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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 30, No. 3. 1967.

Book reviews: a contrast

page 9

Book reviews: a contrast

Ironies Of History, Essays on Contemporary Communism, by Isaac Deutseher (Oxford University Press. NZ Price 44/6, published 1966). Reviewed by Nevil Gibson.

Many writers of serious books who are also journalists invariably have "collections" published of articles written over a number of years. Only a small number of these books deserve a wide audience, as much of the content can ill stand the test of time. This applies especially to books on political themes where changing circumstances wreak havoc on opinions which are easily swept away in a tide of irrelevancy.

Some writers can stand this supreme test belter than others, and Isaac Deutscher is better than most. Through his monumental three volume biography of Trotsky, his earlier biography of Stalin (Penguin Edition 1966) and other writing on Soviet Russia, Deutscher has established himself as one of the few outstanding writers on Communist affairs. In his new collection, his first since Heretics and Renegades (1955), Deutscher presents most of the longer pieces he has written during the 10 years following Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February, 1956. In those 10 years we have seen in modern Communism many changes and developments: From the denuciation of Stalin and the beginning of "de-Stalinisation" to the current "Cultural Revolution" in China.

During these turbulent years Deutscher has consistently put forward his own Marxist appraisal, always using facts with honesty and always making his opinions clear and lucid. His critics have accused him of many things, but mostly because he remains on the Left—loyal to Marxism and a critic of the West. Deutscher was one of Che first Trotskyists to be expelled from a Communist Party (Poland in 1926) for opposition to the autocratic policies of Stalin, and has since then watched Soviet affairs with the experience of an "insider" yet not a "defector."

Unlike many others, he understands the hollowness of many of the ideological justifications emanating from official spokesmen, but at the same time is aware of the motivation and drive behind these rulers of many millions of people who justify their rule in the name of socialism.

Ironies of History is divided into four pails: The first two parts are concerned with contemporary Communism as it has developed through the era of Khrushchev to the war in Vietnam. In Khrushchev. Deutscher sees a true Russian muzhik (peasant), who was only happy when he was visiting a farm or discussing agriculture. Yet it was in agriculture that Khrushchev made his greatest domestic mistakes.

It is this kind of "ambiguity" that marks Khrushchev as both a wily and cunning politician as well as a weak ideologist capable of disastrous blunders. Recognising the need to dismantle parts of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but unable to totally destroy the system of which he was the product. Khrushchev was caught in the paradoxes and conflicts inherent in the Soviet system.

But Deutscher has always held an "optimistic" attitude towards the possible democratisation of the Soviet Union as a truly socialist state. This attitude is detectable throughout his earlier essays, but in his final essay Deutscher plainly sees little hope in the present regime except as marking a breathing space before a future (possibly) revolutionary step forward.

As to the revolutionary ethos of Maoism, Deutscher at first saw many similarities of Maoism to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, but one can only feel that current developments in China will convince Deutscher that Mao's peasant Communism has little in common with Trotsky's revolutionary socialism.

Despite reservations concerning such judgments (and they remain only minor disagreements), the essay on Vietnam and the Cold War is a tour de force of socialist polemis, based as it is on various "teach-in" lectures given in 1965. This essay alone more than makes up for some of the annoying repetition of the other essays on contemporary affairs. Deutscher shows that Stalinism is not to him a fetish as it is with many imitators and that the realities of United States imeperialism display the equal bankruptcy of capitalist society.

The second part of Ironies of History consists of short, review articles, many of which elaborate on themes covered earlier, and a section entitled "From a Biographer's Sketchbook" made up of various pieces on Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and Rokossovsky. As is expected, these essays cover much ground and contain many fascinating insights into history and literature.

The best pieces include "The Moral Dilemmas of Lenin," which describes Lenin's grave misgivings towards the end of his life concerning the autocratic tendencies of the Bolshevik party and his "guilt" before the workers and peasants of Russia. Stalin certainly showed no equal moral conflicts about expedience and principle. Of historical interest is the survey of the Mensheviks, in winch Deutscher demonstrates his historical method, which he explains at the theoretical level in his criticism of E. H. Can's What Is History? As a Marxist. Deutscher does not altogether escape from the tensions in historiography between subjective and objective, causation and moral judgment.

This is not to say that only Marxists suffer from such conflicts, but the very nature of an historian's commitment to Marxism yields problems that an individual can never totally solve. This, perhaps, is the challenge of history.

Be that as it may. Deutscher has more than recompensed in his final offerings of reviews of recent Soviet literature. He praises Yevtushenko, severely rebukes Ehrenburg for his dishonesty and presents a welcome view of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago— surely the most overrated novel of this century. The danger, as Deutscher makes quite clear, is that the dividing line of literature and politics in the Soviet Union is very slim.

Consequently it is wrong for Western critics to praise a novel for its political content merely because it suits the anti-Communist fashion. It is fitting that Deutscher's book should present us in literary criticism with this East-West conflict so clearly, for it pinpoints only too well the degeneracy of intellectual achievement when it is used as an instrument in the Cold War.