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PARTISAN REVIEW
observation about Andrei Gromyko applies to many of them: " ... the
Party became ... his mother, his father, his teacher, his conscience, and his
master. He was never to question its ideals, its authority, its moral purity
..." The Party could be divorced from the errors of particular human
beings who belonged to it, led it, and who were mortal; it transcended the
life-span of the individual. Kennan further observed:
.. . for anything undertaken in response to the will of the collectivi–
ty (in this instance the Party), no matter how distasteful, no matter
how unattractive from the standpoint of individual morali ty, there
could be no guilt, no questioning, no remorse. And if it turned out
that what the Party required to be done ... involved apparent injus–
tice or cruelty - well, one might regret that it was found necessary,
one might wish that it could have been otherwise; but it was not
one's own responsibility.
It was a part of Communist political culture - originating in the early
Soviet political practices and traditions - that, as Nathan Leites put it
... it became ... forbidden to admi t in public that any act of the Party
was regrettable ... All acts of the Party are presented in public as
entirely desirable.. . . [Moreover] the Party must be prepared to inflict
any amount of deprivation on any number of human beings if this
appears 'necessary' ... The refusal to use necessary bad means appears
to the Bolsehvik as an expression of stupidity ... or as imperfect ded–
ication to the great goal; or as self-centeredness which keeps one
more concerned wi th not touching dirt and not feeling guil t than
with transforming the world ...
George Lukacs, himself not involved in the dirty business of keeping
the system in power, had fully internalized this principle and expressed it
wi th great dari ty:
The highest duty for Communjst ethics is to accept the necessity of
acting immorally. This is the greatest sacrifice that the revolution
demands of us. The conviction of the true conunurust is that evil trans–
forms itself into bliss through the dialectics of historical evolution.
Especially helpful was the idea (for the Communist revolutionaries
and their successors) that there is and can be a radical discontinui ty
