WRITERS IN EXILE
489
someone asked all of us what is likely to happen. We didn't an–
swer, because we didn't know.
I would say that the main difference between dissident be–
havior and ideas in the Soviet Union and its Polish counterpart
is that the Polish try to give hope to their people, they try to offer
some prospects for Polish workers and peasants; and that is why
this movement in Poland was so massive, intensive, heroic, and
partly successful. From this point of view I would like to talk of
the relation of ideology to politics, especially in the dissident
movement in the Soviet Union.
In my opinion, the most important movement in the Soviet
Union was the human rights movement.
It
was hard to publicize
cases of oppression, but there were many achievements. It has
been part of the philosophy of the human rights movements (and
I support it) to separate problems of rights and laws from politi–
calor historical evaluations and perspectives. We did not have
any political ideas about how to change the situation, but we did
recognize the importance of making connections with all the dis–
sident groups and tendencies that were united by the idea of hu–
man rights. Now, this is not enough. We have to think of the fu–
ture. We know that in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the
official ideology is Communism; we also know that this Com–
munist ideology is really dead-that is, nobody believes in Com–
munism. Maybe there are enthusiasts in other parts of the
world-in Italy and France-but there are none in the Soviet
Union. Yet this ideology remains powerful there. How did this
happen?
The answer, I think, does not lie in whether people believe
or not, but in the fact that people have lost all hope. They believe
that there is nothing they can do. They are despairing. The main
tragedy, perhaps, is that the Soviet people are
too
skeptical. With
their loss of faith in Communism, they lost the ability to have any
faith at all. Their main ideology is not Communism but an–
ti-Communism. People know that they live in horrible condi–
tions, that they participate in the lying all around them-they all
know this, from the first secretary of the Communist Party to the
most obscure collective farmer. But this negative view of Soviet
reality is not productive. It is not a useful substitute for the dead
ideology of Communism. It is not enough to tell "the truth"
