by Martin Amis
62 The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Two, pp. 119–20.
PART III
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN
Letter to a Friend
Chalet La Galana,
Calle Los Picaflores,
Esquina Los Biguá,
José Ignacio,
Maldonado,
Uruguay.
10 February 2001.
Comrade Hitchens!
I like the way the Bolsheviki hailed each other in their letters, and will be disappointed if inquiry reveals that the exclamation mark was a national habit – just as the Americans favour the businesslike colon, while the British stick with the diffident yet intimate comma. I like the comrades’ ‘shock’ greeting, with its suggestion that the recipient may have fallen into some deviationist reverie, and its further suggestion that he had better snap out of it and reattend, on pain of death, to his quotas. I like the air of menace, of vigilance, of sleeplessness. Considering my current location, I might have followed what was presumably the practice at POUM1 and opened my communication with an inverted exclamation mark, as well, obliging the comrade to tense up even quicker.
The northern hemisphere, at least in the months that we call winter, is, I fear, a fool’s game. Here we all wander about the place with the grateful and trusting smile of a recently rescued Bambi. It is a land of thousand-mile beaches, spectacular tormentas, and flipped and wriggling beetles the size of Gregor Samsa. Fernanda has learned how to swim, Clio has learned how to talk, and I have learned how to say one very versatile sentence in Spanish – Yo siento mucho, pero no puedo ayudar (oh and the equally all-purpose Yo no sé nada).2 All I lack is the presence of my other children. I miss them. And I miss my sister Sally, whom you knew. I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. Now I do know wherefore – but it took some time. ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ It took me a while to find this speech, because I was sure Hamlet was in colloquy with Horatio – rather than with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which makes Hamlet’s dejection even more soiled and thrown-away … The key phrase is ‘but wherefore I know not’. Hamlet doesn’t fully see that his metaphysical miseries constitute a subliminal symptom of grief; and this was exactly my case. I thought I was sick, I thought I was dying (maybe that is what bereavement actually asks of you). Literature gives us these warnings about the main events, but we don’t recognize the warnings until the events have come and gone. Isabel, my senior in the loss of a sibling, told me that you just have to take it, like weather – yes, like sleet in your face. Other skies ask other questions. Even the candid blue of Uruguay. But more of this another time, and there will be more of this, much more of this, and then more, and then more.
Just before we left we had a couple of very good evenings with the Conquests. Bob said to me, ‘Do you remember my suggesting, long ago, that you should call your next novel The Cupid Stunts?’ I said that I did, and adduced the analogous Cunning Stunts from Nabokov (is it from Transparent Things?). Then (dry, professorial) he said, ‘Of course there’s also The Cotton Runts.’3 I asked him, ‘What is The Cotton Runts?’ And he said, ‘A social-realist novel about Lancashire slum children affected by the collapse of the textile industry’ … If Nietzsche is right, and a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, then this joke is a massacre. I laughed for so long that he got going too; as it subsided he took off his glasses and removed a tear with his little finger. I think I reminded him of Kingsley – for the Amis men double over when they laugh, and scrunch up their eyes to remove all possible distractions. More curiously, he reminds me of Kingsley. Because he is really terrifyingly unchanged, isn’t he? Remember in the Letters, when Kingsley and Larkin have been exchanging sincere and eloquent complaints about old age, and Kingsley says incredulously that ‘Bob just goes on as if nothing has happened’? (Liddie4 says he simply ‘wakes up happy’. Christ, is that what you’ve got to do?) In his Seven Ages limerick5 he is still hovering between lines three and four – in his mid-eighties. How is he getting on with his memoirs? Will we learn about his Pierce Brosnan period at the Foreign Office? When you see them next, give them my love and say that I’ll be over in June. Now back to business.
Comrade Hitchens! There is probably not that much in these pages that you don’t already know. You already know, in that case, that Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it. So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn’t want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted disciple-ship of Trotsky. These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use. And they showed him a remarkable thing: that it was possible to run a country with a formula of dead freedom, lies and violence – and unpunctuated self-righteousness. During one of our four or five evenings on the subject, you quietly stressed that Lenin’s performance was ‘not hypocritical’. I wonder at that. Isn’t unpunctuated self-righteousness, in a man presiding over the less than perfect world of the Soviet Union, 1917–24, automatically not not hypocritical? Off the record, Lenin was capable of telling the truth, blandly conceding that certain policies had had certain (unpleasant) results. But nothing here qualifies Bunin’s judgment, with which I increasingly concur: Lenin, ‘that congenital moral imbecile’. I will return later, if I may, to Trotsky.
