A man of faith

National Interest, The, Summer, 2003 by Paul Hollander

Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet people under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.

Nonetheless, a few lines later he observes that "it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or willful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side", and ht adds: "In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves." This reminds one not of Marx and Engels but of Martin Heidegger, who said in 1935 (and had published in 1953):

in the domain of the essential, half-measures are always more fatal than the Nothing that is so terribly feared.... [W]hat is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism... has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement. (2)

Of course, the siren of "total war" has been the time-honored excuse that each and every modern dictatorship has offered for its repressive policies, and the Soviet one for its campaigns of terror in the 1930s here rather unoriginally embraced by Hobsbawm. Stalin's favorite phrase here rises to the mind: "When the forest is cut down, splinters fly."

The abstract quality of Hobsbawm's youthful affections for the Soviet Union is also revealed in his negative reactions to his limited exposure to Soviet realities during the visit he paid in 1954-55, of which he returned "depressed and without any desire to go there again." But even the partially chastened, mature Hobsbawm has retained blind spots of impressive proportions which, for example, enable him to believe that East Germany (he insists on calling it the "German Democratic Republic")

was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education... social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day's work... open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions.

His worldview still requires, too, a perception of the Soviet Union as having been relatively weak and lacking in the "global ambitions and aggressiveness of the USA."

These remarks highlight the degree to which Hobsbawm's alignments and beliefs were predicated on the appeal of good intentions, potentialities and a future superior to the present. It was the attribution of these great hopes to the USSR that prevented him from a proper appreciation of its "severe defects" and that enabled him to give them little weight in his moral-political accounting. Neither knowledge nor a certain amount of self-reflection has prevented him from effortlessly subordinating intellect to emotion--a condition far from unknown among politically committed intellectuals. Recalling his teenage years in Germany, he writes:

The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me. ... To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.