Let Talk Become A Walk
The Great Betrayal of the ideal of Communism by Stalin, Mao and their Political Heirs
Sumanta Banerjee
No one kept his promise, no one .... I've been waiting for the last thirty three years.... My father once touched my shoulders and promised: "Rest assured, we'll also see better days..." Today, my father is blind. We haven't yet seen anything...
These lines (translated from the original) were written by the Bengali poet Sunil Gangopadhyay sometime in the late 1960s. They move beyond Sunil's personal pain at betrayal, and extend to then contemporary political environs in the midst of which he composed the poem, when the old Left's promise of a new future was being betrayed by internecine feuds between the ruling CPI(M) and its Naxalite opponents. What was happening in Bengal in those days was nothing new in the history of the world Communist movement-which had been plagued by similar feuds in the past, that among other factors, ultimately led to the betrayal of the cause of Communism all over the world.
All through the past, Communists were torn between the sense of pride in the achievements of the socialist states on the one hand, and the disappointment at their failures and repulsion against their rulers' atrocities on their own citizens on the other. If one re-examines the past, one can identify two factors that had led the Communist movement astray. They look like a pair of political twins, co-existing with each other. The first was a political style of functioning that was dictated by the personal ego of its leaders, leading to clashes with their rivals. It led to internal squabbles among various factions, each claiming to be the authentic and purest disciple of the prophet Marx , thus elevating him to the status of a religious guru-something which Marx hated. One can look back at the Stalin-Trotsky debate in the Soviet Union, and later the Mao-Lin Piao fight in China. But, as later exposures revealed, most of these leaders were fighting their own egoist battles with rivals, masquerading under the mask of Marxism. The second factor was the type of foreign policies followed by the ruling Communist parties of the erstwhile Soviet Union, and People's Republic of China. They forged opportunist alliances with capitalist powers to suit their respective national interests in external affairs, at the cost of the interests of the proletariat who were fighting those powers in their own countries. Remember the atrocious Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty signed under Stalin's leadership, when thousands of Communists and Jews were being massacred in Germany in the 1930s. Remember the Mao-Nixon handshake in the 1970s, when Nixon's airplanes were bombing the Vietnamese Communist freedom fighters.
The saddest thing about betrayal is that it is not an operation carried out from outside, but from within one's own circle of kin and friends. The cause of Communism, dreamt of by Karl Marx, and sought to be operative by his followers in different parts of the world, had gone through experiences of both success and failure. But in the course of its journey, some of the experiments had been marked by acts of terror and suppression conducted by Communist rulers themselves against their own comrades in the Communist movement-acts which amounted to betrayal of the ideology of Communism that was originally intended to bring together all who believed in it. Stalinist atrocities and Dissent While acknowledging Stalin's achievement in defeating Hitler, at the same time one cannot ignore his atrocious misdeeds that were revealed by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Till then Communists across the world had been worshipping him as a messiah. Although these misdeeds were known before in countries and circles outside the Soviet Union, they used to be dismissed as 'bourgeois propaganda' by leaders of the Communist parties of those countries, who accused the Western powers of besmirching the image of the socialist state. On a personal note, let me narrate my experiences as a Communist activist in the student movement in Calcutta in the early 1950s. Trained by our senior leaders (through study circles held every month or so), we turned into loyal devotees of Stalin. Our Communist Party office in Calcutta, hung a picture showing the profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in a row. One of our Communist poets went to the extent of composing a poem in praise of Stalin saying: "For you Stalin, our fields yield crops and the village bride gives birth to a new life"! Some of my class mates who belonged to rival Congress and socialist student outfits, used to show me reports that appeared in some journals (Encounter from the West and Quest brought out from India) about imprisonment of writers and killing of political dissidents in the Soviet Union. When I used to draw the attention of our local party 'dadas' to these reports, they advised me not to be swayed by them, which they dismissed as CIA implanted stories!
Yet, a few years later in 1956, Khrushchev authenticated the very same allegations that were made against Stalin by the West. Among other things, he also indirectly confirmed the complaints made by former Communists against the Stalinist style of imposing orders on Communist parties in other parts of the world. In fact, long before his exposures, in 1949 a group of six European ex-Communist intellectuals came out with a book entitled The God That Failed, narrating their pathetic experiences in the movement. Having earned fame in their own right as poets, novelists and literary critics, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone and Louis Fischer, were in a position to take an independent stand and make a dispassionate assessment of the Communist movement to which they once belonged. Each described how the party bureaucrats in their respective countries throttled their creative energies by imposing orders to follow the 'party line'-that finally led them to leave the Communist movement, once a God for them, but which turned out to be a failure.
