Tito's Revenge by Sandor Kopacsi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In January 1955, the new Hungarian police force that had been created after the war was preparing to celebrate its tenth anniversary. As police chief of Budapest, it was my job to organize the banquet. I had invitations sent to the Minister of the Interior, the under-secretaries, the Soviet counsellors, and the top leaders of the armed forces and the AVO (State Protection Authority- the secret police). One day on impulse I called my private secretary, a young police officer who was a product of the party school.

    ‘Are you sure you sent invitations to all our dignitaries?’

    ‘Yes, I think so, Comrade Kopacsi.’
‘Including all the former ministers of the interior?’

    He showed me a protocol list.

    ‘Are you sure we haven’t had any other ministers? Could you list them all?’

    ‘There was Rajk. And Zold. But they are dead.’

    ‘Well, you’ve forgotten one. Someone who was on a list of traitors but who wasn’t a traitor. Comrade Janos Kadar*, Minister of the Interior in 1949, and currently first secretary of the executive committee of the thirteenth district’

    The young secretary’s jaw dropped. ‘You really want to invite him?’

    ‘Not only invite him but seat him at the head of the table next to the other ministers. Comrade Kadar has been rehabilitated and reintegrated into the party leadership and he must be given his due.’

    My secretary swallowed hard. ‘At your service, Comrade Colonel’

    At the time, Kadar was forty years old. Despite his suffering in prison, he radiated strength. If Imre Nagy was ‘a pure product of the peasantry’, Janos Kadar was visibly a product of the working class. Obviously, Kadar wasn’t a worker any more than Nagy was a peasant; both had spent most of their adult lives in the top ranks of the Communist Party, Nagy in the Soviet Union, Kadar in Budapest, at the head of the then illegal party organization. But both still bore the marks of their origin.

    I received Kadar at the entrance to the banquet hall and led him to his place on the dais, next to Piros, the current Minister of the Interior. The two men shook hands.

    ‘How are you  Comrade Kadar?’

    ‘Better, thank you, Comrade Piros, much better.’

    They exchanged smiles. Those were the only words and the only smiles they exchanged all evening long. But Kadar didn’t spend the ceremony in silence. My former minister, Arpad Hazi, despite his reputation as a hardline Stalinist, never stopped talking to Kadar, who he knew very well from the days when the Communist Party was illegal.

    What did they say to each other? The next day, Hazi phoned me. ‘You know, Kopacsi, it’s truly horrible what we did to that man. His so-called crime was no worse than yours or mine. The people in charge of security were truly monsters or idiots to go after comrades like him.’

    That wasn’t Piros’s viewpoint. He called me to his office where he received me in the company of his staff of senior AVO officers.

    ‘What got into you to invite Kadar? Who suggested that you do that?

    ‘No one, Comrade Minister. Comrade  Kadar has to be rehabilitated, so he is  once more on our protocol list.’

    One of the AVO officers laughed bitterly. ’Janus the Shit on the protocol list. He was the most miserable prisoner we had.’

    The minister called him to order and turned to me: Comrade Kopacsi, you must understand one thing. Yes, Janos Kadar has been rehabilitated. Yes, the party wanted to give him a post. That doesn’t mean he becomes what he was in the past. The rehabilitations now underway don’t mean that the comrades who were imprisoned were all knights in shining armor. They mean that we want to let bygones be bygones and start with a clean slate as Comrade Rakosi has said. I propose to give a verbal reprimand to the chief for his, let us say .  .  . ill-considered initiative.’

    On my arrival one morning at my office about six months after the anniversary dinner, I found the following message: ‘Urgent: Call Kobanya brewery.’

    With beer I had nothing to do. I was a wine drinker. But as Kobanya was in the tenth district, my fiefdom as deputy, I called the manager.

    ‘This is Kopacsi. You need me?’

    At the other end of the line, a familiar voice responded, ‘Yes, Comrade Deputy, urgently. We would like to know if you have decided to change your mind on the subject of your preferred beverage?’

     It was Czako, the public prosecutor.

    ‘Czako, what are you doing at a brewery?”

    ‘I’m the new manager. Hurry up if you want to sample some of our best products.’

    I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t an invitation to down a few beers but to hear some news. I hurried over to the brewery.

   ‘What does this mean?’ I asked Czako.

    ‘The day before yesterday, I was called to the Central Committee headquarters. Lajos Acs, who is on the Politburo, asked me to sit down and said: ‘Comrade Czako, do you know the percentage of alcohol in Giraffe beer?’ I said I wasn’t prepared for the question but that it must be between fifteen and eighteen. Why? Because, Comrade Czako, the manager of the Kobanya brewery must be able to answer such questions without hesitation. Here is your dismissal as public prosecutor and you appointment as manager.’
  “Congratulations, old pal. This job means a lot less hassle for you.’                

    ‘Yes, but that’s not all. I was given to understand that things are going to go backward in the courts. Everything is going to be the way it was.’

     ‘Are you kidding?’

    ‘And not only in our field, but everywhere. The emphasis on consumption is over, heavy industry is top priority again. The collective farm is mandatory again.’

    ‘Imre Nagy?’

    ‘In a few days, he will be kicked out as prime minister and maybe even out of the party.’

    Czako told me that Rakosi had just returned from along ‘sick leave’ in the Soviet Union, happy and full of news. Were we about to witness yet another radical change of direction by the Supreme Soviet? Everything pointed to it.

     In response to the decisions of the Western powers in favor of rearming West Germany, the Kremlin had decided to create the military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Army was said to be readying its Plan X, a surprise attack on West Germany followed by the occupation of Europe all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. It was the height of the Cold War and many people thought a third world war was inevitable.

    ‘You understand, in such a situation, there’s no more fooling around with liberalism, they’re not about to install reform regimes behind the front.’

    I couldn’t believe these rumors of war. But my friend was right in what he said about internal affairs in Hungary.

    Rakosi was on the way up again. He announced that the party was in danger because of ‘right deviationism, which meant the policies of Imre Nagy. He wanted the Prime Minister out, but Nagy put up a fight and asked the Kremlin to arbitrate. On January 7, 1955, Nagy travelled to Moscow with Rakosi once more, only to return repudiated by the same Soviet leaders who had directed him eighteen months earlier to undertake reforms.

