508
PARTISAN REVIEW
for which the fellow-travelers come to such conferences? To get to–
gether in one room, to hear authoritative voices ringing with confirma–
tion of one's hopes, to see and perhaps for a moment talk to the leaders
after their oratorical performances, to be reassured by the august trustees
of the faith from overseas-this was the attraction of the conference.
Now it may be objected that all political movements must engage in
such ritual procedures, which is true; but the distinctive feature of
Stalinism, as of all totalitarian movements, is that these procedures be–
come the essence of the convocation of followers . For this ritual to be
satisfying to the participants, the managers of such a conference must
make certain that it moves with a minimum of disturbance and dissent,
a maximum of pleasant and smooth unanimity. The fellow-traveler's
half totalitarian mind wants to be soothed, to be immersed in a warm
bath of rhetorical reassurance. And this the conference managers could
not quite provide-the bath was there, but the temperature was er–
ratic. Which is why the audience applauded the Russians so hysterically:
they at least were reliable, undeviating, the real thing.
For the party fraction working behind the scenes, organizational
control of the conference was a quite easy matter. The larger the con–
ference, the less trouble a small minority has in controlling it. By its
very nature, such a conference attracts people who have neither the
intention nor the ability to raise serious problems or to participate active–
ly; they come for passive delights. Bound together by the Russian myth,
the participants are infinitely pliable; were they not, they would not
have come at all. (How can 3,000 people hold a conference, anyway?)
For the Stalinist managers the problem was not the mass of participants,
but the unpredictable speakers. So long as they can bank on the Rus–
sian myth and so long as they have cadres of hardworking anonymous
members, the Stalinists will always be able to control the mechanical
side of such conferences.
Besides, they have developed in the past twenty years a series of
highly skilled manipulative devices. The conference chairman, Harlow
Shapley, appointed a resolutions committee-and which delegate would
have thought to disturb the atmosphere of unity by suggesting that the
committee be elected? Shapley r,an the conference as if he were an old
party factionalist; how curious the way in which the fellow-traveler de–
lights in the vicarious sensations of regularity and discipline. At Prince–
ton I have argued with scientists who furiously insist that Shapley is
an independent intellectual and not a fellow-traveler, but if his behavior
at the Waldorf was not fellow-traveling, it was, for the Stalinists, a most
convenient kind of intellectual independence....
