516
. PARTISAN REVIEW
I wish to emphasize the error of those socialist leaders who,
though sufficiently informed, did not want either to see themselves
clearly or clearly to inform their parties. Undoubtedly they them–
selves were seduced by this sentimental attachment. When in 1937,
released from the prisons of the GPU, I published in Paris and New
York
Russia T wenty Years After,
I had a correspondence about this
book with the great Austrian Marxist, Otto Bauer, who found me
"too pessimistic." Most of the French socialists, bound by the Popular
Front to the CP, professed the same opinion. The Spanish socialists
and anarchists allowed the Republican Government to prohibit the
publication of this book by journals critical of the USSR. Trotsky
still upheld the "progressive role" of the latter. More recently, soon
after the liberation of France, the French militants estimated that
the greatest divergencies between the two "brother parties" had been
diminished. This blindness has led them to electoral defeat. At this very
moment, some writers of the Independent Labor Party praise the
policy of Stalin toward the colonial nationalities of the ancient Czarist
Empire. They have not seen the Kazaks die of famine, they have not
taken into account the autonomous governments that have been
destroyed, they ignore the destiny of the Bashkirs and Tartars during
the war....
If
socialism does not alter this absurd complacence to–
ward the darkest of despotisms, does not proclaim itself as the party
of human dignity, obviously it will only be crushed between the reac–
tionaries and the totalitarians.
The antisocialist nature of the Stalinist system is no longer to
be doubted. One must have a keen love of paradox to see in the
battle of Stalingrad the sequel to the capture of the Winter Palace
in 1917, and in the hangman of Lenin's associates, Lenin's successor.
A sociological datum that I hold irrefutable deserves more attention:
we see at the summit of the social hierarchy of the USSR a minority
of about 15 per cent of the population, adults and children, enjoying
material privileges. (This estimate was Trotsky's, several other wri–
ters', and my own before the war; the numerical importance of the
privileged minority has rather decreased during the war.)
If
on the
other hand we admit for the penal labor
in
the Soviet concentration
camps a figure varying between ten and fifteen millions of condemned
persons, the percentage of adults reduced to slavery is greater than
that of adults enjoying living conditions comparable on the whole to
those of the skilled worker in the United States.
The unimaginable inner weakness of Stalinist totalitarianism,
demonstrated by these percentages, makes less probable its victory
