Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [78]
My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam, but nothing moved. Poor Freddie … It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin … Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Good-bye boys, good-bye Tedy.3
Freddie did not die, though she has spent the rest of her life with legs amputated below the knees. At the time it would not have struck any of us as surprising that the last words of a dying Party member should be for the Party, for Stalin and for the comrades. (In those days among foreign communists the thought of Stalin was as sincere, unforced, unsullied by knowledge and universal as the genuine grief most of us felt in 1953 at the death of a man whom no Soviet citizen would have wanted, or dared, to call by a pet name like ‘Uncle Joe’ in Britain or ‘Big whiskers’ [baffone] in Italy.) The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return, we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity.
The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it’, as we were expected to. For, unlike fascism, which demanded automatic abdication and service to the Leader’s will (‘Mussolini is always right’) and the unconditional duty of obeying military orders, the Party – even at the peak of Stalin’s absolutism – rested its authority, at least in theory, on the power to convince of reason and ‘scientific socialism’. After all, it was supposed to be based on a ‘Marxist analysis of the situation’, which every communist was meant to learn how to make. ‘The line’, however predetermined and unchangeable, had to be justified in terms of such an analysis, and, except where circumstances made this physically impossible, ‘discussed’ and approved at all levels of the Party. In Communist Parties outside power, where members were not too scared to pursue the ancient left-wing tradition of argument, the leadership had to go through the process of repeating its case for the official line until there was no room for doubt about what we were expected to vote for. (The technical term for this process was ‘patiently explaining’.) After the vote, ‘democratic centralism’ required that argument should give way to unanimous action.
We did what it ordered us to do. In countries such as Britain it did not order us to do anything very dramatic. Indeed, but for their conviction that what they were doing was saving the world, communists might have been bored by the routine activities of their Party, conducted in the usual ritual of the British labour movement (comrade chairman, branch minutes, treasurer’s report, resolutions, contacts, literature sales and the rest) in private homes or unwelcoming meeting rooms. But whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. After all, most Soviet and Comintern cadres in the period of Stalin’s terror, who knew what might await them, followed the order to return to Moscow. If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so. After 1933 the German Party in exile ordered Margaret Mynatt (later the inspiration behind the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels) to go to England from Paris, since they needed someone in London and, as known German communists were not admitted, a comrade with valid British documentation was needed. Without