DANIEL BELL
535
The emotional shock in reading about Kronstadt was reinforced by
the factual details about the Communist cooperation with the Nazis
in Berlin in 1932 , the dreadful theory of "social fascism," in which
the Comintern proclaimed that not the Nazis , but the Social Demo–
crats, were the primary enemies of the Communists. Added to this
were the appalling scenes in February 1934, when the Socialist party
held a huge meeting in Madison Square Garden in New York to
demonstrate solidarity with the Austrian Socialists (who had risen in
armed conflict against the Heimwehr of Dollfuss), only to have that
meeting violently disrupted by the Communists, who were literally
carrying out, in action, the theory of social fascism.
All this, and more, is history. But it is not the history of the "vic–
tors ." And being the "victors" does not explain the recurrent appeal
of communism, long after the events of Kronstadt were repeated
again and again . The explanation - following the repeated disillu–
sionments-has been given many times, and recently most vividly
and convincingly by Jorge Semprun in
The Autobiography
oj
Frederico
Sanchez,
the experiences of a Communist intellectual told in novelis–
tic form. Semprun joined the Spanish Communist Party-in-exile in
1947 . Had he not known of the shooting of Anarchists in Barcelona,
the violent attacks on the quasi-Trotskyist
P.O .V .M.,
the murder–
ous role of the French Communist leader Andre Marty in ordering
the execution of "oppositionists" within the International Brigade,
the sinister role of the
G.P.V.?
No matter. "When all is said and
done," Semprun writes about his alter ego, "the day-to-day aspects of
politics have always bored you; politics has interested you only as
risk and as total commitment." And when, in the autumn of 1952,
Semprun read in
L 'Humaniti
that at the Slansky trial , Josef Frank,
the assistant secretary-general of the Communist Party of Czecho–
slovakia , had confessed to having worked under Gestapo orders in
Buchenwald , a "strange chill ran down his spine ," for Frank had
been his comrade in Buchenwald, living side by side with him for
two years, and he knew "immediately . .. with that brutal physical
certainty tha t tangible truths bring with them . . . that the accusation
was false." Yet :
You said nothing, however. Nowhere d id you proclaim Frank's inno–
cence, or the false ness of the accusation brou ght against h im. Had you
proclaimed that innocence you would no doub t have ended up being
expelled from the party. You decided to remain in the party. You pre–
ferred living the lie of the accusation against Frank within the party to
