PARTISAN REVIEW
So now at last it is to melt
this extravagant iceberg
in
the midst of Prague
one-tenth of which
floats on the city's rooftops
and nine-tenths are within us
Slowly
without cease
the heavy turbid water
snakes forward
In the moraine underneath
each of us can find
his foundation stone"
575
To the new generation, the Stalinist epoch is history and Stalin
the name of a man whose picture they were told by their teachers to
tear out or paste over in their history books until new books could be
printed. Of cou rse, aspects of Stalinism have surviyed, and where they
have been a bolished they can be revived, often with the same effect. In
Poland itself in
1968,
even students who suspected their own roommates
of working for the police were open with me; by
1970
I found many
of them worried about meeting a foreign writer, and not a few refus–
ing to do so.
But this is, I think, a matter of outward behavior, and not, as it
was for many people in the fifties, of inner psychology. Both enthusiasms
and fears reach only so far down. The same found at ion stones cannot
be laid again. In the economy and in politics, versions of Stalinism may
appeal to smaller or larger groups in the Party. But the demiurgic aura
of a Stalin and the passions of his world are unlikely to be reborn
1Il
the lifetime of the new generation of East Europeans.
Of the two main reasons, one is that the parties Stalin put in
power can no longer claim any rights to the heroic passions and author–
ity that Stalin abused. "I want to ask what comrades in the highest
positions did to prevent the development of the personality cult," a
Youth League member who had obviously been a sincere Communist
said in a long letter published in
Po Prostu,
the famous Warsaw student
weekly, in March
1956":
"It
was not my fault if Stalin exalted himself
2 Antonin Brousek, "The Monument,"
New Writing in Czechoslovakia,
ed.
George Theiner (London: Penguin, 1969 ),
p. 202.
3
Po Prost u,
25
March
1956,
in
East Europe,
Vol. V, No.6. (New York:
June 1956 ), p. 39.
