they are to Washington. The reaction clearly
shows that present-day Soviet Communism and
its leaders are basically stolid and resistant to
change. In their view, therefore, the New Left
has not only been moving in the wrong direction
but has done so in a highly vulgar fashion which
the Soviet leaders-who set no little store by res-
TRUE- AND FALSE-
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pectability-find repellent. (1 may add from my
own experience that a large proportion, if not
the majority, of the Soviet population feel the
same.)
Moscow's SITUATION may be summarised as
follows: the "Left" (in inverted commas,
Moscow-style), i.e. the adherents of the Maos and
Marcuses of this world, are good if they turn
into the Left (without inverted commas), i.e.,
adherents of Moscow. "Left-wingers", however,
who remain "Left-wingers" and even turn
potential Left-wingers into "Left-wingers" are
bad-worse indeed than if they were Right-
wingers. How nice it would be if, as in the good
old days before Mao and Marcuse, there were
only loyal goodness on the Left and evil badness
on the Right!
In general terms the reaction of Soviet journ-
alism to the New Left can be divided into three
phases. Until early 1968 it was ignored; then
came a sense of extreme disgust leading to
downright hostility to this new unruly element;
finally, it was taken really seriously, though the
picture was painted in varying colours. It has not
been an easy time for the Soviet journalists. They
have welcomed the youthful vitality of this
criticism of Western society coming from an
unexpected quarter; at the same time, however,
they are worried about the direction it is taking
and the form it has assumed. Moreover, they
know that on high, among the Party leaders, this
New Left is primarily regarded as a tiresome rival,
and also as an infection potentially dangerous to
their own population, to be accepted as sym-
pathetic recruits only with considerable reserva-
tions.
Nevertheless it seems to me that, in dealing
with the New Left, Soviet journalists have shown
more interest and diligence and have said more
sensible things than they have in the case of
Chairman Mao. There are a number of reasons
for this. In the first place, quite apart from the
language difficulty, China remains a closed
world to Russian journalists. Then there is the
special risk that any utterance about Peking
could draw a devastating reply from the mighty
Chinese propaganda machine, and so make the
author responsible for subjecting his own country
to a journalistic slap-in-the face in the argument
now in progress.
More important than all, however, as I know
from numerous conversations, Maoism exerts no
form of intellectual attraction upon the Moscow
ideologists. In fact it is basically repugnant to
them-even among a hundred, or a thousand,
one would hardly find an exception to this rule.
The Soviet ideologists to whom I talked invari-
ably showed pain and surprise at the fact that I
even took the trouble to read and study it.
intelligentsia in the present-day era, or the
repressive role of the technocratic state. In
contrast to Maoism with its extraordinary say-
ings in the Little Red Book, the New Left uses a
familiar range of expressions; it has adopted many
well-known phrases from the Russians' own
ideological tradition. And when it invents new
ones, they can be absorbed without difficulty-
like foreign scientific terms. So one finds Soviet
journalism, without explanation, using words
like "cheppening" (happening), "chippi" (hippie),
' frustraziya" (frustration), "isteblischment" (est-
ablishment), "relevantnost" (relevance), "titsch-
in" (teach-in), and even "seksapilny"-yes,
you've guessed right-the adjective of "sex
appeal."
Yet the reaction was slow and ponderous.
Soviet ideologists make very heavy weather of
unexpected intellectual developments. This atti-
tude on the part of the Eastern world is the
precise opposite of the hectic involvement with
which the West reacted. When something happens
in the ideological field in the East (Khrushchev
removes Stalin's halo-the Cultural Revolution
breaks out in China-the Czech writers run
amok-Solzhenitsyn publishes a new novel in the
West), whole armies of Western intellectuals hurl
themselves into the fray. Having no need to re-
insure themselves with either Right or Left, they
let loose their analyses and prognoses upon the
market. Innumerable little streams of thought
gush forth, the majority of which gradually find
their way into the same river-bed. A general
consensus is formed, but there are always some
who do not agree; and this leads to further in-
tellectual revision of the various positions. Much
is pure speculation since accurate information
from the East is lacking. Months or years later,
however, it turns out that the view on which the
majority of experts ultimately agreed, was not so
very far from the truth.
This "hit-and-miss" method, this lively, contra-
dictory, and entirely uninhibited discussion, is
something unknown in Communist countries. No
Soviet manager would dare to open a brown button
factory unless it was provided for in "The Plan."
Similarly no Soviet ideologist will pronounce
upon a question known to be thorny until the
Party has laid down the line or opened the matter
for discussion-within limits. This takes time,
however.
Soviet scholasticism finds it very difficult to
integrate unforeseen developments into its
system. For any journalist to try to do this ahead
of time, and on his own initiative, would be pre-
sumptuous and dangerous. Nevertheless, some-
times more is forthcoming than one would have
expected, not in the shape of fresh ideas but at
least in so far as information is concerned. This
is certainly so in the case of the "New Left."
THEIR ATTITUDE TO the New Left is quite different.
Admittedly it too is a heresy, a potentially dan-
gerous heresy in fact; but it stems from a world
they know. It is understandable; it even exerts a
certain fascination. I suspect Mat many a Soviet
ideologist finds entirely comprehensible, perhaps
even agrees with, many of the ideas emerging
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