You, who will emerge from the flood In which we have perished Remember also When you speak of our weaknesses The black times You have escaped
But the point of Brecht’s poem, which speaks to communists of my generation as no other does, is that hardness was forced upon the revolutionaries.
We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves.
Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.7 Nobody could anticipate the scale of human suffering in the Second World War until it happened. However, it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or wilful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side. In any case, we were not liberals. Liberalism was what had failed. In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves. Since we were not in power, or likely to be, what we expected was to be prisoners rather than jailers.
There were Communist Parties and functionaries, such as André ś Marty, who appears in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who took pride in their necessary ‘steel-hard’ bolshevism, not least the Soviet Communist Party, where it combined with the absolutist tradition of unlimited power and the brutality of everyday Russian existence to produce the hecatombs of the Stalin era. The British CP was not among them, but Party pathology appeared in more masochistic and peaceful forms. To take a case in point: the late Andrew Rothstein (1898–1994). Andrew was a rather boring, round-faced petit-bourgeois figure, who defended whatever needed defending in the Soviet Union, the son of a more dramatic Russian old bolshevik, Theodore Rothstein, who had once been a Soviet diplomat and had written a pioneering book of Marxist labour history. We shared a cold bedroom once at a conference of the Association of University Teachers, and I still recall him carefully unpacking his toilet set and slippers. Possibly I was mandated to protest against the failure of the University of London’s School of Slavonic Studies, where he taught Soviet Institutions, to renew his time-limited contract as a lecturer. A founder member of the British CP, and obviously with good Russian connections, he had been a leading figure in the Party in the 1920s, but in 1929–30 his opposition to the Comintern’s ultra-left course, not to mention his vitriolic temper and lack of proletarian bona fides, led to his fall. He was exiled (minus his wife and children) to Moscow, his Party membership transferred to the CPSU. Luckily for his survival he was soon allowed back into Britain and the British CP on condition that for the rest of his career he occupied only local functions in the Party. Yet he remained a totally loyal, totally committed communist. Indeed, I had the impression that for him, as for others like him, the test of his devotion to the cause was the readiness to defend the indefensible. It was not the Christian ‘ credo quia absurdum’ (I believe it is because it is absurd), but rather the constant challenge: ‘Test me some more: as a bolshevik I have no breaking-point.’ When the British CP finally went out of existence in 1991, he became, at the age of ninety-three, the first member of the tiny hard-line Communist Party of Britain which succeeded it.
I doubt whether any communist of my generation would have been inspired to join the Party, or stayed in the Party, by the career of Rothstein. And yet we had our heroes and models – Georgi Dimitrov, in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 who stood up alone in the Nazi court, defying Hermann Göring and defending the good name of communism and, incidentally, of the small but proud Bulgarian nation to which he belonged. If I did not leave the Party in 1956, it was not least because the movement bred such men and women. I am thinking primarily of one such figure, barely known in his lifetime, un-remembered except by comrades and friends today. I still recall him, small, sharp-eyed, quizzical, as we walked on a Sunday morning through the sun-dappled and carefully marked footpaths of the Wienerwald hills, among occasional couples of hiking acquaintances, white-haired men and women, who had organized illegal Party and socialist meetings in the remoter parts of those woods before they survived the concentration camps. The open air had always been the characteristic environment of Austrian revolutionaries. There is probably no man for whom I have a greater admiration.
In mid-August 1944 he had written his last words in cell 155 of block 2 and cell 90 of block 1 of Fresnes prison in Paris:
Franz Feuerlich, communist Franz Feuerlich, Austrian will be executed 15 August 1944 On the eve of liberation?8
But Ephraim Feuerlicht (1913–79), whom we all knew by his Party name Franz Marek, was lucky. The liberation of Paris saved him. He had been a leading figure in the French Communist Party’s MOI (Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée) organization, under the Czech Artur London (later victim of the Stalinist trials), whose Spaniards, Jews, Italians, Poles and others played such a disproportionately large and heroic part in the armed Resistance in France. (Those whose image of Jews under fascism is that of eternal victims, should remember the fighting record of socialist and communist Jews, from the 7,000 who fought in the International Brigades to the MOI and their equivalents in other occupied countries.) Among other things Franz was in charge of work with the German troops themselves. He did not talk about those times, except once to our son Andy, then about ten, who wanted to know what sort of things you did in the Resistance. He said that mostly you kept out of the way of the people who wanted to arrest you, but that he had had a few narrow escapes. Born in Przemysl, which is today in the Ukraine, brought up in the deepest poverty in interwar Vienna – Franz claimed that he never had a new jacket and trousers until he became a professional revolutionary – he became politicized as a Zionist at the age of fifteen, but converted to communism from the most Marxist of the Zionist groups, the Hashomer Hazair, though he did not join the Communist Party until after the Austrian civil war of 1934. Not surprisingly, it was the immediate consequence of a few months spent wandering round pre-Hitler Germany in 1931–2. He became a professional almost from the start, having demonstrated what were clearly exceptional abilities for clandestine work to the comrade sent to instruct the Austrians in the unaccustomed situation of illegality. Though he insists that the secret of such work was punctuality and pedantry about details, in short, the strict bolshevik ‘rules of conspiracy’, as a man in his early twenties he enjoyed the romantic side of the work. He liked to recall that he occupied what had once been the office of Dimitrov in the ninth district – Vienna had always been the International’s centre for the Balkans. Soon he was setting up a Vienna office for the Romanian CP (all 300 of them) and organizing its participation in the forthcoming Seventh World Congress, before being promoted to head the ‘Apparat’ of the illegal Austrian Party – communications, safe houses, frontier crossings, and the provision and distribution of literature – and later its entire agit-prop activities. No doubt it was this that brought him to Paris after the Anschluss.
He returned to Austria after the war as a member of the Austrian CP’s Political Bureau, wrote a brief and luminous book on France, and edited the Party’s theoretical journal. In 1968 he briefly succeeded in decoupling the Austrian CP from the USSR after condemning its invasion of Czechoslovakia, but Moscow soon reasserted itself. Marek was expelled, but continued as editor of an independent left-wing monthly the Wiener Tagebuch and (together with myself and some others) planner and editor – his only regular income now came from it – of Giulio Einaudi’s ambitious Storia del Marxismo. He fell to a long-awaited heart attack in the summer of 1979. He died a communist. The Italian Communist Party was represented at his funeral. What he left at his death, give or take a few books, could be packed into two suitcases.