    Rakosi excluded him from the Politburo and Central Committee and fired him as prime minister. He also took away his right to teach at the university where he had a post lecturing in agrarian science, thus depriving him of his livelihood. The dignity with which Nagy bore this treatment only served enhance his reputation and increase his popularity.

 

    Laid low by a heart attack, deprived of any income, Nagy was confined to the second floor of his house. Suslov, a member of the Soviet Politburo, came to see him at his bedside.

    “Comrade Nagy – note that I still call you ‘comrade’ – you need only admit your errors and you will be quickly be reinstated.’

    ‘Comrade Suslov, thank you for calling me ‘comrade’, but after forty years of struggle in the workers’ movement I can’t renounce the last eighteen months. I have let innocent people out of prison, authorized farmers to work individually, and worked to increase consumer goods – a series of reforms you suggested I make, that I agreed with, and that were all ratified by the Central Committee. It’ unthinkable for me to disown them now.’

 ‘That’s a shame. For You.’

    A few months later, Nagy was expelled from the Communist Party. But it wasn’t long before the pendulum would once again swing back in his direction.

    Between the night of February 24, 1956, and the dawn of February 25, something happened in the meeting chamber of the Grand Palace of the Kremlin that would turn the Communist world topsy-turvy. It was the pronouncement of Khrushchev’s famous ‘secret report’.

    Only about 1,600 delegates were present and they were sworn to secrecy, but it took only a few days before we found out what Khrushchev has sais. He denounced Stalin as an ‘ignorant and bloody monarch’ responsible for the gulags, the massacres of innocent people. And the liquidation of millions of peasants.

    The Stalinist leaders of eastern Europe tottered under the shock of these revelations. Bierut, the Polish chief of state, gave up the ghost  on the spot. The Cominform, the body that had pronounced the expulsion of Tito from the Communist International, was dissolved. Tito was rehabilitated. In Hungary, Rajk’s widow, Julia, emerged from hiding and demanded the rehabilitation of her husband. In newly founded clubs, especially the Petofi Circle, thousands of comrades demanded Rakosi’s resignation, the rehabilitation of martyrs, and the return of Imre Nagy to power.

I asked Iemelianov his opinion of the situation.

    ‘Old man not dead’, he responded in typical lapidary fashion.

    ‘You mean Rakosi?’

   The Soviet officer smiled. He explained that, in the language of Comrade Mao, the ‘old man’ meant the past; it still lived and had o be killed.

‘But it’s not up to us officers to do it,’ he added seriously. ‘We have taken an oath of loyalty to our leaders; politics is the politicians’ affair.’

    I found his reasoning a bit strange. We were officers, yes, but weren’t we also Communists? We had sworn allegiance to our leaders, but hadn’t we also promised in our youth to be Communists and to work in every circumstance for the good of all the people?

It was clear that Rakosi, the Hungarian Stalin, no longer belonged at the head of the nation. Worse, he himself didn’t realize it.

    On March 27 of the same year, at the request of the Minister of the Interior and the Budapest party committee, I organized a meeting of the Communist Party members on the Budapest police force. Some 1,200 people crowded into the police school on Boszomeny Avenue. Like all the speakers, I went to the podium clutching speech notes prepared for me by my superiors. But this time, I forgot to read them.

‘Comrades, do you know what the French word ‘renaissance’ means? It meant  ‘rebirth’. And a renaissance is what our party needs. It must renew itself because that is the only way to regain the people’s confidence – which we have lost. Yes, comrades, lost.’

  The audience was listening intently. For once, they weren’t being fed the never-ending litanies to the glory of the party. What I was about to say would astonish them even more.

   ‘Now, comrades, its necessary to discuss the problem of our first secretary, Comrade Rakosi.’

  I sense movement in the room. The ministry representative cast a worried look in my direction. Rakosi’s name was never mentioned except to praise it. Imre Mezo, the party committee delegate for the capital, stifled a smile. I understood that he supported me in what he sensed I was going to say.

   ‘My friends, Comrade Rakosi has made mistakes. And we know that when a Communist makes mistakes, he must recognize his mistakes. Yet this Comrade Rakosi has refused to do. We say to him: Comrade Rakosi, admit your errors, it may be your last chance to do so. Self-criticism will not diminish you; instead, it will make you greater. It is the only way to regain the confidence of the party and the people.’

   A thunder of applause greeted these words. It seemed every cop in the room wanted to have his say. These people, their party manuals in their pockets, were the sons of peasants and the sons of workers or former workingmen themselves, who had known the hardships of being part of wage-earning class that had borne the brunt of the regime’s mismanagement of the economy. There is no doubt that these comrades hungered for a national rebirth.

 

   At the annual state reception to celebrate the liberation, Rakosi greeted the guests at the entrance of the banquet hall. I was with my wife. When it was our turn to enter, Rakosi did not extend his hand and looked away from us. I wasn’t particularly concerned but Ibolya was offended.

   ‘What have you done now?’

   ‘I said out loud what everybody was thinking.’

   That same morning,  the newspapers has published the Soviet government’s telegram of good wishes to ‘the great veteran of the worker’s movement, our highly respected Hungarian comrade, Matthias Rakosi’.

   This was, undoubtedly, a last-minute salvage by Rakosi, his team, and the few friends they still had at the Kremlin. But it was too late. The old was already condemned by the majority of his party, not to mention the public at large.

 

   His principal and most dangerous enemy was Josep Broz Tito. The Yugoslav leader wanted the head of the Hungarian dictator who had mounted the false trial as of Rajk and Kadar in which everybody had been ‘agent and spy for Tito’s clique’. In May 1956, this former ‘runing dog of imperialism’ was was invited to the Soviet Union as one of many unorthodox Communists and social democrats with who Khrushchev was seeking a modus vivendi. Chance had it that a holiday trip to Russia that Ibolya and I had planned and paid for a year earlier coincided with the arrival of Tito, dozens of European Communist and social democratic delegations, and the hundreds of journalists covering the event.

   It was the first time that Social Democrats had been invited to the Soviet Union. The first words spoken by Guy Mollet, the French socialist leader, were later noted with interest in the embassies: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, or if you wish, comrades . . .’  Could one be so flip before a Soviet audience?

