Anyone reading this piece of recall aided by my notes will have valid reason to ask: Since a conversation is a colloquy, why is it not in that form? My reasons are threefold:
One: The conversations took place some 50 years ago. They were conversations brought on as much by my queries as by Borodin's purpose to "sell" Communism. Our revulsions to imperialism, no matter what the brand, made Russia's Third International reprehensibly obnoxious, if not more so because of the guise it took and its callous and insensate regard for human life. But it allowed that the Third International's external cloak of imperialism is more subdued and with a finer cut, their method is more sophisticated than the unadorned gunboat policy or the stark and brutal force of the imperialistic brand as practiced by the West of those years. Allowing that democracy is in many aspects hypocritical, yet how much more deceiving when the wolf is in sheep's clothing.
Two: Unlike a question and answer seance, it was an outwardly congenial conversation mostly by two people, with my elder sister Madame K'ung listening to the conversations and occasionally remarking (Time and space do not permit me to include what my sister said in this article.) while my brother T.V. literally commuted between his study and the living room whenever matters needing his attention slowed down, permitting him to join us to listen in. We three and Borodin were poles apart basically in thinking - the goals of Dr. Sun's Three Principles for a better life versus Communism's pie in the sky nebulous promises. No notes were taken at the time of the conversations. It was only after each conversation that I made exegetical jottings, some days in greater detail than other days when the demand on time with other matters of that day was not as great. I took down such notes that I regarded as interesting in sparse fashion, only recording what struck me on that day as outstanding, extensive, portentous, pretentious, gross or inhumane or what I thought was an induced arbitrary value of right or wrong as well as the illogic logicality in its enormity in crassitude.
Three: Half a century has elapsed. I readily say that it is impossible for me to recall the catenated sequence of questions and answers in its proper time frame as they were asked and answered. Refreshed and fortified by my notes in which were occasional direct quotes and the enumerated pointers, I am able to recall much and reconstruct as faithfully as possible the highlights that are still vivid in my memory. Should I have erred, I have erred in understating rather than overstating the matter-of-fact, across-the-board Communist disregard for human life and the Third International's maniacal zeal to communize the world.
Notes found only recently
The reader will also wonder as to why only until now, after such a considerable time had elapsed before my committing down on paper the conversations. Again there are three reasons. First, I believe there are not many people living anywhere in the world today who will have known Mr. Borodin of that day. Still fewer people who are "outsiders," let alone those of the "opposite camp," would have perhaps heard him expound so candidly and in English (unbroken by the irritant yet unavoidable impediment of an interpreter when no common vehicle of communication between the communicants is available) on Russian aspirations for China and the world. Second, by assessing Communism-in-action with historical remove, one cannot but be struck by the near identity of Soviet philosophical behavior and action since those years after 1917 to what Borodin outlined in 1926. Third, for those who might ask as to why I did not make known before now the Third International grand design for world conquest, especially since I have been working, writing and speaking on the dangers of Communism these many years, I can only give a simple answer. The notes were put away with some of my many other papers and were not found until quite recently.
To the peripatetic on the move and to one who is constantly preoccupied and occupied with the flow of matters of the day, together with what one has to do to keep up with current as well as with contemporary affairs, voluminous number of pieces of paper and documents of the day of a more recent vintage are all that one can contend. And without the notes, rough as they were, I could scarcely put together faithfully and accurately the expositions as they were related. Even so, I have avoided possibly direct quotes (when quotation marks were missing) with what I had committed to paper even though the terminology and expression used could but be from the responder.
And, to be equanimous to Mr. Borodin, I must say that he personally was a brilliant, deep thinking (but not profound) and well-educated man, not at all like what Lenin said of Stalin or what Svetlana wrote of her father - a rude and uncouth person. He was capable, able, shrewd if entirely cynical, perhaps "with ice water in his veins," to use today's parlance. He could see cruelty, injustice and degradation committed with detached coolness. He acted out his misguided role as the instrument of the Third International with aplomb and with dedication.
