I have expressed my bewilderment at American academics who persist in being Marxists despite the long, bleak and horrific history of societies that adopted Marxism. All of that would seem a rather conclusive refutation of the theory, just as satellite photos of the Earth would seem to be a rather conclusive refutation of the Flat Earthers. Nevertheless, my reading last night of Chapter 11 of Book Three of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago introduced me to a group of Marxists even more perplexingly clueless.
The chapter, entitled “The Loyalists,” was about the labor-camp experience by loyal Soviet Communists who, like everyone else, had been arrested for nothing at all during one of Stalin’s many purges. Arrest placed those people in a crisis of conscience (“they were government people! Enlightened Marxists! Theoreticians!”). “It was more than the human heart could bear,” Solzhenitsyn wrote of them, “to fall beneath the beloved ax ? then to have to justify its wisdom! But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.”
Solzhenitsyn quotes one R.M. Ger, who sounds almost Niem?lleresque:
So long as the arrests involved peoply who were unknown to me or scarcely known to me, I and my acquaintances had no doubts about the well-foundedness [!] of the arrests. But when people close to me were arrested and I myself was arrested, and when I encountered dozens of the most loyal Communists in prison, then …
Then what? During this time of crisis, of course, several realized the truth, but others came up with the “inevitable moral: I have been imprisoned for nothing and that means I am good, and that all these people around me are enemies and have been imprisoned for good cause.” (This is why so many later bragged later of being “stoolies”; that is, labor-camp snitches.)
Solzhenitsyn records their explanations for their arrests despite being orthodox Communists, none of which “accused Stalin,” who “remained an uneclipsed sun!”: it was “very cunning work by foreign intelligence,” it was “wrecking [sabotage by class enemies] on an enormous scale”; it was their fault for “relaxing our vigilance” against class enemies; it was “treason” within the Party; it was an “historical necessity for the development of our society”; it was a test of one’s true loyalty to the Party ? “do everything demanded of you [i.e., confess to every made-up crime] and whoever would sign everything would be promoted substantially later on” (which is why “it was the Communists who turned out to be the first to give false testimony against themselves” and “name as many names as possible” ? italics in original).
Per George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Solzhenitsyn refers to them as “Goodthinkers” and “like Parsons,” the character who said “You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man? … ‘Thank you,’ I’m going to say [to the tribunal]. Thank you for saving me before it was too late!” Here’s one example among the many in the chapter:
In the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison baths these [Communist] women were driven naked between formations of jailers. Nothing happened, and they were reassured. And in the ensuing stages of their journey they sang in the [train] car:
I know no other country
Where a person breathes so freely!
Arguing with such people, Solzhenitsyn wrote, was fruitless ? and monotonous. “It is as if all of these dogmatists taken together had been rolled into … one person” (ellipses in original). About this Every-Marxist, Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Armor-piercing shells for iron-heads have not yet been invented! In arguing with them, you wear yourself out, unless you accept in advance that the argument is simply a game, a jolly pastime.” Later he adds,
He is imperturbable. He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is like walking through a desert.
It’s about people like this that they say: “He made the rounds of all the smithies and came home unshod.”
And when they write in their obituaries: “perished tragically during the period of the cult [of Stalin],” this should be corrected to read: “perished comically.”
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