The arc of the late Dmitri Volkogonov is an interesting one, is it not? His Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy appeared in 1989; and although the cover of my paperback is wreathed in quotes like ‘a massive indictment’ and so on, it is in fact comparatively lenient. In 1988 Volkogonov didn’t know that Stalin was responsible for the fates of his parents (and two uncles). He found out later, and directly, in the archives: his father was shot in the Terror for possessing some work of Bukharin’s, and his mother died in ‘exile’ – that is, as a police-harassed woman of the road. Dmitri was nine years old in 1937; he sensed what life was like, but he had already eaten the ideology … His Stalin has blind spots, tacit assumptions (he is almost jocose on the repressions of the clergy). Because he was still a believer: a political believer. The disappearance of that belief was complex, and partly independent of filial outrage, coming ‘like the melancholy of a spiritual hangover’.6 A queasy counterrevolution of the mind, the heart, the soul, the gut. Volkogonov’s subsequent books in his trilogy, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (1992) and Lenin: A New Biography (1994),7 continue a curve of mounting disgust and despair. ‘Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,’ he wrote (when his life was ending), ‘was to break with the faith I had held for so long.’ The workings of Volkogonov’s internal perestroika are altogether alien to me; but this quietly extraordinary remark is a goad to the imagination.
You must understand the process better than I do, because you have undergone it, or partly undergone it. Your restructuring remains incomplete. Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror. They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom. A while ago I told you that 1989 was a turning point in your evolution as a writer. Until then your prose had always given me the impression of less than complete disclosure – the sense that certain truths might have to be postponable. Then you lost that inhibition, and your writing voice gained a new quality: freedom.
Seen in terms of freedom and freedom alone, October was not a political revolution riding on the back of a popular revolution (February). It was a counterrevolution. The ‘unrest’ of 1921 – in the armed forces (mutiny at Kronstadt and elsewhere), in the post-
Civil War remains of the proletariat (strikes, demonstrations, riots), and in the countryside (peasant rebellion involving millions) – constituted a popular revolution far more thoroughgoing than those of 1917 and 1905.8 The Bolsheviki, of course, called this a counterrevolution, and bloodily suppressed it. Whereas, in fact, their revolution was the counterrevolution. That was the elephant – the trumpeting, snorting, farting mammoth – in the Kremlin living room. Established on an abyss of untruth, Bolshevism was committed to its career of slapstick mendacity, attaining universal and ideal truthlessness under Stalin. The fragile freedom of the interrevolutionary period was replaced by unfreedom, dead freedom, as Vasily Grossman puts it. And that’s what matters:
The history of humanity is the history of human freedom … Freedom is not, as Engels thought, ‘the recognition of necessity’. Freedom is the opposite of necessity. Freedom is necessity overcome. Progress is, in essence, the progress of human freedom. Yes, and after all, life itself is freedom. The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.
So may I make a suggestion? You should reread the twenty-four volumes of Lenin’s works in the following way: every time you see the words ‘counterrevolution’ or ‘counterrevolutionary’ you should take out the ‘counter’; and every time you see the words ‘revolution’ or ‘revolutionary’ you should put the ‘counter’ back in again.
Your boy Trotsky. No, I haven’t read Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast, but I have read Volkogonov’s Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (make that Counterrevolutionary. And what’s all this ‘eternal’ stuff and ‘prophet’ stuff? What was he a prophet of? A Communist England? A Communist USA?). As is certainly not the case with Lenin (I groaned with deep recognition when I recently learned that he couldn’t pronounce his r’s: not a good start, I think, for a Russian revolutionary), the attraction to Trotsky is intelligible, and has some human basis. For one thing, he had literary talent – there is always a lulling quality in his rhythms; and he was a great encapsulator. When the Kronstadt sailors (his ‘flower and beauty of the revolution’ – and make that ‘counterrevolution’) inaugurated their articulate and principled rebellion, he said, ‘Now the middle peasant speaks to us with naval guns’ – because the armed forces had started responding to state terrorism in the countryside. (As against that, he suppressed the sailors with exemplary Bolshevik mercilessness, and never mentioned this postponable truth in his various memoirs.) Trotsky’s slogan at Brest-Litovsk (‘Neither war nor peace’) was insubordinate and gravely counterproductive – but it was original: I can hear that German general saying, ‘Unerhört!’ And so on. But Trotsky was never a contender for the leadership. In that struggle he was a mere poseur (reading French novels during meetings of the Central Committee): a Congress election result of 1921 put Trotsky tenth (and he didn’t come tenth because he was more humane than the other nine). More basically, Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer – they all were. The only thing that can be entered on the other side of the ledger is that he paid a price that was very nearly commensurate. Death was visited on him and all his clan. It is shaking to read the list of Bronsteins, and near-Bronsteins, destroyed by Stalin. When Trotsky publicly offered Stalin the job of ‘gravedigger of the Revolution’ (and make that ‘Counterrevolution’), it was said that he would not be forgiven ‘unto the fourth generation’. And so it might have proved. Murder came to almost everyone who had ever known him or talked to him or seen him up close; hundreds of thousands, millions of innocent people lost their lives for some imagined connection to him and his name. So far as I am aware there is in Trotsky’s writing no reference to what this felt like. He seems simply to have accepted it – that he became a lightning rod for death. But then they were all charged up with the electricity of violence.
