52
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing themselves to it. They needed to help themselves with a dialectical view
of history. Communism, they argued, should be supported not for its own
sake but as a tool of Russia's national rnission. This way of thinking created
the widespread, innerly differentiated phenomenon of the so-called national
bolshevism-which originated among the Russian em.igd:s, formerly res–
olute enemies of bolshevism. Its main ideologist, Nikolai Ustrialov,
explained this as a Hegelianized gnosticism that openly challenged the com–
monsensical interpretation of events. The revolution, he argued, had a hidden
meaning: it was the most extreme expression of Russia 's defeat and at the
same time the beginn.ing of her resurrection through a rejuvenating move–
ment that had
to
be accepted as the national destiny. He ended up a victim
of his double-edged sword, but national bolshevism survived.
The early reception of
Tile Captive Mind
was dominated by sharp criti–
cism. Both communist believers and anti-conU11unist emigres saw Milosz's
report on life under the ConuTIunist regime as a sophisticated lie. The
ConU11unists defined it as a masterpiece of hostile propaganda, wh.iJe the emi–
gres treated it as an embellishment of the communist reality and a shameless
justification of opportunism. Both indignantly rejected the notion of spiritual
tyranny. For the Stalinists, communism was a liberation, whereas, for the emi–
gres, it was merely a system of external coercion. Both militant conununists
and old style anti-conU11Unists demanded clear-cut political conU1utments and
refused to understand the phenomena of dual consciousness and dual identity.
The emigre criticism of
TI,e
Captive Milld
sometimes was simply a moralistic
rejection of dialectical complexities. The best representative of this position
was Gustaw Herling-Grudzmski, a writer connected with the Paris magazine
Kultura
and the author of
TI1e IMJrld Report,
one of the best first-hand accounts
of the Soviet gulag before Solzhenitsyn.
In
his criticism of
77Ie Captive Milld,
he stubbornly repeated that communists had no power to enslave human
minds from within and could only apply physical terror and thus force people
to lie. The post-Stalinist deideologization made Grudzihski's view more and
more convincing. For the activists of Solidarity, for whom the main genera–
tional experience was Jaruzelski's martial law, Milosz's view of communism as
a spiri tual tyranny often was llIuntelligible, whereas Grudzmski's dismissal of
ideology and emphasis on naked force were inU11ediately acceptable. Mter all,
it was impossible to see Jaruzelski's regime as a nUlitant church capable of
imposing ideocratic rule; it was only a weak authoritarian (no longer totalitar–
ian!) regime, unsure of itself, unable to exercise ideological and moral pressure,
and thus had to rely on force alone. Now, the opposition effectively organized
moral pressure to enforce non-collaboration and to silence dissidents.
In
this
new situation, it was easy to maintain that Milosz's image of conUTIunism was
nustaken. This paved the way for a newly organized and overt opposition, no
longer infrastructural but ostentatiously extrastructural, trying to exert contin-
