Nothing seems right about the Left

For much of the twentieth century, communism caught the imagination of idealists around the world. Few of my 60-plus generation were unaffected by its seductive allure. While some amongst us stayed faithful to the ‘cause’, the rest shipped out after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s metamorphosis into a capitalist society.

Elsewhere in the world, the Left has reinvented itself, carving an existence outside communism. About the only ones to buck the trend are the Indian communists, holding fast to Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin — never mind that the last two killed hundreds of thousands, incarcerated millions, and unleasehd a reign of terror that lasted long after their demise.

Many of my friends in Eastern Europe, once staunch communists, wondered how they had remained true to an ideology that savaged their lives, sent so many to prison, and impelled them to falsely denounce those closest to them. A friend, an official of the former East German state, the German Democratic Republic, told me recently how shocked he was to know that Stasi had spied on him, using his own family members to render him an ‘unperson’.

The few former hardline communist ideologues I ran into in Cambodia, obviously for their own safety, denounced Pol Pot while accepting they had been misled into following him. Several amongst them improbably claimed to have survived Security Prison 21, the notorious institution run by the communists in the heart of Phnom Penh from a school, suitably modified for maiming, crippling and torturing people to death, and archiving everything in meticulous detail. In Budapest where I lived for some time, I saw gallows of the kind used to execute the Hungarian communist politician Imre Nagy in 1958. It would have won a prize for grisly neatness of design. Such is the thought that went into creating the implements of death.

Outside Europe, communism found little traction. In the Americas, except for a fast-disappearing toehold in Cuba, it was an inconsequential force, while in Africa it never took off. In Asia, however, the ideology achieved unexpected success in China, North Korea and Vietnam. But in all those countries they were anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles that happened to be led by the communists. As the Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed, “It was patriotism, not communism” that inspired him.

Mao himself laboured against communist orthodoxy of the  kind Stalin tried to impose. By 1953, however, he was confident enough to stand up to Stalin and go against Marx, asserting that “Man makes his own history, but he makes it in accordance with his environment”. It is another matter that Mao later instituted his own reign of terror.

In West Bengal, where communism had its longest run in India, it stands discredited, while in Kerala it persists in an uninspiring mutated form as just another political party facing charges of graft and wrongdoing. The ideological space communism once had a stranglehold over is now occupied by a rainbow hue of political parties.

Communism created its own hierarchy, the senior members of which became its aristocracy. Prof Archie Brown’s magisterial work,  The Rise and Fall of Communism , reveals out  how ‘privilege’ emerged as a consequence of the hard line the leadership took if only to have the discretion “to get rid of potential rivals”. 

Stalin, of course, had a journeyman’s approach to unfolding developments in the USSR arguing that “the only way to get ahead was by a policy of absolute severity and intransigence”.  Polish Marxist theorist and economist Rosa Luxemburg had foreseen the danger that communism posed to liberty, declaiming that “if freedom becomes privilege, the workings of political freedom are broken”.

From Stalin’s time, communism was no longer just an ideology but a religion with its own liturgy and, incredibly, an acute sense of sin. In its pursuit of confessions, it outdid the Medieval Inquisition, with thousands owning up to crimes they never committed only to be led away and shot.

There’s many a gap

We need to accept that in communism, theory missed ground realities by a mile and more. The venality of the ideology is lost on India’s Reds who continue to live in an imaginary glorious past instead of giving it all up and adapting to the future. Here they would have done well to take note of Mao’s two eminently sensible observations: that “future events would be decided by future generations, and in accordance with conditions we cannot forsee”, and that in future “even Marx, Engels and Lenin would possibly appear rather ridiculous”.

In its time, communism threw up the likes of Soviet revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky, of “We stand for organised terror” fame and Levrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief spook, who famously boasted: “You bring me the man, I'll find you the crime”. These were not exceptions to the system but the norm for those who believed in the Trotskyite dictum, “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”

“He who is conceived in a cage”, the Soviet-era poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko declared, “yearns for the cage”. That, sadly, can be said of India’s doctrinaire communists, snared in an ideological prison. They have a great opportunity to reinvent themselves as the preeminent force to challenge and check the factors contributing to an India that is getting richer yet increasingly unequal and iniquitous.

But for that they first need to accept communism’s failure as an ideology and give it up as their driving force. Will they? One hopes they do.

The writer is visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru  

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