Keys of This Blood (40 page)

Admiration for Stalin in the United States was a more tender sort of thing. Despite his incomparable ruthlessness, which was in full swing in the 1930s, Stalin's NKVD was so unbelievably skillful in promoting his cult that America was able to allow itself to ignore his genocidal policies the way bad manners are ignored in polite company. An article in one popular American magazine of the thirties,
Harper's Weekly
, presented but one example of the agreeable stereotype that came to be accepted in the United States: “Uncle Joe”—as President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself dubbed Stalin familiarly—that gentle bear of a man, firm, pipe-smoking, devoted to his family, and living modestly on a manager's salary, like any honest American capitalist.

Truly, as Lenin had said, Stalin was the “Miraculous Georgian.”

·   ·   ·

Stalin's entire plan for European and global conquest reposed on the success of his 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler. But it was Hitler who was quicker on the draw by far. The German dictator's admiration for Stalin and his methods proved to be no stumbling block to betrayal. In a hatred born of envy, emulation and his own megalomania, Hitler turned on the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev revealed twenty-five years later that, when Stalin learned of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he suffered a nervous collapse and shouted, “All that Lenin created we have lost forever!”

There was precious little to choose between these two dictators who styled themselves as champions of the world socialist cause. But despite Stalin's fit of nerves, his day was to be a longer one than Hitler's. For once again, the Miraculous Georgian was aided by a strange combination of events over which he had no control: Hitler's maniacal mistakes. The heroism of the Russian people. And, above all, the entry of the United States into World War II.

The trouble was that the Americans as saviors turned out to be a mixed blessing for Stalin. On the one hand, they saved his hide by resupplying England, France and the USSR itself with needed military equipment and food, and by their own enormous military effort. On the other hand, however, the Americans saved Europe's hide into the bargain; and that threw a spanner into Stalin's plans for a debilitated France, England and Germany.

In fact, the United States became the most important of the historical factors of World War II on which Stalin had not counted. The presence of America, with its ebullient economy and its exclusive possession of the atomic bomb, in the heartland of Europe from 1945 onward changed the whole Leninist-Marxist equation for geopolitical dominance. The age-old dream of a Slavic-German basis for such dominance was out of the question. At least, for the foreseeable future.

Still, perhaps tomorrow would be a different sort of day. And there was no harm in working to see it.

Here, at least, the United States turned out to be particularly obliging. Franklin Roosevelt allowed himself and his Western allies to be agreeably and painlessly bamboozled out of their original purpose in going to war—the liberation of Poland and all European nations.

A cartoon-like image comes to mind of a swamp drainer so frightened by alligators snapping at his hide that he forgets why he came to the swamp in the first place. But sadly, the facts of their gross betrayal of
Eastern Europe suggests something far less comic—and far less complimentary and exculpatory—for the American and British leaders who connived at yet another nonrevolutionary victory for the Leninist-Marxist proletarian revolution. A bitterly cynical cartoon appeared in one of the last editions of Budapest's principal daily, a short time before the iron hand of Stalinism wiped out all freedom in Hungary. It showed the Eastern European nations as a maiden being swept away in the paws of a bearlike Joseph Stalin, while she cries to three uniformed men—Britain, France, and the U.S.A.: “You promised to free me from this rape … you promised!” Their answer: “Sorry, my dear, but we all belong to the same club.”

That, in sum, was the difficulty. Already a “beloved ally,” already a founding member of the United Nations Organization, already possessing treaty papers granting Stalin all power over those nations, the West lacked any moral backbone to stand up to Stalin. The best that could be done was the Kennan containment policy and the tedious, sometimes bloody, always duplicitous Cold War, splotched with Korean blood and Vietnamese blood, and unmatched in the history of nations for the number of men, women and children made the victims of man's grossest inhumanity to man.

Nor did Stalin's death, in March 1953, change any of the fundamentals on which the Party-State continued to function. The Leninist geopolitical structure animated by the Leninist geopolitical aim was handed on intact by the successors of Stalin. Constantly maintained at par was the international grid of local Communist parties modeled on the CPSU, the ever-active subversion through diplomatic missions and front organizations, the ideological presumption that everywhere it was possible to bring about the final overthrow of the capitalist “superstructure” and thus “liberate” the “proletariat.”

In true Leninist style, there never was any serious effort at a skillful cultural penetration. The Soviet efforts, right up to the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, did foment cultural relations organizations and movements. But no one in any position of leadership was ever deceived. In propaganda, the Soviets had far greater success than the West. But, in matters of substance, they failed miserably. There was never the slightest sign of a genuine proletarian uprising in any country—only the meretricious imposition of Soviet domination by deceit, assassination, threat and military investment.

Only somebody like Karol Wojtyla, in the position he occupied as Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, in the front line of the Stalinist empire, could—among his Poles and fellow Slavs—smell the dry rot in the timber
of that empire and could confidently predict back in the mid-seventies that “nothing can ensure the continuance for long of a system that is eating its own vitals.”

By the time the sinister Yuri Andropov died, in February 1984, the men huddled around the Politburo table in the Kremlin were beginning to realize that time was not on their side, that the hated capitalist world was growing stronger, that a new spirit was abroad even among their captive nations within the USSR and outside its borders, and that the colossus to the east—Communist China—was developing dangerous-looking muscles. There would be a short reign by the already ailing Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko—really an interregnum. For in their midst since 1980 there was this bustling, agile-footed Mikhail Gorbachev, already substituting for Andropov and Chernenko. His Party orthodoxy was above reproach. His administrative powers were recognized as superb. Under such headings of practical housekeeping, there were no doubts registered in his Politburo colleagues' minds.