   Our group as following the same itinerary as a group of English trade unionists on a tour of Georgia. Their plane took off before ours, but when it arrived at the airport in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, it was ordered to turn back. Despite the perfect weather, out plane received the same order. I asked our interpreter what was going on.

   ‘It’s nothing’ he replied, embarrassed. ‘A slight irregularity in traffic.’

   But one of the journalists was from Budapest, a young man attached to police headquarters, gave me a poke with his elbow. ‘Look below,’ he said.

   In the bright sunshine, the streets of Tbilisi were totally empty except for some objects that looked from above like little toy tanks but were actually real tanks. The tanks were giving off flashes of light that made me think of flakes of cotton wool.

   ‘Tell me, Comrade interpreter. What’s happening down below?’

   ‘Uh . . . maneuvers, Comrade. Those are probably maneuvers.’

   They weren’t maneuvers. The next day, reports from the Hungarian party daily told us that we had witnessed the last phases of the suppression of an armed uprising in the Georgian capital. Several days earlier, some Russian officers had been murdered  by a crowd. The Army and KGB troops had moved in swiftly to crush the rebellion.

   The uprising had nothing to do with the visits by Tito and the Western delegations. We were told that it had been sparked by a new austerity policy in Georgia, which, under the regime of its native son, Stalin, had once been the showcase of the Soviet Union.

   Journalists are a gossipy bunch and I couldn’t help joining in. We speculated that Khrushchev’s change of direction was proving too abrupt in a country with so many nationalities, a country in which, Ibolya observed, it was impossible to find in the stores even a tenth of the merchandise commonly available at home.
   While Tito headed south to Crimea, we contented ourselves with a tour of Leningrad, where Ibolya stood riveted for an hour on the bank of the Neva River at the same spot where the destroyer Aurora fired its historic cannon shots in the direction of the Summer Palace, the first shots of the revolution. ‘Despite everything,’ she said, ‘the Revolution was really something, wasn’t it?’
Speaking of the revolution, on our return to Budapest, we found ourselves in the midst of unusual excitement. My friend and neighbor Joska Szilagyi welcomed us with open arms and a jocular reprimand; ‘History with a capital H is happening here and you’re busy amusing yourselves abroad.’

Joska lived near us, in a modest lodging. He was no longer in the armed forces or at the Central Committee headquarters on Akademia Street. He had a small job in the state grain and seed enterprise and spent his free time analyzing the recent works, available only in manuscript form, of that great Marxist theoretician, Imre Nagy.

“I’d very much like you to drop in tonight. We are going to receive some interesting friends,’ said Joska with an air of mystery. We accepted. Arriving at Joska’s place, we saw other guests we knew, including a young writer, a policeman from Debrecen, and a civil servant from the Ministry of Foreign Trade. I was shocked to see two that we had never met - Imre Nagy and his wife.

‘Comrade Nagy. I’m delighted to meet you. Your speech to Parliament in 1953 was truly a revelation for me. My life has changed since then.’

   ‘Mine too,’ replied Nagy with a smile/

   ‘Especially yours. Rakosi destroyed you, and we all watched from the sidelines.

‘During your trip, Comrade Kopacsi, ‘ said the writer, who had been listening, ‘the balance has shifted. Rakosi is on the way out.’

 We learned that at public meetings held by the Petofi Circle, the philosopher George Lukacs and the famous writer Tibor Dery had been openly dissecting the defects of the party leadership. Although the Petofi Circle was an adjunct of the official; Young Communists, part of its leadership backed the Nagy reforms. The Literary Journal, the publication of the Hungarian Writer’s Union, was publishing virulent attacks on the crimes committed by the Rakosi regime. The opposition had become powerful within the party. As a result, the dictator was losing his head and was readying some old-style repression, complete with mass arrests, newspaper and theater closings. He had already suspended certain clubs, including the famous Petofi Circle.

Imre Nagy smiled. ‘Do you think we could talk of something else? I’d love to know how the beautiful Mrs. Kopacsi enjoyed the Soviet Union.’

‘Moscow not at all. Kiev, yes. Leningrad, a terrific city.’

‘That’s true,’ said Nagy. ‘Leningrad is Europe.’
  Nagy and his wife smiled as Ibolya described a scene we had encountered in the streets of Kiev: people seated on the sidewalk in front of a store in the process of trying on and exchanging among themselves pairs of shoes they had just bought. In the face of interminable line-ups, the store required its customers to choose their shoes and take them away without trying them on.

   Nagy took off his pince-nez, wiped them, and remarked to his wife, ‘You see, unfortunately things haven’t changed much since we lived there . . . and those were the hardest years of the war.’

    To my great surprise, Nagy aid he planned to travel to the Soviet Union. Ambassador Andropov (Ibolya couldn’t repress and exclamation of ‘Oh, that one!’) has called him in for a friendly conversation. According to Andropov, Nagy’s problem with Rakosi and his exclusion from power hadn’t in any way changed the Kremlin’s esteem for him. The Soviet leaders wanted an exchange of ideas with Nagy. At the same time, there was interest in the publication of a Russian edition of his writings during his time ‘in the desert.’

   “But, Ibolya, what did you have to say about Andropov?” some asked.                      ‘That he was an excellent dancer. And a real gentleman to boot.’

   Ibolya told the story of her evening with Andropov, and of how, the day after, colonel Petofi (’You know, these counsellors call themselves anything at all but some of them have good manners, too’), on a mission from Andropov, asked Ibolya to go home (‘Can you believe it, in the middle of the day!’) where he brought her a basket of white roses, the like of which she ‘had never seen in my life’. That wasn’t surprising: the daughter of a workingman and wife of a metalworker didn’t often have occasion to enjoy white roses. What refinement! What luxury!

   Nagy smiled. ‘Russia is an immense Byzantine empire where the manners of the former great landlords are strangely mixed with revolutionary traditions. Sometimes also with barbarism. You have to have lived there to understand it and love it.’

 

In mid-July, I received an urgent phone call from some of the members of the party organization for Budapest. I was to get down to their headquarters on Koztarsasag Square on the double. A sudden death? The Third World War? I asked George to step on it and to hell with the speed limit.