Soon after Khrushchev's revelations, another eminent American author, Howard Fast came out with a book entitled The Naked God (1956) where he poured out his pain of disillusionment, by stripping the political God of the US Communist Party, that he had once worshipped, but who betrayed him. Howard Fast was a devoted member of the US Communist Party for thirteen years, and narrated his bitter experiences with the leaders of the party during his stint. They suppressed independent thinking among party members, and worshipped Stalin and the Soviet Union with blind devotion.
More disillusionment awaited us. In 1967, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva who had married an Indian Communist Brajesh Singh in Moscow, came to India to scatter the ashes of her husband after his death. We Communists in India, although taken aback by this observance of a Hindu religious ritual by the daughter of an atheist leader, pardoned her considering her personal sentiments. But the worse was to follow, when Svetlana on March 9 that year walked into the US embassy in New Delhi, seeking political asylum. Her request was granted, and she moved to the US, where she spent the rest of her life, dying in 2012. We realised then that her coming to India to scatter the ashes of her dead husband was a mere ruse to escape from the Soviet Union, where she experienced a sad upbringing, and felt threatened by an uncomfortable future, and she planned therefore to go to the US and settle there. So much for the great Joseph Stalin and the legacy left by him-both in the political sphere and his personal life!
Maoist Bungling in China
Let us come to the bitter experiences that we, as Indian Communists, underwent when watching China under Communist rule. If the 1950-60 period in our lives as Communist activists was marked by the rise of political hope followed by disappointment with the Soviet leaders, the decade that followed was yet again another period of equally distressing experience following the same pattern of ups and downs-this time under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung, worshipped as the Chairman and Great Helmsman by his people. It was the second betrayal that Communists of our generation experienced. During the 1960-70 period, we Indian Communists were fed upon reports of great achievements in China under Chairman Mao. We were encouraged to laud the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which, we were told by our party leaders, had turned China into a paradise! It was again, the post-Mao leaders of China who were to reveal how the Red Guards were pampered by Mao to persecute his rivals in the party, and dissenters outside. But even during Mao's life time, his image was getting smeared by reports of his rivalry with Lin Piao, the air crash (suspected to be planned by Mao) that killed him, and the ugly behaviour of the Gang of Four led by his wife Jiang Qing. All the sordid details of Mao's degeneration, both in his political career and in his personal life, kept coming out after his death, when his successor Hua Guofeng arrested the Gang of Four and brought them to trial. We lost faith in Mao, and felt cheated by the propaganda that he had mounted all these years to bolster his image. Many years later, sometime in the early 1980s, at a party hosted by a friend in Delhi, I came across a diplomat from the Chinese embassy, and asked him how he assessed the Great Chairman. He shamefacedly said: "Mao at the end of his life was becoming a megalomaniac, slowly declining into senility."
Legacy of Past Betrayals
The legacy of this betrayal continues, as evident from the recent wars and armed conflicts in different parts of the world. While the US-dominated Western powers must owe responsibility for starting some of them (in Afghanistan and West Asia), there are two other states, Russia from the West and China from the South, who have contributed no less to the conflagration of such wars and conflicts in certain other corners of the world, like Russia in Ukraine and China on the borders of India. Interestingly enough, both these countries established themselves as socialist states on the world scene-Russia in 1917 as the Soviet Union, and China in 1949 as the People's Republic of China-both swearing allegiance to the cause of Communism. Much water had flown down the Volga and the Yangtze rivers since those historic times.
The present day successors of the founders of those two states, who are running the governments there, are committed to a different cause altogether-the programme of neo-liberal capitalism, accompanied by ruthless suppression of human rights. Both of them have acquired notoriety for the repression of civil rights of political dissidents, and suppression of religious minorities within their countries (Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang in China, and Chechen Muslims in North Caucasia). While the rulers in Moscow have been honest enough to drop the Communist term 'Soviet,' and renamed their country as the Russian Federation, their Chinese counterparts in Beijing in their usual hypocritical stance still stick to the old name 'People's Republic of China,' and describe themselves as the 'Communist Party of China,' claiming to follow Marxism. But both the terms are totally inappropriate for the style of governance that is followed by them. To be blunt, the Chinese version of Marxism is far removed from its origins, just as Karl Marx, the philosopher is distant from the comedian Groucho Marx-although they shared the same surname. The Communist rulers of China, appeared to have quite often preferred Groucho over Karl, in their various domestic experiments during the 1960-70 years-as evident from the tragi-comic consequences of the much-hyped Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution.
