The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  In his long Comintern career, Jan had learnt to master the technique of the `internal manoeuvre' (`Fraktionspolitik'). It is a technique difficult to explain to people brought up in the political climate of a democracy, who are used to thinking of political activity in terms of parliamentary debates, appeals to the electorate, the struggles and alliances of parties with a more or less defined programme. In the Marxist camp, ever since the founding of the First International in 1848, the struggles of ideas and personalities were waged by entirely different techniques, initiated by Marx himself. In the small conspiratorial groups of the early years, and in the revolutionary movement which grew out of them, the usual rules of the game of politics did not apply. These rules were replaced, broadly speaking, by revolutionary discipline, and obedience to a quasi-military leadership. The delegates at Party--Conferences and Congresses did not represent the interests of their constituents, or of any specific group of the electorate. Without a proper mandate, the delegates were a diffuse and amorphous gathering, divided into coteries, in Party parlance `fractions'. Thus these Congresses--which only met at rare intervals, and often under difficult circumstances, for a few days--could never develop into representative parliaments of the Revolution. The `fractions' were not political parties, but alliances between individuals temporarily held together by a common concept of strategy or, more often, a common bid for power. The internal history of the various Communist Parties, including the Russian, is a story of struggles between the various `fractions', which, in the absence of a democratic procedure, could only be waged by means of intrigue, the springing of traps, the shifting of personal allegiances, and other manoeuvres of `Fraktionspolitik'. The final decision rested with the Russian Politbureau, and later with Stalin alone, who exercised his power through periodic demotions, expulsions, the liquidation of one `fraction', and its replacement by another.

  Accordingly, the professional Communist politician's concept of `politics' was fundamentally different from the Western politician's. Principles and ideals, the gifts of public oratory and parliamentary repartee, grasp of reality and knowledge of history, originality, initiative and personal integrity--all these were not assets, but liabilities to the Comintern politician. `Politics' for him meant the acquisition of techniques and skills which were in almost every respect the direct opposite of the qualities just mentioned. The secret of Stalin's rise to personal power and of his victory over his more brilliant competitors, from Trotsky to Bukharin, is only a secret to the Western observer unfamiliar with the climate and atmosphere of Communism. His lack of any attribute of greatness in the Western sense--the deadly tedium of his writings and speeches, the absence of principles, ideals, originality, his treacherousness towards his associates and deafness to the sufferings of the people, his gross falsifications of history--all this would have made him a grotesque outsider in the House of Commons, and made his incomparable greatness as a`Fraktionspolitiker'. True to the dialectics of the Comintern universe, he remained, through the years of manoeuvring for position, the perfect Invisible Man; the moment he was established in power, he became the omnipresent god.

  Our Jan of the League of the Godless was a pocket-sized Stalin. On the remote peripheries of the Comintern where our INFA lived, the deadly battles of the Olympians were reenacted in more or less harmless, and often grotesque, versions. Jan had no power to liquidate us, to send us to a labour camp, to extract confessions from us. To Communists outside Russia, these things could only be done by ordering them under some pretext to Moscow. If any of us had received the call, he would, of course, have obeyed. But we were far too unimportant for such grand measures; they were only used on leaders and appnrat-men.

  So the battle of the INFA was in a sense a shadow battle; the implied penalties were not death or confinement, only disfavour and dismissal--and in the last resort, of course, expulsion from the Party. But the knowledge of these dangers was quite sufficient to condition us to obedience, and to lend Jan an absolute authority which everybody took for granted.

