1 / The Costs in Life

       A British journalist, D. G. Stewart-Smith, in his book Defeat of Communism, attempted an estimate. International communism from 1917 to 1964, he found, was directly responsible for eighty-three million deaths—more than the deaths in the two World Wars. This did not include the loss of life in the second of these holocausts, although Moscow's role in the triumph of Hitlerism and in unleashing the war cannot be underestimated. Of the eighty-three million, according to his analysis, more than forty-five million were in Soviet Russia proper, through civil war, famines, "liquidation of the kulaks," purge executions, the high mortality rates in concentration camps, and so on.

       Such figures, any figures in this grim context, are open to challenge in both directions. He puts the dead in the man-made famine of 1932-1933, for instance, at six million— I would scale it down to four million. (354) (Yet a British historian, J. N. Westwood, in his recent book, Russia 1917-1964, writes: "About 10 to 15 million people died in the 1932-34 famine and its attendant epidemics"; possibly he had in mind also the toll of life in the deportations of those years.) Deaths in forced-labor areas and prison "isolators," Mr. Steward-Smith reckons at eleven million— most estimates are substantially higher. At Yalta, Winston Churchill was voicing sympathy for the high Russian casualties in the war. Stalin shrugged. Collectivization, he told his guest, had cost the USSR more lives than the war. If he was right, Mr. Stewart-Smith's total in that column is probably too small.

       In his monumental study The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, released in 1962, Professor G. Warren Nutter aligned Soviet statistics revealing "a deficit of some 40 million people between 1941 and 1945." Since the highest estimate of loss of life in the war is 20 million, at least that many more had been lost through other causes. In 1913 the population within the present boundaries of the Soviet Union was more than 60 per cent higher than that of the United States, but by 1962 it was only 20 per cent higher. In this Soviet shrinkage demographers see evidence of the tens of millions of lives destroyed.

       A young Yugoslav educator, Mihajlo Mihajlov, returning from a long summer sojourn in Russia in 1964, was jailed for publishing an uninhibited account of his experience and findings. Apparently Tito had acted under pressures from Moscow: the main charge was giving offense to a friendly foreign government. Tito himself, of course, had said things a thousand times more devastating about the USSR. Speaking in Zagreb on November 3, 1952, for instance, he exclaimed: "Millions of Soviet citizens languish in death and forced-labor camps." It was no secret that what Moscow found most distressing in Mihajlov's account was his revelation that the Soviets early in their career had operated extermination camps, thus canceling out another "first" in the Nazi obscenities.

       "The Soviet press is writing less and less about fascist and Nazi camps, to avoid comparisons with the Soviet camps," Dr. Mihajlov wrote.(355) "This is quite understandable. The first 'death camps' were not founded by the Germans, but by the Soviets. In 1921, near Arkhangelsk, they set up Kolgomor camp for the sole purpose of physically destroying the prisoners. It operated successfully for many years and swallowed up many of the Bolsheviks' former allies—members of the non-Bolshevik revolutionary parties."

       But one blushes at the quibblings about figures and comparative sadisms. It is like insisting that only five million Jews perished in Nazi gas chambers, not six million as commonly believed. What are a few million corpses more or less in the statistics of the Caligulas and Genghis Khans, the Hitlers and Stalins of history?

       Millions of the victims, in the torture chambers and in the slave camps, were denied the solace of a quick and easy death; they died slowly, excruciatingly, from physical abuse, overwork, undernourishment and exposure. The Soviet killings of individuals and of groups "as a class" were not committed in a frenzy of anger or panic. For the most part they were carried out in cold blood, deliberately: calculated destruction not only of enemies, but also of potential enemies, or simply to be rid of the superfluous and unwanted.

2 / The Costs in Terror

       It is even more difficult, actually impossible, to reckon the costs of half a century of terror generally, spanning as it does the spectrum from harassment to executions, from purges to mass deportations. No one was exempted, not even devoted communists and heroes.

       The vastness of the Soviet state's machinery for internal spying and repression is in itself an index to the extent and ubiquity of terror. Never before, not even in a world that included German Nazism and Italian fascism, has a regime spawned such gigantic organs of surveillance, denunciation, punishment, censorship, and intimidation. No government in modern times, except perhaps Communist China, has invented so many "crimes against the state" or applied the death penalty so extensively. (356) In former revolutions, terror and brutality subsided with victory. In Soviet Russia, uniquely in the history of revolutions, persecution and punishment grew in scope and ferocity after the safety and power of the new masters was assured.

       As a matter of course, the authorities read the citizen's mail and listen in on his phone. The secret police maintain branch offices on the premises of the larger factories, mines, farms, universities, libraries, hotels, and railroad stations. Little agents inform on bigger agents, like vermin on vermin. Every functionary important enough to rate a secretary or chauffeur takes it for granted that they are reporting not only his conduct, contacts and opinions, but his "political mood" for evaluation by the police. Not even the topmost leaders are exempt from this round-the-clock attention.

       Every janitor reports on the tenants and every tenant is encouraged to watch and report on his neighbors, his fellow employees, local officials. Children are taught to report on their parents. In the years since Stalin, especially in Khrushchev's time, millions of young people have been organized in local vigilante brigades to check on the personal and political morals of their neighborhoods. Under beguiling names like Druzhiny (state guards), these youngsters, mostly teen-ager's, may invade private homes, stage "trials" and hand out punishments. In some ways they resemble the Red Guards unloosed by Mao Tse-tung in China in 1966.

       Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector, wrote in his celebrated book, I Chose Freedom (1946): "Multiple webs of espionage, by the party and of the party, by the GPU and of the GPU, pooling information at some points, competing at other points, covered Soviet life from top to bottom. We lived in a world swarming with invisible eyes and ears." He was depicting the 1930's, but basically this system still prevails.

       On January 11, 1918, Lenin, commenting on the bloodletting already under way, added: "We are still far from real terror, because for the time being we are stronger than they are." (357) They—the foes of his regime—must have grown stronger with every month and year, since the "real" terror was applied on an ever-larger scale.

