Reappraisals (21 page)

Hobsbawm is sufficiently tone-deaf in such matters that he can still cite with approval the nauseating sentiments in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Those Born After Us”:

We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves.

After that it comes as less of a surprise to read Hobsbawm’s curious description of Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” in 1956 as “the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds.” Note that it is the denunciation of Stalin that attracts the epithets (“brutal,” “ruthless”), not his “misdeeds.” In his enthusiasm for the Communist omelet, Hobsbawm has clearly lost little sleep over the millions of broken eggs in unmarked graves from Wroclaw to Vladivostok. As he says, History doesn’t cry over spilled milk.

At most, he evinces regret at the injustices committed by Communists on Communists: recalling that the trial of Traicho Kostov in Sofia in 1949 “left me unhappy,” he describes it as the first of the “show trials which disfigured the last years of Stalin.” But it wasn’t. In Bulgaria itself there had been an earlier show trial, that of the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov, who was tried and executed in September 1947 by Kostov’s own party. However, Petkov passes unmentioned.
His
judicial murder does not reflect ill on Stalin.

As Hobsbawm half concedes, he might have been wiser to stick to the nineteenth century—”given,” as he puts it, “the strong official Party and Soviet views about the twentieth century.”
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He still seems to be writing in the shadow of an invisible censor. When describing the survival into the 1920s of Habsburg-era links between independent Austria and Czechoslovakia, he concludes: “The frontiers were not yet impenetrable, as they became after the war destroyed the Pressburg tram’s bridge across the Danube.” Younger readers might reasonably infer that a fractured tram line was the only obstacle to Czechs and Slovaks seeking to visit postwar Austria after 1948; Hobsbawm avoids mention of any other impediment.

These are not atavistic slips of the pen, occasional Homeric nods. British commentators who tiptoe politely around them in homage to the author’s accomplishments are simply patronizing an old friend. Hobsbawm deserves better. François Furet once said that leaving the French Communist Party in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary “was the most intelligent thing I have ever done.” Eric Hobsbawm chose to remain, and that choice has hobbled his historical instincts. He can acknowledge his mistakes readily enough—his underestimation of the sixties, his failure to anticipate the precipitate decline of Eurocommunism after the mid-seventies, even his high hopes for the Soviet Union, which, “as I now know, was bound to fail.”

But he doesn’t seem to understand why he made them—even the concession that the USSR was “bound” to fail is simply an inversion of the previous assumption that it was “bound” to succeed. Either way the responsibility lies with History, not men, and old Communists can sleep easy. This retroactive determinism is nothing but Whig History plus dialectics; and dialectics, as a veteran Communist explained to the young Jorge Semprún in Buchenwald, “is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.”
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Hobsbawm has landed on his feet, but from where he stands much of the rest of the world is upside down. Even the significance of 1989 is obscure to him. Of the consequences of the victory of the “free world” (his scare quotes) over the Soviet Union he merely warns: “The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.”

But Red Rosa wrote that nearly one hundred years ago. The socialism of which Eric Hobsbawm dreamed is no longer an option, and the barbaric dictatorial deviation to which he devoted his life is very largely to blame. Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage. If today we face a world in which there is no grand narrative of social progress, no politically plausible project of social justice, it is in large measure because Lenin and his heirs poisoned the well.

Hobsbawm closes his memoirs with a rousing coda: “Let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.” He is right, on every count. But to do any good in the new century we must start by telling the truth about the old. Hobsbawm refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works. If he seriously wishes to pass a radical baton to future generations, this is no way to proceed.

The Left has long shied away from confronting the Communist demon in its family closet. Anti-anticommunism—the wish to avoid giving aid and comfort to cold warriors before 1989, and End-of-History triumphalists since—has crippled political thinking in the Labor and Social Democratic movements for decades; in some circles it still does. But as Arthur Koestler pointed out in Carnegie Hall in March 1948: “You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons. . . . This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.”
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If the Left is to recover that self-confidence and get up off its knees, we must stop telling reassuring stories about the past.
Pace
Hobsbawm, who blandly denies it, there was a “fundamental affinity” between extremes of left and right in the twentieth century, self-evident to anyone who experienced them. Millions of well-meaning Western progressives sold their souls to an oriental despot—”The ludicrous surprise,” wrote Raymond Aron in 1950, “is that the European Left has taken a pyramid builder for its God.”
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The values and institutions that have mattered to the Left—from equality before the law to the provision of public services as a matter of right—and that are now under assault—owed nothing to Communism. Seventy years of “real existing Socialism” contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.

Perhaps Hobsbawm understands this. Perhaps, as he writes of James Klugmann, the British Communist Party’s house historian, “he knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public.” If so, it isn’t a very proud epitaph. Evgenia Ginzburg, who knew something about the twentieth century, tells of blotting out the screams from the torture cells in Moscow’s Butyrki prison by reciting over and over to herself Michelangelo’s poem:

Eric Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kołakowski and the Marxist Legacy

Leszek Kołakowski is a philosopher from Poland. But it does not seem quite right—or sufficient—to define him that way. Like Czesław Miłosz and others before him, Kołakowski forged his intellectual and political career in opposition to certain deep-rooted features of traditional Polish culture: clericalism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism. Forced to leave his native land in 1968, Kołakowski could neither return home nor be published there: Between 1968 and 1981 his name was on Poland’s index of forbidden authors, and much of the work for which he is best known today was written and published abroad.

In exile Kołakowski lived mostly in England, where he has been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 1970. But as he explained in an interview last year, Britain is an island; Oxford is an island in Britain; All Souls (a college without students) is an island in Oxford; and Dr. Leszek Kołakowski is an island within All Souls, a “quadruple island.”
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There was indeed once a place in British cultural life for intellectual émigrés from Russia and Central Europe—think of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Koestler, or Isaiah Berlin. But an ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher from Poland is more exotic, and despite his international renown Leszek Kołakowski is largely unknown—and curiously underappreciated—in his adoptive land.

Elsewhere, however, he is famous. Like many Central European scholars of his generation Kołakowski is multilingual—at ease in Russian, French, and German as well as Polish and his adopted English—and he has received accolades and prizes galore in Italy, Germany, and France especially. In the United States, where Kołakowski taught for many years in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, his achievements have been generously acknowledged, culminating in 2003 in the award of the first Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress— bestowed for lifetime achievement in those fields of scholarship (the humanities above all) for which there is no Nobel Prize. But Kołakowski, who has more than once declared himself most at home in Paris, is no more American than he is English. Perhaps he is properly thought of as the last illustrious citizen of the Twentieth-Century Republic of Letters.

In most of his adoptive countries, Leszek Kołakowski is best known (and in some places only known) for
Main Currents of Marxism
, his remarkable three-volume history of Marxism: published in Polish (in Paris) in 1976, in England by Oxford University Press two years later, and now reprinted in a single volume by Norton here in the U.S.
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No doubt this is as it should be;
Main Currents
is a monument of modern humanistic scholarship. But there is a certain irony in its prominence among Kołakowski’s writings, for its author is anything but a “Marxologist.” He is a philosopher, a historian of philosophy, and a Catholic thinker. He spent years studying early modern Christian sects and heresies and for most of the past quarter-century has devoted himself to the history of European religion and philosophy and to what might best be described as philosophical-theological speculations.
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