One of the creators of the Soviet political or politicized trials, in which innocent people were condemned on the basis of forced confessions and name-calling that substituted for proof (stinking carcass, fetid pile of human garbage), was the knowledgeable prerevolutionary lawyer Andrey Vyshinsky. His Czech disciple, Josef Urválek, was a lawyer as well.
Far too many intellectuals were in the service of a fanatical idea that contradicted and betrayed everything humanity had thus far achieved.
In 1934, just after the Nazis took power in Germany, Karel Čapek published several remarkable reflections on the role of intellectuals in the political tragedy that was unfolding.
An entire nation, an entire empire spiritually conceded to a faith in animality, in race, and in other such nonsense. An entire nation including university professors, preachers, men of letters, doctors, and lawyers. . What has happened is nothing less than the immense betrayal of intellectuals, and it has resulted in a horrifying image of what intelligence is capable of. Everywhere that coercion occurs on cultured humanity we find intellectuals who are engaged en masse, even brandishing ideological arguments. This is no longer a crisis or the powerlessness of the intelligentsia, but rather its quiet and energetic complicity in the moral and political mayhem of today’s Europe. . No cultural value can be exceeded if it is abandoned. . Destroy the hierarchy of the spirit, and you prepare for the return of the savage. The decline of the intelligentsia is the path to the barbarization of everything.
Nevertheless, it did indeed happen, and for decades scholars have repeatedly tried to explain this mass failure of the intelligentsia.
Thus far I have mentioned only the intellectuals who participated directly in the creation or the operation of totalitarian regimes. It is significant to note that, with only a few exceptions, these were not especially gifted thinkers. (This is particularly true of the Nazis just mentioned.) Goebbels was merely a capable demagogue; in reality, as his diaries show, he was inwardly insecure. For years he despaired over his fate, which seemed to him so hopeless that he considered suicide. Himmler was just as uncertain. His entire youth was utterly without success, and from his lack of confidence was born a raving fanaticism. When he finally decided to assume the mantle of the intellectual, he proclaimed only fatuous prejudices based on romantic German mythology. Their ferocious anti-Semitism bears eloquent testimony to the base intellectual level of both men.
Not even among the Communist intellectuals do we find great minds. Although numerous paeans have been written about Lenin’s intellectual achievements, no one has yet sought inspiration in his flights into the area of philosophy or the social sciences. When examined objectively, his theses are a conglomeration of cranky polemics, simplifying interpretations, and, above all, errors and lies presented as scientific truth.
Otherwise, intellectuals did not participate directly in the achievement of totalitarian power, but they either actively endorsed it or tolerated it without objection. Of these there were millions.
During the birth of Communist ideology, enthusiastic supporters were found all over the world (even more than in the Soviet Union), and many were outstanding intellectuals. Artists were captivated by the utopian vision, the marvelous goals, and the skillful demagoguery with which Communist dictators managed to defend everything that took place in their empires (terror, famine, murder, and imprisonment). Some of these artists, at the beginning of the Bolshevik reign, were still allowed to work. During the first postrevolutionary years, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, and Isaac Babel even approved of and were willing to publicly defend the Communist vision of a joyous society, as if it had already been created. Although other recognized and influential minds of the time condemned Bolshevism immediately after the revolution, they also found positive things to say about Russia. H. G. Wells visited Russia in 1920 and was shocked by what he saw. However, he ended up writing several complimentary things about Russia and Lenin. He concluded his book about his visit, Russia in the Shadows, with the assurance that only the Bolsheviks were capable of preventing the collapse of Russia. It was as if he’d forgotten that it was precisely the Bolsheviks who had brought Russia to the brink of collapse in the first place.
In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Bertrand Russell, who visited Russia at the same time as Wells, spoke more ambivalently about Bolshevism.
One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. [But] the hopes which inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount [!], but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.
It is true that the First World War shook people’s faith in current political systems, and this caused even educated people to look with expectation upon this great social experiment the Bolsheviks were trying to bring about in Russia.
There were many intellectuals who supported Stalin even during the period of his greatest cruelty. Usually they found a rational justification for their weakness concerning the merciless totalitarian regime. Hewlett Johnson, nicknamed the Red Dean of Canterbury, one of the most passionate advocates of the Soviet regime, considered it more humane than capitalism. In his trilogy of journalistic books about the Soviet Union, he writes only about that which lent itself to Soviet propaganda. He enthusiastically praises free medical care, education, and the tax system, and justifies his praise (like Stalin) by pointing out the great support the regime receives in its elections. If such a large percentage of the population participates in elections — on May 10th, 1946, it was 99.7 percent — and if 99.18 percent voted for the selected candidates, there must be truth behind the elections in a country where there are equal voting rights, where voting is secret, and where elections are direct. Whether this prominent intellectual public figure from a country of traditional democracy actually believed this claim is difficult to judge. Lenin, however, called such intellectuals useful idiots. Useful idiots were used and abused, often cited as authorities, and showered with admiration and accolades. (Johnson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.)
Of course, it is true that Soviet politicians cunningly continued the Russian tradition of showing willing visitors their country. After the war they deftly exploited the atomic fears of a series of intellectuals, and although they themselves were feverishly producing atomic weapons (intended to defend their camp of peace), they unleashed an enormous political campaign against the spread of weapons of mass destruction — and for this campaign they enlisted the foremost scientific experts, the Nobel laureates Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Linus Pauling.
A few decades later, just after the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editor for L’Humanité announced on television that even eighty million dead did not tarnish the Communist worldview. After Auschwitz, he opined, one cannot be a Nazi, but after the Soviet gulags, one can be a Communist.
Certainly it is possible to remain a Communist standing over the mass graves of the murdered (they were, after all, enemies of the greatest and most humane society), it is possible to remain a Communist on the scaffold (whether as the condemned or the hangman), but it is impossible to remain an intellectual or a cultured person. Because the betrayal of intelligence leads to the barbarization of everyone.