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in its name. By the same token, the myth of the Party also relieved of
responsibilty those executing its presumed will. This included the early
generation of highly-educated idealists, revolutionaries, as for instance Lev
Kamenev, who characteristically "shared the near mystical belief that the
Party was the sole embodiment of correct thinking. And ... [shared] the
desire to root out any thinking held to be incorrect." Eventually he too
perished, a victim of one of the show trials. For them there was "no pos–
sibility of salvation outside the faith" as Adam Hochchild wrote, following
an interpretation originally put forward by Arthur Koestler in
Darkness at
Noon.
Even so it remains
One of the great psychological puzzles ... why so many intelligent,
educated Communist Party members ... looked into the abyss, saw
the arrests, the midnight executions, the suppression of all dissent.
recalled the reign of the guillotine that had followed the French rev–
olution, vainly spoke out in protest - and then camc back loyally to
the Party fold.
Ideological convictions (or some primitive variant of them) were also
helpful in later times, as the remarks of Dimi tri Tokaryev, the commander
of the murder squad at the Katyn Forest (where 15,000 Polish officers
were killed on Stalin's orders, indicate. David Pryce-Jones related that
Tokaryev justified his actions "on the grounds that these Poles were class
enemies ... '{ am proud of the work that I did in defense of our revolu-
tion.' . .." Several decades later, "Judge Zubiets .. . had sentenced the
dissident Irena Ratushinskaya to prison for her poetry and religious faith.
'Times were different then ... [he said] I did my duty.'"
Of the more recent (or perhaps middle) generation of functionaries
Pavel Sudoplatov, a former high-ranking KGB official wrote in a similar
spirit: "We must recall ... the mentality of idealistic Communists in the
later forties and early fifties
. Party business was sacred . . ." Vladimir
Farkas, who used to be a high-ranking officer in the Hungarian political
police, recalled the part played by the idea of the Party in betrayals which
would otherwise have been difficult to justity:
I first observed in the case of my father [minister of defense and
member of the "troika" of four running the country] and Janos Kadar
[head of the Party for almost three decades] the capability of aban–
doning former comrades-in-arms, their mistreatment and the hideous
point of view - which may be compared to that previaling during the
Spanish Inquisition - that whatcver they said was the word of the
Party, and the truth of the Party , because the Party is never mistaken.