We come back to where we started. As you rightly intuit, the gravamen (‘essence, worst part, of accusation’) runs as follows: under Bolshevism the value of human life collapsed. You claim that the value of human life had already collapsed – because of the world war. Well, this argument would have more weight behind it if a) there had been a similar collapse (i.e., total, and lasting thirty-five years) in any other combatant country, and if b) a single Old Bolshevik had spent a single day at the front, or indeed in the army (though it is true that Stalin got as far as failing his medical: that withered left arm plus ‘a defective foot’). The ‘full-time revolutionaries’ spent the war years abroad, or in state-subsidized and unsupervised internal exile, or in the embarrassingly congenial Tsarist prisons, rereading that idiot Chernyshevsky. (Trotsky said that he enjoyed his stays in the Peter and Paul Fortress: he had all his comforts, and didn’t have to worry about getting arrested.) The full-timers nursed their impotence until that night in October, when they saw that power was lying on the streets of Petrograd and picked it up ‘like a feather’. That summer the Party slogan was ‘Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!’ In fact, the Bolsheviki had more in mind than capital punishment. ‘We must rid ourselves once and for all,’ said Trotsky, ‘of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.’ What they had in mind was vanguard violence: a violence ‘not seen for centuries’ (Conquest); a violence ‘whose scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past’ (Malia).
I know a little about Russian Jacobinism, the writings of Sergey Nechaev et al. (kill everyone over the age of twenty-five, and so on), but it isn’t clear to me how the paradise-via-inferno idea survived a moment’s thought in the first place. Let us laboriously imagine that the ‘paradise’ Trotsky promised to ‘build’ suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful ‘Yes’ to a paradise so bought. Means define ends, as Kolakowski said – and means, in the USSR, were all you were ever going to get. And the contradiction within the contradiction is this: the militant utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility. Nadezhda Mandelstam talks of the ‘satanic arrogance’ of the Bolsheviki. There is also infernal insecurity and disaffection, and infernal despair.
Bukharin is apt in his demolition of the permanent-revolution theory propounded by Stalin (and, with variations, by Trotsky):
This strange theory elevates the actual fact that the class struggle is now intensifying into some sort of inevitable law of our development. According to this strange theory, it would seem that the farther we go in our advance towards socialism, the more difficulties will accumulate, the more intense the class struggle would become, so that at the very gates of socialism, apparently, we will have to either start a civil war or perish from hunger and lay down our bones to die.
Now, Hitch, I want to leave you with two images. I cannot find the source in either case, and maybe there has been some unwarranted elaboration in my mind. Anyway.
In the early months of the Great Patriotic War there were reports of pitched battles between troops and their Cheka ‘blocking units’.9 Imagine such a battle, with machine guns (certainly), tanks (possibly), and a third army just across the field …
The second image is more notional. Trotsky’s other theory of permanent revolution (we should call it Permrev) consisted of the vain hope for a series of revolutions in foreign lands, the process concluding with global socialism. Some prominent comrade further remarked that only then, when Communism ruled the earth, would the really warm work of class struggle be ready to begin … And I instantly pictured a scorpion stinging itself to death. Scorpions have of course been known to do this – when surrounded by fire, for example. But where is the fire, on a Communist planet? It is a fire in the self. It is self-hatred and life-hatred. After all, the scorpion has an excellent ‘objective’ reason for killing the scorpion: it’s alive, isn’t it?
Not with a
nti-Communist greetings, then, because these thoughts are part of no package, but with fraternal love, as always,
Martin
1 Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista, the heretical sect of Catalonia, savaged by the Cheka during the Spanish Civil War for its Trotskyist bent.
2 ‘I’m very sorry, but I can be of no help.’ ‘I don’t know anything.’
3 The Nabokov quote is naturally another matter, but American readers should be told that the word being quibbled with here means, in English, something like ‘moronic bastard’, and has no sexual connotation.
4 Liddie Neece, the fourth Mrs Robert Conquest. ‘Liddie and I are getting married,’ he told my father. ‘Bob, you can’t do that. Not again’ ‘Well, I thought – one for the road.’ That was twenty-two years ago.
5 Seven ages: first puking and mewling:
Then very pissed off with one’s schooling;
Then fucks; and then fights;
Then judging chaps’ rights;
Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.
6 These feelings are described in Autopsy for an Empire. Volkogonov died shortly after completing it, in 1995.
7 Dates of publication in Russia. They appeared in reverse order in the West.
8 The Kronstadt sailors, and other groups, actually called themselves revolutionaries and fought under the red flag.
9 ‘Above all, it was Trotsky,’ writes Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, ‘who in December 1918 ordered the formation of “blocking units” equipped with machine guns, whose role was simply to shoot front-line soldiers who attempted to retreat.’