The Spanish Tragedy (RLE Responding to Fascism)

Jef Last

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136960574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

The Spanish Civil War was one of the pivotal events of the 1930's, the moment when fascism and socialism came into open conflict. First published in 1939, The Spanish Tragedy recounts the experiences of Jef Last. Activist, poet and novelist, Last might have been the archetypal Republican volunteer but his experience left him even more disenchanted than most. Critical of Soviet Communism, a court martial loyal to Moscow tried to sentence him to death and he was forced to flee to Scandinavia.

RETROSPECT

Stockholm, January 1938.

FROM ALL SIDES I WAS ADVISED NOT TO PUBLISH MY “letters from Spain,” as they were written and as they here appear. A kind friend wrote from Holland:

“From every quarter he will be attacked and persecuted. His best comrades will isolate him if they can. If they do not murder him with weapons, they will attempt to starve him into submission. They will spread rumours about him and tell his comrades at the front that he fled from them like a coward. Against their better judgment he will be dubbed a Trotskyist, only to be reviled and persecuted by the Trotskyists. The Volk newspaper will be furtively jubilant at his conversion, and the Volksdagblad will bellow something about “corrupt intellectuals” a la Gide and Last. Boris Raptschinsky will write a smart and mannered article in the Handelsblad about the revulsion of feeling that has come over “the best spirits in Red Spain” who have been taught by grim experience what “brutish humanity” is like, but who, like all revolutionary socialists, are too unintelligent to realize yet that society is changing. The Telegraaf will issue a warning that one of the leaders of the press-gang has returned to Holland to lure a few more innocent victims to the ‘perilous land of murder.’ In short, anybody who arrives at a definite and personal point of view is outlawed, because freedom of opinion in general is frowned upon and, consequently, outlawed.”

I have good reason to believe that this is only a tame description of what awaits me as a stateless writer without legal rights. Nevertheless, I do not see why the prospect should restrain me since I already settled my account with life in the trenches, and can only now consider what remains of it as an undeserved extra. In any case I should consider it an act of betrayal to myself not to communicate to others my spiritual experience.

I should be more tempted to keep silence on other grounds which were forcibly brought home to me a few days ago when two German refugees came to visit me here in Stockholm, immediately after I had addressed the Clarté group on the subject of “Don Quixote in the Trenches.” One of them told me that his brother, who had worked for the Party for fifteen years, had been expelled from the Soviet Union at the same time as hundreds of other Germans, in spite of the article in the constitution guaranteeing the right of asylum. His expulsion was not on grounds of opposition but only because he did not wish to assume Russian citizenship. Since then he had roamed through Europe as a refugee, which means that he was denied work, and the means of living or of founding a legal home anywhere. He now had drifted to Paris with a view to enrolling as a volunteer for Spain, Although he had never taken action against the Party, the suspicions aroused by his expulsion from the Soviet Union were so great that he had already been kept waiting six months without means of subsistence. His brother had come to ask me if I could do anything to enable him to recover the right to fight for his ideals and, if necessary, to die for them.

That opposition should be punished with a pro hibition to continue the struggle; that one is cut off from the masses; that perhaps it will never be possible for me to lead my company in the last settling of accounts with Franco—this is the bitterest thought of all. But I must learn to face this, too. Indeed, whoever refuses to speak after the Moscow trials deserves for his betrayal and craven-heartedness the eternal contempt of the masses.

If I have to justify myself, it is not for speaking out now, but for having been silent so long.

For years it has been customary in Holland to consider me as a purblind, fanatical partisan of Stalinism. This view is so prevalent as to make people overlook the unmistakably critical comments in many of my articles, and In my book Een Huis zonder Vensters. As a matter of fact, I went over to Communism not straight from the Social Democratic Party, but through the Schmidt Movement and the Anarchist-Trotskyist School of Sneevliet. I had read practically everything that had been written by the opposition, and on my very first visit to Russia, in 1930, was made to realize that much of their criticism was justified. Already then, at the back of the Trade Union Palace_, excited and desperate workers showed me their worn-out shoes and the hovels In which they lived, saying: “Do the workers in Europe live like this ?” Already then, I had conversations with students who revealed to me an entirely different side of life from that which is usually shown to tourists.

