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By Root 1700 0

Probably some we met were convinced as well as loyal communists, but theirs was an inward-looking Soviet conviction rather than an ecumenical one, although it is likely that we would have had more in common with some of those we asked to meet but who were ‘unfortunately prevented from coming to Moscow by problems of health’, ‘temporarily absent in Gorki’ or not yet returned from the camps. It was much easier to sense what the ‘Great Patriotic War’ meant, privately and emotionally, to the people we saw – particularly in Leningrad, survivor of the terrible wartime siege – than what communism meant to them. At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland Station in the marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I shall never get used to calling St Petersburg, what we thought about the October Revolution was not the same as what our guides from the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences thought.

I returned from Moscow politically unchanged if depressed, and without any desire to go there again. I did return but only fleetingly, in 1970 for a world historical congress, and in the last years of the USSR for brief tourist excursions from Helsinki, where I spent several summers at a UN Research Institute.5

The trip to the USSR in 1954–5 was my first contact with the countries of what was later called ‘really existing socialism’, for my visit to the 1947 World Youth Festival in Prague occurred before the Party had taken full power in the new ‘peoples’ democracies’. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia it had just emerged, with 40 per cent, as by far the largest party in a genuine multiparty general election. Apart from getting to know several of their historians personally, I made direct contact with the other socialist countries only after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet CP which inaugurated the global crisis of the communist movement, though in the case of my first visit to the German Democratic Republic in April–May 1956, before the publication of Khrushchev’s public attack on Stalin. But by that time everything had changed.

II

There are two ‘ten days that shook the world’ in the history of the revolutionary movement of the last century: the days of the October Revolution, described in John Reed’s book of that title, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (14–25 February 1956). Both divide it suddenly and irrevocably into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. I cannot think of any comparable event in the history of any major ideological or political movement. To put it in the simplest terms, the October Revolution created a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress destroyed it.

The world communist movement had been constructed, on Leninist lines, as a single disciplined army dedicated to the transformation of the world under a centralized and quasi-military command situated in the only state in which ‘the proletariat’ (i.e. the Communist Party) had taken power. It became a movement of global significance only because it was linked to the USSR, which in turn became the country that tore the guts out of Nazi Germany and emerged from the war as a superpower. Bolshevism had transformed one weak regime in a vast but backward country into a superpower. The victory of the cause in other countries, the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial world, depended on its support and on its sometimes reluctant but real protection. Whatever its weaknesses, its very existence proved that socialism was more than a dream. And the passionate anti-communism of the Cold War crusaders, which saw communists exclusively as agents of Moscow, welded them more firmly to the USSR.

As time went on, and especially during the years of the battles against fascism, the effectively organized revolutionary left had become virtually identified with the Communist Parties. They had absorbed or eliminated other brands of social revolutionaries. While the Communist Universal Church gave rise to one set after another of schismatics and heretics, none of the rebel groups it shed, expelled or killed had ever suceeded