       Estimates of the number of slave laborers, by former camp inmates and scholarly researchers, range from ten to twenty-five million. Brooks Atkinson, in 1946, after his return from a six-year assignment in the USSR for the New York Times, put it between ten and fifteen million. A conscientious study made for a Commission of Inquiry into Forced Labor, published in 1951 as a book (The Soviet Slave Empire, by Albert Konrad Herling) said: "There is no doubt that in the last decade the prison camps and forced-labor camps had a minimum of eight million workers, and at various times a maximum of twenty million."

       Some 90 per cent of this humanity being men of working age—only about 10 per cent of the victims were women— this represents about 15 to 30 per cent of the country's total male working population. But when we take into account the large turnover in the camps and exile regions—the mortality rate in the worst camps has been estimated as high as 30 per cent a year—it is a fair guess that no fewer than fifty million Soviet citizens in the aggregate experienced the Gehenna of the slave-labor system for periods of a year (for those lucky enough to die quickly) to twenty-five years.

       After all discounts are made, it is clear that almost every family in the vast Soviet empire gave at least one member to the insatiable beast. During and after the war, of course, millions of non-Soviet prisoners—Germans, Baits, Poles, and other East Europeans, as well as Japanese and many Americans—swelled these legions of the damned. Statistics do not begin to suggest the sufferings involved for the direct victims and their broken families. It would take the genius of a Dante to describe the purgatory and the hell in which men, women, and even children lived like so many animals, in filth and vermin, worked literally to death, chronically starved, abused and insulted.* [For those interested to delve more deeply into the grim facts about Soviet concentration camps, there is a rich literature in many languages. Here, arranged chronologically, are a few of the books available in English:

       A German woman, Elinor tipper, came close to conveying the horror in her book, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, published in 1951. "A Soviet camp," she wrote, "is an incubator for all the vilest human instincts. Its name, 'correction labor camp,' is a mockery. . . . Not only does the camp provide no educational work; it gives the criminal the finest opportunity to practice his profession. The thief steals, the speculator speculates, the prostitute sells herself. The normal person is perverted, the honest man becomes a hypocrite, the brave man a coward, and all have their spirits and bodies broken."(359) The fact that political offenders, the vast majority, are herded together with ordinary criminals is one of the worst afflictions of camp life; the "politicals" are literally at the mercy of killers and perverts, who wield more power than the official warders and guards.

       Contrary to widespread misconceptions deliberately spread by the Kremlin and its friends abroad, the camp system has not been abolished since the passing of Stalin. Its dimensions have been reduced, although current victims must still be counted by the hundreds of thousands—by millions, according to some estimates. The treatment of inmates has become more lenient. But the institution itself is intact, and additional "crimes" punishable by exile to "corrective labor colonies"—in many cases the old camps renamed for easier swallowing—have been announced by the authorities from time to time.

       Then there was the malignant process of collectivization. According to the pro-Soviet Sidney and Beatrice Webb, British Fabian Socialists, one million peasant families were liquidated. This is the most moderate estimate. At least five million human beings, that is, from babes in arms to the aged, were stripped of all possessions and transported in cattle cars to the Siberian taiga, the Arctic tundra, and Central Asian deserts, to live or die. Three or four times as many fled from the unfolding horrors in their ancestral villages, abandoning their homes and goods; most of them found work at new construction and industrial sites, the rest ended up in slave camps and exile regions.

       Their ordeal was only part of the incalculable agonies of the entire peasantry—at that time more than three-fourths of the population—most of them despoiled of their earthly goods and herded by raw force into the hated -kolkhozes. Ever since, they have been subjected to a new species of serfdom, tied to the land, exploited without mercy in the interests of the state, their fate even bleaker by far than that of the so-called proletariat in factories, mines, and offices.

       The testimony of Isaac Deutscher, a British writer, is pertinent because he has been consistently pro-Soviet, excusing the most obscene crimes in terms of historical necessity. (360) In his book What Next? (1953), he wrote about collectivization: "The terror matched the resistance that those policies encountered. Only with scorpions could tens of millions be driven into collective farms, multitudes be shifted to new industrial sites, and the vast majority of people forced to toil in misery and suppress in silence the fury evoked by the privileges of a minority."

       After a brief relaxation of pressures in the mid-thirties, the terror zoomed to new peaks in the time of the blood-purges, from 1936 to the coming of the war. The world to this day has not realized the real magnitude of that great carnage. It could know directly only the publicized butchering of leading communists, military men, professors, and writers. The melodramatic Moscow treason trials in the foreground tended to shut off the view of the all-embracing purges behind them. Actually the whole population was affected.

       In the ruling party, 1,800,000 members and candidates for membership were expelled, more than half the total, and that meant for them anything from concentration camp to shooting. At least eight million more, non-communists, were subjected to liquidation, implying anything from loss of their jobs and homes to loss of their lives. Executions and suicides have been estimated by Soviet defectors involved in the holocaust as high as two million, and one million would probably be a moderate guess of the total. The late Moshe Pijade, one of the three or four leading communists in Yugoslavia, raised the ante in his polemic anti-Stalin zeal. "In 1936, 1937, and 1938," he said, "over three million people disappeared from the earth's surface in the Soviet Union."

       A purge of some ten million men and women staggers the imagination. Including their families and friends, whose lives were shaken up and often wrecked, we come close to a quarter of the whole population! And in truth no one escaped the tragedy, living amidst the thunderous fears of the time. Millions not actually involved in the purge remained psychologically crippled by the sheer waiting and dreading. (361)

       During the war, the inhabitants of entire "autonomous republics" were torn up by the roots from their ancestral soil, deported and dispersed, like the supposed kulaks a decade earlier. These victims included the Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, the Buddhist Kalmyks, Chechen-Ingush, Balkars, and Karachais. Millions of Ukrainians received the same treatment; Khrushchev himself, one of the top engineers of this mass exile, would explain in 1956: "The Ukrainians escaped this fate only because there were too many of them and because there was no place to exile them to." The peoples deported in mass—not even members of the Communist Party and the Komsomols were spared—were not "rehabilitated" until 1957. The half-million Crimean Tartars, for some reason, were not officially "exonerated" until September 1967, nearly a quarter of a century after the deportations—and it was billed by the government as a fiftieth-anniversary present! The whole rehabilitation process was a farce: by 1957 and 1967, their ancient homes had been pre-empted by Russians and others, so that the belated right to return was largely meaningless.

