PARTISAN REVIEW
559
The applause continued for eleven minutes, because no one wanted to be
seen by the
NKVD
men posted in the hall, as ceasing to applaud. "Then after
eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike
expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where
had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man,
everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel
had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. ... That same
night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him
on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form
206, the final document of the interrogation, his interpreter reminded him:
'Don't every be the first to stop applauding!' "
What I have written above about communism as a religious anti-religion
in which the dictator takes the place of both a Pope (who represents God who
is the proletariat) and also is God (since the proletariat have no voice in all
this) applies of course only to those to whom the Party is a religious anti–
religious Church. It doesn't apply to the masses of people who were Russians
before they were communists, or members of some other nationality before
they were Russians, or kulaks, or peasants, or engineers, or Cadets, or old–
style intellectuals. Millions of them were arrested for the reason that they
could be easily cast in the role of class enemies and thus blamed for the
mistakes of the communists or for their failure to carry out totally unrealiza–
ble programmes. The classic example of members of the community who
could be regarded as potentially hostile outsiders and so blamed for all mis–
takes in their very important work was those necessary technicians of the
revolution, the engineers. Solzhenitsyn explains that they were always re–
garded with suspicion.
. . . We never did trust the engineers-and from the very first years
of the Revolution we saw to it that those lackeys and servants of former
capitalist bosses were kept in line by healthy suspicion and surveillance
by the workers ... However during the reconstruction period, we did
permit them to work in our industries, while the whole force of the class
assault was turned against the intelligentsia.... But the more our
economic leadership matured ... the more the number of plans in–
creased and the more those plans overlapped and conflicted with one
another, the clearer became the engineers' basic commitment to wreck–
ing, their insincerity, slyness, venahty. The Sentinel of the Revolution
narrowed its eyes with even greater vigilance-and wherever it directed its
narrow gaze it immediately discovered a nest of wreckers.
However although engineers when submitted to interrogation, sleepless–
ness and torture, could be made to confess, in their confessions they only took
the blame for their inability to fulfill impossible goals set by planners. This