   ‘What’s up?’ I asked, charging breathlessly into the party office.

   ‘What’s up is that the party needs your famous underground.’

   ‘For What?’

   I was informed that several old comrades, including Imre Nagy, were ‘in danger’, that they  needed a safe house for several days or maybe weeks, ‘until the clouds disperse.’

   ‘What clouds?’

 

  The comrades exchanged glances. Swearing me to secrecy, they said that Rakosi was getting ready to strike. He had called the Central Committee to ratify a list of four hundred opponents to be arrested. The first name on the list was Imre Nagy, followed by a whole series of writers, intellectuals, and senior civil servants. Included were some. Such as Janos Kadar and Julia Rajk, who had only recently escaped the AVO’s dungeons.
   I suspected a hoax. People knew I was sympathetic to Nagy; was someone trying to trap me into an act of disloyalty to the current regime? Nevertheless, very discretely, I took the necessary steps. A former underground fighter, now a doctor, was running a nursing home in a forested area up north. An isolated house could be made available. My friend asked few questions. He readily agreed to my request that he accommodate a small group of undercover agents that I would send in advance. Meanwhile, Imre Mezo, a member of the Budapest party committee, warned the Kremlin of what Rakosi was planning.

   The Central Committee of the Hungarian party was summoned to meet on Julyn17. Rakosi, a pile of documents in his hand, began to explain why he proposed to arrest four hundred opponents of his regime. At that moment, the door opened and Comrade Mikoyan of the Soviet Politburo entered in the company of his bodyguards and his interpreter.

   Silence. Some members of the audience stood up.

    ‘Continue,’ said Mikoyan. ‘Make your report, Comrade Rakosi.’

   Rakosi proceeded to denounce ‘the open opposition against the party and the popular democracy organized by Imre Nagy.’ He spoke of the Petofi Circle. The interpreter translated. Mikoyan raised his hand.

   “Excuse me, Comrade Rakosi, you say the Petofi Circle [which had been suspended two weeks earlier] is made up of enemies of the people and counter-revolutionaries. But from what we’ve heard the cry ‘Long live the party’ was heard at every meeting. If counter-revolutionaries love that song, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

   Large drops of sweat rolled down Rakosi’s face.

   ‘Nevertheless, Comrade Mikoyan, what I am saying is true.’

   He asked that the meeting be adjourned and left, accompanied by the Soviets.

   Several minutes later, Mikoyan gave him a message from Khrushchev: ‘In view of the measures being planned by Comrade Rakosi, he advised him to resign from all his positions in the Hungarian party and leave the country’

   In a state of shock, Rakosi picked up the red telephone that connected him to the Kremlin.

   ‘Comrade Khrushchev. I have difficulty believing my ears .  .  .’

   ‘It would be in your interest to believe them.’

   The next day, Rakosi left for Moscow, taking all his belongings with him. For the newspapers, he left a communique saying that his departure was necessitated by high blood pressure. For the country, he left a replacement who was hardly any better than he was: Erno Gero, his longtime right arm, the former political commissar of the Soviet secret police in Spain and the champion of bizarre industrial plans that in ten years had ruined the Hungarian people.
  After the dictator had slunk out of the country, the opposition within the party obtained the full rehabilitation of the most notable of Rakosi’s victims, principally Laszlo Rajk. After long and difficult research, his remains were found, miraculously intact, in a wood alongside the national highway from Budapest to Lake Balaton.  The quicklime that was supposed to have destroyed the body has preserved it instead. Th burial was scheduled for October 6, 1956.  the party opposition and Rajk’s widow insisted on a solemn public ceremony.  Attendance would be large.

This was dangerous. The general public didn’t care that much about settling accounts within the party, but poor management of the economy and shortages of goods had pushed them to the end of their tether. This was the first time the criminal incompetence of the regime was to be exposed publicly and it was feared that Rajk’s funeral would degenerate into a riot. As police chief of Budapest and as a Communist, I wanted to ensure that the ceremony unfolded without incident. The leaders of the opposition assured me of their co-operation. There would be no inflammatory language, nothing that might arouse the passions of the crowd.

   The morning of the ceremony. the first secretary of the Budapest party organization, a notorious Stalinist, phoned me in a panic.

   ‘Kopacsi, what’s to become of us?’

   He was in a pitiful state, his voice trembling.

   ‘What are you afraid of, Comrade?’

   ‘A riot.’

   ‘It’s going to be okay, Comrade. You have nothing to fear.’

   On the phone, I heard a sigh of relief. ‘May God hear you, Kopacsi.’

   This time God heard me. A throng of two hundred thousand people paraded in front of the funeral chapel, but there was no riot. The guard of honor changed every five minutes. I took part myself as a representative of the Partisans’ Union.

   When it was the turn of the members of Rakosi’s Politburo, a fierce wind started to howl. Everyone noticed the phenomena. A supernatural production for a Shakespearean drama full of spilled blood and treachery.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_K%C3%A1d%C3%A1r

An Appeal to Progressives by Edmund Wilson

 

January 14, 1931

In any case, American optimism has taken a serious beating; the national morale is weak. The energy and faith for a fresh start seem now not to be forthcoming: a dreadful apathy, un-sureness and discouragement is felt to have fallen upon us. It is as if we were afraid to go on with what we were doing before or as if we no longer had the heart for it. I want to suggest that the present depression may be nothing less than one of the turning-points in our history, our first real crisis since the Civil War. The Americans at the present time seem to be experiencing not merely an economic breakdown but a distinct psychological change.

 From the time of the Civil War on, all our enthusiasm and creative energy went into the development of our tremendous resources. This development had two aspects: one was the exploration of the continent and the engineering feats involved in reclaiming it; the other the amassing of tremendous fortunes. Today the discoveries have all been made: we no longer look towards the West, as the Europeans once looked to America, as to a world of untold treasures and wonders – and the excitement of mastering new seacoasts, new rivers, forests, prairies and mountains seems now completely spent. This was already true at the time of the European War (when, incidentally, we were running into a business depression), but the war gave us a new objective- new discoveries, the discovery of Europe; new heroic stunts of engineering, the transportation of our army to France. Since the end of the war, however, we have, as a people, had nothing to carry us along except the momentum of money-making. We have been trying still to find in it the exhilaration of the wildness and size of the continent – the breaking it in to the harness of the railroads, the stumbling upon sudden riches. But during these last years our hope and our faith have all been put behind the speed of mass production, behind stupendous campaigns of advertising, behind cyclones of salesmanship. Our buoyancy had become hysterical. And the reaction from a hysterical exhilaration is a slump into despondency and inertia.