       The nationwide purges were resumed after the war, in the so-called Zhdanov period (named for Stalin's ideological inquisitor, Andrei Zhdanov). In scale, duration, and malevolence, they matched the abominations of the 1930's. Those subjected to the greatest pressures were then the educated classes: scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals generally.

       Having touched on the most conspicuous episodes, we must again make clear that these, and others like them, do not encompass the whole terror in its myriad dimensions. There was the premium put on hypocrisy and lying, the shattering of family life by sudden arrests and by the ravages of denunciation. There was, and remains, the systematic persecution of religious faith and practice, the most sacred beliefs and holy objects of the greater part of the population—Christians, Moslems, Jews—mocked and mangled. Like people trapped on battlegrounds in war, everyone in Soviet Russia, from the lowliest to the highest, lived in an atmosphere of unremitting fear, blood, sudden evacuation and sudden death, but with refinements of danger and dread unknown in mere military wars. (362)

       Every student of the Soviet times has his own little list of what he considers the worst or most revealing elements in the terror. Dr. Lin Yutang, for example, cites his three "favorites": (1) making children of twelve subject to capital punishment; (2) sending women to work in under-surface coal mines; (3) harassing workers in their lunch recess, with threats of prison for lateness in returning to work.

       The overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens now alive were born into an all-pervasive atmosphere of terror, grew up in it, absorbing its nerve-wracking hates and poisons. They have lived under the constant surveillance of a colossal secret police organization, with its own specialized army for internal repressions, supported by great contingents of professional and volunteer informers—an establishment for detection of heresy and swift punishment second in size only to the regular armed forces.

       They have known the panic of the after-midnight knock on the door; the anguish of denunciation by close friends and relatives, including one's adored children; the awareness that their most innocent conversations, their mail and phones might be monitored and bring disaster. Arbitrary terror encompasses more humiliations, persecutions, and punishments without crime, than language can convey. This was the haunting memory that moved Yevgeny Yevtushenko to recall the loss of "twenty million in war, and millions in the war on the people."

       The defense of the horrors has become standard in communist apologetics. It is to the effect that capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century, marked by sweatshops and child labor, was also cruel. The argument is both specious and stupid. Private entrepreneurs did not deliberately and arbitrarily, as a matter of state policy, murder millions and condemn tens of millions to slave labor in hideous concentration camps. Moreover, in Western Europe and the United States, under relatively democratic systems, the evils could be exposed, opposed, and ultimately eliminated. (363)

       Let no one suppose that terror on this scale over such a protracted period can be canceled out in the national memory and from the national conscience by a few years of moderation. Its scars are on every mind and heart. Although they have never been published, the heartbreak songs of camp and prison, the haunting laments of the homeless children, are sung by the new generation, secretly among themselves or defiantly in schools and at demonstrations. The wounds are unstitched, unhealed—-gangrenous with guilt among the mighty, a festering fury among the humble.

3 / The Costs in Thought Control

       Having sealed the country as hermetically as they could against foreign printed matter and radio, the oligarchy rationed information stingily through absolute control of the flow of news and ideas. The content of everything in print and on the airwaves was limited to authorized "truths," which is another name for official lies. Multiple layers of censorship guarded against the leakage of forbidden thoughts through the press, books, scientific papers; on the stage and screen and on the air; in schoolrooms and lecture halls. Folk songs and fairy tales were examined for dangerous overtones. Not even the Holy Writ of Marx, Engels and Lenin was exempt from censorial editing and suppressions.

       Textbooks, from kindergarten up, were crammed with half-truths and full lies. Every discipline, from economics to agronomy, from biology to philosophy, was narrowed and mangled to conform to dicta from Marx and Lenin and the propaganda line of the moment. Areas as seemingly remote from Kremlin interests as astronomy and psychiatry were sown with booby-traps for careless practitioners. The marauders were especially ruthless in the fields of history. Everything that did not fit into their arbitrary mythology was thrown into what has been called the Memory Hole. Past events were revised or blotted out. Historical "facts" and biographical data were simply invented, then deleted or restored periodically as the party "line" changed. (364)

       Reflecting the occupational hazards of callings involving the mind, the proportion of professors and students, scientists, historians and such was especially high, in relation to their numbers, among the "liquidated" and the inmates of slave camps. In literature and all the other arts, music included, the creative urge became the shortest road to economic penury or physical extinction. At the same time the treasure-houses of Russian poetry, prose, music, philosophy were "purged" insofar as censors could do it with so great and vast a national heritage.

       Lord Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, though he was at the time sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, wrote in a book on Bolshevism in 1920: "If a more just economic system were only attainable by closing men's minds against free inquiry, and plunging them back into the intellectual prison of the Middle Ages, I should consider the price too high." The exorbitant price was paid but it did not buy the more just economic system. Said Andre Gide, after his journey through the USSR which cured him of his illusions about communism: "I doubt that in any country of the world, even Hitler's Germany, is thought less free, more bowed down, more terrorized."

       Those who have read George Orwell's fantasy-novel, 1984, have some idea of what it means to have your every thought and gesture and facial expression watched by Big Brother. Some parts of his prevision of thought-control carried to its extreme were chillingly close to what was actually happening in Stalin's empire.

