From The New International, Vol. XVI No. 3, May–June 1950, pp. 177–179.
Translated & annotated by James M. Fenwick.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Erongaricuaro, May 4, 1945. I would very much like to write a “personal history” on How Comrades End Up and among them I would find a place for Romain Rolland, who died a few weeks ago while writing a biography of Péguy and swearing to Aragon [19] his faithfulness to the CP. The old man on the point of disappearing wrote still another letter to Maurice Thorez – the totalitarian bureaucrat with neither conscience nor scruples.
I knew him well enough, indirectly, through Jacques Mesnil, who had been his friend for at least twenty years and broke with him – while irritating him with his infallible honesty – only when R.R. definitely chose the party of executioners.
Like all the First World War generation I had seen in him a “great conscience.” Jean Christophe was for me a revelation of the nobility of life. And the author of Jean Christophe during the European catastrophe had been able to place himself “above the struggle” – to remain integrally human.
On the boat which was carrying us hostages from French concentration camps to Petrograd I noticed R.R.’s books in the hands of young French officers back from the front, and we were able to look each other in the face more easily. I knew that these books provoked a sort of persecution which he bore uncomfortably and firmly while suffering, the experience of which he related in Clerambault.
The bolsheviks to whom I spoke about him wanted to see in him nothing but a troubled intellectual, weak and well-intentioned. This was also the opinion of Gorky, but Gorky expressed this judgment with an infinity of sympathy.
Later, in ’22–’24, R.R. published in Clarté [20] articles on Gandhi and on revolutionary violence which irritated me all the more in that they contained the most exact, the most prophetic insights on the stifling character of dictatorship – all the while misunderstanding the terrible reality of a spontaneous revolution alive only by virtue of unceasing miracles of implacable activity.
I replied in Inprecor [21] that we were “the party of free men.” I believed it, I saw it, I felt it, I wished it, along with a mass of others – and all of us were not able to say where we were going, and it was doubtless not at all fatal. R.R. was dissatisfied with this rather harsh reply. He was to remember it years later when I was persecuted in turn and he was asked to intervene in my favor. He replied that he had only limited sympathy for persecuted persecutors. He nevertheless intervened for Francesco Ghezzi [22], imprisoned at Suzdal – and moderately for me. He was growing old (in ’29–’30); belatedly married a woman who had worked in Moscow under the direction of a Heinz Kogan, whose life I had saved in ’19 (“Princess” Kudacheva). He seized upon a faith in the declining Russian Revolution; he consented openly to all the repressions, to all the strangling of thought, he let Panait Istrati [23] be slandered – it was a complete abdication of clearsighted personality and what remained of a “great conscience” reduced itself to a demagogic and deceptive renown....
When I found myself deported to Orenburg, we entered into correspondence on the subject of the manuscript of my Hommes perdus, which he offered to receive and forward to my publishers, and which the GPU stole from me and from him on two occasions without his making the slightest protest.
He came to see Stalin in ’35 and asked that a period be put to “l’affaire Victor Serge,” that I be either sentenced or freed. Stalin said he was “not up on the matter” and promised my liberty if it was at all possible. It was to this request in particular that I owe my life, it seems to me.
R.R. had been greeted warmly on arrival by Bukharin and amiably accompanied by Yagoda. He knew the regime well enough and I knew that the support he gave it was full of anxiety, doubts, of scruples overcome daily.
At the time of the trial of the old bolsheviks Piatakov, Muralov, Serebriakov, Boguslavsky I wrote to him, denouncing the forgeries, predicting a bloodletting, begging him – harshly – to intervene in time. I never received a reply and he did nothing, sadly insulted by my letter.
He had previously let it be known that along with other well-known intellectuals he approved of the massacres which followed the assassination of Kirov [24] at Leningrad; and he kept silent during the trial and the execution of the thirteen (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov). Perhaps he knew his own powerlessness – but why did he refuse to free his conscience, at least?
The author of Jean Christophe at 70 let himself be covered with blood, shed by a tyranny for which he was the faithful apologist. It was incomprehensible to me, demoralizing, and Jacques Mesnil could find only one response: “He is old” – he was old himself, J.M., alone and hurt, but of an absolute uprightness.
I was all the more struck that such, identically such, as seen from without, was the attitude of Gorky whom I had known as so unremitting in his defense of the victims of the civil war.
There is an aging of the strongest personalities, of the highest, of the most humanely lucid, and neither their work nor their experience preserves them from decline through ossifying, through hardening, when at the end of their life they clutch the illusion of serving a great cause in spite of everything ...
And I learned in 1938 that R.R., tortured by a sort of remorse, was keeping a diary, destined to be published a long time after his death, in which he noted his scruples, his doubts, the drama of his fidelity to communism.
He was afraid to keep this diary with him and deposited it for safekeeping in friendly hands. These pages will say in twenty or fifty years that his intelligence and his conscience were not dead but dimmed. Posthumous escape.
(Perhaps something will also be known of Gorky’s crises, the reproaches he addressed to Stalin, the recurrent furies which consumed his last energies ...)
July 5, 1945. We were passionately talking about the leaders of the Polish emigration who have just consented to enter the government set up by Moscow. Someone said: “They are traitors and imbeciles!” I took up their defense: they are men caught between heroism and self-abdication. (That there are traitors in the group and careerists capable of becoming traitors does not interest me: only the others count.) They are playing an obviously desperate game; destined to be duped, dishonored, rejected when they are no longer needed – or destroyed. They know it.
History is also composed of the unforeseen, duty requires seizing the final chance, even if it is the only one. Whole peoples cannot emigrate and there is the obligation of sharing their fate, whatever it may be, in order to attempt their salvation or to bide one’s time for the future. Emigration is necessary only when struggle has become completely impossible and paralysis a form of annihilation; or when struggle abroad offers more chance of success and is combined with action at home.
When I reasoned in this fashion I was reproached for justifying dubious, selfish and vile adaptations and the duplicity which hides them. All that exists like a gangrene. But it remains that a people cannot escape from defeats, that obvious submission is sometimes the last means of resistance, that terrorist despotism leaves room only for duplicity, a final defense by hypocrisy, shorn, reservations of conscience, secret heroism.
Russia having become the first finished totalitarian state, all the Russians know it, consciously or not. I was a member of a party which repudiated duplicity; I still prefer it that way; all my character upholds it. I do not have the right, nevertheless, to fail to recognize the facts.
What a startling intuition is contained in these lines of André Salmon from his Prikaz (Decree), written in 1918, in regard to the Russian Revolution which was beginning without traitors and without assassins:
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“Traitors are saints. |
Heroes in a time of duplicity betray treason – and it is more bitter, more difficult, more perilous than condemning it from abroad. The faithful hero proclaims himself “traitor” out of devotion to the party which demands this confession from him before shooting him. Some of his fratricides, unacquainted with what lies behind the scenes, believe these confessions with a pure heart and reply by assassinating him. It is the eighth stage of Hell – the psychological stage. It proves that all the grandeur acquired up to now by mankind is menaced.
19. Péguy, the French Catholic poet and writer, and Aragon, the French poet and Stalinist literary hack.
20. Originally a CP literary magazine. It later became oppositionist.
21. International Press Correspondence, an organ of the Comintern.
22. An Italian Bordighist.
23. The Rumanian writer, for whom Rolland had served as a literary patron.
24. The Stalinist bureaucrat whose assassination was seized upon as a pretext for the first of the long series of purges in the ’30s.
Last updated on 19 October 2018