In 1932 I lived nine months in Moscow in a ramshackle place in which nobody would dare accommodate the poorest Dutch family. I saw at close range the boundless corruption that was prevalent among the leading Russian writers; I became personally acquainted with such figures as Serge and Kliuiev, and knew to what persecutions they were exposed. I had contacts with Russian peasants who lived in cellars, compared with which Gorki’s Dosshouse was paradise. Later, in 1936, my journey to Russia with André Gide brought me to the verge of despair. Alas ! I knew Russian too well, and had too many connections among all sections of the population, to allow myself to be deceived by outward appearance.

Is my honesty to be impugned because I refrained from publication?

Entirely of my own free will, and without expecting or obtaining any advantages, I had become a member of the Dutch Communist Party. In the Sneevliet group I had found the same barren negations which had always prevented Trotsky from exercising an influence upon the masses. I had come to realize that no mass movement can be built up on mere criticism which is allied to opportunist action. I realized that to discredit the revolution itself by denying its results and by depriving the working classes of future hope was to throw away the child with the bath water. I had a great personal respect for the genius and integrity of Trotsky, but his system diverged only tactically from that of Stalin. It sprang from the same juristic-rabbinical root; its methods were morally as ruthless, and in my view, it would not have worked very differently from Stalinism, had it been put to the test of practice.

Weapons are required to wage the class war. The Parties must needs be accounted a portion of our armament. When we set out from Madrid for the Sierra, we defended ourselves with shot-guns. Our realization of their inadequacy in a war against a modern army did not induce us to throw away the only firearms we possessed. We wage war for socialism, not because proletarians are angels, but because capitalism has adulterated and corrupted whatever was originally good in men. The Parties created by man for the purpose of furthering the struggle are as imperfect as man himself. You stick to your shot-gun so long as no better firearm is available, and so long as you have one shot left. At the same time, whoever joins in the game must adhere to the rules of the game, and whoever is member of a party must submit to its discipline. No word or act of mine was directed against the party until I left the party as a result of the Moscow trials, and of Russia’s inadequate support of the Spanish Republic which became manifest at the fall of Teruel.

Whoever has learnt to think dialectically knows that there is no such thing as “either, or,” that shadow is one of the conditions for the existence of light, and that the two sides of a coin cannot lie in the sun at the same time. Only naïve souls hanker after a heaven without shadow, and even so they have to conjure up hell as a contrast, in order properly to enjoy their blessed state, The Russian revolution is and was neither the perfect paradise depicted by some of its champions nor the hell depicted by the capitalists. It always was and had to be a dialectical unity of opposites. The revolution should be judged not by taking a cross section at any given moment, but by considering the resultant forces, the synthesis towards which the whole movement is trying to evolve. So long as any hope was left that in this process the revolutionary forces would triumph over the counter-revolutionary, it might well have seemed a crime to further these counter-revolutionary forces by criticism which could be taken advantage of by the enemy against the revolution itself. In the life and death struggle which the working classes are now waging against Fascism, it might have seemed misguided and gratuitous to alienate the only potentially powerful ally at our disposal.

In the face of all Bourgeois and Anarchistic criticism, it must be stated that the Russian revolution, far from being a failure, was a tremendous historical stepping-stone on the road to socialism, the importance of which it would be impossible to overestimate.

The liberation of mankind demands as a prerequisite condition a planned control of the forces of production, which in a capitalist society are chaotic and therefore oppressive to mankind. To the Soviet Union belongs the imperishable honour of having carried out the first five year plan ever launched, and all the subsequent plans of Roosevelt, of Social Democracy, and of Hitler only confirm the prestige attached to this first plan. For the first time in history a State was able to overcome the fatal iron cycle of crisis following upon crisis. Only those who have felt in their bones the deteriorating effects of unemployment, not only on the physical but also and more particularly on the moral plane, can fully grasp the superiority of socialist methods of production which have made an end to unemployment.