  Jan set to work in a quiet, inconspicuous manner. He never made a harsh remark, he never expressed direct disapproval of anything that was said. It took me at least a month to realise that his aim was the elimination of Peter from the Institute. Since Jan had arrived, we had every week two or three `official meetings', which took up much time and had the inevitably paralysing effect of a sudden change of atmosphere from friendly informality to bureaucratic solemnity. At these meetings, Jan delivered speeches which lasted from one to two hours, laying down the `general principles' of our work in orthodox Dugashwilese, such as `deepening our contact with the masses of toilers', `broadening our ideological front', `intensifying the dialectical mastery of our scientific-educational work', `remedying our neglect to take sufficient account of the camouflaged Fascist character of the so-called teachings of the so-called Austro-Marxist school', and so forth. All this was an unintentional parody of Stalin's `directives' and `theses' addressed to sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and had no practical relation whatsoever to our actual work. Jan deliberately avoided getting involved in practical problems, and thus to assume direct responsibility for anything that was done. But after a while I began to discover that although his lectures had no bearing on our work, they had a direct bearing on personalities. In each of his speeches, he singled out members of the staff for praise in a significant order of priorities-whereas his exhortations to `self-criticism' were, in one way or another, always aimed at Peter and later on, when I had made it clear that I stood by Peter, at myself. These attacks were always veiled, and never mentioned any concrete shortcomings in our work; they were couched in the nebulous terms of `broadening fronts' and `intensifying efforts', `deepening contacts', and the like. But they achieved their purpose: the experienced `old Party horses' on the staff understood that, for one reason or another, Peter and I were in for it.

  In any normal Party office this would have been sufficient to finish us off. The staff would have taken the hint, would have denounced us on grounds of inefficiency, Trotskyism or corruption; the Central Committee would have ordered an investigation and would have thrown us out from the Institute or the Party itself, as the case may be. But the people who worked in INFA were an exceptional lot. They did not contradict Jan--that would have been a useless and quixotic gesture and interpreted as mutiny--but they abstained from attacking Peter or me, and seemed to be deaf to Jan's oblique hints.

  The Party could, of course, have got rid of us by a simple order. But, according to the principles of Comintern politics, it is essential to `unmask', that is, discredit a person or fraction `in the eyes of the masses' before he or they are liquidated--hence the infinite and painstaking trouble that is taken to extract self-incriminating confessions from the victim. The `masses' in this case were not only the six or eight people on our staff, but the important group of French intellectuals who sponsored INFA. They would ask questions, and if it came to a scandal, this would one day boomerang back on Jan in the form of an accusation of `political sabotage'.

  So Jan devised a new manoeuvre. In the happy days before he had descended on us, the Institute had accepted my project of an International Anti-Fascist Exhibition, and by the autumn we were well launched on it. It was an ambitious project: the Exhibition was to be held in one of the vast pavilions of the annual Paris Fair, at the Port de Versailles. It was to remain open for a month or longer, with public rallies, lectures by the elite of European intellectuals, and so on. It would, of course, cost millions of francs and was far beyond our financial and organisatorial powers. But Peter and I got several progressive bodies interested--such as the League for the Right of Man, the League against Racial Persecution, and some of the leaders of ,he French Socialist Trade Unions Council. The negotiations were delicate, as each of these bodies pursued its own policy, and they were often at logger­heads. A loose agreement had been reached, according to which INFA should work out the detailed plans and budget of the enterprise, and then we would all
get together and appoint a mixed committee for its implementation.

  Our small staff was working feverishly on the plans, when one day a new man appeared, introduced by Jan. Jan described him as 'Maurice, a reliable­comrade, who is a caricaturist and a designer'. He was to help us with the artistic side' of the project.

  Maurice was a stocky man in his thirties, with pointedly prolitarian manners and a peeved, distrustful expression. I learnt later on that he had worked for the apparat in Hamburg, and had occasionally done caricature for the Party paper. He shook hands with us with an unsmiling, suspicious look in his red-rimmed eyes, and for the next three days never spoke a word. He was installed with his drawing-board in Jan's own room; he asked us no questions about the work of the institute which was new to him, and took no interest in the plans on which he was supposed to collaborate. Gradually we discovered that comrade Maurice was very nearly a moron, and that his distrustful silence was due to his inability to grasp any subject that was being discussed. Then, one day, we were shown the drawings he had prepared. One was a sketch for a poster on which a giant worker in overalls smashed a pigmy Hitler with a hammer; the other was a sketch for the main Exhibition hall with one wall reserved for `photographs of the atrocities committed by the Fascist barbarians' and the opposite wall for `photographs of the Socialist reconstruction in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics'.

