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PARTISAN REVIEW
Stalinist Social Democratic party. Both of these parties were detested by
Stalin and Hitler alike. And the two dictators' shared motive in Austria
was to use the "anti-fascist" campaign to provoke them both into mutual
destruction.
In Vienna, the anti-Stalinist Marxists, socialist city-dwellers mainly,
were led by Otto Bauer. The arch-conservative countryside of the
"clerico-fascists" was led by the Austrian premier, Engelbert Dollfuss.
Note well: "clerico-fascist" though he was, Dollfuss was every bit as
roundly detested by Hitler as the Marxist Bauer was hated by Stalin. That
is the crucial point. Both dictators wanted both parties destroyed. Neither
Dollfuss nor Bauer had ever done his act of submission to his respective
totalitarian leader, and the aim of the campaign in Austria was simultane–
ously to serve both the Nazis and the Soviets by destroying them both.
They only seemed to take sides with their apparent ideological allies. A
year later Dollfuss would be assassinated not by communists but by the
Nazis. Stalinist "help" tore Bauer's non-Stalinist party to shreds. A cam–
paign that would destabilize Bauer and Dollfuss was therefore a welcome
event in Hitler's eyes, and Stalin's secret service eagerly took on the job.
In 1934, Dollfuss had set out to tear down the very real achievements of
Bauer's Social Democratic government. At this moment, Stalin saw the
opportunity to wreck the hated Social Democrats under the guise of help.
Gibarti and Orlov set out to create a high-visibility "anti-fascist"
campaign, mingling propaganda and covert action, sabotaging and dis–
crediting Bauer's non-Stalinists under the appearance of "aid" while gen–
erating one of the dominant and most destructive political cliches of the
1930s. This was the notion that the social democratic left, and the
democracies in general, were too weak, too ambivalent, too much of a
divided mind really to fight Hitler. For that, decent people would have to
turn to the hard left, and to Stalin. But they would be brought to this
change by an "anti-fascist" campaign that in reality posed no challenge at
all to Hitler and was in fact perfectly welcome in his eyes.
This lie about the feebleness of democracy, and the campaign that
promoted it, were a great success. By the time the effort was over, the
combined brutalities of the
apparat
and the Austrian clerico-fascists left
Austria's entire non-Stalinist left dispersed, converted to Stalinism, or in
jail. Many of Bauer's naive young supporters ran for their lives to their
"friends" in Russia: the Soviets gave them a parade, then sent them to the
gulag. Simultaneously, and to the Nazis' delight, Dollfuss was destabilized
and discredited as well, and by the end of the year the Nazis had
assassinated him. He was replaced by a bewildered, weak, utterly intimi–
dated government of the anti-Nazi right, cowering in an effective squeeze
between the two dictators. And when Hitler at last moved into Austria in
