Giorgio Amendola, one of the pre-war generation of Italian communist leaders, called the first volume of his beautifully written autobiography Una scelta di vita, ‘A Chosen Life’. For those of us who became communists before the war, and especially before 1935, the cause of communism was indeed something to which we intended to dedicate our lives, and some did so. The crucial difference turned out to be between communists who spent their lives in opposition and those whose Parties took power, and who therefore became directly or indirectly responsible for what was done in their regimes. Power does not necessarily corrupt people as individuals, though its corruptions are not easy to resist. What power does, especially in times of crisis and war, is to make us do and seek to justify things unacceptable when done by private persons. Communists like myself, whose Parties were never in power, or engaged in situations which call for decisions on other people’s life or death (resistance, concentration camps), had it easier.
Membership in these Leninist ‘vanguard parties’ was thus a profound personal choice, but not an abstract one. For most interwar communists joining the Party was a further step on this road for someone who was already ‘on the left’ or, in the parts of the world where this was appropriate, ‘anti-imperialist’. It was, of course, easier for those who came from politically homogeneous environments of the right kind – say, in New York, where, as I once overheard one contributor to The New Yorker say reflectively to another, ‘One actually never meets any Republicans,’ rather than in Dallas, Texas. It was even easier for those who came from communities, generally marginal to the larger society, whose situation placed them outside the national political consensus. Conversely, vast as is the number of ex-communists of my generation, it is uncommon to encounter among them people who have swung to the extreme political right. The exit-route of the politically disillusioned communist usually led either, if young enough, to some other branch of the political left, or, generally by stages, mainly to a militant anti-communist Cold War liberalism. Even in the USA a generation had to pass before the (anti-Stalinist) intellectuals of the New York left abandoned the old family loyalties and frankly declared themselves ‘neo-conservatives’.
This is particularly clear among intellectuals, for the prevailing conventions of rational thinking about society are rooted in the rationalist eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. As the political right has never ceased complaining, this has made intellectuals inclined to sympathize with such causes as liberty, equality and fraternity. Even my friend Isaiah Berlin, with his visceral commitment to a non-negotiable Jewish identity, which made him defend, or at least try to understand, the critics of the Enlightenment, found it impossible not to behave like an Enlightenment liberal. Outside Germany a secular intellectual tradition suitable to the right hardly existed. In the first half of the past century, the left visibly attracted far more intellectuals than the right. Even in the major creative arts, where rational thinking is less relevant, anti-fascism prevailed On this question the last word has been said with admirable brevity by ‘Simon Leys’, the pseudonym of an eminent Belgian sinologue with an unparalleled record as a deconstructor of the myths of Maoism: ‘All of us in the intellectual world know people who have been communists who have changed their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?’ The truth is, whether they changed their minds or not after the war, there simply were never that many.
This does not mean that communism attracted a particular type or types of personality open to extremism, authoritarianism and other ‘undemocratic’ traits, although in the Cold War era this was argued by authors anxious to demonstrate the similarity of communism and fascism, but politically angled social psychology need not detain us. In any case there is little base for the liberal belief in a fundamental affinity between ‘extremisms’ of right and left, which made it easy to pass from one extreme to the other. Since the British CP was small, communist workers and students, at least in the late 1930s, were exceptional but they were not untypical. I can detect no common personality traits among my Cambridge contemporaries who joined the CP that distinguished them from those who did not join, except perhaps a greater intellectual liveliness. Indeed, in later years, as I met some former comrade again in his post-communist existence as a respectable – though rarely Conservative – middle-class professional, I would sometimes say to myself: ‘To think that I once recruited him and fellows like him into the Party!’ It is less surprising that the workers who joined the Party were, in Britain at least, young, livelier than most, but otherwise typical of their class and trades – mainly engineering, building and in some regions mining. Between the 1930s and 1950s, before A-levels and higher education came within reach of their class, the way in which bright young apprentices or the dynamic young workshop activists would get their political and intellectual education was through the Party. It formed the future national leaders of British trade unionism, and, of course, provided the Party itself with capable working-class cadres, which a consciously ‘proletarian’ party insisted on. Contrary to common opinion, intellectuals as such played no significant part in the Party leadership, until the educational revolution removed the potential exam-passing youth from workshop to college, which therefore became the way into politics or better jobs – and not only in Communist Parties.
Communism was therefore not a way of picking out ‘extremists’ from ‘non-extremist’ personalities, although both poles of the political spectrum may sometimes attract the same clientele, namely persons, usually young, who have a natural taste for adventurous operations or political violence, the sort of people to whom terrorism or direct action appeal. Perhaps Rambo-types have been more attracted to the extreme left since the rise of street confrontation and small-scale armed groups in the aftermath of the student revolt of 1968, with its rhetoric of ‘streetfighting men’. Nevertheless, a life devoted to making revolution is not the same as a life that gets its thrills from irregular warfare or adventure.
Given the tradition and importance of clandestine activities in the Communist Parties, which, with the rarest exceptions (such as Great Britain) were illegal for at least some of their history, there was obviously scope for the life of adventure in the international communist movement of my times, but bolshevism, whose motto was ruthless efficiency rather than romance, did not favour the culture of the bank-robber or commando-raid. It invented the supremacy of the ‘political commissar’ (i.e. the civilian) because it distrusted the impulses of the soldier. It was hostile in theory to individual terrorism. Lenin’s own reaction to such gestures was utterly typical. He could not understand why in 1916 the social democrat Friedrich Adler had publicly shot dead the Prime Minister of the Habsburg Empire as a protest against the First World War. Would it not have been more effective for him, as secretary of the Party, to circulate the branches with a call for a strike?
I have known several communists whose career would interest, and in some cases has interested, the writers of thrillers, but on the whole their ideal of clandestinity, however dangerous, was not buccaneering or self-dramatization. Let me compare the character of Alexander Rado, the head of the extremely important Soviet spy network in wartime Switzerland and the only master spy with whom I have ever spent a somewhat bizarre Christmas in Budapest, and that of his radio operator Alexander Foote, apparently a British double agent, as described in the literature. Foote ‘had not become a secret agent in the first place for ideology, money or patriotism. He made very little money out of spying, abstract political ideas bored him, and M15 did not regard him as a patriot when he eventually returned to Britain. But he was a born adventurer …’2 Rado did not look like a man thirsting for action, but like a comfortable middle-aged businessman whose natural leisure habitat was a central European café śtable. When I met him in 1960, returned to a chair at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest after several years in Stalin’s camps, he was what he had always wanted to be, a geographer and cartographer. He had spent his entire political life since 1918 in and out of clandestine or unavowable activities, always returning to this vocation. Neither fighting – he was the organizer of the armed workers’ brigades destined to head the (aborted) German revolution of 1923 – nor running spy networks diverted him. No doubt he also enjoyed the thrills of that kind of life, but he did not strike me as a man who chose it for that reason. He did what needed doing. ‘When we were young,’ he told me, ‘Rakosi [the former Hungarian communist leader and dictator, at the time of this conversation retired in exile in the USSR] used to say to me ‘‘Sandor, why not become a full-time professional revolutionary?’’ Well, look at him and look at me. It was a good thing that I had a proper trade and never gave it up.’ Communist Parties were not for romantics.