  That was just what we had feared most. Any project on undisguised Communist propaganda lines would lead to an immediate snapping of the precarious ties with the persons and organisations on whom the realisation of the project depended. The alternative to be presented to the public must be `Fascism or Freedom', and not `Fascism or Communism'. Our only possible line was to stress the defensive community of interest of all parties from the Centre to the extreme Left, including the Socialists, who, regardless of their ultimate aims, were all threatened by a common danger. In short, we could only succeed by adopting a`People's Front' policy, meaning a broad coalition of all the parties of the Left. It was at this point that the battle of the Olympians had its direct repercussions in our miniature universe.

  In 1934, the Communist International went through one of the periods of convulsion and upheaval which accompany each of its reversals of policy. The official line up to the beginning of that year had been one of intransigent radicalism, rejecting any compromise with Socialists and Liberals. The subsequent reversal of policy is summarised by the following quotations'

  Maurice Tliorez, leader of the French C.P., in Cahicrs du Communisme, April r, 1934:

  `Any attempt to forget, to extenuate the role of social-democracy [in suppressing the working classes] is more than a mistake, it is a crime against the working class.'

  Maurice Thorez in Hunianite, April 13:

  `All gossip about a marriage between Communists and Socialists is fundamentally alien to the spirit of Bolshevism. We do not want to unite with social-democracy. Fire and water cannot mix.'

  Maitrice Thorez in Cahiers du Bolshevisme, July I:

  `We the Communist Party, we are ready to renounce all criticism of the Socialist Party during our joint action.... Neither from the lips of any of our propagandists nor from the pen of any of our editors will there be found the smallest attack upon the organisations and the leaders of the Socialist Party while they are faithful to the agreement they will have concluded with us.'

  Thus by June 1934, after Thorez had been summoned to a hurried visit to Moscow, the line had been completely reversed. The Socialists who, two months earlier, had been denounced as Social-Fascists, had now become precious allies of the `People's Front against Fascism'. Bourgeois democracy wluch, two months earlier, had been regarded as `Fascism in disguise', was now praised as a guarantee of freedom, and it was now the duty of Communists to `cherish every scrap of bourgeois democracy'. All revolutionary slogans were eliminated from the Communist vocabulary, and replaced by the slogans of `freedom, peace and national unity'.

  But this spectacular about-turn was as yet only tentative. The new 'People's Front' strategy was being tried out in France as a preliminary to the Franco-Russian military pact of 1935. It only became the official policy of the Conuntern a year later, at the Seventh Congress in Moscow, in July 1935. In the meantime, and particularly during the second half of 1934, everything was confusion and hesitation. It seemed quite possible that the French experiment would again be reversed--such things had happened in the past--with woeful consequences for those who had fallen for it. Stalin himself had so far made no pronouncement. Manuilsky, Secretary General of the Comintern (who was soon to be replaced by Dimitrov), was known to be engaged in a bitter fractional struggle against Bela Kun and Piatnitsky, representing the `Left'. And Jacques Doriot, the most popular figure among the Communist leaders in France and the direct rival of Thorez, had been expelled from the Central Committee (and subsequently from the Party) as late as April.1934­precisely because he had been advocating the `People's Front' line a few months before Moscow had ordered it.

  Peter and I fell into a similar trap. Owing to our dependence on French Socialist and Liberal sponsors, we would have been bound to adopt the People's Front' line for purely practical reasons--even if it had not happened to correspond to our natural inclination and political temperament, which it did. But for Jan, as a member of the Comintern bureaucracy, the situation was not as simple as for us, and fraught with danger. For the German section at the Comintern was in a position entirely different from the French, and was stubbornly opposed to the new line.

