Commissar and Priest

Abstract

Those intellectuals resistant to communism in the 1930s were frequently puzzled by the willingness of their peers to surrender their freedom of thought on joining the party and to submit voluntarily to a discipline that demanded unequivocal obedience to the edicts of the Russian Comintern, however illogical or unpalatable those edicts might be. Such novices were conscious that membership involved not only suppression of their independent judgement but also harsh personal discrimination aimed deliberately against them. The movement’s identification with the working class, from which the leaders of the communist cells were generally drawn, made the middle-class academic who joined them suspect as a potential informer and therefore prone to distrust and scepticism. He became the victim of frequent acts of humiliation intended to impress the newcomer with his inferiority to the manual labourer, and to remind him of the reversal in status being effected by the revolution. Such disdain constituted at that time official party policy, the academics who had joined their ranks being informed regularly that they were tolerated only because Russia was, until it had trained its own workers, temporarily in need of specialists in such areas as medicine, engineering and journalism, but they were warned expressly of the condition that they were forbidden to use their trained minds to suggest new policies or to deviate in any way from the party line established from above.