52
PARTISAN REVIEW
of my physical powers. The doctor visited me twice daily, yet weeks
passed until, on August 15, 1944, I was finally released. At first I
was not sent to the academy but to a camp hospital, for I had lost
consciousness after a dragging foot march of two miles in fresh
air. A young Russian woman doctor took infinite pains with me and
many others. After my recovery I worked in a factory for three
months before going to the Academy.
To eliminate war, to exterminate militarism-these demands
related immediately to my personal life. Here I was shown a new
way to accomplish this. At that time I still did not know of Lenin's
doctrine of just and unjust wars, and when I did get to know it, the
difference between pacifism and a struggle for peace became clear
to me. The just war is one that serves in the end to remove war
altogether. Not until much later did I recognize that Soviet domina–
tion of the world is a prerequisite for this, and even then militarism
could not be abolished for some time. Because of the "capitalist
remnants in the consciousness of men" an army would be needed
for the suppression of the former exploiters and those infected by
them, the inmates of the labor camps. Therefore one could not
expect the withering away of the state under Communism, as Stalin
proved so conclusively in his ingenious development of Lenin's
theory. It was later still that I got to know the rules and regulations
governing service in the Soviet Army; they far surpass the Prussian
reglement.
At about this time I first saw the heavily guarded prison
trains in the railroad stations at Kursk and Belgorod; behind the
small, barred windows crowded clusters of pale-faced women and
unshaven men. Capitalists?
The doctrine of the two types of war was presented to us in the
Academy at Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, by the old professional
revolutionary Wilhelm Zaisser, the General Gomez of the Spanish
Civil War. "I am no philosopher," the huge, broad-shouldered
colossus once said to me when he suggested that I study Lenin's
philosophical notebooks and report to him on the significance of
these posthumous publications. He preferred to lecture on the
strategy and tactics of the Stalinist theory of war, using concrete
examples from the course of the war.
When he had me removed from the Academy after I had pro-
