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PARTISAN REVIEW
was never committed with all of myself to Communism. I know this by
comparing myself with some who were. The tragic figures were those
very poor boys and girls who found in Communism a hope, a way of life,
a family, a university - a future. Some came out of the poor families of
London's East End, and joined the Young Communist League. For them
Communism was everything, and when they lost their faith they were
being deprived of everything that was best in life. Some died. Some had
serious breakdowns. They were - but really - never the same again.
The question should be put like this:
if
a person takes on afaith
-
politi–
calor religious
-
surrendering individuality in an inner act of submission to au–
thority, then how long does it take to regain emotional
(I am deliberately not
saying intellectual)
autonomy? There must be some psychological law that de–
termines this, which has nothing to do with reason, with the rational level of a per–
son.
In my case it took years to shed it all, and I was not committed with
all of myself, as some people I knew were - and a few still are. That to
me is the real question, yet to be answered. A person says: I
left
when the
Soviet Union invaded Finland ... because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact ...
because of the suppression of the rising in Berlin ... because of the inva–
sion of Hungary ... because I learned the truth about the Purges and
Collectivization. But meanwhile they are still subject to this psychological
law, whatever it is.
More influential in the long run than all these attitudes, some defined
and debated, others implicit, was something persuasive that united them
all, the atmosphere of sentiment created by the 1917 Revolution, and
which has remained to this day, the Soviet Union as an idea, as the great
exemplar. A generation, two, three, in the West, have absorbed an atti–
tude towards the Soviet Union which seems able to survive any number
of "revelations." Exactly at the time when Gorbachev was explaining to
the whole world about the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, literally and
morally, a group of young people were demonstrating outside a theater in
London on the grounds that the play was "anti-Soviet." But the play's
statements were mild compared to the truths emerging from the debates
in their Alma Matter. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, there
were many newspapers who would not criticize, and many did not begin
to mention the Soviet atrocities in that country until the Soviet Union
criticized itself This phenomenon, the long-lasting, the pervasive myth of
the Soviet Union's role as a beacon to all humankind, can be very well
studied in the story of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and media atti–
tudes to it.
In our little group, in 1943, 1944, the inner "contradictions" - a
word we used continually - began to tear it apart almost as soon as it was
created. Frank Cooper was the destructive yeast. Gottfried and Ken, de-
