“How many times have I
wanted to nestle in your arms but could only turn to the empty wall in front of
me? I felt I could not breathe. Yet time would pass, and I would pull myself
together. We will get through this, Lev.”
Svetlana Ivanov
No, I do not see any grounds
for pessimism. One must take history as she is. Mankind moves like some
pilgrims: two steps forward, one step back. During the movement back, it seems
to sceptics and pessimists that all is lost. Nothing is lost. Mankind has risen
from the ape to the Comintern. It will rise from the Comintern to genuine
socialism. The sentence of the commission shows once again that a correct idea
is stronger than the most powerful police. In this conviction lies the
indestructible foundation of revolutionary optimism.
Leon Trotsky
"We wanted nothing for
ourselves, we all wanted just one thing: the world revolution and happiness for
all. And if it were necessary to give up our lives to achieve this, then we
would have done so without hesitating."
Nadezhda Joffe
There is a strong cultural
tradition in Russia of recording memoirs as a form of political protest. Unfortunately,
the memoirs of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov recorded
by Orlando Figes’s 2012 book Just Send Me Word does not fall into this category.
Memoirs from this time can
in the words of J.J. Plant “serve many purposes, personal,
political and literary. For the survivors of the Stalin terror, it has been
particularly important to set the record straight, to rescue and preserve the
memories and knowledge which Stalin and his regime set out to expunge and to
name the criminals and collaborators who thought the Stalinist regime would
last forever”.[1]
Just Send Me Word is a
narrative-based study that has become one of many of the survivors of
Stalinism memoirs” that they have in the words of the Marxist writer David
North become a “literary genre”.
This is not to say that Just
Send Me Word has no merit. The book is well written and researched. The archive
of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanov should contain a goldmine if a historian
mines it well. Figes appears to found what he looked for in that the book is mainly
absent of any politics.
What kind of enemy was Lev
Mishchenko? Mishchenko studied physics and was heavily influenced by quantum physics.
Ordinarily would have been a death sentence straight away given Joseph Stalin’s
ignorant hostility to bourgeois physics. Lev survived and served in the army
during the war and was captured by the Nazis.
After the war he offered
work in the US as a nuclear physicist He turned this down preferring to be with
his girlfriend, Svetlana. It was a wrong decision given that he was arrested
for “betraying his homeland”.
During his time in the gulag, he exchanged more than 1,200 letters with Svetlana. These letters quite unbelievably
have been preserved thus creating “the only known Gulag correspondence
collection of such size and scope”.
Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana
Ivanov were part of the nightmare years of the late 1930s, during which Stalin
oversaw the physical extermination of socialist intellectuals and workers in
the USSR.
The flower of the October
revolution, Left Oppositionists, intellectuals, workers and peasants died by
the hundreds of thousands in conditions of back-breaking labour and
deprivation. The political nature of the opposition to Stalinism is a problem
for Figes. In the book this struggle is absent.
Why is this a problem for
Figes? Is it because the scale of the crimes are so big that they are difficult
to comprehend. The key to understanding Figes position appears on page 18 when
Figes laments that “no one ever knew what this calculated policy of mass murder
was about “. This is not true as there was an opposition to Stalin in the form
of the Left Opposition.
Figes blames Stalin’s “Paranoic
killing of potential enemies”. This is very vague and is not a satisfactory
answer. If Figes elaborated he would be forced to explain that there was a
socialist alternative to Stalinism in the form of the Left Opposition led by Leon
Trotsky.
A point elaborated by Russian
Marxist historian Vadim Rogovin who states ” Stalin’s repressive
campaigns flowed from his fear not only of the peasantry but of the working
class and above all, its revolutionary vanguard—the Left Opposition. The
ever-growing wave of mass violence was directed not against enemies of the
October Revolution, but against enemies that the Stalinist regime itself
created: the peasantry resisting forced collectivisation and participants in
the communist oppositions.[2]
Conclusion
Both Lev Mishchenko and
Svetlana Ivanov lives are a triumph of principle and human decency over
repression caused by Stalinism. As Helen Halyard states “The
memoirs of survivors of the Stalin terror are central in shedding personal
light on the process of the long civil war which Stalin waged against the
revolution. They illuminate and add force to the historical research of writers
such as Conquest and Rogovin. However, they do more than this. They can, at
their best, demonstrate the survival of some tiny kernel of humanity in the
face of the most immeasurable oppression”. Both Lev Mishchenko and
Svetlana Ivanov had spirits they did not have a revolutionary spirit.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol6/no4/plant2.html
[2] Author’s introduction
to Bolsheviks Against Stalinism 1928-1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition
By
Vadim Z. Rogovin-30 August 2019- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/30/intr-a30.html