The Soviet Union proved for the first time in the history of mankind that a whole people can live without the mysticism of the Church. At a time when Kollontai wrote Free Love, it proved also that a very considerable degree of sexual freedom constitutes no danger to society as a whole. At a time when Jews and Negroes are once more being sent out like scapegoats into the wilderness, and the insanity of the race theory is rampant in the world, the Soviet Union has carried out a racial and national policy which, whatever its defects, can certainly serve as an example to every other country. Not only was illiteracy abolished, but the Soviet Union contrived to awaken throughout the masses a profound and live interest in the arts and sciences such as is to be found nowhere else. The significance of this achievement is not by any means lessened by the deplorable and unprogressive examples of bad taste with which this hunger is being more and more satisfied.

The Soviet Union has no imperialistic aspirations. It never strove to recover the regions it had lost, and as a result of its peace policy, it preserved us for years from a new world war.

Its agricultural policy, with all the successes and setbacks of collectivization, is the most heroic experiment in history and an object lesson for the future. The emancipation of women, even after the prohibition of abortion and the many reactionary measures which more recently have again reduced the status of women, constitutes an enormous step forward. One could fill libraries with the records of what has been accomplished in the spheres of hygiene and child welfare. Naturally the development of industry at a more than American tempo, and the building up of a powerful army, do not in themselves constitute socialism, but these achievements certainly do constitute the necessary foundations for its development and defence. What is even more important, they testify to the fact that the bourgeoisie are no particularly intelligent and indispensable species of human beings, and that they can be replaced within a few years by forces springing exclusively from the masses of the people. The theory that some are born to lead and others born to serve was destroyed in Russia by the practice of the revolution. In those days, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were merely the instruments for carrying out the will of the masses. They were carried forward by these masses because they consciously set out to interpret and carry out the latter’s wishes. When the country was invaded on fourteen fronts by the armies of Wrangel and Koltchak, the invaders were driven out, not by a dictator, but by the people themselves. With boundless self-sacrifice the misery of famine was overcome and the foundations of reconstruction laid not by any dictator but by the people themselves and their councils.

The Russian revolution is a triumphant proof of the power of the masses to create cultural values. Its stream only began to silt up when criticism, one of the greatest creative forces of the people, was suppressed. A soulless discipline was introduced, destructive of all criticism—except, needless to say, such criticism as was directed against the opposition —and, with every window closed, the air became so fetid as to make it impossible for any healthy person to remain any longer inside the Third International.

And yet, viewed historically, even the introduction of this soulless discipline was to be understood. The Third International had before its eyes an example of a party completely bereft of discipline, that of the Second International, where congress decisions were taken only to be forgotten as soon as possible, where the word, International, was only a pretext for international congresses with impressive resolutions, but where in practice every country merely pursued the path prescribed by its own narrow interest. Owing to lack of discipline and international solidarity, the Second International became a negligible factor in international policy from 1914 onwards.

We have been repeatedly intimidated by the assurance that every criticism of the Soviet Union and the Third International was criminal, because it would be used by the reaction and by Fascism as a weapon against the proletariat. This assertion has proved unwarranted. The Soviet Union’s loss of credit with the masses is due to its own deeds and not to our criticism. One single trial at Moscow has had a more potent effect than could be achieved by a hundred books of Gide. Furthermore, it is no longer enough to be silent; whoever wishes to defend the recent policy of the Soviet Union is compelled more and more to resort deliberately to pretence and prevarication.

But so great are the elements of truth still residing in the movement that we must guard against allowing our criticism to breed a spirit of indifference among the masses. Nor must we slur over the faults committed by the other parties, whose responsibility for the final catastrophe has been at least as great as that of the Communists, and whose responsibility for the course of events in Russia is also not to be denied.