That he had failed in his surreptitious mission on behalf of Moscow was an irrefutable fact, yet to attribute Borodin's failure as a personal failure in leadership would be extremely simplistic and an extremely naive assessment. He was a very complex and complicated man. The Third International, gauging from afar in Moscow how Communism in China should come about and how the Kuomintang was to be subverted, decided upon the technique of seizure of power through the labor unions and the workers in the cities (that were already infiltrated by the Communists) - the orthodox road traveled by the Communists in Russia in 1917 and onwards. It failed due to the timely excision of the cancerous growth at the time.
Atmosphere in Hankow
In order to get a better idea of 1926, let me give you the general atmosphere prevailing in Hankow. During our sojourn in the twin cities we stayed at my brother's apartment at the Central Bank building, at one time the Czarist-Russo Asiatic Bank in Hankow situated on the Bund of the former Russian Concession. Never a week passed when there was no demonstration of thousands upon thousands of Communist union-controlled workers shouting slogans of down with such and such a person, some tradition or mores, or some imperialistic country. It was usually down with English imperialism, while the trade unionists and workers militia in uniforms of indanthrene dark blue cordoned off traffic or protected the marching columns. For hours on end one could hear the deafening shouting of thousands reach a crescendo as each unit marched past the Bank building led by a group leader with a megaphone. The cacophony of noise made by bugles, drums, gongs and brass cymbals was drowning. It was a time when the Communists controlled unions all over Nationalist-controlled territories, and surreptitiously in yet to be liberated warlord controlled cities. They set up kangaroo courts and ran the local governments, replacing or interfering at will county or district magistrates in the Nationalist-controlled central provinces of our mainland. One can best imagine the chaos in East Central and South China provinces in 1926 by visualizing the chaos of the Paris Commune of 1793 of which much has been written.
Moscow disconcerted
Borodin's previous orders from the Third International were for a more quiet imperceptible erosion and gradual diminishment until extinguishment of the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) and the takeover of territories under the control of the Nationalist Government. What so alarmed them was the unenvisioned swift advance of the Nationalist Army under its Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, an advance much sooner than their minimal educated guess of time needed to complete the defeat of the warlords' armies. It was as startling to the Russian military advisory group as it was to the Russian political advisers who took pride in their prognoses of situations. In Russia herself even with the political commissars presumably in full control, the Naval mutiny of Kronstadt which broke out in February of 1921 - a full three years after Lenin had built up supremacy from November 7 of 1917 - was put down with much bloodshed and great difficulty. The fact is that Kronstadt had happened. Anti-Russian imperialism in China also happened.
The precipitousness of the Nationalist advance alarmed Trotsky, Radek et al and disconcerted Moscow greatly. They hurriedly gave Borodin instructions to hasten the time schedule of Communist takeover. Abruptly he was told the smiling mask of cooperation and bonhomie was to be discarded soonest possible. It was just at this juncture in time when we arrived in Hankow. And for arcane reasons best known to Mr. Borodin, he was very much interested in talking at length on Communism and China's part in this grandiose task to members of our family. Often he would say that the Soongs should become more involved and take a more active part in the government by giving our service and whatever talent we are ascribed to have for "the cause." To make his point, he spoke of the crucial part and contributions that some women played in the Russian Revolution. He particularly mentioned Krupskaya (Nadezhda Krupskaya, often referred to as Nadya, was Lenin's wife), Stasova (Elena Stasova was party secretary until Jacob Sverdlov took over the party post. She then became Lenin's principal assistant), Kamenev (Olga Kamenev was the sister of Trotsky), Bonch-Brueviches (Vera Bonch-Brueviches had been among the 22 people who formed the nucleus of Lenin's Bolshevik faction in Geneva after the 1903 split), Sumenson (Eugenia Sumenson was Lenin's conduit and link to the Germans), Armand (lnessa Armand was French by birth; she was fluent in five languages and translated many of Lenin's writings, mostly from Russian to French and German; she was also sent on secret missions by Lenin from Switzerland to various destinations) and a host of others.
