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man" for carrying through the Great Purge. ("From the Commu–
nist viewpoint, Stalin could have taken no other course, so long
as he believed he was right. . . . That was the horror of the Purge–
that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly.") This is sheer
fantasy. What evidence is there that the Purge advanced the cause of
Communism, that it was in any sense "objectively necessary," or that
Stalin was under any illusions as to its effect?
It
should be obvious that
the Purge strengthened Stalin's personal dictatorship at the cost of con–
siderably weakening the Communist movement the world over.
It
shook
the faith of millions in the Soviet myth. (For that matter, Chambers
himself might still be numbered among the faithful if not for the Purge,
the direct cause of his break.) After all, no policy that Stalin promul–
gated
after
the Purge could have been seriously resisted, let alone
blocked, by the abject and beaten Old Guard of the Revolution. Not
the necessities, real or imaginary, of the revolutionary cause but the
drive for unlimited power on the part of Stalin and his faction, who
have never hesitated to sacrifice the good of the cause for their own
advantage, is the one plausible explanation of the Purge.
Chambers appears to have quit the Communist Party cherishing
some of the same illusions with which he entered it. He was certainly
close enough to the Stalinist oligarchy to have learned that it has long
ago ceased to regard power merely as a means-least of all as a means
of bringing to realization "the vision of man," as he calls it-but as an
end in itself. The present Stalinist elite, which raised its leader to the
supreme heights and which he, in turn, organized and disciplined in
his own inimitable fashion, no longer cares to remember the socialist
idealism of the generation that made the Revolution. It has been taught
to despise that idealism; and Chambers' portrait of Colonel Bykov, his
Russian superior in the "apparatus," is perfectly illustrative of this
psychology. Whatever the nature of their rationalizations, those people
now act more and more like the totalitarians in George Orwell's novel,
1984, whose program comes to only one thing: power entirely for its
own sake. "Power is not a means; it is an end.. .. The object of perse–
cution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
power is power."
The original idea of Communism accounts for the behavior of
real live Communists no more and no less than the original idea of
Christianity can account for the behavior of real live Christians in the
centuries when they wielded temporal power; the Great Purge, the
slave-labor camps and the other horrors of the Soviet system can no
more be deduced from the classic texts of socialism than the murderous
