Romain Rolland and André Gide were both famous French writers in the 20th century. The former was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, with his major works including The Three Giants and John Christopher; the latter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, with his major works including Pastoral The latter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, and his major works include “Symphony in the Garden” and “The Vatican’s Crypt”.
In 1917, after the October coup in Russia, Romain Rolland called “the leaders of the Bolsheviks the great Marxist Jacobins, who were engaged in a magnificent social experiment. experiment. Gide, on the other hand, “studied Marxist works for three years” and gradually approached communism in his thinking, while participating in the activities of the French Communist Party.
As a result, they were invited to visit the Soviet Union in 1935 and 1936, respectively. Upon their return from the visits, they wrote down what they had seen and heard, and from then on alienated themselves from the Soviet Union and communism.
Roland’s Fear of the Soviet Union
During his visit to the Soviet Union, Roland endured his illness and wrote down his observations and reflections one by one, which he gathered into the Diary of Romero. It was supposedly for political reasons that Roland wrote on the cover page of the original manuscript of the Diary: “This book – either in full or in excerpts – cannot be published without my special permission until the expiration of the 50-year period beginning on October 1, 1935. I myself will not publish this book, nor will I allow any fragments to be published.”
Fifty years later, the dusty Diary has finally become known. In the Diary, a frightening Soviet Union is presented to the world. The following is a translation of the book by “Misty Moon”.
On factionalism. Before Roland’s arrival, the Soviet Union was under the shadow of the Kirov affair. Kirov, a member of the Central Politburo, was assassinated by Nikolaev at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad on December 1, 1934. Nikolaev and 13 suspects were shot. Many people were implicated, suspected and scrutinized. Stalin then unleashed the Great Purge by claiming to have discovered a grand conspiracy to plan the assassination of the entire leadership. (Note: At the Time, there were suspicions that Stalin was behind the assassination of Kirov).
In Moscow, Roland met with a wide range of Soviet intellectuals, including writers, architects, musicians, and engineers. In addition to the language barrier, Roland had a keen sense that the conversations were not heart-to-heart, and that many of them were unwilling or unable to say what they wanted to say. Even the doctor who examined him was nervous. Roland even suspected (and did not say so explicitly) that Gorky was under surveillance: Gorky’s secretary Kryuchkov controlled Gorky’s entire daily Life.
About artistic life. While in Moscow, Roland was often invited to see Soviet films and plays. The film “Chaboyant”, which he saw at the Soviet Foreign Affairs Association, made a certain impression on Roland, too, because “for the first time the Communists gave the heroism of the White Army its rightful place”. However, for the other films, Roland could not help but use the word “poor” several times, considering them either “political propaganda” or “poor imitations” of American cabaret. In his Diary, Roland wrote: “Since the abolition of the diversification of literary forms, the artistic taste of the people has been corrupted to this extent.”
After seeing the new ballet “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”, based on Pushkin’s long poem, Roland appeared in the theater to an “incredible” reception. However, his assessment of the play was that it was “not original” and “contrived.
About the privileged class: the upper intellectuals. Roland notes that Gorky, who was the chief administrator of Culture, had at least two houses, one in Moscow and one in the suburbs of Moscow. The houses did not belong to Gorky, but Gorky was well off in them. Roland observed that the upper-class intellectuals with whom Gorky interacted generally owned dachas, and many of them owned small cars.
“The privileged class has no money, but they have power, and with power comes houses and Food,” Roland said in a note following his diary, revealing his concern about the alarming disparity between this and the life of the people, a dangerous tendency to become seriously detached from them.
About the Soviet people. In Moscow, Roland was surrounded by artists, delegations and people in the upper echelons of power, and could not get close to ordinary people at all. He could only observe the Soviet people from mass celebratory parades like the one on June 30, and could only get to know them from the letters that were sent to him in droves from all over the Soviet Union.
From the parades, Roland expressed his dismay at the fervent “leader worship” displayed by the masses, but he believed that the sentiments expressed in the mass parades were sincere and that “the Soviet people sincerely trust their own cause and their own government. However, in a letter Roland received from the son of a rich peasant, he mentioned that the doors of all the universities and factories were closed to him because of his origins.
In response, Roland’s wife, Maria, who was also a Soviet, argued with Gorky that everyone should be judged on the basis of what he was, not on the basis of who his Parents were. And Roland’s “Gorky’s eyes showed a look of pain and panic …… tried to pass it off, referring to the new constitution that was being drawn up, promising greater freedom. But this was only an excuse for self-congratulation”.
About Stalin. During his visit to the Soviet Union, Roland had two opportunities to meet Stalin. Once in the Kremlin, where Stalin received him specifically and answered his questions. The other was a dinner with Stalin at Gorky’s Moscow suburban villa.
The June 28 meeting in the Kremlin began at 4:10 p.m. and ended at 5:50 p.m. The conversation is detailed in Roland’s diary. Roland raised a number of sensitive issues, such as the Kirov affair and the threat of the death penalty for children, and was impressed by Stalin’s “frankness”, describing it as “complete and absolute simplicity, frankness and honesty”. However, for Roland, Stalin was “always a mystery” and elusive.