Borodin never tired of repeating that there was a dearth of the right kind of revolutionary spirit and talent in the world. He knew of my interest in the working conditions of factory workers. I had spent much time in visiting various factories in Shanghai and was repelled at the long hours (12 hours each shift) and poor working conditions of women and children in the so-called International (but mainly run by the British) Concession of Shanghai. The sanitation was appalling, and little babies were lying in the aisle as their mothers worked on the machines. In the silk factories, the women's hands were purplish-red and often blistered by having to work with hot vapor issuing forth from open vats.
Reforms viewed as futile
The Shanghai Municipal Council invited me to be a member of the Child Labor Commission. In our conversation he referred to workers reforms per se with a great circular wave of his arm as "futile, futile." His reasoning was that whatever laws could be enacted could be as easily neutralized or nullified by other laws in a democratic system. To be occupied in reform was time ill spent. The best and only real permanent cure was Communism. He would far better wish to see me use my talent in reaching more people and awakening them to the blessings of egalitarian Socialism - his euphemism on this occasion for Marxist-Leninism.
Aside from sermonizing us, he was of course on close working relations with my elder brother T.V. and was forever dinning into him the importance of his remaining as Minister of Finance. He made it very plain that now with Shanghai in Nationalist hands and unification of China within the foreseeable future, the Nationalist Government (Borodin meant the government in Wuhan) would need more than ever modern minds who understood the Western mind, and in the realm of finance the need for proficient minds to deal not only with complexities of the center of finance and economy of China, Shanghai, but in other fields as well. He knew from his own observations, reports from Hankow banking circles and from foreign banking assessments that T.V. Soong would be invaluable to the Nationalist Government as Finance Minister. He repeated the pedestrian that the most crucial organs of any government are finance, the armed forces and administrative personnel. While reserving reticence in his instructions from Moscow he discussed with us extensively his concern of China's paucity in modern talent not only in finance but talent in other callings. It was only months later that the Russian frantic alarm signals to Borodin and the precipitation of their timetable came to light when the opportunist Wang Ching-wei (汪精衛), who went specially to Hankow to cooperate with Borodin and the Chinese Communists, found out that the Communists were intriguing to "do away" with him and General Tang Shen-chi (唐生智) once they were through using them. Wang Ching-wei and Tang Shen-chi's (whose troops Borodin had counted on to buttress his intrigue) honeymoon with the Third International quickly soured and ended. Contemporaneously, Communist quickened tempo ran rampant. Communist kangaroo courts in those provinces where they hold sway were putting on mock trials and executing the indigenous squirarchy and literati indiscriminately. The much revered scholar Yih Teh-hui (葉德輝) of Changsha, Hunan, with myriads of others were tortured and killed because they dared to dispraise the Communists and in fact scoffed at and reviled them as animals of the most scurrilous breed. The "open trials" of landlords, officials and even of their kith and kin such as their mothers - we Chinese have a special niche in filial piety reserved for our mothers - all these committed grotesqueries induced common anger. Should anyone doubt that such things could have happened 50 years ago, let me remind you that all this again happened in the 1950s and 60s when the Communists took over the mainland and when children were encouraged to snitch on their elders and parents and report to the Communist authorities.
Fight against hunger
I recall I was incensed as well as amazed many a time during the conversations by Borodin's ingenuousness. I thought it valid and cogent to ask of him: Why had he (Borodin) been so categorically forthright not only with his views and thinking of Communism but also in revealing the Politbureau and the Third International's dark and crepuscular plan for the world? He denied the plan was ebon and benighted and said that on the contrary, proletarian internationalism was and would be the greatest blessing for the common man. Time and time again, he repeatedly said that it is the bedrock Communist belief that the real and ultimate need of the common man is a full stomach, job security, guidance and a spiritual haven - all of which, even the spiritual need, the party can well provide. He emphasized that history attests to the fight against hunger as the greatest need of mankind. It is only the firebrands, the slick shysters who for their self-serving and petty purposes use the fanciful shibboleths of political democracy, and the folderol that freedom is the victual the people crave. People do not need the hocus-pocus, the abracadabra of religion, for religion is superstition which has no substantive or intellectual basis. It is only the true historian who can bring into focus the past, and the intellectuals who twist facts to show their forensic brilliance, to justify a cause they may wish to play with or espouse.
