SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U.S.S.R.
and treats those who do not join in as enemies. Often enough it
happens that Stalin adopts as his own some measure suggested by
somebody else; but first, the better to appropriate the proposal, he
gets rid of the proposer. This is Stalin's way of being right. So that
very soon he shall find himself surrounded exclusively by men who
can hardly annoy him with critical ideas since they shall have no
ideas at all. Such is the traditional fate of despots: to be surrounded
not by values but by an empty servility.
Whatever the issue which brings before any Soviet court work-
ers of any category, whatever the justice may be of the workers'
cause, where is the lawyer who will dare defend them if the rulers
have decided on condemnation?
And the thousands deported ... those who have not bowed in
the way prescribed.
I do not have to imagine myself in their boots as M., the other
day, was saying, "The devil! It could happen to me, too.... " These
victims I see, I hear, I feel right near me. It is their gagging cries
which wake me in the night; it is their silence which today dictates
these lines. Because I have dreamed about these martyrs I have had
to write words against which you protest, and whatever assistance my
book can bring them means far more to me than all the praises and
imprecations of
Pravda.
Nobody intervenes on their behalf. All the right-wing journals
simply exploit their fate to censure a regime which the reactionaries
detest; the Barbusses and Rollands, those who love liberty and justice,
who fight in behalf of men like Thaelmann, are silent; around the
martyrs to criticism the immense proletarian mass is blind.
But when I become indignant, you explain (and still in the
name of Marx!) that these definite and undeniable evils (I refer not
only to the deportations but also to the profound poverty of the
workers, the enormous disproportion of incomes, the reconstituted
privileges, the furtive reestablishment of classes, the liquidation of
Soviets,the progressive liquidation of everything conquered by 1917)
you show great skill in explanations as you point out that these evils
are inevitable, and that you yourself, as an intellectual inured to the
contradictions (the sophistries) of the dialectic, regard the evils as
provisionalpauses on the road to a greater good. You, the intelligent
communist, know of these evils and deem it best to hide them from
thosewho, being less intelligent than yourself, are very likely to dis-
approve....
27
