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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
novels about Goya, the American Revolution, and the last part of the
Josephus trilogy.
In recent years, the Feuchtwanger affair and the writings of other
Westerners who have whitewashed Stalin and the trials have provided
ammunition for a number of Russian writers on the extreme right of the
ideological spectrum. Their argument runs, in brief, as follows : The Rus–
sian people cannot be made responsible in any way for the "cult of the
individual." Stalinism was a world-wide phenomenon "from Madrid to
Shanghai." If such humanists and astute observers of human behavior like
Barbusse , Rolland, and Feuchtwanger, who were under no compulsion
and pressure, totally misjudged the real state of affairs, why blame the
poor Russians who were living in a totalitarian dictatorship?
The real explanation, as I see it, is simpler. Rolland, Feuchtwanger,
and the others were indeed students of human behavior, but their
experience was limited in the main to France and Germany. I don't
think they ever understood England and America - let alone the Soviet
Union. Their political interest was not very deep, although they did
sense that Europe was on the eve of a war. This theme occurs repeatedly
both in Rolland's
Diary
and in Feuchtwanger's
Moscow
1937. Having to
choose between Hitler and Stalin, they opted for the latter. Seen in this
light, any criticism of Stalin and the Soviet Union was tantamount to
weakening the anti-Fascist alliance. Feuchtwanger feared that the West
was no longer capable of resisting Hitler. At the end of his book, he
wrote that Western civilization was in decline, that it could no longer
take decisive action and was cowardly and hypocritical. The very air in
the West was poisoned; in Russia it was fresh. So he concluded this
"report for his friends" with three cheers for the Soviet Union , despite
all the problems as yet unresolved there . Stalin and his people were the
only hope for stemming the tide of N azi barbarism. The argument is a
little shaky. The decapitation of the Red Army was certainly not the best
way to prepare the Soviet Union for war, and in any case Stalin did not
believe that a military conflict with Nazi Germany was near. The real
enemy was the West.
It
is not my assignment here to examine the validity of the arguments
of our two fellow travelers. All that matters in this context is that they
genuinely believed that the West was finished and that the Soviet Union
was the only bulwark against a Nazi victory. As for the rest, Romain
Rolland died in 1944 at Lake Geneva; Feuchtwanger moved to Pacific
Palisades, California, despite the fact that he had so much liked the
Moscow air. He never went back to the Soviet Union, but he never
recanted either. In a sampler of his work that Feuchtwanger published
in