As to the reality of Communist ambitions of world conquest, he gave candid answers. They were:
One, we Communists have never attempted to hide our call to world revolution. If the capitalists and liberals do not choose to believe what we say so often and so openly and interpret us as they wish to see us, it is their doing not ours.
Two, we believe that it is "necessitous policy" as well as good strategy not to deceive on matters of high policy to certain intelligent people who are not of our persuasion. For "camouflaging" our aim, even should it succeed for a time, will only make them turn against us with ferocity. Hiding our goal is only for people-at-large, as they do not wish to or cannot understand the intricacies of politics. Therefore it is kinder that they should not be burdened with them. All these people need are simple slogans to chirrup and direct targets to assault. Moreover should we dissemble on high policy as differentiated from day-to-day policy, we would lose the respect and credibility of foes and comrades alike - respect of our foes and credibility with our comrades.
Three, it has been our experience on innumerable occasions that when we bare our hopes and goals, we have found the non-Communist intellectuals, unless they are out-and-out anti-Communist, in sympathy with us, oftentimes explaining away intricacies and bottlenecks encountered with more eloquence than many of our own comrades could. Be that as it may, our standing caveat to our own is beware of their doctrinal and intellectual duality as well as their long-term untrustworthiness, which we despise.
Mish-mash of ideas
The behavior and ideas of the Intellectuals which many Communists call "a goulash" - a mish-mash of ideas - were something which Borodin found both amusing at times and impossible to fathom at other times. He relegates these Intellectuals into the realm of emotional orphans, since they were unwanted by the left and were anathema to the right, yet they take on the pose as being in total rapport with Russian Communism and even fighting spiritedly against the right as if they were truly in one with the Communists but actually exprobated and expunged by the left. In this sense, they have been aptly called the hermaphrodites of the intellectual world. Swallowing the bitter tears of humiliation in relative silence whilst still putting up a haughty front for the benefit of the unknowing, such is their pitiful plight.
For the non-Communist we might get some understanding and insight into the undeserved contempt most Liberal Intellectuals had earned for themselves. The Italian critic Nicola Chiaromonte writing on what Communism means to Italian Intellectuals says that Communism offers to the Intellectuals a substitute for social conscience without any testing or criticism of ideas, a new conformism, a way of putting oneself in the service of progress, the history of the proletariat, yet without making the slightest change in one's way of living or thinking. Like the critical armchair strategist, Intellectual Liberals aspire to be leftist and fashionable as our subject quoting Lenin typified them without having to suffer the ordeal by fire - Communist fire.
It is according to the Communist purview of human shortcomings that there is no formula in which the fulfillment of a need can elicit repletion without soon spawning another need. And by its very repletion it creates a sentience of self-defeating disappointment-in-paradox unless another need or needs yearned for are forthcoming. This penumbral as well as distrustful view of mankind runs through the whole gamut of Lenin's and Stalin's thinking as to become now a universal silent phobia in the Communist world. We see it in Russia, in the repression of Communist Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Indo-China, mainland China. We see it behind the Iron Curtain time and time again in the same dreary common pattern whenever uprisings or dissatisfaction occur. Yet the inordinately taut rein is always clothed in impressive lofty rhetoric of "eternal vigilance against imperialism," vigilance against the agent provocateurs of the imperialist capitalist West. It is also always interesting to note it is the U.S.S.R. which is the aggressed, not the aggressor. Curiously or perhaps uncuriously, Communist regard for man is quite akin to the Nazi view. Martin Heidegger in his often perceptive (although not always optimistic) book Being and Time (Zein und Zeit), so lauded by the Nazis at the time of its publication, writes interestingly: "Massenmensch" is so entrenched in banalities of everyday life that he is doomed to mediocrity and will never understand the real roots of his Being. It is a rare person who can sustain even a fleeting insight into himself long enough to make a difference in his life. Heidegger, the thinker in Substance, is saying that since very few men can know themselves - again strong shades of the Nietzschean superman seem to emerge! - they should follow a rare person who can sustain some insight, fleeting though it may be, since a degraded man cannot even hope to rise above mediocrity, let along capturing a moment to know himself. It stands to reason that a common mind would be better off to have a superior mind do his thinking and guide him! What a cynically misanthropic philosophy of human nature! Does leadership encourage mediocrity and knavery so that it can rule the roost?
