The Soviet writer Kuznetsov has explained at some length, and with moving detail, his reasons for leaving his country. His account of the persecutions, the censorship and punishment of writers in the Soviet Union for what they have written is indisputably a true one. The evidence in *support of it has been accumulating for nearly half a century: first under Stalin's Krushchov was In power; then increasingly during the years since Brezhnev and Kosygin took over the Kremlin, its apparatus of power and control, and the entire wretched and Vicious legacy of a deformed revolution back through the death of Lenin ultimately to the deeper roots which lie in the long tragedy of Russian history and Czardom.
That the Bolshevik scale is equally indisputable; but the choice made by Kuznetsov, and the fate of his fellow writers who failed to conform to their bureaucratic masters, is part of a greater testimony to the political, ideological and moral disintegration of that first great victory of those who work and produce over those who own and profit: October 1917.
Kuznetsov, however, in his letter of resignation from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, goes further: "After much serious reflection over many years, I have arrived at the complete rejection of Marxism-Leninism. I consider today that this doctrine is utterly obsolete, rigid and naive. It is utterly incapable of • resolving the contradictions in society today, and, what is worse, it has led, continues to lead, and threatens to go on leading to frightful social tragedies.
We are then forced to ask ourselves the question, what does Kuznetsov mean by "Marxism-Leninism"? His whole account of his reasons for finally taking the drastic step of leaving the Soviet Union rather suggests that Marxism-Leninism he means the theory, dogma and practice which led to the miseries and injustices he describes. Which is curious, when one reflects that the calculated distortions of the meaning and intention of Marx and Lenin's work commenced after the death of Lenin.
Conveniently (and one hopes unintentionally) for the West, Kuznetsov regime; a temporary relaxation when identified the work of Stalin and his collaborators, and its terrible consequences for the Soviet people with Marx and Lenin! He manages to imply that it follows from applying the theories of Marx and Lenin that there must result the kind of society which developed under Stalin. By the same kind of logic one might then have to say, for example, that because Einstein conceived his Theory of Relativity Revolution then eventually someone would have to materially transformed Russia on a huge drop an atom bomb somewhere. And one would have to reply that history intervened as critically in the first case as 'in the second - which disproves neither Marx, Lenin or Einstein, but reminds us that dialectical change includes not only the complexities of economic laws but also the actions and decisions of men. In this sense Marxism-Leninism is neither deterministic nor absolute. Like all attempts at a scientific methodology it must follow definable empirical procedures.
Kuznetsov would be right to say that once Stalin seized and held power, he reduced a historical-social-economic body of theory to a sterile mythology devised and propagated to rationalise his own personal and pathological absolutism, to mystify the Soviet people and thus create ideal conditions for the operation of systematic terror; perhaps finally to cover the discrepancy between his ruthless sense of necessity and its indefensible consequences terms of human suffering. Kuznetsov does not say that. He looks for his views of historical causality in by those criminals Marx and Lenin, who were rotting in their graves before Stalin's servile criminals began throwing good, honest communists into their graves. He has nothing to say about the conditions in which the Bolshevik Revolution was torn inch by inch from its idealism - conditions of a nation exhausted by an imperialist ›overty, hunger, destruction; a willins out tragically depleted proletariat; civi war; intervention by the Western powers. The catalogue of threats to human idealism struggling in a bog of famine, violence and chaos is endless.
Nor does Kuznetsov have anything to say about Stalin's cynical handling of the Party after Lenin's death: the exile, humiliation and persecution of the Old Bolsheviks and their ultimate destruction in the nineteen thirties. Nothing about Trotsky, and his savage and brilliant critique of the post-Lenin period. Nothing about the Moscow trial In fact, all Kuznetsov has to say really i that nothing resembling humane communism developed in the Soviet Union, and that he personally has had enough of it. No communist with intelligence and humanity can judge Kuznetsov, or condemn his personal choice of action. No one convincingly fault his picture of life in the Soviet Union as experienced by most intellectuals and artists of conscience.
But Kuznetsov's fault lies in his analysis, and in this he innocently provides excellent political ammunition for governments and institu everywhere who are running the li millions of people for the most totally ignorant of Russian history pre and post revolutionary. One and distinguished communist has cl Western freedom and a very freedom it is, for precisely the peop in is talking about: writers, But journalists, intellectuals of all k Freedom to make public their v whether as men and women who b in and enjoy the society create For as people who nauseated by it and reject it.
It is quite likely that steelworkers at Port Talbot care as for this freedom for these people, the Soviet miners of the Don basin they free in any profound human s war: Are their conditions of life and human possibilities determined in real sense by them? The answer is 1 both for those who live under S "communism" and those who live u capitalism. Nor does anyone suppos longer that the simple essentials Marxism-Leninism - the oppositio dispossessed and possessing classes necessity of a revolutionary party one imagines that these precepts are a necessary and sufficient cond for the liberation of men from squalor of consumer technology o pseudo-ideological Soviet equivalent But without these precepts their critical relation to contempo processes of dialectical change - wit their implementation by men women who have taken the troub learn the lessons of history, which there for all to know and compreh then there will be a simple ch car between the barbarism against human spirit which Kuznetsov kn and the comfortable, subtle insid barbarism which we know. It destro quite painlessly, but none the destroys us. And we call it capita And so did Marx and Lenin.