       The other side of suppression and censorship has been large-scale and systematic indoctrination. Veritable armies of lecturers have been engaged in molding two hundred million minds to conform to preconceived patterns. Enormous funds and manpower—a million full-time and part-time indoctrinators, it has been estimated—were assigned to this job of "brainwashing." William Benton, publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, after a study of the subject in Russia, wrote in 1956: (365)

       Never before in history has there been such a stupendous enterprise in shaping the thought of a nation—in "selling" a regime on a twenty-four-hour schedule to its captive subjects. The pressures of nagging, hectoring slogans, cliches, exhortations, boasts, and threats are so relentless that they have amounted to a form of psychological torture. Some people have cracked under the strain, most have bowed meekly. Yet amazingly, unauthorized thoughts and feelings, memories and intuitions, somehow did survive in the underground of minds and hearts and now, more than ever before in the fifty years, rise to the surface to taunt and frighten the rulers.

4 / The Political Costs

       These are inherent in the formula of "dictatorship of the proletariat." The self-anointed and self-perpetuating dictators, a few hundred or a few thousand, have exercised absolute power over the small ruling party and through it over the rest of the citizenry. The rank-and-file communist has various privileges and opportunities but no more political rights than his non-party neighbors. The tight oligarchy operates through appointed proconsuls and agents of all degrees. The authority each of them wields is strictly delegated from the top and he is accountable only to his superiors in the pyramid, never to the people under his tutelage.

       Soviet communism has stamped out free speech, press, and assembly, even in the restricted measure that they existed under the monarchy. The reader need only think of the political rights he enjoys—no matter how inadequate he may consider them—and realize that he would not have them if he were a Soviet citizen. (366) "Elections" are limited to a single list of names, drawn up by the party or by organizations under party control. The whole process of "voting" is a compulsory totalitarian charade, implying not the slightest degree of popular participation in government. It does not differ from elections under Mussolini and Hitler, who in fact merely copied the Soviet model.

       As a practical matter, it is unimportant how the Soviets or "legislatures" are "elected" and who "represents" the constituency, since these bodies have no governing function whatsoever. They meet so rarely and so briefly that the very pretense of a role in running the nation is farcical. The Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the national parliament, meets only once or twice a year for a few days, a week at most. Only mentally retarded children could believe the fairy tale that it disposes of the law-making business of a great and complex empire in this tune. The "parliament" does not even have the time to rubberstamp all the decrees and plans theoretically submitted for its approval. It has never rejected any law or plan submitted by the bosses or approved it by less than unanimous vote. From the ballot box to the gala annual speech-making marathon in the Kremlin, the exercise is spurious.

       Despite the beating of drums around so-called de-Stalinization, the country still lives under the Stalin constitution—not that it makes any difference, since it is ignored in practice insofar as political and civil rights are concerned. That extraordinary document was modestly presented in 1936 as "the most democratic constitution in the world" and duly hailed abroad at the time as evidence of Stalin's "new liberalism." It added insult to injury by listing on paper the fundamental civil guarantees denied in actuality, then and now. It assigned autonomous functions to an array of social and governmental organizations, with the mere proviso that all of them must remain under control of the Communist Party.

       From time to time, as at present, there has been a supposed "return to legality." But it appeared soon enough that there can be no real rule of law under a regime that is itself lawless, that extracts "confessions" to invented crimes by torture, violates its own constitution, disposes of its enemies by secret administrative action, issues decrees affecting the entire citizenry by arbitrary decision of the uppermost clique. (367)

       Where political sins are involved—and nearly everything is "political" in the totalitarian world—the judicial system is a travesty of justice. The accused has no right to defense counsel until after the police and investigatory machine has prepared him for trial. Even then, the defense lawyer, unless he has an urge to political suicide, can do nothing to embarrass the prosecution or expose its deceptions. In the infamous demonstration trials, in particular, the supposed defenders sometimes outdid the prosecutors in zeal to destroy their "client."

       Exoneration of citizens brought to trial under "political" statutes is exceedingly rare; to be accused by the all-knowing, all-seeing state is proof enough of guilt. Failure to denounce others who may harbor sinful views, whether relatives or strangers, is a punishable crime. Wives are obliged to testify against husbands, husbands against wives, and of course no one is exempted from testifying against himself.

       Everyone knows that in Soviet Russia there is no habeas corpus. Few outside the country know that there is not even habeas cadaver. No non-official witnesses can confirm an execution and the body of the executed is not returned to the family for burial. The suspicion that a relative or friend whose death has been officially announced may in fact be alive, rotting in some isolator or concentration hell, adds mortifying uncertainty to the tragedy. Instances, of "executed" persons who years later turned up alive are not unknown in the Soviet Union.

       The individual has no semblance of any role in government, in law making and decision-making, and most important, no protection against the will and whims of an arbitrary, all-powerful state. A differing value is placed on political and civil freedoms in different civilizations, but no matter how low the price tag, their total denial to more than 200 million people for five decades is a decisive element in the balance sheet. (368)

5 / The Costs to the World

       Directly and through its international apparatus and extensions, the damage Soviet communism, has done to the world is incalculable.

       There is hardly a major crisis anywhere on this globe— from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, from Africa to the Middle East—in which the territorial and ideological ambitions of Moscow are not deeply involved. The turbid tides of anti-Western and anti-American demonstrations, riots, arson—even in America and the West—are almost always communist-instigated, communist-led or, at least, exploited by the communists.

       And this has been true ever since Bolshevism seized a base of operations in Russia, along with the country's colossal material and human resources. The world since 1917 has been in a continuous turmoil of bloody conflicts, ferocious civil wars, competing propagandas, nearly all of them fomented or encouraged by communism. At bottom, the history of these fifty years has been a struggle between free nations and those aspiring to freedom on one side, and a dehumanized totalitarianism on the other. Directly or by its example, as already observed, communism has spawned other types of totalitarianism, while itself enduring as the strongest and most menacing.

       It happens that I was present, as a very young free-lance reporter, in late 1920 at the Livorno (Leghorn) congress of the Italian Socialist party. I watched how the communist faction, with Moscow agents present openly directing the strategy of demolition, split that powerful organization and its trade unions. It was this split that opened wide the road to Mussolini and his castor-oil brigades. In the same fashion, more moderate Marxist and other Leftist forces in the rest of the world were splintered from within on Kremlin orders. The parties which local adherents of the Moscow faith could not take over, they systematically destroyed.