  In France, where the Communists were relatively weak, they could only gain by an alliance with the Socialists and the progressive middle-class; above all, the impending Franco-Russian alliance made it imperative that France should be united and strong. Exactly the opposite considerations applied to Germany. Here the Communists, as the Nazis' victim number one, had a chance of monopolising the opposition movement; the moderate parties were discredited, and defeat had made the hatred between exiled German Socialists and Communists even more embittered. It was probable that in the end the new policy would be imposed on the German Party too--but it was also possible that the French and German sections would be ordered to adopt different lines, as it sometimes happened in the Comintern. The first alternative was the more likely one, but there was no certainty. Under the circumstances, Jan could only play for time. But Peter and I had acted on the new line ahead of time just like the unfortunate Doriot. To attack us on these grounds would not have been politic, in case the new line was later confirmed. At the same time, Jan had also to avoid getting involved in the Institute's practical activities, and assuming responsibility for any step on which we decided. Hence all the evasive talk about `broadening the front' which could be interpreted as an endorsement of the `People's Front' line and of `deepening our contact with the masses'-which could be interpreted as sticking to the old, revolutionary line.

  But if Peter and I were replaced by others, the new men would, by force of circumstances, be bound to adopt the same policy we had pursued. It was in this dilemma that Jan proved his mastery of `internal manoeuvring'. He brought in Maurice the moron, who spoke no French and would not commit Jan to anything because he would do nothing at all. What mattered to Jan, and what would have mattered to any Comintern man in his place, was to last through the period of upheaval.

  A few days after the arrival of Maurice, Jan called a meeting. After one of his long-winded and nebulous sermons, he came out with a series of `proposals for the reorganisation of the Institute's work in the interest of higher efficiency'. Comrades Peter and Arthur should withdraw from the Exhibition project so that they could devote their energies to other, unspecified tasks. The Exhibition project would, in the interests of efficiency, henceforth be concentrated in the hands of one person, Comrade Maurice, who would be in charge of all planning, negotiations and administrative tasks.

  The proposals were, of course, decrees. Our exclusion from the Exhibition project meant not only that we were `politically liquidated
', but the end of the project itself which, by the nature of circumstances, depended on our work. I believe that everybody present understood this. The meeting lasted three or four hours, and ended with my resignation from the Institute; since I had taken the job voluntarily and not by the Party's orders, this could not be construed as a direct breach of Party discipline. Peter, the real target of Jan's manceuvre, was a better Communist than I; he sat through most of the meeting in silence, staring at Jan with an expression of Christian love which the latter, for all his horse-hair stuffmg, seemed to find embarrassing. Peter's only contribution to the discussion was an attempt to dissuade me from leaving the Institute. He spoke very quietly, trying to convince me that some Party decisions may be hard to face at the time, but that in the end the Party always proved to be right--an axiom in which he firmly believed. Yet after a few weeks he, too, was finally forced to resign.

  The other members of the staff spoke in a similar vein. They did it with so much warmth that it amounted to an implicit criticism of the purge, and made it even harder for me to leave. Yet nobody dared to contradict Jan's directives. Such an act of insubordination was unthinkable to them, in spite of their loyalty to Peter and their devotion to our Institute. It did not even occur to any of us to ask for a vote on Jan's `proposals'. That, too, was unthinkable.

  Peter resigned some time during the winter, and after another month INFA closed down.

  The Party, or at least Jan, must have foreseen this outcome. Our Institute was an altogether too unorthodox and independent enterprise. It aimed at a study of social phenomena beyond the limits set by the Party's changing slogans, and regardless of these changes. Such an approach must sooner or later lead to deviations from, and conflicts with, the Party line; it fell into the category of `bourgeois-objectivism'. If the Comintern wanted to retain its monolithic ideological structure, such attempts, large or small, could not be tolerated. It was therefore essential to get INFA under closer control by liquidating Peter, who was its creator and moving spirit. If it did not survive the bloodletting, so much the better, as it was bound to remain a permanent headache anyway.