review, we leave these aside.
We likewise leave aside other essays, particularly the portraits or sketches of Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, and also those figures in the history of the Russian revolution, the Mensheviks, who were swept aside by events.
Nor will we deal with Deutscher's comments on Pasternak, showing that Doctor Zhivago is neither the great novel which the Western world has praised so highly nor the slanderous work seen by so many bureaucrats, who, like Pasternak but in a different way, have failed to understand the Russian revolution.
"What is at stake is no longer the 'right' of a Leader and a ruling group to terrorize the nation, but the very essence of their political monopoly, their right to speak for a people which is not allowed to speak for itself. The predicaments with which the Soviet Union is contending at present call not for a new dose of patriarchal-bureaucratic 'liberalism,' but for genuine liberty and a genuine advance to socialism." (Page 133.)
With regard to this, beginning on page 138, Deutscher in a searching way presents on the one hand the changes that have occurred in the relations between the top leadership and the bureaucracy as compared to Stalin's time, and on the other hand the lack of substantial changes between the bureaucracy and the masses. He emphasizes very strongly the contradictoriness of this situation and also its unhealthy consequences in Soviet society.
But how can this contradiction be
tion is long overdue." (Page 1443, my emphasis.) With these words, Deutscher, at bottom, comes up against the problem of a political revolution in the Soviet Union. * * x
With regard to the international policies of the Soviet authorities, Deutscher points forcefully to the fact that from Stalin to the present leaders, they have not aimed at subverting the capitalist.world and that their attitude towards the revolutionary movements and towards the workers states is determined by "reasons of state" which at bottom signify trying to maintain the status quo in a world that is continually moving. It is all the more necessary to remember this inasmuch as working-class militants in their great majority have long been aware of this, although the capitalist leaders often act as if they were unaware of it.
In the articles dealing with the international crisis in the official Communist movement, the crisis of the international disintegration of Stalinism, Deutscher offers a very valuable contribution showing how the differences were born and how they developed under the apparent monolithism which masked them for such a long time. His contribution on Maoism is particularly interesting.
Nevertheless, he takes a certain analogy too far in his article "Three Currents in Communism." Without any doubt at the time he wrote the article, it was correct to put the spotlight on the differences that existed between a right wing (in which Tito and Togliatti could be considered as the most representative figures), a center (around Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership), and a left wing (including the then apparently united Chinese leadership). Under these conditions the temptation was understandable of recalling the differences between the Left Opposition, the centrist bureaucratic faction and the Right Opposition into which the Bolshevik party and the International Communist movement was divided at one time.
But the analogy cannot be carried so far as to ask, in conclusion, as Deut-— scher does, if the Communist movement can regenerate itself. Underestimation of the bureaucratic degeneration, it appears to us, is involved in this. We do not doubt that there are still considerable revolutionary forces within the Communist parties and this has tactical implications in various countries. But the Communist parties are all deeply rotted organizations.
Since Deutscher wrote this article, that is, a little more than three years, several new developments have highlighted the extent and also the meaning of the disintegration of the movements having a Stalinist origin and leadership.
In the parties having mass influence, like those in France and Italy, the rightist orientation has become accentuated to such a degree that the differences with the Social Democracy are hardly noticeable in daily political activities and in theoretical questions, remaining solely in the tie with Moscow in the sense that these formations see the economic development of the USSR as the main factor in the march of humanity toward socialism.
The rightist evolution of the Soviet leaders is equally evident.
As for the Chinese leaders, the unfolding of the "cultural revolution" proves among other things that one cannot expect from them a return to free criticism, to discussion, to democratic methods.
On the other hand, genuinely progressive development is discernible in the Cuban leadership, the decisive sector of which did not originate in a movement that had been under a Stalinist leadership. There is material for a supplementary chapter on the role of the personality in history, as well as a chapter concerning the influence which the condition of being a small workers state in proxim-— ity to American imperialism has had on the politics of the leadership of that state.
If there is a real “irony of his-
"it is certainly in this surprising tory,
development of a revolution at the very and quite particularly today of the herodoorstep of imperialism which is today ism of the Vietnamese people, who by holdproving to be more combative and richer ing the powerful American imperialism at in ideas than movements having at their bay are compelling the vanguard militants disposal much greater material means. more and more to consider the biggest
problems of strategy and tactics in the
However slow and complex the be- revolutionary movement in our time. In this ginnings may be along the road to the re- way, too, the Vietnamese revolution merits newal of communism, it must not be for- the strongest support. gotten that the progress made is one of the products of the colonial revolution, April 17, 1967