22
PARTISAN REVIEW
only too happy to seize upon my statements as long as they fitted in
with your ideas, as long as you could make capital of them. And in
the same way, today, this incompetence of mine you would never
have held against me had I only praised the U.S.S.R., and declared
that everything there was going rapturously well.
All of this in no way alters the fact (and this is the only thing
that matters to me) that subsequently the commissions of inquiry set
up in the Congo confirmed all my observations. So now, the quantity
of evidence which keeps coming my way, the reports which I have
been able to read, the stories of impartial observers (however great
"friends of the Soviet Union" they are, or were before they went
there to look at it), together bear witness to the reality of my picture
of the Soviet Union, together reinforce my fears for it ....
One of the most legitimate objections made to my
Return from
the U.S.S.R.
is that it seems to lay too much stress on intellectual
questions, which one must be willing to see relegated to second place,
so long as other, more pressing problems remain unsolved. The reason
for this is that I had felt obliged to include the few speeches I had
been persuaded to make in Russia, and which had given rise to some
controversy. In such a little book these speeches took up too much
space and drew attention to themselves. They date for the most part
from the beginning of my trip, from a time when I still believed (yes,
I was that naive) that in the Soviet Union it was possible to speak
seriously about culture and to debate straightforwardly, from a time
when I did not yet realize how primitive and uncertain the social
equilibrium was.
But I protest the attitude which has insisted on regarding
what I said as the mere special pleading of a literary man.
When I spoke of intellectual freedom, I meant something much more
general. Science is compromising itself quite as badly as literature by
its complaisance to authority.
Such-and-such a scholar finds himself forced to repudiate a
theory in which he believed but which had a not-quite-orthodox
look. Such-and-such a member of the Academy of Science disavows
"his former errors," since they "were susceptible of being used by
fascism"-so he himself has just declared in public
(Izvestia,
Decem-
ber 28, 1936). Such a man is compelled to admit the veracity of
charges launched, under orders, by a journal like
Izvestia,
which
smells out in his researches the dreadful symptoms of "counter- revolu-
tionary delirium."
Eisenstein is halted in the middle of his work. He must
acknowledge his "errors," admit that he has made a mistake and that
the new film, which he has been two years getting ready and on
