CONFESSIONS/EXPLANATIONS OF A FORMER STALINIST
(Comment/discussion articles for publication to: Tony.Papard@btinernet.com)
(Email to Timonthy Garton Ash in reply to Attitudes to Communism debate in The Guardian newspaper, September 2002.)
(Click on the picture above to hear The Internationale)
As a former hardline CPGB member, who continued to praise Stalin right into the 1970s and who supported the Soviet-led invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, you may find my in-depth analysis of why the Marxist-Leninist experiment went wrong and how Socialism should develop in the 21st Century of some interest. The article can be found on my Website at the following adddress: www.btinternet.com/~Tony.Papard/21stCenturySocialism.htm
I joined the Young Communist League in 1968 after leaving the Labor Party due to disillusion with Wilson's government and his support for the Americans in the Vietnam War. Later I joined the Communist Party itself. I was first a member of the Camden Party, which had many hardliners like myself, including an elderly couple named Basil and Sybil who looked as if they wouldn't harm a fly. I well remember Sybil saying how awful it was the way the Soviet Union treated Solzhenitsyn and dissidents like him. She then elaborated - Stalin wouldn't have let them go to the West to spread their poisonous propaganda, they should all have been shot! One comrade in the Camden YCL was known as 'Madam Mao' for her hardline Stalinist views. Other comrades in the Camden Party followed the official CP line and opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, including Sabrina Aaronovitch who I remember well.
In those days I thought the end justified the means, and saw the GDR (East Germany) as the ideal worker's paradise. I fully supported the Berlin Wall for economic reasons, and felt if anyone could make Socialism work efficiently it was the Germans. The ordinary GDR citizen appeared much better dressed and had a higher standard of living that their Soviet counterparts (I visited the Soviet Union twice, and the GDR twice). Furthermore the Germans, unlike the Soviets, were straightforward - on an official visit in 1968 with other peace activists and trade unionists we were told bluntly by GDR Party officials that the Berlin Wall was built to stop people escaping to the West. But there was also a more liberal side - as a young gay man I found the freedom for homosexuals in the GDR capital, East Berlin, quite refreshing and astounding - far in advance of anything we had in London at the time.
I fully believed in the one-Party system, or a coalition led by the Marxist-Leninist Party as in the GDR, as a necessary preparation for Communism. I believed in the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat', and fully believed the State would eventually wither away as people got in the habit of governing themselves thru the Party and the workers' organizations. I saw no need for opposition Parties, and indeed wrote two articles in the Communist Party's theoretical journal, 'Marxism Today', on the need to crush all opposition to Socialism in preparation for the classless society which would exist under Communism, and also called for the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin.
It was this line of thinking which led me and my comrades to oppose Dubcek as a dangerous revisionist, and applaud the crushing of the Prague Spring. I was in the GDR in August 1968 when the tanks rolled into Prague, and attended a rally in East Berlin attended by thousands of Free German Youth and others applauding the crushing of the 'counter-revolutionaries' in Czechoslovakia. We really thought Dubcek was being used by the CIA and West German 'revanchists' to pluck Czechoslovakia from the Socialist camp, opening up a 'corridor' from West Germany to the Soviet border. I remember our East German hosts saying this very thing: look at a map of Europe, we can't allow Czechoslovakia to join the Western camp. They were openly saying the Soviet Union needed the 'buffer' states of Eastern Europe for its own protection. The Germans are so very honest, as I have already said. The Soviets, by contrast, were always evasive, denying they had such things as 'conscientious objectors' or 'cholera' in their country when we knew full well they did.
It was only after a second visit to the GDR with my gay life-partner, who was anti-Communist, that my eyes were finally opened to the reality of the situation. The fact that the liberal gay scene in East Berlin had been completely crushed only added to my disillusionment, and I left the Party as soon as I returned home. It took me years to analyze what had gone wrong with my youthful dream of a better society. My article is just such an attempt at this.
Basically, the one-Party system made it far too easy for careerists and opportunists to take over the State and corrupt the Socialist ideal. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Marx, Engels and Lenin saw the overwhelming numerical power of the masses as a guarantee that no corrupt ruling class could ever again exploit them, but as I state in my article, the masses were too apathetic to exercise the power given to them by the Bolshevik revoution in 1917. Dedicated Communist idealists may want to get invoved in endless daily meetings of soviets to govern society and weed out opportunists; most ordinary people do not want this level of responsibility. Therefore I now believe Communism is an impossible ideal, and Socialism must therefore allow competition both in the economic and political arenas. This means Market Socialism rather than nationalization and State monopolies, and a plurality of political parties and genuinely free elections so the people can get rid of a corrupt government.
I was badly mistaken when I thought you could force people to be less selfish. I praised Stalin as a strict Father of the Peoples who built the modern Soviet Union despite Trotskyite conspirators, Hitler fascists and Western imperialists all out to destroy the Soviet State. I blamed his 'excesses' and 'paranoia' on his Soviet Party comrades, and the Trotskyites in particular. I thought it was justifiable to shoot people trying to escape across the Wall to West Berlin because the GDR was being deliberately bled dry of its best workers and professional people. I saw West Berlin as the 'thorn in the flesh of the GDR', a provocative and artificial 'shop window' of selfish capitalism enticing GDR citizens to the West by CIA-funded bribery. I even remember Labor MP Renee Short telling a CND meeting soon after the Wall was built that it was erected to keep West Berliners out of the East German workers paradise, and saying the butcher's shops windows in East Berlin appeared empty because the meat was kept in the fridges. It wasn't just us Communists who were duped! I believed crushing dangerous 'revisionist' experiments like Dubcek's 'Socialism with a human face' was essential in order to eventually move on to Communism proper, where everyone automatically gave selfless service for the common good.
We were wrong, badly wrong, but capitalism is NOT the answer. Socialism should never have been dismantled in 1989, it should have been democratized and reformed along Yugoslav lines. By destoying Socialism and replacing it with Thatcherism-Reaganomics the vast gains enjoyed by the people of the Socialist bloc (full employment, free health and education, cheap housing and transport, security in their old age) were all lost, and the old corrupt ruling class remained in power and continued to exploit the people. The Communist Party became the mafia overnite, and showed their true colors for the first time. But the pendulum will swing back and Socialism will come into its own, learning from the terrible mistakes of the 20th Century varieties. I remain a fervent believer in the common ownership and control of the entire means of production, distribution and exchange, i.e. the complete abolition of private enterprise, thru a system of worker/consumer cooperatives and competing publicly owned non-profit-making companies. Tony Papard