Judging by their performances, both Russia and China can be designated as a pair of rogue states, like their counterparts-the US-Israel gang of rogue states. Acts of Russian atrocities in Ukraine (backed by China) are replicated by Israel (militarily aided by the US) in its bombing of Gaza. The degeneration of both Russia and China from their original commitment to the cause of Communism and their decline to the depths of enslavement to the global capitalist order, and their imitation of imperialist states in their aggressive foreign policies, need a deeper political analysis. While blaming their present rulers, we cannot ignore the past historical roots of this degeneration. They are embedded in the practices followed by their predecessors, Stalin in Russia and Mao in China in the past, as pointed out earlier. This historical record awaits an intensive investigation by future researchers.
Leftist Dilemma
What is really both tragic and ironical today is that those who are still committed to the Leftist values of socialism and democracy, are split between two camps-one still loyal to Stalin and Mao, and the other are dissidents who discard the two icons. The loyalist camp mainly consists of armed guerillas known as Maoists (or 'Left-extremists' in official parlance), confined to a few far-flung areas in hills and forests. A few sections among the parliamentary Communists also swear by Stalin and Mao. Members of the camp of dissidents feel that they were betrayed by those two leaders and the erstwhile socialist states. But they, are willy-nilly being compelled to share a common platform with the capitalist camp if they want to voice protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities that are being carried out by Putin's soldiers. Similarly, in the case of China, these Leftists feel repulsed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party's suppression of information, like its refusal to open up its Wuhan laboratory to WHO inspection. That laboratory was suspected of being the original source of the spread of the Covid pandemic, as there were allegations about its experimenting with certain dubious germs without proper safeguards. If Beijing thinks that it has a clean record, why doesn't it welcome a WHO team to inspect the lab? Still further, there are continuing reports of violation of human rights and suppression of Muslim minorities in China (as mentioned earlier in this article). When the Leftists want to protest against such cases, they willy-nilly again, have to express their discontent through the capitalist-owned media channels if they want to reach out to a wider audience. The alternative TV channels and news portals which offer them space, have a limited reach. It is urgent therefore for the Left in India (and elsewhere) to carve out an independent path and launch a campaign from the Leftist point of view (instead of their protests being appropriated by the capitalist powers) against both the two neo-fascist camps-the gang of Sino-Russian axis on the one hand and the coterie of US-Israel ruffians on the other. These two global powers are confronting each other through a proxy war in the Ukraine. While taking a stand on this war, the Stalinist-Maoist camp of the Left seems to suffer from a hangover of the past-often displaying sneaking sympathies for the present political leaders of Russia. Such sympathies are derived from their earlier devotion to the cause of Communism that the USSR and PRC upheld in the past, and their support to them against US aggression. Today, out of that devotion, they support Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the plea that he was compelled to do it because of the threat from NATO. Yet, while Kremlin till now has failed to produce any such evidence from the ground level to support its claim, ironically its invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the NATO, which is attracting otherwise neutral states bordering Russia. These states now feel threatened by possible aggression on their territories by Russia. Does Putin, who with his ham-handed militarist policies is wreaking havoc on the common citizens of Ukraine, deserve any sympathy or support from the Left?
In these challenging circumstances, the Stalinist-Maoist camp of the Left has to get rid of its lingering nostalgic loyalty to Stalin and Mao, a tendency which quite often encourages it to support the misdeeds of the present political heirs of those two states. The future of the Left movement lies not in the resuscitation of the Stalinist-Maoist legacy, but in its rejection. It has to be replaced by a new innovative Leftist set of strategy and tactics to meet the country-specific requirements of the Indian people and voice their demands-to be framed not according to the advice from abroad (like Stalin's in the 1950s during the Telangana struggle, or Mao's in the 1960s during the Naxalbari peasant uprising), but that will arise from the experiences of daily struggles at the ground level. It is by this only that we can overcome the betrayal that we suffered at the hands of Stalin, Mao and their political heirs.
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Vol 57, No. 15 - 18, Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2024 |