What we have lost is, it may be, not merely our way in the economic labyrinth but our conviction of the value of what we are doing. Money-making and the kind of advantages which a money-making society provides for money to buy are not enough to satisfy humanity – neither is a system like ours in which everyone is out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, with no common purpose and little common culture to give life stability and sense. Our idolization of our aviators – our extravagant excitement over Lindbergh and our romantic admiration (now beginning to cool off) for Byrd – has been like a last desperate burst of American idealism, a last impulse to dissociate our national soul from a precipitate progress that was taking us from automobiles and straight through electric refrigerators to Tom Thumb golf-courses.

The old American ideal and legend of the poor boy who gets to be a millionaire, which gradually came to take the place of the poor boy who got to be President, has today lost almost all its glamor. Not only do people not hope to be Hoover – they do not even hope so often as they did to be Carnegie or Henry Ford. The romance of the poor boy was he romance of the old democratic chance, of the career open to the talents – but the realities of a millionaire society have turned out to be the monstrosities of capitalism: the children of the successful poor boy get lazy and sick on their father’s money, and the poor boys who afterwards arrive on the scene discover that – with the crippling of the grain market, the elimination of the factory worker by the development of the machine and the decimation of the white-collar class, even though sometimes apparently well on their way to getting in on the big money themselves, by enormous business mergers – the career is no longer open to the extent that had originally been hoped. What began as the libertarian adventure of eighteenth-century middle-class democracy seems to have ended in the cul de sac of an antiquated economic system.. And capitalist-minded as the Americans have now become, they seem to feel they are in a cul de sac. It is as if they did not dare to go on.

 

In spite of the fundamental absurdity of so much of what we have lately been doing, we are considerably better educated and intelligent than we once were, and since the war we have been closer to Europe. The Buicks and Cadillacs, the bad gin and Scotch, the radio concerts interrupted by advertising talks, the golf and bridge of the suburban household, which the bond salesman can get for his money, can hardly compensate him for the daily work of a kind in which it is utterly impossible to imagine a normal human being taking satisfaction or pride – and the bond salesman is the type of the whole urban office class. The brokers and bankers who are shooting themselves and jumping out of windows have been disheartened by the precariousness of their professions –but would they be killing themselves if they loved it? Who today, in fact, in the United States can really love our meaningless life, where the manufacturer raises the workers’ wages only in order to create a demand for the gadgets which for better or worse he happens to have an interest in selling them, while agriculture goes hang, and science and art are left to be exploited by the commercial laboratories, the market for commercial art illustration and the New York publishers’ racket, or to be fed in a haphazard way by a dole from the fortunes of rich men who have been conscience-stricken or simply overpowered at finding themselves at the end of their careers with enough money on their hands to buy out an old-fashioned empire?

We liberal have professed not to love it, yet we have tried to believe in it, none the less. In a country where money changes hands so often and social position fluctuates so easily, where the minds of the working class have seemed largely to have been absorbed into the psychology of the middle class, we have been unable to believe in the Marxist doctrine that capitalism must inevitably give rise to class warfare , and we have perhaps never taken sufficiently seriously Karl Marx’s prediction that for many years to come the stupid automatic acquisitive instinct of humanity would still be so far ahead of its capacity for intelligent and disinterested behavior that the system of private enterprise would never be able to run itself with foresight enough to avoid a wreck. It used to be pointed out that in America our support of this system was indestructible, since the stock market made it possible for anybody who had been able to save a little money to become a capitalist himself, with interests presumably identical with those of J. P. Morgan and Charlie Schwab. But can we expect that to be true in the future? – and even if people persist in aspiring to be stock-market capitalists, should they be encouraged in this or even left to their luck? Should they not rather be shown that their interests are incompatible with capitalism itself?

Yet the truth is that we liberals and progressives have been betting on capitalism – and that most of our heroes and allies, heterodox professors like Dewey and Beard, survivors of the old republican tradition like Wilson and Justice Holmes, able and well-educated labor organizers like the officers of the Amalgamated, intelligent journalists like Lippmann and Chase, though all sincere and outspoken democrats, have been betting on capitalism, too. And now, in the abyss of starvation and bankruptcy into which the country has fallen, with no sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out, our liberalism seems to have little to offer beyond a discrete recommendation of public ownership of water power and certain other public utilities, a cordial feeling that labor ought to organize in a non-social-revolutionary way and a protest, invariably ineffective, against a few of the more obviously atrocious of the jailing, beatings-up and murders with which the industrialists have been trying to keep the working class docile.

Doesn’t this program today seem rather inadequate? We liberals have always insisted on the desirability of a planned society – the phrase ‘social control’ has been our blessed Mesopotamian word. If this means anything, does it not mean socialism? And should we not do well  to make this plain? It may be said at the present time it is utopian in America to talk about socialism: but with the kind of administration that the country has largely been getting, do not all our progressive proposals, however reasonable or modest, seem utopian? It is not obvious, as was lately made plain by an article in this magazine, that a government like our present one is incapable of acting in good faith in even the simple matter of preserving the water power which is supposed to be operated for the general benefit from being exploited by private profiteers? Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history- a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once. We know that we are not even able to depend on them today to protect us against the frankly disreputable race of blackmailers, thieves and assassins who dominate our municipal life. We know that we cannot even complain that the racketeers are breaking the laws which are supposed to be guaranteed by the government, because the government differs little from the racketeers. How can we expect them, then, to check the relatively respectable scoundrels who merely rob us of public utilities by more or less legalistic means?