Stalin was cruel and ruthless, but in front of people he was easy-going, simple, and sometimes had a “childlike, innocent smile”; both personalities were real, and the man who possessed them puzzled Roland. The same doubts existed when Roland observed Yagoda, a former head of the Secret Police and a member of the NKVD, as well as Bukharin, an enthusiastic and talented Soviet Communist, who, when talking about the repression of the enemy, believed that “whatever it takes” should be done. This suspicion lingered in Roland’s mind and stayed with him after he left Moscow.
About book censorship, deportations, prisons and concentration camps. Despite Yagoda’s claim that censorship had been abolished and that even the White Party’s letters could be freely exchanged, in fact, the letters of Roland and his friends were secretly censored by the Soviet Union because they were received opened and “crudely and shamelessly” stamped with the words “broken when taken out of the mailbox, envelope The envelope was “crudely and shamelessly” stamped with the words “Torn from the mailbox, envelope not securely attached”! Of this practice, Roland playfully says in his diary: “The police of Fouchet (the French police minister) might have been more careful: when putting the letterheads back into the envelopes, they should not have been confused. ……”
With regard to the camps, Roland sees “another manifestation of police idealism”, “an idealism that focuses not on the physical suffering of people, but only on the social and moral connotations of things.”
After Roland’s visit to the Soviet Union, he compiled his diary and summarized his visit, which is the section of the “Notes” that follows the Diary. Despite Roland’s attempts to defend the Soviet Union in the Notes, his penned accounts reveal a Soviet Union to be feared: devoid of freedom of speech and subject to surveillance at all times. And Roland dusted off the Diary, presumably because he still harbored some illusions about the Soviet Union.
Gide publicly breaks off relations with communism
In 1936, Gide went to the Soviet Union, where he had always wanted to be, and upon his return, he not only criticized the Soviet authorities, but also publicly broke off his ties with communism. What exactly did he see and hear that caused Gide to undergo such a transformation after his two-month-plus trip to the Soviet Union? We may be able to get a glimpse of this in his book “Return from the Soviet Visit”.
What first shocked and disturbed Gide was that the political and economic reality of the Soviet Union was completely contrary to the socialist theory proclaimed by its leaders. In the Soviet Union, ordinary workers and peasants still lived in poverty and deprivation; on the one hand, people’s livelihoods were withering, but on the other hand, the leaders were eager to celebrate and parade with great pomp and circumstance; on the one hand, factories were being built and chimneys were being erected, but on the other hand, there was a shortage of housing for workers, and socialist industrialization was being built in shacks; even bureaucratic privileges and extravagant life were not uncommon, such as entertaining Kidd and his party, even The cost of an ordinary dinner party, for example, was enormous.
Faced with this reality, Guede angrily denounced the existence of class exploitation and oppression in Soviet society, the “dictatorship of the bureaucrats over the proletariat.
Gide also noted that the clothing of the average Soviet was monotonous and crude, not only compared to that of the West, but even to that of the old Russian era, and that daily necessities, books, stationery, etc., were all of extremely poor quality and unusable. Gideon’s analysis of this is: “What is supplied is what you like, to be or not to be is this thing. Since the state is also a manufacturer, buyer and seller, quality can only progress with culture.” In the Soviet Union, “the state had no rivals and didn’t care about that, there was no competition anyway,” so it is not surprising that Soviet products were of poor quality.
What made Gideon even more uncomfortable was the distorted thinking of people under Soviet political oppression. For example, when he sent a message of thanks to Stalin, the telegraph office refused to send it because he forgot to write the long list of “special honorifics” in front of Stalin’s name. When Gide exchanged questions about foreign language learning with a Soviet university student during his visit, the student proudly told him, “A few years ago, Germany and the United States had something for us to learn. But now, we have nothing to learn from foreign countries, so why speak their language.”
Gide also noted that the Soviet Union’s so-called “universal elections are an irony, a sham, and all appointments are made from the top down” – a “one-man dictatorship” in which “there is no room for talent around, only for minions. “In such a “one-man dictatorship”, “the proletariat is utterly fooled”. He also found that when full-scale nationalization of industry and collective farming took place, the workers and peasants had to be completely dependent on the factories and farms: “the worker has no freedom to stay or go, neither can he stay where he likes, nor can he go where love or friendship calls him”.
Seeing such a scene in a country whose mission is to proclaim the eradication of exploitation and class oppression, Gide was outraged: “They are exploited, but they do not know by whom they are exploited, and all the more so because they do not know to whom their poverty should be attributed and against whom it should be opposed!”
Thus, Gide, who walked and watched and observed, was completely disillusioned with communism at the end of a visit of more than two months. Thus he lamented, “I do not think that in any other country today, not even in Hitler’s Germany, people’s minds would be more illiberal, suffer more distortions, be more timid, and be more obsequious than they are here!”
After his “Return from the Soviet Visit”, Gide was attacked by his Soviet “friends”. So Ji De issued a public statement, saying, “I embrace the truth, and if the Party leaves the truth, I will leave the Party at once.”
Conclusion
Unlike Roland’s choice of silence, Gide’s sobriety proved his wisdom, and the shortcomings of the Soviet Union that he had pointed out were not resolved until its collapse and are no different in China today. The fact that Ji De abandoned his illusions about communism and the Soviet Union is worthy of consideration by every intellectual in China today who still harbors illusions about the Chinese Communist Party.
Recent Comments