Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [111]
“What is the principle upon which Komsomol is founded?”
“The principle of democratic centralism.”
He was admitted to higher institutions for languages, then Marxism, and then International Communism. Heinrich Hirsch closed his mind to the things happening around him. Names of men who were heroes of the Revolution yesterday became the names of traitors today. Marshals of the Red Army, members of Lenin’s Politburo, members of the Central Committee all fell under the ax of the purge. Suicides of great names often took the place of official confessions. One had no choice but to study and keep his nose clean.
At Institute #16 for advanced studies of foreign Communism Heinrich again saw Rudi Wöhlman, titular head of the German Communists in the Soviet Union. Wöhlman had come to Institute #16 for a series of lectures on German Communism.
He remembered Heinrich as a little boy of five in Berlin and, of course, remembered his martyred father, Werner Hirsch, very well. Often times Heinrich heard his father speak of Rudi Wöhlman as the great hope of the German Communists.
Wöhlman had left Berlin for special schooling in Moscow in the mid-1920s, but never returned. It was a great disappointment for the German Communists. After his training in Moscow, Wöhlman was assigned as a commissar of the Soviet Union’s German-speaking Volga Republic.
No wonder Heinrich looked forward to his lectures with great anticipation. Here at last was the link between Moscow and Berlin. What followed was a terrible disappointment. Rudi Wöhlman’s speeches were a recitation of the current political line; he delivered them with parrot-like perfection, the words a rehash of a hundred speeches Heinrich had listened to before.
Rudi Wöhlman showed himself to be a shrewd politician rather than a man of thought. He had a sheen of glibness which hid the lack of depth or intelligence. He used the same verbal acrobatics all the teachers used. Wöhlman kept it safe, worked around the core of delicate problems, kept clear of personal opinions, and sidestepped pointed questions by having the students argue them, then placing himself as a final judge. A man of slight build with an immaculately trimmed goatee and darting eyes, each thought and word was calculated to keep him out of trouble.
By the end of the third lecture, Heinrich came to the conclusion that Rudi Wöhlman was a German in name only. He had not suffered during the Nazi era, nor did he show any allegiance to the German working class. Wöhlman was another of those “foreign” comrades whom Moscow kept because they had meaningful names in their former native lands. In fact, they had no grasp of the struggle in the countries they pretended to represent, but merely carried out Moscow edicts.
Heinrich’s own father, although a devout Communist, was nonetheless a devout German. He had impressed in the boy that Marx and Engels and the Communist idea were all German. The Soviet Union had merely borrowed them. Wöhlman’s lectures left no doubt that Moscow now was the mecca of Communism.
The first disasters of the campaign against Finland and the vulnerability of the Red Army threw him into a quandary.
The great shock came with the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Barrages of written and verbal explanations came from the propaganda organs to “prove” that the pact was a scientific treaty consistent with socialist aims. But, explain as they might with all of their persuasive forces, the complete reversal overnight of Soviet foreign policy and avowed Communist goals had a lasting effect upon him and thousands of others. Heinrich Hirsch could not remember when he was not fighting Nazis. These Nazis, now in pact with Russia, were the very same who had murdered his father.
The recourse? There was no way to either question or protest—only justify. He reasoned that if there were