Yet, as I say, it may be true, with the present breakdown, we have come to the end of something, and that we are ready to start on a different tack. If we look back at the depressions of the last fifty years, we see that through every one of them there always remained something for which the Americans could still legitimately feel ambition or enthusiasm, some to challenge the national spirit and appeal to the national imagination. After 1885, there we still the West and the consolidation of the railroads; after the prolonged depression of the nineties, the final consolidation of great industries such as United States Steel as well as the crusade led by Theodore Roosevelt against these great corporations in the interests of the dangerously increasing number of those who were being injured by the process of consolidation, and the robustious Rooseveltian imperialism; after the slump of the early years of the European War, our entrance into the war, and after the slump following the war, the period of the glorification of the automobile and the airplane. Today the further consolidation of the big business units is ruining more people than in Roosevelt’s time, and there is no sign of a Roosevelt or a Wilson to revive our political vision and to persuade the people who are out of luck that something is about to be done for them. It may be that the whole money-making and –spending psychology has definitely played itself out, and that Americans would be willing, for the first time now, to put their traditional idealism and their genius for organization behind a radial social experiment. The future is as blank in the United States today as the situation is desperate: the President seems so inhibited by dread of encouraging subversive forces and by faith in the capacity of the capitalist system to right itself and survive that it is impossible for him to act, and when he tries to, he is deadlocked by Congress; nor have the industrialists or the financiers come forwards with any constructive proposal. But this very blindness of the outlook may mean that we are looking in the wrong direction and that help may be coming from some other quarter. In the meantime, one gets  the impression that the people who don’t deal in, ideas are doing more thinking at the present time than the professional ideologues.

The minds of the general public have, furthermore, been more affected by the example of Soviet Russia than is easily grasped by anyone who has been in the habit of assuming that it is only the radical or liberal who understands what Russia is up to, and that the ordinary American citizen is bound to be stupidly prejudiced against the Soviet system. During the NEP period in Russia, the capitalist powers were relieved to feel that the Russians had been forced to recognize the impracticability of Communism and were quietly returning to laissez faire. But with the inauguration of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate capitalism business in Russia, the aspect of things changed. The apparent success of the plan has had its effects on all classes in all the rest of the world – on the Americans, surely, not last. In the course of this winter of our capitalist quandary, the Soviets have been emerging from the back pages of the New York newspapers and are now given much and prominent space- even to interviews with Stalin’s mother; and behind what one reads on the subject in even the reactionary papers, one feels as much admiration as resentment. After all, the great Communist project is distinguished by almost all the features that Americans have been taught to glorify –the extreme efficiency and economy combined with the ideal of a herculean program- like a Liberty Loan drive – to be put over by concerted action to the tune of impassioned boosting. The Russians, furthermore, on their own side, have been studying American methods: they have imported a thousand American engineers and put them at the head of enormous enterprises with practically a free hand, and one would not be at all surprised to hear that Mr. Edward I. Bernays had been in Moscow at the time of the recent trial. We have already, in spite of the Treasury regulation, been doing a good deal of trading with Russia, and an important New York Bank was at one time on the point of advancing to the Soviets the loan that has been advocated by this magazine.

The Communists in the United States assume that, by their very nature, neither our government nor our business is capable of learning anything from or of associating itself with the Soviets. They believe that a war against Russia is inevitable. They believe, moreover that they themselves constitute a trained compact minority which, at the moment when American capitalism shall have finally broken down completely and been left helpless in its ignorance and anarchic selfishness, will be able to step in and man the works. To liberals, this idea has always sounded absurd, but who will say that it is entirely fantastic today when the machine is so badly in need of repairs, and one can see no political group in any position of power that has either a sensible plan or even good intentions? I believe that if the American radicals and progressives who repudiate the Marxist dogma and the strategy of the Communist Party still hope to accomplish anything valuable, they must take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their ultimate goal is the ownership by the government of the means of production.  If we want to prove the Communists wrong, if we want to demonstrate that the virtue has gone out of American democracy , if we want to confute the Marxist cynicism implied by ‘ economic laws’ the catastrophic outcome of which is, after all, predicted only on an assumption of the incurable swinishness and inertia of human nature – if we seriously want to do this, an American opposition must not be afraid to dynamite the old conceptions and shibboleths* and to substitute new ones as shocking as necessary. Who knows but they may seem less shocking to the ordinary suffering public than to us shibboleth experts ourselves?

When John Dos Passos proposed last summer that what was really needed in the United States was a publicity expert like Ivy Lee to familiarize the public with the idea of Communism and induce people at least to remain neutral towards Communist agitation instead of clapping all the Communists in jail, the suggestion, to some, sounded comic. Yet Dos Passos at once had a letter from a publicity man in San Francisco, who said that the same idea had recently occurred to him and that he would like nothing better than a chance to carry it out. There are some signs that the liberals are having ideas as well as the publicity men: Stuart Chase has said lately that the past year may represent ‘the end of an epoch’ and has offered a set of suggestions for rescuing the economic structure, and John Dewey has just proposed to Senator Norris** that he lead a new political party. The extreme illiberalism of the post-Wilsonian period has had the effect of discouraging liberals. We have gone on complaining and recommending, but with a vigor that has tended to diminish in proportion as we came to be conscious that people were not listening to us. Who knows but, if we spoke out now with confidence and boldness, we might find our public at last?

 

* a belief or custom that is not now considered as important and correct as it was in the past. They still cling to many of the old shibboleths of education.

**  George Norris of Nebraska https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/George_Norris.htm

Roots of the Great Ennui by George Steiner

It is the events of 1789 and 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes. The levée en masse of the Revolutionary armies was far more than an instrument of long-continued warfare  and social indoctrination. It did more than terminate the old conventions of professional, limited warfare. As Goethe noted acutely on the field at Valmy, populist armies, the concept of a nation under arms, meant that history had become every man’s milieu Henceforth, in Western  culture, each day was to bring news – a perpetuity of crisis, a break with the pastoral silences and uniformity of the eighteenth century made memorable in De Quincy’s account of the mails racing through England with news of the Peninsular Wars. Wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge they saw bayonets passing. As Hegel completed Phenomenology, which is the master statement of the new density of being, he heard the hoofbeats of Napoleon’s escort passing through the nocturnal street on the way to the Battle of Jena.