       The most disastrous consequences of this effort— disastrous, it turned out, for Russia too—was the triumph of National Socialism in Germany. (369)In the climactic years of Hitler's rise, Stalin and his Communist International identified the moderate socialists and liberal reformers as "social fascists" and "the main enemy." Against them, even collaboration with the Hitlerites was certified as smart tactics. In 1931, on Kremlin instructions, the German Communist party joined the Nazis on certain issues to defeat the non-communist Left. Thus the opposition, which might have headed off the obscenity, was fragmented and the Nazi movement had the unimpeded right of way.

       The Kremlin stuck to its blunder even after Hitler was enthroned and slaughtering German communists. As late as April, 1934, the Communist International still declared solemnly that Nazism "by destroying all the democratic illusions of the masses and liberating them from the influence of Social Democracy, accelerates the rate of Germany's development toward proletarian revolution."

       Earlier that year the communist chieftain in the United States, Earl Browder, ridiculed those who feared Hitlerism. Fascism, he explained, "destroys the moral base for capitalist rule, discrediting bourgeois law in the eyes of the masses; it hastens the exposure of all demagogic supporters of capitalism, especially its main support among the workers—the socialist trade-union leaders. It hastens the revolutionization of the workers, destroys their democratic illusions and prepares the masses for the revolutionary struggle for power."

       The Stalin-Hitler pact that unleashed World War II astonished only those who had forgotten the Kremlin's ambivalence on Nazism. The two dictatorships had plenty in common. It was easier for communists willing to serve Hitler to join his party than for most other Germans. After the war, Ulbricht in East Germany repaid the compliment by enlisting thousands of ex-Nazis in his communist apparatus.

       The evil went deeper. Communist ideology, by disorienting the minds of several generations of men, contributed to a world-wide erosion of traditional intellectual and ethical standards, the decay of idealism and democratic preferences. It provided a rationale for inhumane practices under "revolutionary" labels. (370)Red intrusion and subversion weakened or destroyed progressive and radical movements, trade-unions, democratizing trends.

       Starting with one hundred and sixty million subjects in one country, communism has spread to take in a third of the human race. Because it was unloosed in Russia, its extension propagated and financed by Lenin's Third or Communist International, the sufferings in all other Red nations, from China to Cuba, may justly be charged against Soviet communism.

       The conquest of unwilling peoples was begun by the Lenin-Trotsky regime with the re-imposition of Russian imperial dominion over racial national minorities that had broken away in the civil war period. Gruzia (Georgia), the Ukraine, various Central Asian areas that had set up their own governments were brutally beaten into submission. Then, in due time, Lenin's successors went on to crush one neighboring nation after another: Outer Mongolia before the Second World War, Central and Eastern European nations during and after the war. And the end, as Soviet propaganda and official programs make clear, is not yet.

       In an era when old-style colonialism has been virtually ended, Red imperialism has emerged as the largest colonial system extant. It is today the only dynamic, expanding imperialism on this planet. Korea, Vietnam, the horrifying toll of death in averting a communist take-over in Indonesia, are merely episodes in the permanent totalitarian offensive against the rest of the world.

       As the Second World War was drawing to its end, Winston Churchill, in a burst of optimism he was to regret, said: "I know of no government which stands to its obligation, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Soviet Union." President Truman matched this faith in "good old Joe." But the echoes of the last battles had barely died away when Moscow returned with renewed energy to its systematic assaults on free societies.

       Again Stalin was denouncing the Allies without whom he could not have saved his regime from obliteration. (371) One after another the Kremlin's solemn undertakings for postwar occupation and normalization of the defeated lands were broken. One after another the hopes that Soviet Russia would cooperate for a peaceful world, nurtured by President Roosevelt's and Prime Minister Churchill's reassurances, were punctured. While the West hurriedly demobilized, the Soviets held their military strength at wartime levels and used it to intimidate neighbors and yesterday's allies. In brief, everything was back to abnormal.

       In Bulgaria, Poland, Berlin, the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, the three- and four-nation interim authorities were displaced by all-Soviet controls. Finally, a Red puppet regime was nailed down on Czechoslovakia. Through the United Nations, Washington offered one of the most generous gifts in history: an equal share for the USSR in a multi-nation control of the nuclear power that was still an American monopoly. Stalin turned it down. Similarly he turned down a part in the Marshall Plan and stopped his new colonies from participating in it. Then came Soviet-made crises in Berlin and the sudden invasion of South Korea.

       Muscovite obstruction and aggression were back on history's agenda. Hesitantly, reluctantly, the United States, Britain, France, Turkey had begun to rearm and to build NATO and other regional defensive alliances. By the deliberate, world-revolutionary choice of the Soviet hierarchs a debilitating armaments race was forced upon a world struggling to repair the devastation of the war. Moscow was fishing in troubled waters in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America—and diligently troubling waters that were still calm.

       Soviet contempt for treaties and its own pledged word are a matter of public record. In 1955, a fully documented analysis of nearly one thousand Soviet treaties made public by a U.S. Senate committee showed that the USSR "had broken its word to virtually every country to' which it ever gave a signed promise." Subsequently a special committee of the American Bar Association found that in twenty-five postwar years the United States had 3,400 meetings with communists, and that "all this talk led to fifty-two major agreements and Soviet Russia had broken fifty of them." (372)

       The strength and prestige of the "United Nations have been undermined by more than a hundred Soviet vetoes, and by refusal, when it suited Kremlin purposes, to abide by U.N. decisions. The Red blight is everywhere. Every nation and colonial region, from the most advanced to the most backward, has its legal or underground communist contingents—usually both brands—working to disrupt the existing or emerging order. Every major social or religious organization, every vital labor and peasant movement, every national-independence movement, is already infiltrated by communists or in the process of penetration.

