RAS 12 - JRL 6535
HISTORY: EARLY STALINISM
11. THE CILIGA MEMOIR: IN THE LAND OF THE GREAT LIE
SOURCE. Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (Ink Links, 271 Kentish Town Rd., London NW5 2JS, UK, 1979) [translated by Fernand G. Fernier, Anne Cliff, Margaret and Hugo Dewar]. First published in France as Au Pays du Grand Mensonge [In the Land of the Great Lie] (1938).
This memoir of the early Stalin period is not as well known as it deserves to be. The author, a prominent Yugoslav communist who represented his party at the Comintern, was sent to Moscow in 1926 to study at the party school. He joined the Trotskyist opposition in 1929, was arrested in 1930, then spent three years in prison and two and a half years in various places of exile in Siberia. In 1936 he finally managed to get out of the USSR: the GPU (secret police) expelled him from the country. Straight away he got down to the job of revealing the truth about Stalin's Soviet Union by writing this book.
Although Ciliga recounts many episodes from his own experience and reproduces many fascinating exchanges between himself and GPU officials, his personality does not occupy a salient place in the narrative. This is no personal life story: he tells us nothing about his family background or early years. His overriding aim is to record his detailed observations about Soviet society. He met and won the confidence of people belonging to all parts of that society and faithfully conveys what they told him about the conditions of their lives and their views of the world. The result is a panoramic survey of a country in the throes of a vast transformation.
A great deal of the content of the book is consistent with what we know from many other sources, although not so many other sources provide such a close-up human picture. Yet some points emerge that are less widely known and contradict the usual image of Soviet society under Stalin. Thus the author argues that while parts of the old pre-revolutionary upper classes were indeed annihilated or emigrated other parts were absorbed into the new privileged class by various routes. For example, many Soviet managers and officials dumped their old wives and married young women of old upper class origin.
It also becomes clear that Soviet politics at this period was not yet fully totalitarian. While from the early 1930s pluralism within the ruling party was no longer permitted open expression it remained legitimate in principle. True, communist oppositionists were imprisoned and exiled, but they were still treated better than other prisoners. They were even allowed to write political programs and discuss them with one another. GPU officials repeatedly assured Ciliga that they regarded him as a wayward comrade, not as an enemy: all he had to do was make a declaration that he had changed his views and he could return to Moscow a free man. Evidently the show trials and purges of 1937 were necessary to de-legitimize opposition by identifying it with terrorism and to turn all oppositionists into "enemies of the people" meriting especially harshest treatment.
The author explains the evolution of his political views from those of a "loyal" oppositionist to thoroughgoing rejection of bolshevism and the Soviet system. Especially illuminating is the chapter "Lenin also" in which he shares his anguished rethinking of Lenin's role, culminating in his tearing up the portrait of Lenin in his cell. The publishers of earlier editions of the book did not like this chapter and cut it out of the published text. But unlike many who followed this path Ciliga never rejected revolutionary socialism as such: his criticism of Soviet reality always comes from the left.
Let me conclude with Ciliga's own concluding words, from the final chapter entitled "Farewell, Russia: farewell, hard, young land!" "Behind me lay sprawling, mighty Russia. Behind me were years of hardship, of seeking for the truth, of fighting for the truth. In experience and emotion the richest years of all my life. Happy years."
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