COMMUNIST DILEMMA
By RICHARD CHANCELLOR
IT is an interesting sign of the times that far more attention is paid to the activities of Communist parties throughout the world than to the present state of the Party inside the first Socialist State, the U.S.S.R. itself. This is partly due, of course, to the ingrained secrecy of the Russian official mind, but it is also natural that the world in general, in its ignorance of the nature of the Party which rules the Fatherland of Communism, should concentrate its attention on the local organisations which bear the same name and which the world rather naively imagines to be a true and representative part of a great international organisation. There can be few ruder shocks, as a matter of fact, than that experienced by foreign Communists of importance and authority in their own countries when they cross the lines and seek what they have been led to believe is their rightful place in the iron-bound ranks of the Russian Communist Party. The Communist cock who leaves his foreign dunghill for the odorous joys of a Soviet Utopia will be wise if he leaves his line of retreat clear. There are few sadder stories than that of the fellow- traveller who, on arrival for the first time in the Soviet Union, tore up his British passport, with awful deliberation, before the eyes of the only man in Russia who could give him a new one.
The Russian Communist Party of today is a very different organisa- tion from the militant Social Democrats to whom Lenin gave the name of "Communists" in 1917. The revolutionary fire of those magnificent days has died to a flicker, and no adequate substitute has 'yet been found to enable the Party to cope with the moral and material problems which face it on the morrow of the greatest victory in Russian history. In retrospect, the Party leadership is bitterly aware that it had to invoke the two great Russian spirits of Nationalism and Orthodoxy to achieve victory, and if it is to reassert its supremacy now that the military need is past, it giust provide a true substitute for those two ancient motive forces of Russian history. The conviction is steadily growing, outside the confines of the U.S.S.R. and despite the rigid curtain of Soviet secrecy, that the faith of Marx and Lenin, or as much of it as survives at the ehd of the era of Stalin, is sterile and incapable by itself of solving the dilemma which faces the Soviet peoples, and still less of deciding the future of the slave-nations which run by their chariot-wheels.
Before considering the structure of the Russian Communist Party it is important to appreciate its relation to the mechanics of Soviet Government. From the lowest level upwards, the Party organisations provide the motive-power for all State activities other than those of a purely routine nature'. In the words of Gorkin, "The instructions of the Party determine the entire activity of the Soviets . . . and the Party ensures that the resolutions of the Soviet organisations are carried out without fail." To this end the Party maintains an organisa- tion whose ramifications extend to every town and village throughout the U.S.S.R., and, by means of a system of delegates, the pyramidal structure reaches its apex in the All-Union Party Congress, which is the highest executive organisation of the Party. The Statute of the Party lays down that a Congress shall be held every five years, and there is significance in the fact that this all-important detail re- . ceives no mention in the contemporary Soviet press, seeing that the last Party Congress, the 18th, was held in March, 1939. In the days when Russian Bolshevism was a live ideal the men who framed the Party Statute took care to ensure that not more than five years should elapse, under any circumstances, before the rank and file of the Party should have an opportunity of calling its leadership to account, and, when dissatisfied, of changing the membership of its Central Committee and of the Central Control Commission. It was perhaps as close as Russian Communists will ever get to the appli- cation of democratic principles to the structure of their Party, in the western sense of that much-abused word. The present Central Com- mittee has made its intentions clear enough by evoking the instru- ment of the "Party-Conference," which is convened by the Central Committee itself at intervals between All-Union Party Congresses to make decisions on questions of Party policy which have arisen since the previous Congress. Such conferences need not be publicised, and far-reaching decisions may be taken, including the removal and replacement of members of the Central Committee up to a maximum of one-fifth of the total membership of that body. Decisions reached at Party Conferences require confirmation by the Central Committee, but under the conditions obtaining in Stalinist Russia this safeguard loses much of its value, seeing that the Central Committee con- venes such conferences in the first place.
The total membership of the All-Russian Communist party is estimated at rather less than six million at the present day, and the Russian party represents by far the largest single fraction of the eighteen and a half millions of people throughout the world who subscribe openly to the Communist philosophy. In 1940 the Russian figure was approximately three and a half millions, and if allowance be made for casualties and removals it is fair to estimate that three million of the inhabitants of the territories now incorporated into the U.S.S.R. became Party members during the war years. At the start the onus was placed on Party members to become "front-line fighters in the struggle against Fascism," but as the struggle wore on, with the Russian soldier showing once again his traditional qualities of courage and endurance, the emphasis shifted, until the naturai leaders who made their way forward were enjoined in their turn to enter the Party, without submitting to the political check and counter-check which is inseparable from such entry in normal times. Many thousands of these new Party members commanded Russian soldiers in a great moment of Russian history, and many of them have had contact with their western allies and opportunity to compare, at first hand, the countries of Western Europe with the capitalistic purgatory of the Soviet textbooks. It is little wonder, then, that Stalin and his Central Committee hesitate to put their fate in the hands of another Party Congress, at least while the Party retains its wartime form, and the present campaign towards Marxist orthodoxy in music, literature and the arts, with the simultaneous and pro- gressive elimination of every western influence, is an essential pre- liminary to the next Party Congress, already three years overdue. In the twenties and thirties the process of Soviet Gleichschaltung took a simpler form. At Stalin's behest the Central Committee would order the re-registration of all Party members, which subjected each in- dividual to a searching examination by the Central Control Com- mission, aided and supported by the Special Department of the NKVD, before his Party card was returned to him. The names of those days can still bring a thrill of horror to those who remember the atmosphere of a Party Purge—Andreev in the blood-bath which followed the death of Kirov, Shvemik in the liquidation of the trade union leaders, Khruschev in the Ukraine in 1937 and Voroshilov as he signed the death-warrants of the flower of the Red Army.
But it is a quite new situation which confronts the same men in the summer of 1947. Perhaps two million Soviet citizens are outside the frontiers of the U.S.S.R., desertion is rife in the Soviet armies of occupation and the moving finger is writing new names on the ancient walls of the Krentlin—Kravchenko, Alexeiev and Gousenko. The Party leaders are faced with two alternatives before the next All-Union Congress, which even they cannot postpone indefinitely. They must either find some means of reducing the Party numbers down to those on whom they caq fely, as Stalin was able to rely in 1939, and for this the traditional method of the Party purge is 110
longer available, as it would precipitate a landslide of defection whose repercussions it is impossible to foresee ; or they must so re-educate the swollen Party membership in such a way as to ensure a docile Congress that will elect a new Central Committee according to the wishes of the leaders of the old. The first is a task of great difficulty which will require more time than the Party leadership may be able to afford, while the second could certainly have been accomplished by the revolutionary faith which inspired Lenin. But of Lenin's original Central Committee of 1917, which consisted of thirty-one . Old Bolsheviks, only one besides Stalin remains alive, and she is a woman. In this process, extending over twenty years, the Russian Communist Party has lost something besides its founders, something which is irreplaceable, the very spirit of the Revolution itself. And Russian Communism has never needed that spirit more than in the dilemma in which it now finds itself.
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