       Because it is consciously at war, international communism endlessly prepares the necessary leaders and experts in the use of all political, psychological, economic, and revolutionary weapons. The campaigns are planned and manned by professionals, painstakingly trained for their jobs. According to NATO intelligence files, Henry J. Taylor reported in the American press in September, 1966, the Soviet regime "runs African-Asian communist indoctrination programs in about 177 colleges and six thousand secondary schools in Iron Curtain countries, a trade-union institute for Africans in Budapest, and terrorist training centers in Prague, Warsaw and in East Germany."

       If anything, these NATO intelligence figures understate the magnitude of the "educational" networks for preparing guerrilla leaders, propaganda specialists, social sappers, terror cadres from all continents, then deploying them in their native lands to explode legal governments, to capture or ruin non-communist revolutionary movements. Other such training centers operate in Red China and Cuba.

       None of this is recent or accidental. Years before 1917, Lenin set up study centers for followers in Bologna and Capri in Italy, and a third near Paris. Schools for communist revolution were established in Russia and non-communist countries soon after the Bolshevik coup d'etat and multiplied steadily thereafter. (373) Textbooks for the trainees in treason cover a wide range of skills. Typical subjects include "Preparation for Armed Insurrection," "Ideological Penetration of Armed Services," "The Tactic of the United Front."

       In the half-century, the schools have graduated scores of thousands of agents, masters of the arts of softening free peoples and sapping their self-confidence, setting class against class and race against race. The fact that there are today more such schools than ever before should give pause to those who would like to believe that the cold war is over. Revolutionary cadres on such a scale are not being trained for the fun of it.

       The communist blight, I repeat, is everywhere. The havoc it works has not been limited to governments and institutions. Its poisonous effects have been even wider and deeper on the minds of men the world over. Sincere progressives in all countries, as I have already pointed out, have been disoriented and corrupted by support of, or flirtation with, communist doctrines and practices. Men and women of intellectual and moral stature—among them educators and religious leaders who influence young minds —not to mention the million-fold Lumpen-intelligentsia in the non-communist world, found themselves defending slave labor, glorying in the Big Lie, shouting "Hoorah for murder!" when the killers were communists.

       Communist propaganda generated the kind of cynicism that could applaud Kremlin blood-purges and genocide; that could side with the enemy against one's own country in Korea or Vietnam; that could argue self-righteously, "What if a few more million die"—in Russia, that is, or China, not in their own country. Unlimited violence and crime were a down-payment on the Utopia of their fantasy world; though the advance payments already come to more than eighty million lives, a usurious fanaticism can take more and yet more in its stride.

6 / The Costs in Moral Values

       A deep immoralism has marked the Soviet years from the start. It turned the person into an object, a bloodless statistic, and shrank respect for the living to the vanishing point. In pursuit of its purposes, it has demeaned or outlawed truth, honor, kindness, personal loyalty, and other such "petty bourgeois prejudices." (374) No appraisal of the Soviet half-century makes sense if it evades these staggering costs in moral terms.

       History, of course, is replete with evil governments and cruel individual tyrants, but usually they gave lip-service to some code of ethics even while violating it. The USSR was the first totally immoral state, so proclaimed by its founders, so maintained by their successors. It has treated immoralism as a positive virtue, derided ethical scruples, boasted of its capacity for what others call evil, acknowledging no limits on action beyond its own will and expediency.

       Communists, one Martin Milligan instructed readers 'in the January, 1965 issue of Marxism Today, "must regard themselves as free, indeed morally obliged, to violate the principles of truthfulness, respect for life, etc. when it is absolutely clear that a great deal more harm would be done by adhering to such principles than by violating them." The killer thus sets himself up as the sole judge of when he is "morally obliged" to kill! This has been a continuous, inviolate principle. Forty-four years earlier, a certain I. Duzcinski explained:

       "Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This was the greatest sacrifice the revolution asked of us. The conviction of the true communists is that evil transforms itself into bliss through the dialectics of historical evolution."

       With continued indulgence, however, acting wickedly ceased to be a sacrifice and became itself a source of bliss— the psychotic thrill of power to inflict pain and death with complete impunity. The willingness to hurt or kill for the cause was hailed in the communist incantations as "Bolshevik firmness" and "Leninist courage." By that perverted logic, the firmness and courage proved by slaying a million were multiplied tenfold in slaying ten million. The very categories of Good and Evil were outlawed as sentimental weakness. Vlacheslav Molotov was entirely in Soviet character when he said off-handedly, while the Germans were raining death on Poland, that one's opinion of Nazism was just "a matter of taste." (375)

       A hostage system made the whole family punishable for the political crimes of any relative. The arrest and conviction of a man almost always brought some punishment, at the least exile, to his wife and grown children; invariably they were dispersed to different prisons and camps in different parts of the country.

       Other regimes may have induced young children to spy on their parents—it remained for the Soviets to erect a monument to Pavlik Morozov, a little monster who informed on his father and mother and got them executed. The Pavlik episode occurred in the 1930's in a village in the Sverdlovsk area. Peasant neighbors were so infuriated by his action that they killed the boy, thus creating a martyr memorialized in metal in that village and held up as a model for all good little communists.

       Other tyrants may have robbed their citizens—it remained for the Soviet secret police to round up tens of thousands suspected of hiding a few dollars, jewels or other valuta, and to subject them to medieval tortures for weeks and months until they handed it over. The police in every district had a production quota to fulfill in this "gold-mining in torture chambers"—those victims who did have something to hand over were the lucky ones.

       Jean Jacques Rousseau, who warned that "nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood," could never have made the grade as a Bolshevik. Lenin and his brethren laughed at such sentimental nonsense as "bourgeois liberalism." For Good and Evil they substituted expediency. Thus released from the moral restraints on normal men, they could compound any monstrosity not merely in good conscience but in pride.

       Lenin, it is important to recall, had found Sergei Nechayev, the apostle of absolute immoralism, even before he found Marx. In 1868, Nechayev wrote his celebrated Catechism of a Revolutionist, in which he renounced all norms of civilized behavior and prescribed every imaginable depravity in the pursuit of the "ideal." It is as fanatic, hate-packed a document as the human brain has ever produced. (376) The revolutionist, he wrote, "knows only one science, the science of destruction," which does not stop at lying, robbery, betrayal and torture of friends, murder of his own family. His central dictum, that "everything that contributes to the triumph of the revolution" is moral, has been echoed by Lenin and his disciples to this day and, indeed, figures in every communist pronouncement on morality.

