Where do I begin? Such stories have no ending until you, yourself, endand even then the threads are picked up by others to be unraveled to a source that is somehow always over the horizon. As I go back in my memories, there is place after placeand yet always one returns to the innocent wisdom of Lewis Carroll, who said that all stories should begin at the beginning.
I had a god who walked naked, but nobody among those I loved said so; for even as the innocent wisdom of Hans Christian Andersen held that those who could not see the kings clothes were persons of small intellect and unfit for the positions they held, so in my world, it was the conviction of millions of good and wise folk that only those who had lost all honor, dignity, decency and courage would dare to point out that this god whom we worshiped for his noble raiment was indeed naked and ugly in his nakedness.
Who would be without honor, dignity, decency and courage?
In the little town where I live, there is a little store, unimportant and of no consequence, and out of this store an old man ekes a living. This is an old man who mourns a hurt which will not heal, the kind of a hurt many who read this will know intimately, for twenty years ago the young son of this man fell in Spain, fighting in the Lincoln Battalion for the Spanish Republic and the freedom of men. His son lies buried in the distant Spanish soil, and for twenty years the hurt in this old man was as if it had happened yesterday.
He had a little salve to rub on the terrible sore. This was the salve, that his son had died in the best of causes, the fight for the liberation of mankind. But in 1956, a man called Khrushchev delivered a certain secret reporttelling a story of Russia and the Communist movement that I and my friends had heard before but had never believed before. Now Khrushchev made proof of twenty-five years of slander, and we believed. And among those who believed because they had to believe was this old man whose son had laid down his life in Spain.
I came into his store one day in that month of June and he was weeping. He asked me,
Why did my son die?
For had I not held, all of my thinking life and in all that I wrote, that one son of man was all the sons of man? He then said to me, but not in wordsfor a broken heart does not make a gentle person cruel or vindictivenot in words but with the look in his eyes,
That I, a plain man did not comprehend this is no wonder; but you, Howard Fast, spoke and wrote and pleaded this causeand why? Can you tell me why?
But I dont know if I can answer that. I want a beginning, a nodule point to make it plain and evident, and then I can go ahead to write down, to the best of my ability and understanding, an explanation of why, when the god was naked, we told ourselves and the whole world that he was quite otherwise.
But so complex, so troubled, so filled with passion, incident and outcry is my own past; and so much more complex the worlds past in which my own tiny effort was made, that I find it almost impossible to place brick upon brick, as a good builder or writer shouldmaking an orderly procession of thoughts, ideas and conclusions.
Nor have I been able, in the year or so that has gone by since the remnants of my long structure of belief crumbled into ashes, to create any theoretical apology. Of such apology I have read at least half a million words, from the simple and insolent idiocy of the men in the Kremlin who explain a river of blood and anguish by saying, cult of the individual, to the finely wrought and beautifully written phrases of Hyman Levy, the British Marxist.
Such apologyall of it that I have readhas less intrinsic meaning for me than the picture of a single tear of an innocent man who is being tortured to confess to crimes he never committed or dreamed of. For twenty and more years of my life, I created for myself a world picture based on the theory of those who pleased to call themselves Marxists. I came finally to understand the stern injunction of Karl Marx, when he declared, I am no Marxist!
Theory, where it is not worthless, is a part of science and the scientific method. But if we are to explain and understand a little of the godhood of communism, we must begin by understanding that we are not dealing with social science or any other kind of scientific movement and outlook; we are dealing with naked terror, awful brutality, and frightening ignorance.
We are also dealing with an epoch, with great movements and struggles of men and of nations; but movements of such size tend to become meaningless and impersonal. This does not entice me. I am neither impersonal nor objective; I write of what I have lived and been, and I cannot write without anger and shame and hatred. For it is not myself alone who has been degraded, but a whole generation of brave and eager youthmen and women who set out to scale the very ramparts of heaven, and then, reaching the top, look over and down into the ugliness of hell.
It can only be fully meaningful if one makes the same journeyand then sees what a single Communist saw. No theory, no historical objectivity can substitute for this.
Comrade Kedrov saw this. When he lived, breathed, dreamed, struggled and climbed those ramparts of heaven, I knew him not; nor can I find any material that will give him form, shape, age or character. I found his name only after he was dead, only after he lay prone on those ramparts, looking into the face of hell, and scratched out his last plea to the naked god. I learned about him when Khrushchev told his story to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Here, according to Khrushchev, is what Comrade Kedrov wrote as he lay dying in a Soviet prison:
Everything, however, has its limits. My torture has reached the extreme. My health is broken, my strength and my energy are waning, the end is drawing near. To die in a Soviet prison, branded as a vile traitor to the Fatherlandwhat can be more monstrous for an honest man? And how monstrous all this is! Unsurpassed bitterness and pain grips my heart.
Is this then, the beginning and the end? As man finally, in his own good time, puts aside all tyrannies, so will there be an end of the Communist movement as we know it. What then? Will the world comprehend Comrade Kedrov? Will a monument be raised to him? Will some Russian novelist, freed finally of his souls enthrallment, write the whole story of Comrade Kedrovs torment? Or will he be forgotten?
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