As I have noted in the above paragraph, there is deep similarity between Nazi thinking and Communist thinking. Only Communist policy is dressed more enticingly and more appealingly, and therefore easier for the common man to understand and be hypnotized by it. Yet, ironically, classless Communism is itself an elitist concept of exclusivity in that it composes of one class proletariat - whereas Naziism is a racist club which appertains presumably only to those of Nordic Germanic blood. Were such two philosophies of governance the only philosophies it would be consigning all human hope forever to the limbo of the damned. In connection with this thought there is much wisdom in the succinct Chinese saying: No sadness is greater than the death of the heart.( 哀默大於心死).
Should International Communism ordain for time everlasting a moribund heart for the world, will it not be proof enough that retro-revolutionary is not progress but retrogression into another Dark Age?
Bureaucratic culprits
I should recall for you also that Communism in the writings and instructions of Lenin and Stalin condemned profusely bureaucracy and its bane, yet the fact is that Lenin and Stalin themselves were the greatest culprits, since it was they who established and proliferated in the best tradition of bureaucracy the most swollen, arcane and stultifying bureaucracy in the world, on the other hand, as for the total dissolution of bureaucracy as perceived by Marx, it could mean one of two things: One, that people would be so well-trained that they would all know instinctively exactly what to do, how to act, and what is expected of them, and to accomplish their tasks symbiotically and in to at a given point in time so that not even a simple coordination function need exist - a true "withering away of the state," two, it could mean total and utter confusion would come into being in the absence of a bureaucracy. This ideal non-bureaucratic concept could exist only in theory, for no matter how tiny a society, to corroborate and regulate the flow of production to the consumer, ugly bureaucracy must come to exist. Therein we find the example par excellence - the duplicity through rhetoric to deceive by Russia's two most well-known Soviet leaders - Lenin and Stalin.
Communism in the personification of the state arrogates unto itself total control over the simplex diversities of human activity as well as the inter-relationships between individuals. Thus, Communist pronouncements and actions, theory and practice, more often than not do not and cannot coincide. It condemns Fascism, yet it is more Fascist in its malevolence than Fascist Italy was and just as infernally sordid as Nazi Germany was. It calls itself a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; but in fact it is neither a union nor socialistic nor a republic. It pays lip service to democracy, yet it has no iota of democracy within her political thought, system and practice. It has the temerity to have East Germany, her puppet, call the Berlin Wall erected under Russian instigation the anti-Fascist Wall as if West Germany were Fascist and they in essence not.
Regulation to a fault
All Russia's spiritual, social and cultural areas of human activity are regulated to a fault. It still wears the facade in its constitution that every individual is free and is protected by law but in fact every one of the common people stays in his assigned slot, and they cannot travel without specific permission. The ruling class, the new nobility supported by the privileged cadre which constitutes the minor nobility enjoy special privileges in protean guise and are in effect the self-appointed protectors of the people - the new peons - the people under Communist control. Time has proven their proficiency in working for the people. Russia with Communism governing the country some 60 years has not been able to solve the most fundamental problem - food - food to feed herself. From year to year in recent years Russia has had to buy wheat from Canada, Australia and the United States, from countries she in the same breath condemns as capitalistic and exploiting societies - a trenchant1y disillusioning commentary on Russian Communism and practicing facsimile of all Communistic states.
Marxism-Leninism has been able to sell itself well because it took recurring ills of the time in diagnoses in greater minutiae and projected them as prognoses, and many unthinkingly took diagnoses as prognoses and fell into step with the pied pipers. Marx and Lenin played on the all too common assumption that since the premise-in-fact is correct, it follows that the conclusion must also be correct.
