558
STEPHEN SPENDER
This is, of course, the heart of the matter. The word "individual" is in itself
very revealing. They did not have and moreover, they would have considered
it ideologically wrong to have, an individual point of view. Was not indi–
vidualism always coupled with the epithet "Bourgeois"-did not one say
"bourgeois individualism?" They did not have a point of view which was
outside the communist one, because they had made that the center of their
universe.
To say that communism is a religion strikes me in some ways as odious
and vulgar. But if you say that it is a religious anti-religion, that is to say, a
religion of man instead of God, with a human ideology made an absolute,
and, with a Pope who,-because there is no God-represents that section of
humanity-the proletariat-whose existence and interests are considered
absolute-then the identity of these opposites works very well.
The thought that the representative of the humanity-proletariat who
-because there is no God-replaces God might be Satan is unthinkable. Or
even if it does occur in certain minds as a faint questioning doubt, it has to be
dismissed. And when one thinks of the Russian Revolution, the scandal of its
being revealed at such an early stage of its history would be too appalling:
appalling in itself, and appalling too because it would mean the triumph of
the forces of evil, the capitalists.
It
would mean that for the first time in
history the communist anti-god God had appeared and proved to be the devil.
It
is impossible to read the
Gulag Archipelago
without feeling that from the
communist point of view one is reading a description of a secular Hell. The
fundamental sin, which includes all other sins, ofthose who are in the Inferno
is pride. They have acted from their "individual point of view" and set them–
selves apart from the will which is the center of their universe, and in obeying
which they could alone find their peace. Their attitudes-or those of which
they are suspected-are defined as crimes against the state. But often the
crime-if it exists at all-is a thought, a memory, an ·inherited disposition or
characteristic which in hypothetical circumstances might lead to crime. Mem–
bers of religious groups, of separate nationalities, of old pre-Revolutionary
families harbor wishes in their hearts which might lead to anti-Soviet ac–
tivities; and that is enough to jail them for ten years or more.
They have not loved Stalin. One ofSolzhenitsyn's best anecdotes is ofthe
director of the paper factory who failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for
Stalin at a meeting in Moscow Province:
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was
called for. Of course, everyone stood ul? (just as everyone had leaped to
his feet during the conference at mention of his name). The small hall
echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three minutes,
four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause, rising to an ovation,"
continued.