       "Thus before he became a Marxist," Max Eastman has summed it up, "Lenin had arrived by an emotional road at the rejection of moral standards which Marx deduced from a pretended science of history. The confluence of these two streams of thought [Nechayev and Marx] is one of the greatest disasters that ever befell mankind."

       It was pure Nechayevism, in almost the master's original language, when Lenin wrote: "Morality is that which serves the destruction of the old exploiters' society. We do not believe in eternal morality and expose the deceit of all legends about morality." This precept was in due time enshrined in the Soviet Encyclopaedia: "The only scientific criterion of morality is the defense of the victory of communism." Thus the wisdom of time and the genius of moral philosophers through the millennia were discarded in the name of a distant vision of the perfect society.

       Let no one suppose from his reference to deceit that Lenin ever opposed it in principle. On the contrary, deception was a matter of tactics, a primary tool for rule, when practiced by "the vanguard of the proletariat," meaning himself and his henchmen. He chose hate, arrogance, mass murder, in the boundless egomania of men possessed by the conviction that they are the destined saviors of Humanity, the destined installments of History.

       Now that Soviet communism has vaulted over a quarter-century of Stalin dominance to rest its claim to legitimate succession on Lenin alone, there is a tendency to romanticize his character. It is argued, even by some opponents of communism, that he was humane, idealistic, and so on. Yet there is little that Stalin did, except in its scale, that was not done first by Lenin. Stalin simply carried to insane extremes the crimes first sanctified by Lenin. (377) It was Lenin, it should not be forgotten, who devised the first terror machine, the Cheka, and put a sanctimonious sadist, Felix Djerzhinski, at its head. It was Lenin who ordered the murder of thousands of innocent "hostages"; dispersed the first and only democratically elected legislative body after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Constituent Assembly; crushed the Kronstadt revolt of his own Red sailors; raised lies and falsification to prime virtues in his system.

       Messianic delusion as an alibi for immoralism is an old, old story. In The Blithedale Romance, a novel about the communistic experiment in Brook Farm in the 1840's, Nathaniel Hawthorne depicted its leaders, men obsessed by a vision of perfection:

       "They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them and cannot take the second and the third, and every other step in their terribly strait path."

       Whatever brand of beatitude those in the grip of such obsession may be pushing, they wind up in utter depravity. Dazzied by hallucinations of some golden future, convinced that they and they alone can bring it into being, any means seems to them haloed by the envisioned end.

       The dilemma of ends and means is central to an assessment of communism. After all, both a. highway robber and an honest workman have the same objective: to acquire money. The difference is in the means each uses to attain that end. Brutal means invariably brutalizes those who use them as well as those who are its victims. Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav ex-communist, in his celebrated book, The New Class, was right, of course, when he wrote:

       "Throughout history there have been no ideal ends which were attained with non-ideal means, just as there has been no free society which was built by slaves. Nothing so well reveals the reality and greatness of ends as the methods used to attain them."

       Another writer, Professor W. W. Kulski, in 1957 posed one of the basic questions in his book, The Soviet Regime: Communism in Practice: "Is it worthwhile to inflict death and untold suffering on individual human beings for a dream of future happiness of mankind?" (378) People who live by the accumulated wisdom of the ages and the sages, he believes, cannot hesitate in giving their answer:

       "No end and no dream of future happiness could make them feel free to use any and all means. Soviet experience proves that means may become ends in themselves, while the millennium of future happiness recedes beyond human vision and reach."

       Yet their profession of noble intentions leading ultimately to a perfect society has been the only argument advanced by communists for their savage terror. Five hundred years ago, in 1441, the nominal Bishop of Verden, Dietrich von Nieheim, set down a statement which helps explain the excesses of the Inquisition. "When its existence is threatened," he wrote, "the Church is freed of moral edicts. Unity as an aim blesses all means: perfidy, treachery, tyranny, simony, prisons and death." The words sound as if they had been uttered by a zealous communist today in defense of his "church." False confessions extracted by torture, mass homicide, universal spying, man-made famine, genocide—everything goes, until the very memory of decency, love, justice fades out.

       That in the Soviet Union the means have all but expunged the professed ends is all too clear. The ends were the creation of a just society of equals. Industrialization— which Marx had taken for granted as a heritage from the displaced capitalism—in Russia became the unavoidable means. And inevitably that evolved into a supreme end in itself, so compelling that it was used to explain and justify the most vicious means. The initial ends continued to be recalled in ritualistic oratory, but they lost relevance to real life, dominated by the regime's obsession with the new end of industrialization at any cost. What is more, the seizure and retention of power, which was at first regarded as a transitory means for the attainment of communism, also turned into a supreme end in itself.

       Thus in the name of humanity, the Soviets have cheapened and insulted human life. (379) They have "scientifically" sacrificed the living generations for the supposed benefit of generations yet unborn, inflicted real horrors today for highly problematical happiness in some far-off tomorrow.

       That, too, violates our ingrained moral intuitions. Anyone who decided to torture and murder one man or woman for the good of the victim's unborn great-grandchildren would be adjudged insane. Is he any less insane when he decides to torture and exterminate millions of men and women for the good of their unborn posterity? Have only the unborn a right to happiness, so that the anguish of the living is a trifling investment for their great-grandchildren?

       A thousand accidents may snatch the theoretical happiness from the coming generations; they may even have a different concept of happiness than the group now brandishing "the sword of history" in their behalf. Only the torment of the living is real and indubitable. If it is morally permissible to wipe out a sector of Humanity for the sake of History, then there is no sensible reason for drawing the line at five million or five hundred million. Drown them all, comrades, leaving only a he-Stalin and a she-Stalin in their monolithic ark to start things over again from scratch!