By using adroitly mass communication to serve their case-by-case specific purpose, and by touching the tender exposed nerves of society or by using constantly imputations, denunciations and imprecations in their plan of repeated attacks, Lenin and his followers built up enough credibility quickly or gradually as the situation demanded. Repeated onslaughts on the psyche had made inroad on a segment of the vulnerable public. By marinating the Liberal elite in cupfuls of cajolery and smarmy or by shock treatment, they manipulate the thinking-to-capture and tilt it in the desired direction. With the advent of relatively inexpensive availability of electronics in the form of telephone, telegram, radio and television, cheap newsprint and cheap inflammable reading materials, it has made the conversion task by far easier and the amenability of emotional eclat so much more formidable.
U.S. point of tolerance
Admittedly the United States, having the endemic strength and wealth within her continental confines, possesses the spiritual, technological, economic and mineral resources which are the necessary components that have made her the great power she is. Yet it must be borne in mind that the threshold of the United States to withstand constant abuse and spiritual debility, however high, has its "ceiling" - a point in tolerance which it must not pass.
Mr. Carl Rowan the columnist, writing in the New York Post of June 9 of America's Bicentennial Year in connection with racial discrimination in the U.S. Marine Corps, quotes the noted Finnish foreign affairs analyst, Colonel Wolf H. Halsti: "I am a military man and I may have a military bias, but it takes no military expertise to see that the effectiveness of the United States conventional forces is very low. An army that murders its officers and counts its deserters by the tens of thousands, an army whose men refuse to go into battle and get away with it - well, can that random collection of men still be called an army?
"I would not have thought so; I would call it a rabble, and anyone who relies on it for his protection does so at his own peril."
Let me give you another commonly held view so well expressed by Mr. W. R. Keevers in the open editorial page, June 30, 1976, of the New York Times. He cites the malaise that now confronts the United States externally. In the past, because America would not put up with any "guff' and stood up for her rights, she was respected in the world. He continues to say:
"Today, its different. Americans are no longer respected. Everybody pushes us around. Our ambassadors and diplomats are brutally murdered by selfless dissidents of doubtful ancestry, in little countries, where these hostile actions will draw no retaliation from the big knuckle-headed boob, that Uncle Sam has become. Murder an Israeli, and you'll have swift, punishing retribution, kill an American or two, the State Department says 'forget it. They're only Americans.'
Signs of U.S. weakness
"Most of our loss in worldwide respect lies with a cowardly Congress. Our elected representatives have only one thing in mind: their own reelection. When an arrogant little nation slaps us in the face, we run for cover. Congress says: 'Remember Vietnam.' It should be saying: 'Remember Valley Forge and Yorktown and Iwo Jima...'
"To our shame, we let outlaws in Lebanon murder our Ambassador and his aide. We even let them fire on our refugee train, without retaliation. They wouldn't fire on the British, knowing full well that British troops would wipe out this stateless vermin...
"American nationals have been murdered or kidnapped in other places. Our American strength, moral character, our national fiber has deteriorated. This is not 1776. Uncle Sam is a tranquil weakling, interested only in appeasement. An arrogant, Marxist military dictator in pygmy Panama tweaks our nose with insulting, pipsqueak threats to throw us out by force..."
I quote the article in great length so that the reader can judge the extent of its veracity. In contrast, no Russian diplomat is killed, for most countries in the Third World and the Free World as well as the terrorists realize the heavy consequences they would have to pay should they incur the wrath of the big Communist countries.
As Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan writes in the New York Times: "The psychological defeat of the U.S. intellectual establishment and the growing isolation of the American people were established facts" - a sad but correct comment of the middle 60s up to the middle 70s.
But recently there are brighter aspects and happier phenomena afoot, for men of high public morality and courage are once more speaking out and setting the patriotic tone and pace by their meaningful warnings. A few quotations will suffice. Mr. Max Lerner in his article on April 7, 1976, of the New York Post quotes Norman Podhoretz in the Current Commentary in which he lashes out in many directions, mainly with scorn, Liberal intellectuals and politicians who leave America's allies open to Soviet expansionism.
Henry Fairlie, famed as the coiner of the phrase "the establishment" in his treatise on America, said: "The Spoiled Child of the Western World" has come to honor such men as Jefferson and the philosopher Dewey and dismisses gurus such as Galbraith, Mailer and Vonnegut. He is unequivocal in his view that the U.S. is being betrayed by its leading intellectuals through their "outlandish advocations."
Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, some months ago U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, doughtily warned that the U.S. has lost confidence in its foreign policy occasioned by the Vietnam war and that "democracy is fading," while Professor Sidney Hook in his article in the New York Times of May 1, 1976, reminds us that from de Toqueville to Walter Lippmann, democracies have been faulted for their inability to conduct timely and intelligently foreign policies. We should take especially the erstwhile doyen of leftist intellectuals Mr. Lippmann's mots juste to heart. The receding tide of democracies all over the world as well as the cross currents and under tow since World War II bespeak the cogency and urgency the future differentiae hold.
Triumph of the spirit
Writings and protestations in action in recent years by such men of outstanding moral and physical courage in the persons of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Bogatyryov, Rilke, Amalrik, Marazirn, Maximov, and the host of other Samizdat writers without and within Russia, demonstrate once more that while the human spirit of freedom can be diminished for a time it can never ever be extinguished for good.
During each of the many long colloquies, I queried or with animus disagreed, whereby Mr. Borodin expatiated and in turn took a dichotomous view from mine as to the designs which the Third International had meticulously laid out to a nicety not only for China but universal in scope. To make his point as authoritatively as possible as object lessons for revolutionaries, he kept on asseverating and reasseverating Lenin's preachment that the true revolutionaries are those who are willing to resort to all sorts of stratagems, illegal methods, artifices, evasions and subterfuges, and that the Communist end justifies the Communist means. For in the opening up of opportunity brought about by cataclysmic happenings, the Communist revolutionary must be ready and able to grasp, educe and exploit to the fullest all such major occasions offered by events. Forcefully and repeated untiringly, Lenin again and again exhorted in his writings a need for obliteration of scruples and moral inhibition. No doubt his was a pragmatic philosophy of duplicity, violence and destruction. Yet, ironically, Communism hiding behind its own immoral driving motivation turns around to accuse democracy with a moral judgment.
But above all else Communism makes brazenly clear its extreme aspersiveness towards established human values by its altogether caitiff-disregard of human dignity and life. It is this dastardly cynicism that the G.P.U., the Russian Secret Police (now changed to the acronym NKVD), became the self-appointed professional "enquirers of souls," and killed off 30,000 victims in the Red Army and Navy alone. It was said that Stalin was duped by the Germans in 1937 that the Russian generals were plotting a coup against him. The Nazis forged documents for Stalin's benefit, and the much vaunted G.P.U. was outsmarted by the Gestapo. The German General Staff in conjunction with Hitler wanted Russia to be stripped of experienced officers before the Fuehrer invaded Russia, and Stalin the tyrant always quaking in fear of coups swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.
Marshal Tukhachevsky, Generals Yakir, Kork, Eideman, Feldman, Primakov, Putna and Uboreviche, all well-known "heroes of the civil war," all decorated with the Order of the Red Flag, all partisans of Stalin against Trotsky, to mention but a few, were tried in camera without witness or defense and quickly executed within 48 hours. So was Blucher (Galen, who was previously in China during the Northern Expedition), as the incumbent commander-in-chief of the Soviet Army in the Far East. He was suspected without proof of collusion with the Japanese and shot.
With regard to the prominent men of the Communist party that were sent to China, Joffe, Lominadze (Stalin's special personal agent in China) committed suicide while the well-known diploma t of that day Karakhan, who never belonged to any opposition, was executed. Borodin, one of the last important survivors of the Third International, disappeared. Tens of thousands were executed for having committed so-called "professional errors." To give the reader an idea of what professional error meant, as was related to me, Dr. Sun Fo who was sent to Russia by our Government in 1939 inquired about Bogomolov (Soviet ambassador to China prior to his recall in 1937). Stalin repeated the name several times as if attempting to recall who the person was until Dr. Sun Fo identified Bogomolov. With a sudden look of recollection, Stalin answered in a matter-of-fact voice that Ah, he was shot! When asked why, Stalin countered that he (Bogomolov) reported that you (China) would not fight Japan. How truly said that the Communists devour their own! Liu Shao Chi, Peng Cheng, Chen Pai Ta, to mention but a few, come to mind.
