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pOSltIon and in the spirit of Lenin, all our sciences, including the
physical sciences." No one had ever dared reply to him without
risking his neck. But there was no M.V.D. at Amsterdam to protect
Kolman from the retorts of those whom he had abused.
Lord Samuel was the first to reply to Kolman, contrasting
his
tone and spirit with the conciliatory approach taken by other speakers
on the program. Then Bertrand Russell arose. He began by asking
Kolman to take home a message: "When you return to Prague, Mr.
Kolman, tell your employers that the next time they see fit to send
a representative to an International Congress of Philosophy, they
would accomplish more
if
they sent someone not so crude.
If
we
must listen to propaganda, we prefer to hear it on a little higher
level."
Addressing himself to the audience, he continued: "Mr. Kolman
has told us at great length that 'higher values' exist in the Soviet
Union. He has not, unfortunately, told us in what these values consist
and what makes them 'higher.' Consequently, I am thrown back
on the principle of induction to get his meaning. I gather, then, he
is saying that the complete absence of freedom of speech, press and
assembly is a higher value than their presence. He must also mean
that the creation of artificial famines in which millions of lives are
lost is another value of a high order. And presumably he must hold
that the existence of slave labor and concentration camps from the
Arctic to the Caucasus is a third value of considerable magnitude.
However, he has not offered a scintilla of evidence that these are
genuine values and that they are higher in the human scale than the
practices which prevail in the West.
If
he can prove that they are
really high human values instead of what they appear to be-ruthless
means of enforcing the most horrible regime of terror in human
his–
tory-I shall
be
the first person to be convinced."
The third speaker to question Kolman made a few
points
in
short order. He first asked how Kolman could assert there was any
kind of democracy in the Soviet Union in the absence of political
democracy, and charged him with confusing democracy with equal–
ity. "One can have an equality in bondage as in freedom." Second,
he showed that Kolman's conception of a party philosophy and its
privileged character provided the premises for a continuous purge in
the
arts
and sciences. In
this
connection he cited the case of the