       By 1934, when I departed from Russia, nothing was left of the high mood of dedication, traces of which I had still found among communists six years earlier. The very vocabulary of idealism had been outlawed. "Equality" was lampooned as bourgeois romanticism. Excessive concern for the needs and sensibilities of ordinary people was punished as "rotten liberalism." Terror was no longer explained away as a sad necessity. It was used starkly and glorified as "human engineering." Means had blotted out ends and have held this priority ever since.

       The Marxist theory of permanent class struggle rules out compromise, reform, truce, common humanity, mutual respect, family loyalties. "Marx's great crime" Eugene Methvin writes in an as yet unpublished book, "was that he dethroned man's civilizing emotion—love and the spirit of cooperation—for his more primitive, monstrous emotion, hate. (380) In man's ambivalent Jekyll-Hyde nature as the civilized savage, Marxism is a throwback philosophy, anti-civilization and anti-homo sapiens."

       Any doubts on this score have been removed by Marxism as practiced under Soviet communism. Philip Spratt, a former British-Indian communist leader, stated: "The communist movement runs on hate—the leading theorists are quite frank about it—and hate is a potent fuel." Hate not merely of capitalism as an abstraction, but of capitalists as people; hate of entire nations is preached in schoolbooks for Soviet children. The American poet, e.e. cummings, after a sojourn in Soviet Russia, wrote in his quaint style: "every kumrad is a bit of quite unmitigated hate."

       In the Congo in 1965, hopped-up Simbas, armed and inspired by Moscow and Peking, went on a murderous spree that shocked the world. Witnesses testified that they attended scenes in which men and women were dismembered, disemboweled, and their hearts used for ritual food. Far from apologizing for its established complicity in such barbaric cruelties, spokesmen for the Kremlin in the United Nations demanded that the United States be condemned for rescuing some of the trapped victims, black and white, from this fate.

       As a practical matter, on its own terms of expediency, the official rejection of ethical standards has taken a heavy toll from the Soviet regime itself. Lacking a moral compass, the Soviets have written a record of blunders and depravities paid for in economic losses, destruction of irreplaceable brains and skills, loss of popular respect, loathing for the system on the part of the new generations.

       A corrupt autocracy, both by example and from the need to escape its exactions, has bred corruption in the people. By falsifying statistics, concealing and lying about simple facts, it has taught its subjects to lie and falsify. Hence the shocking dimensions of theft of state property, bribery, faked bookkeeping, disregard of law: matters that are constantly exposed and bewailed by the Kremlin's own press. Hence political and moral decay within the ruling party likewise admitted and inveighed against in this press. Day after day the leaders plead for discipline and dedication among their followers, attacking (to quote a recent Soviet document) the "schizophrenics, hypocrites, self-servers, windbags, eye-washers, demagogues" in the party concerned only with "their own personal well-being." (381)

       In a time of ferocious purges, Maxim Gorki was implored to intercede with the Kremlin, where his influence was enormous, for literary friends dying in dungeons or awaiting execution. Not only did he refuse, but he used the occasion to express publicly his sympathy for the prison wardens and executioners. "People whose historical duty it is to kill some beings in order to save others," he wrote, "are martyrs, and my conscience will never allow me to condemn them." It was a degrading affair: the champion of the denizens of the "lower depths" championing the police and firing squads! If the once warm-hearted humanitarian could be so corrupted in the climate of immoralism, what did it do to lesser men?

       Indeed it is proof of the underlying moral potential of the Russian peoples that, in the fifth decade of life under Nechayev-Leninist oppression, they still harbored "old-fashioned" human feelings. As soon as the Stalin terror subsided a little, after the despot's death, we saw it in the writings of young poets and in the eagerness with which the new soul-searching was taken up by youth generally. The instincts for decency had not atrophied; they were thawing out. In endless ways the more articulate and more daring showed, and continue to show, that they have hearts attuned to love and charity and respect for life.

       Inevitably the reign of immoralism in one country, its rationale for "acting wickedly," spilled over into the surrounding world. Once they accepted communism in theory, men and women managed to accept and even defend its excesses in practice. This was true not only of outright party members bat of a broad periphery of sympathizers, those whom Stalin called his "useful idiots" abroad.

       And that, too, must be listed, along with the orgies of savagery in the name of good causes in so many places. (382) Communism has fed and fattened and spurred on "the monster of violence that stalks the unhappy twentieth century," as Allen Drury calls it in his latest novel.

       Such are the appalling costs of fifty years of Soviet dictatorship—a sketchy and inadequate summary, yet sufficient to underline the folly of evaluating supposed "progress" without considering the price paid by the Russian peoples and all mankind.

       The New "moderation" after Stalin has been so blown up by wishful hoping that it has induced waves of euphoria in some quarters. There is loose talk of "liberalization," though the Kremlin mocks the word and dreads the idea. In truth the Soviet Union remains a closed and maximally policed society. Not a dent has been made in the regime's monopoly of political power.

       The dictatorship itself, eager to establish the continuity of its reign from Lenin to date, does not rest its claims of "miraculous success" on the post-Stalin or post-Khrushchev period, but on the entire half-century. The judgment of history, similarly, will be based on everything that has transpired in these fifty years.

       The half-centennial anniversary touched off a flood of articles, newspaper serials, special issues of magazines in the West. I have read the most conspicuous of these in the American press. Too many of them, alas, seemed under a psychological compulsion to put the best face possible on the Soviet phenomenon. Large parts of their material were based on "interviews" with Soviet citizens, all of whom, by predictable coincidence, expressed themselves as content with their lot and with communism. The assumption that the Kremlin's subjects, who hesitate to reveal their true feelings to their own families, would take foreign reporters into confidence is deeply naive.

       This anniversary, journalism rarely gave a detailed, uninhibited accounting of the hideous costs of the Soviet half-century. Even the more realistic reports were satisfied with generalized allusions to "great sacrifices," without spelling out the grim facts as fully as they spelled out the claimed "miracles" of achievement. Few seemed aware of the long martyrdom of the Russian peoples or could spare a word of compassion for the myriad victims. (383)