We also lack a history of the future tense ( in another context I am trying to show what such a phenomenology of internal grammar would be ). But it is clear that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades brought on an overwhelming immanence, a deep, emotionally stressed change in the quality of hope. Expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement, which had formerly had a conventional, often allegoric character, as of a millenary horizon, suddenly moved very close. The great metaphor of renewal, of the creation, as by a second coming of secular grace, of a just, rational city for man, took on the urgent drama of concrete possibility. The eternal ‘tomorrow’ of utopian political vision became, as it were, Monday morning.

 

 We experience something of this dizzying sense of total possibility when reading the decrees of the Convention and of the Jacobin regime: injustice, superstition, poverty are to be eradicated  now, in the next glorious hour. The world is to shed its worn skin a fortnight hence. In the grammar of Saint-Juste the future tense is never more than moments away. If we seek to trace this irruption – it was that violent- of dawn into private sensibility, we need only look to Wordsworth’s  Prelude and to the poetry of Shelley. The crowning statement, perhaps, is to be found in Marx’s economic and political manuscripts of 1844. Not since early Christianity had men felt so near renovation and to the end of night.

The quickening of time, the new vehemence and historicity of private consciousness, the sudden nearness of the messianic future contributed to a marked change in the tone of sexual relations. The evidence is plain enough. It comes as early as Wordsworth ‘Lucy” poems and the penetrating remark on sexual appetite in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. It declares itself from a comparison, even cursory, between Swift’s Journal to Stella and Keats’s letters to Fanny  Brawne. Nothing I know of at an earlier period truly resembles the self-dramatizing, self-castigating eroticism of Hazlitt’s extraordinary Liber Amoris (1832). Many elements are in play: the ‘sexualization’ of the very landscape, making of weather, season, and the particular hour a symbolic restatement of the erotic mood; a compulsion to experience more intimately, to experience sex to the last pitch of nervous singularity, and at the same time to make this experience public. I can make out what must have been contributory causes: the partial emancipation of women and the actual role of a number of them in political life and argument: the breakdown of usages of decorum and formal reticence which had been a part of the caste system of the ancient regime. It is not difficult to see in what ways an intensification and widening of the erotic could be a counterpart to the dynamics of revolution and European conquest. Nevertheless, the phenomena, with its culmination in Wagner’s amalgam of Eros and history, remains complicated and in certain regards obscure. The fact that our own sexuality is distinctly post-romantic, that many of our own conventions stem directly from the revaluation of the erotic in the period from Rousseau to Heine, does not  make analysis any simpler.

But taking these different  strands together, one can say confidently that immense transmutations of value and perception took place in Europe over a time span more crowded, more sharply registered by individual and social sensibility, than any other of which we have a reliable record. Hegel could argue, with rigorous logic of feeling, that history itself was passing into a new state of being, that ancient time was at an end.

What followed was, of course, a long spell of reaction and stasis. Depending on one’s political idiom, one can see it either as a century of repression by a bourgeoisie that had turned the French Revolution and the Napoleonic extravaganza to its own economic advantage, or as a hundred years of liberal gradualism and civilized order. Broken only by convulsive but continued revolutionary spasms in 1830, 1848, and 1871, and by short wars of intensely professional, socially conservative character such as the Crimean and the Prussian Wars, this hundred years’ peace shaped Western society and established the criteria of culture which have, until very recently, been ours.

To many who personally experienced the change, the drop in tension, the abrupt drawing of curtains against the morning, were deeply enervating. It is to the years after Waterloo that we must look for the roots of ‘the great ennui,’ which, as early as 1819, Schopenhauer defined as the corrosive illness of the new age.

What was a gifted man to do after Napoleon? How could organisms bred for the electric air of revolution and imperial epic breathe under the leaden sky of middle-class rule? How was it possible for a young man to hear his father’s tales of the Terror and  Austerlitz and to amble down the placid boulevard to the counting house? The past drove rats’ teeth into the gray pulp of the present; it exasperated, it sowed wild dreams. Of that exasperation comes a major literature.  Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle  (1835-36). The generation of 1830- was damned by memories of events, of hopes in which it had taken no personal  part. It nursed within ‘un fonds d’incurable tristesse et d’incurable  ennui.’ No doubt there was narcissism in this cultivation, the somber complacency of dreamers who, from Goethe to Turgenev, sought to identify with Hamlet. But the void was real, and the sensation of history gone absurdly wrong. Stendhal is the chronicler of genius of this frustration. He had participated in the insane vitality of the Napoleonic era; he conducted the rest of his life in the ironic guise of a man betrayed. It is a terrible thing to be ‘languissant d’ennuui au plus beau moment de la vie, de seize ans jusqu a vingt’ (Mlle. De La Mole’s condition before she resolves to love Julien Sorel in La Rouge et le noir). Madness, death are preferable to the interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form. How can an intellectual bear to feel within himself something of Bonaparte’s genius, something of that demonic strength which led from obscurity to empire, and see before him nothing but the tawdry flatness of bureaucracy? Raskolnikov writes his essay on Napoleon and goes out to kill and old woman.

The collapse of revolutionary hopes after 1815, the brutal deceleration of time and radical expectation left a reservoir of unused turbulent energies. The romantic generation was jealous of its fathers. The ‘antiheroes,’ the spleen-ridden dandies of the world of Stendhal, Musset, Byron, and Pushkin, move through the bourgeois city like condottieri out of work. Or worse, like condottieri meagerly pensioned before their first battle. Moreover, the city itself, once festive with the tocsin of revolution, had become a prison.

For although politics had entered a phase of bland mendacity analyzed by Stendhal in Lucien Leuwen, the economic-industrial growth released by continental war and centralized consciousness of the new nation-states took place exponentially.  The ‘dark Satanic mills’ were everywhere creating the soiled, hybrid landscape which we have inherited. The theme of alienation, so vital to any theory of the crisis of culture, is, as both Hegel and Saint-Simon were among the first to realize, directly related to the development of mass-manufacture. It is in the early and mid-nineteenth century that occur both the dehumanization of laboring men and women in the assembly-line system, and the disassociation between ordinary educated sensibility and the increasingly complex, technological artifacts of daily life. In manufacture and the money market, energies bared from revolutionary action  or war could find outlet and social approval. Such expressions as ‘Napoleons of finance” and ‘captains of industry’ are semantic markers of this modulation.

