400
PARTISAN REVIEW
must not be sought in the USSR (in a moment 1 shall say why)
but rather in the countries vassalized by the USSR, where totalitarian
rule is applied even more rigorously than in Russia. For in the USSR
devotion to the regime developed thanks only to a certain pre–
existing, often very sincere patriotism capable of slipping by degrees
and through trickery into total approval of the system that the
USSR is supposed to represent.
And this is indeed why there is no reason to expect a patriotic
unification among those
a~imilated
people. One cannot ask a
Hungarian, a Rumanian, a Pole to sacrifice himself body and soul
for the country that has conquered him. Their submission, obviously,
can only be the result of constraint and oppression involving the im–
possibility of showing one's feeling, for we know only too well what
that costs.
1 wrote in 1936: "I doubt if in any other country the mind
is less free, more bent over, more terrorized, more vassalized than in
the USSR." I no longer have any doubt of this today. But I am
willing to grant that the system of unification is much closer to
"perfection" in the USSR than the capitalist system is in the USA
at present. In the capitalist countries there still is considerable vacil–
lation and many weaknesses, of which the individual can fortunately
take advantage.
Furthermore, I have no illusion in
this
regard: that desire, that
will toward unification of thought does not belong to Communism
alone. We encounter it every time that power gives doctrine the
hope of working on minds and souls. Catholicism (and even occasion–
ally Protestantism and Judaism or Islamism) hoped to achieve a
general enforced uniformity without ever stopping to consider that
the accomplishing of such a process of leveling would be the end of
arts, letters, and sciences, of all development of thought. Never–
theless, so long as a Church does not hand over to the authorities
that represent it the means of coercion it possessed during the In–
quisition, for instance, the free-thinker is still allowed to shrug his
shoulders in regard to this or that dogma against which his reason
revolts without thereby incurring exile, torture, or death: the risk
of no longer being able to think at all rather than not to think
properly (others being there to think for him).
ANDRE GIDE
