THE DOUBLE CRISIS
try to explain the break as the result of personal interest or economic
pressures. By all the evidence, these explanations are absurd. Hem–
ingway, Andre Gide, and so many others were made neither more nor
less rich by breaking with the party, nor had they been by following it.
I believe that the explanation lies in this: the anticlerical cam–
paigns which the Stalinists launch from time to time have concealed
the obvious truth that for many intellectuals the Communist myth
is the final development of the Christian myth.
I know very well that insofar as the proletariat has recourse to
dictatorship, it turns away from the Christian ideal. But Marx thought
of this dictatorship only as a provisional and necessary means for
achieving social justice, without which there could not be, in his view,
any true justice.
Furthermore, negative attitudes played a major role, after 1920,
in the European democracies. Our earlier radicals were, first of all,
anticlerical; and our intellectual fellow-travelers, antifascists. I never
belonged to the Communist Party, but I was President of the World
Committee against Fascism. I had the fortunate duty, with Gide, of
conveying to Hitler the protest against the vicious condemnation of
Dimitrov for the Reichstag Fire. '(What is the ghost of Petkov think–
ing on that subject?) The violent break between the artists and the
bourgeoisie, which began much earlier, inevitably led almost all of
our artists and intellectuals to a passionately antibourgeois point of
view. In their eyes, it was impossible to excuse the class which left
Verlaine and Gauguin abandoned in hospitals. It is not absurd to
say that they embodied their hopes in the proletariat.
We must not forget that in the early years of the Russian revo–
lution, Maiakovsky was a national poet, and Chagall did the decora–
tions for the Jewish Theater in Moscow. The ideals of artistic free–
dom and social freedom fused in a world which itself seemed heroic
and apocalyptic. But from year to year Soviet realities forced those
who knew them to take note of the break between these two myths.
The Cheka was first conceived as a terrible necessity; the GPU after–
wards and now the NKVD appear more and more like a fourth estate.
I mean by this that the police in totalitarian states are not merely
a larger version of the kind of police found in other countries. They
are an organism peculiar to, and bound up with, the totalitarian state,
just as parliaments were a part of nineteenth-century democracy.
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