But what about his constant harping on a restructuring of the Marxist economy? And his proposals of a new mission, an utterly new mission for the Party-State, involving an entirely new way of penetrating the already burgeoning globalism of the capitalist nations? What did he imply by the “disaggregation of useless surrogates”? The refurbishing of the governmental structure of the USSR itself? The historic ties between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Germanic peoples and the Russian peoples? Nothing, he had stated to his colleagues, in the last seventy years of the Revolution has prepared us, in terms of how we have practiced Leninism, to deal with the new globalism.

Eventually, in their hardheaded way, those colleagues would yield to the importuning passion this comparatively young man brought to their brooding discussions. They vested him with all authority over the Party-State in March 1985. But it is most probable that none of them, or not, at least, the majority of them, had ever seriously delved into the writings and theories of Antonio Gramsci. His prison notebooks and their fateful analysis of Leninism were the textbooks of their new General Secretary.

When Pope John Paul II reckons up the major forces against him and his Church in the millennium endgame, the geopolitical strength of Soviet-led world Communism at the end of the twentieth century rests in his view on the contributions of one man, who stands second only to Marx and Lenin. The historic events that have been gathering momentum since the end of World War II, and that have reached a pitch of euphoric fever at the opening of the 1990s, have proved Antonio Gramsci the worthiest, the most farsighted and, in practical terms, the most successful of all the interpreters of Karl Marx.

Italian Communists have long recognized Gramsci as the authentic founder, theoretician and strategist of their party's unique success in the West. But that is not the basis of John Paul's judgment. Rather, the Pope counts Gramsci's greatest contributions as three. His incisive critique of classical Leninism. His stunningly successful blueprint for the reform of that Leninism, which has now swept the world. And his accurate prediction of the cardinal mistake that the Western democracies would make in their confrontation with Gramscian Communism, and with their own future.

Antonio Gramsci's contributions have outlived the man by half a century. And, though Moscow has been chary with its kudos for him, the fact remains that the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism—and certainly more than Stalinism—to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West. All that has happened both to capitalist and Communist powers since 1945—and most dramatically
since 1985—has completely vindicated the judgment of this authentic Marxist genius in the Hall of Communism's Heroes.

Personally speaking, Antonio Gramsci was not the most fortunate of men. But he was probably one of the most tenacious. He was born in the village of Ales on the island of Sardinia in 1891. As the only road upward for any Sardinian is the road out, Gramsci left for mainland Italy, where he studied philosophy and history at Turin University. By 1913, he was a member of the Italian Socialist Party. In 1919, he founded a newspaper, whose name alone—
L'Ordine Nuovo
, The New Order—gave clear indication of his bent of mind and of the fact that, like Lenin, he was both a visionary and a doer of deeds.

In 1921, in association with Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci founded the Italian Communist Party. The next year, however, the squat, broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed, forty-year-old Benito Mussolini came to power. Like a toad who had been masquerading as a prince, that onetime Italian Socialist turned into a Fascist dictator. Italy became a Fascist nation. And Gramsci took off for what he no doubt expected would be the safer haven of Lenin's USSR.

Marxist though he was, and as fully convinced as Lenin that there was a force completely inner to mankind driving it on as a whole to the Marxist ideal of the “Workers' Paradise,” Gramsci was too aware of the facts of history and of life to accept other basic and gratuitous assumptions made by Marx, and accepted unquestioningly by Lenin.

For one thing, Marx and Lenin insisted that throughout the entire world, human society was divided into just two opposing camps—the broad “structure” of the great mass of people, the workers of the world; and the unjustly created “superstructure” of oppressive capitalism.

Gramsci knew otherwise. He understood the nature of Christian culture, which he saw as still vibrant and thriving in the lives of the people all around him. Not only did Christianity point unceasingly to a divine force beyond mankind—a force outside and superior to the material cosmos. Christianity was also the spiritual and intellectual patrimony held in common by the bone-poor peasants in his native Ales, the workers in Milan's factories, the professors who had taught him at Turin University, and the Pope in his Roman splendor.

Gramsci himself rejected Christianity and all its transcendent claims. He knew Mussolini was the latest in a long list of leaders who abused it. He knew the Sardinian peasants and Milanese laboring classes readily accused the upper classes of playing on it. He knew the university dons might have contempt for it. And he knew it was under attack from many sides.

Nevertheless, he knew Christian culture existed. It was far more real, in fact, than the still nonexistent proletarian revolution. Moreover, as a religion, the appeal and the power of Christianity could not be denied. For that was the force binding all the classes—peasants and workers and princes and priests and popes and all the rest besides—into a single, homogeneous culture. It was a specifically Christian culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important things about human life transcended the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal lives.

True, in the Czarist Russia in which Lenin and Stalin had been reared, there had been an oppressive “superstructure”—the Czar, the aristocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church—which had stood in opposition to the mass of citizens. But even in such ripe conditions as that, there had been no such proletarian revolution as Marx and Lenin had predicted.

Perhaps Lenin and Stalin and the rest of the Bolshevik Party were prepared to pretend otherwise. And perhaps the rest of the world was prepared to accept their Big Lie. But Gramsci would not. For him, a coup d'état was not a revolution. And for him, the Russian masses, whom he described contemptuously as “primitive and spineless,” had no importance, in any case.

Gramsci agreed that the great mass of the world's population was made up of workers. That much was just plain fact. What became clear to him, however, was that nowhere—and especially not in Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm.

And if that was true, Gramsci argued, then Marx and Lenin had to be wrong in another of their fundamental assumptions: There would never be a glorious uprising of the proletariat. There would be no Marxist-inspired violent overthrow of the ruling “superstructure” by the working “underclasses.” Because no matter how oppressed they might be, the “structure” of the working classes was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian faith and their Christian culture.