The Great Terror

Kravchenko won his case, and won it flatly and clearly, as the non-Communist press of the West agreed. Much credit went to his lawyer, the Resistance hero and former Socialist deputy Maître Izard, who had himself been a prisoner of the Gestapo. But in the main, the result depended on the chance that Kravchenko was of quick intelligence, capable of coping with skilled French lawyers. And even with his victory, as the details began to be forgotten, the mud was again picked up, was flung, and stuck. As for Paris intellectuals without any knowledge of Russia, they had a sound safety mechanism: “All they had to know was that Kravchenko was opposed to the Soviet system. This proved he was wrong.”⁹⁸

Thirty years later, the Les Lewes françaises editor responsible, Claude Morgan, admitted in his autobiography,

Don Quichotte et les autres that “Kravchenko was right.” He said that after Kravchenko’s death, he had wished “to pay him homage, but it was as yet too early….”

Even when the existence of camps was admitted, they were described as of a most humane and reformatory nature. Pat Sloan, the British Communist chiefly concerned with cultural liaison with the USSR, wrote:

Compared with the significance of that term in Britain, Soviet imprisonment stands out as an almost enjoyable experience. For the essence of Soviet imprisonment is isolation from the rest of the community, together with other persons similarly isolated, with the possibility to do useful work at the place of isolation, to earn a wage for this work, and to participate in running the isolation settlement or ‘prison’ in the same way as the children participate in running their school, or the workers their factory.⁹⁹

And again: “The Soviet labour camp provides a freedom for its inmates not usual in our own prisons in this country.”¹⁰⁰

In 1966, he was prepared to comment on the above: “Among most writers on the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, I have least to be ashamed of, or to wish to withdraw.”¹⁰¹

The editor-in-chief of Les Lewes françaises, Pierre Daix, wrote:

The camps of re-education of the Soviet Union are the achievement of the complete suppression of the exploitation of men by men; the decisive sign of the effort by victorious Socialism to achieve the liberation of men from this exploitation in liberating also the oppressors, slaves of their own oppression.

By a considerable irony, when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

came out in a French edition, sponsored by the Friends of the Soviet Union, they selected Daix to write the preface; but Daix had, in fact, changed his views.

Active falsification by partisans and—worse—theoretical justification of falsehood by philosophers were not the only causes of delusion. In addition, a general vague good will towards the Soviet Union, even in the 1930s, led to a tendency to palliate or ignore the facts.

Dr. Margolin remarks that “an entire generation of Zionists has died in Soviet prisons, camps and exile”; and he comments that the Zionists of the outside world were never able to help them, not only because of the difficulties, but also because “we did not care. I do not remember seeing a single article about them in the prewar papers. Not the least effort was made to mobilize public opinion and alleviate their fate.¹⁰²

If this is true of the intelligent, inquisitive, and internationally minded Zionist movement, with a special interest in a special group of prisoners, it applies much more to those in the West whose interest in the matter was, or might have been, the common bonds of humanity.

Whatever the Zionists felt, we should note that one great Jewish tradition remained clear and forthright in its attitude. The old Bund, the Jewish Social Democratic organization which had played a most important part in the old Left, though crushed in Russia, had continued to work in the Baltic States and Poland. And in the United States, some of the most effective militants in the New York Jewish Left had sprung from Bund circles. A great example is David Dubinsky, who throughout the period combined a firm radicalism with regard for the employers and an equally firm resistance to the Terror in Russia, and even during the war rebuffed pressures from “liberals” and from the State Department, which tried to dissuade him from protest against the executions of Ehrlich and Alter.