The immense growth of the monetary-industrial complex also brought with it the modern city, what a later poet was to all la ville tentaculaire – a megalopolis whose uncontrollable cellular division and spread now threatens to choke so much of our lives. Hence the definition of a new, major conflict: that between the individual and the stone sea that may, at any moment, overwhelm him. The urban inferno, with its hordes of faceless inhabitants, haunts the nineteenth-century imagination.

Sometimes the metropolis is a jungle, the crazed tropical growth of Hard Times and Brecht’s Im Dickicht der Stadt. A man must make his mark on its indifferent immensity, or he will be cast off like the rags, the dawn flotsam which obsessed Baudelaire. In his invention of Rastignac, looking down on Paris, challenging the city to mortal combat, Balzac dramatized one of the focal points of the modern crisis. It is precisely from the 1830s onwards that one can observe the emergence of a characteristic ‘counter-dream’ – the vision of a city laid waste, the fantasies of Scythian and Vandal invasion, the Mongol steeds slaking their thirst in the fountain of the Tuileries Gardens. A odd school of painting develops: Pictures of  London, Paris, or Berlin seen as colossal ruins, famous landmarks burnt, eviscerated, or located in a weird emptiness among charred stumps and dead water. Romantic fantasy anticipates Brecht’s vengeful promise that nothing shall remain of the great cities except the winds that blows through them. Exactly a hundred years later, these apocalyptic collages and imaginary drawings of the end of Pompeii were to be our photographs of Warsaw and Dresden. It needs no psychoanalysis to suggest how strong a part of wish-fulfillment there was in these nineteenth-century intimations.

The conjunction of extreme economic-technical dynamism with a large measure of enforced social immobility, a conjunction on which a century of liberal, bourgeois civilization was built, made for an explosive mixture. It provoked in the life of art and of intelligence certain specific, ultimately destructive ripostes. These, in seems to me, constitute the meaning of Romanticism. It is from them that will grow the nostalgia for disaster.

Here I am on familiar ground and can move rapidly.  .  .

 

 

 

Let's Take Another Look by Eric Vuillard

 

After the massacre of Wounded Knee, the Indians eked out a miserable existence on uncultivated and divided territory. Those who had worked for the Wild West Show returned after a few years, but their luck didn’t improve. The Redskins were viewed as the remnants of an old world, and the watchword was now assimilation.

The destruction of a people always happens by degrees, and each phase, in its own way, is innocent of the preceding one. The spectacle which seized upon the Indians in the final moments of their history was  not the least of the violence perpetrated against them. It casts our original consent into oblivion. In every case, the initial infatuation lasted no more than an instant. Then, each time, there followed the same un-containable destruction. And no words were ever able to generate its world of things.

So now let’s look. Yes, let’s look very hard, with all our might. Let’s look at them, from the vantage point of our outrageous ease and prodigality.

And then let’s imagine for a moment – oh, just a brief moment – that everything we have around us, our houses, our furniture, our kit, even our names, our memories, and then our friends, our jobs, everything, absolutely everything could be taken away from us, jeered and confiscated. ‘Oh, of course,’ we say, ‘Yes, yes, we’ve thought about it’, and ‘Obviously we knew about it. ’But it’s all abstract, just words, a hypothesis. Yes, it’s a hypothesis. Other people. A hypothesis. Well, let’s try harder, just a little but harder, to see if we can deduce anything from it. Let’s try telling ourselves, now,  that this hypothesis has been going on for a very long time, in fact, my God, it’s been going on forever.

And the people in this photograph no longer have a home, and most of their memories are gone. For them, it’s not just a hypothesis. Look more closely. Yes, you know them, in fact,  you know them very well, you’ve seen them a hundred times, two hundred times. Oh of course, they’re not exactly the same, not exactly the same as these people, and yet, if you look carefully, you’ve seen them before.

 

Let’s take another look. You don’t just feel a strange unease at the sight of their destitution, you also feel a sort of sympathy. It’s existed since the dawn of time, but where, in God’s name, does this sympathy come from? No one knows. It’s something that courses through your body, your eyes, it takes you by the throat and fills your breast with tears. It’s a strange phenomena, sympathy. We must be little like these poor wretches. Because poor wretches is what they are, always the same frail figures, the same cluster of children, the same rags.

Yes. Let’s take another look at them. At the time their history is coming to an end, and ours is beginning. Ah! It’s both moving and painful to look at them. And if we find it painful, if we feel a dull angst, its because, despite the smile we detect on the man’s face, we know, yes, we know very well that they’re going to die. And because they are going to die, and we know it, sensing without seeing it, we suddenly feel very closer to them, like them; except that we are not actually dying; we hardly ever die.

Let’s look at them: they’re the survivors of Wounded Knee. They must be in some sort of camp, a few days after the massacre, a few hours before the grand spectacle takes hold of them and delivers them up to us. And they look at us: the women, the children and the fellow on the right with his funny fur hat, his sad smile, his sorrowful eyes and his US Army jacket snatched, perhaps by an irony of fate, out of a need to cloth himself.

A photograph is a peculiar thing. Truth lives within it as if it were inseparable from its sign. And, all of a sudden, I seem to see not just these poor wretches, but the very incarnation of poverty – as if this testimony exceeded its occasion. And I say to myself: These are Big Foot’s Miniconjou, and will be to the end of time, they’re the performers in the Wild West Show, they’re poor devils, and they belong to the same family as the people who hold out their hand to us, anywhere we find ourselves, outside the cathedral or McDonald’s. Yes, it’s still the same fellow and the same few women sitting on the ground with the ugly face of poverty.

May the fellow from Dakota forgive us, and if he can, return from his past narrative tense with his beggar’s pouch of worries, where shards of History lock together like jaws. Let us take one last look.

Let us love his sorrow: we share his incomprehension, his children are our own, his funny hat suits us! Let’s take a good look at him. It’s a sleepless night. Whisper to me what I must write. But please don’t show me your face anymore, don’t look at me. The earth sorrows, the body is alone. I can’t see anything now. And there you are, a destitute king because you picked the wrong card.