ANTI-COMMUNISM
389
The crisis in Communism has been accompanied by an insistence
by Communist intellectuals on the anti-authoritarian, democratic and
fraternal elements in the Communist tradition. They have taken risks
to make their views known-risks rather more serious than the loss of
posts or preferment. A spiritual community has developed, often amongst
men and women who have never met; there are now many in the West
who are prepared to accept the dissident Communists as fellows–
despite the fact that these remain Communists. Quite apart from the
differing views held by Westerners as to the incidence and possibilities
of de-Stalinization in Communist society, it is hardly possible any
longer to depict Communist society as unredeemably black.
Some of the consequences of the crisis for anti-Communism merit
examination in greater detail. In 1956, Sartre said that de-Stalinization
would eventually de-Stalinize the de-Stalinizers. Khrushchev's extra–
ordinary performance at the Twenty-second Congress suggests that de–
Stalinization, while not necessarily an irreversible process, is one which
is
difficult to stop. A good deal of attention has been given to the
motives of the anti-Stalinist ex-Stalinists, rather less to the extent to
which in the Soviet Union itself the process may well escape their
control. The mobilization of sentiment against the Stalinist elements in
the Party involves a recourse to popular opinion as well. The explosions of
1953 in Germany and 1956 in Hungary and Poland cannot repeat them–
selves in the U.S.S.R.: the factor of national protest is missing. Yet there
is no reason to suppose that the process of de-Stalinization can be confined
to the Party and to the intelligentsia, with only occasional mutterings
amongst the people. The notion, entertained by some, of a relatively
peaceful de-Stalinization to be accomplished by (partial) concessions
from above, in response to (limited) pressures from below, is nonsense.
If
a genuine opposition emerges in the Soviet Union, it will define itself
through conflict. There will be strikes, demonstrations, violence in the
Soviet Union before the process can be completed. The very possibility
of such conflict, which need on no account pre-suppose an internal
attack on Soviet Communism but rather contradictory interpretations
of Communist legitimacy, has diminished the intellectual respectability
of those sorts of anti-Communism which insist upon the impossibility
of open political conflict in Communist states. More, the thesis of
limited and controlled de-Stalinization rests on a view of Soviet society
as so bureaucratized that no direct expressions of dissent can be expected
-a view which, to some extent, may reflect a projective judgment on
Western society itself.
The conflict between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties,