We were taught in the trenches to look upon cowardice as the gravest sin of all. It looks more and more as if the entire youth of Europe were now of the same opinion. Cowardice was the original sin of the Second International. From cowardice it permitted towards the end of its days the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Cowardice and the spirit of President Ebert, who “hated the revolution like sin,” gave us the bloodhound, who was the undoing of the workers of the Ruhr; through cowardice the downfall of the Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics was consummated, and cowardice presided over the constitution of every coalition with the bourgeois parties. Cowardice permitted Zörgiebel to shoot down the workers of Wedding on May Day; it voted for Hindenburg and armoured cruisers, and prevented the general strike when Hitler came into power. It induced the party members of the Reichstag to vote for Hitler’s foreign policy to the tune of Germany’s national anthem and the trade union leaders to order the party members to celebrate May Day together with the Nazis. Cowardice is the only truly international characteristic of the Second International, and was responsible in the end for Blum’s initiative in the matter of nonintervention, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of the flower of Spanish youth.

It would be worse than foolish, however, to pretend that leaders or members were guilty of personal cowardice: this wanton accusation could only further hinder the reconciliation of the various wings of the working class movement. Nothing has been so conducive to the rise of Fascism as these reciprocal cries of betrayal which have destroyed confidence within the movement itself. The overwhelming majority of these people were moved by honest conviction and many of them subsequently gave proof of their unshakeable personal courage and conviction in the law courts, the concentration camp, or, like Julius Deutsch, in Spain. The cowardice of which we speak springs from a mistaken theory, according to which it must always be assumed that only direct material interests need be taken into account, and not the magnificent reserves of sacrifice and idealism that lie hidden in the people. Often, too, it has been the outcome of an exaggerated sense of responsibility which quailed at the very thought of acts of violence to which the opposing party was prepared to resort with an easy conscience.

Undoubtedly Trotsky was right when he affirmed that socialism could not be built up in one country alone; it was equally clear, however, that on the basis of this pessimistic proclamation there was nothing to be done in Russia as soon as the proletariat of western Europe proved to be hopelessly unequal to the situation. Revolution happens not to be an article for export, and it became necessary to endeavour to make the best of things in isolation and surrounded by foes. Distrust of the revolutionary will of the proletariat drove Russia to an alliance with the capitalist States which naturally was only to be purchased at the expense of extensive capitulations and concessions. By 1935, I was able to observe in national Mohammedan circles in Morocco the extent to which the attitude of the Soviet Union was driving the disappointed nationalists of the colonial countries towards the Right. No further trust was placed in a State which denounced Italian aggression in Geneva, and at the same time multiplied its friendly offices to Italy, to which it calmly went on delivering grain and oil. And worse was to follow: Italian aeroplanes over Madrid were fed with Russian oil.

S.T. R

In 1933 the Soviet Union disillusioned the whole world proletariat, when its only reply to Hitler’s coup d'état was to extend its commercial agreement with Germany. Its greatest error, however, was committed in 1936 when, in contrast to Mexico, it signed the non-intervention agreement for the sake of a doubtful alliance with France; by faithfully adhering to the agreement until October 23rd, the Soviet Union deprived the Spanish Republic of the arms with which in the beginning it could easily have triumphed.

The constant menace of war made it necessary for the Soviet Union to build up its industry on an unbalanced basis, first place being given to armament production. It was compelled to strengthen its centralized bureaucracy and to resort to non-socialist methods to force up production. The danger of an inadequate food supply necessitated the granting of more and more concessions to the peasants. All these concessions have resulted in the emergence of a new privileged class which now is ruthlessly and consistently using the power of the State to defend its own interest...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• FOREIGNERS
• BEHIND THE FRONT
• BERGAMIN, CATHOLIC AND REVOLUTIONARY
• UNIVERSITY CITY
• FRENTE DE L’ESTACION DE GOYA
• LOS CHICQUETILLOS
• PAJARO NEGRO (The Black Bird)
• LA COSECHA ES SAGRADA (The Harvest is Sacred)
• ON LEAVE
• GOOD-BYE TO THE FOURTH COMPANY
• ANTI-FASCIST WRITERS
• WE FORGE AN ARMY
• THE WOUNDED
• VALE
• RETROSPECT