Faith in punishment
The same barbaric method was adopted internally to stimulate production when Molotov reported that production fell off in food, steel and cast iron to below pre-World War I level after the Bolshevik takeover, that elicited Stalin to utter his famous epigram, "...bloodletting is a necessary part of political doctoring." Stalin believed that punishment of the harshest form is the best cure to inspire leading personnel with leadership in industry. What a macabre and bloody cure it is! Again to give you some idea of the fantastcity of crassitude and of violence, Balitsky, head of the G.P.U. in the Ukraine, estimated eight to nine million died in the Ukraine alone in the 1930s, not to mention those who died of starvation in the Urals, Trans-Volga and Eastern Siberia.
In the concentration camps prisoners were made to work like slaves and whipped like dogs. Such was Russia under Stalin's "classless society." Yet, excepting a few, most Liberals and Intellectuals for reasons best known to their conscience, maintain a deep and censorious silence over the years.
As Thomas G. Marsaryk , the first president of Czechoslovakia after World War I who had intimate knowledge of Communism noted, "The Bolshevik half-culture is worse than the absence of all culture."
Theirs is a procrustean (Procrustes was a brigand who put his victims on his iron bed; he would cut off any length that protruded from his bed) philosophy that people must be cut down to size and constantly supervised living under what is euphemistically called "structured lives," for their own good. In juxtaposition to the duplicitous yet idealistic theory of the "withering away of the state," it is the catechism of practicing Communism that there should be ever more control of the individual by the state to insure its survival. To proselytize that people can function with a minimum of guidance is rank heresy.
Stalin's image of youth
By demographic liquidation through starvation and with the instituting of Goulags dotted over Russia complemented by wholesale executions, Stalin believed he could pour into the image of his making new generations of youth who would be the new Stalinist youth unrelated to the past. This electrifying notion of the new Stalinist youth sprung from the statistical report to the Congress of Soviets in 1936 that 43 per cent of the population had been born since the Revolution of 1917. It meant also that each year there was an increase of nearly three million births - equivalent to the whole population of Finland that could be molded to the great father Stalin's liking.
But alas! "the ultimatist" Stalin's innovatively sinister notion of doing away with the older generation through his particular type of generation renewal - genocide - produced two antithetical and disappointing types: (1) The "Soviet Youth" has turned out to be uninformed of the real outside world, crass, avaricious, boastful and parrot-like in his utterances. His is a head filled with desiccated sloganeering as fed to him. (2) The pseudo-Soviet youth on the other hand is non-conformist, dissatisfied with the present yet hides his true opinions on politics. He avoids official influence while keeping up appearances. Neither type fulfills Stalin's fond dream of the new Soviet man. For by allowing both the serious-minded youth as well as the imitators to become imbued with primitive sophism, schematic idiocies and indehiscent group experience, they produced divergent types of sterile automations. Thus the richness of the human spirit, the creativity in ideas, and cultivation of thought and talent by all logic shall have been made barren for generations to come.
Essence of progress
In relation to the ideals upon which the United States was founded, it is the greatest of irony and tragedy that those forebears, who fled Europe to a new land primarily in search of freedom of person and thought as well as freedom in religious worship, should have descendants that are working perhaps unwittingly to diminish those very freedoms which their forefathers through undergoing hardship had gained and paid for so dearly in misery and sorrow. It makes one wonder why the illogicality of this "Sampson complex" for self destruction.
A year-and-a-half ago, in putting down my observations "We Do Beschrei It," I wrote in a tentative and somber mood of the ills of our time. I could not but be cognizant of the malaise that afflicted us in the Free World. True, many did speak out, albeit in sotto voce their anxiety in the loss of faith in the Free World especially the United States. I must say this loss of faith was not confined to the countries of Southeast Asia, for too many countries in the democratic column were ready to consign the buttresses of the Free World to the Tarpeian rock of perdition.
It seems Yeats' hexametric words applied to the 60s and the 70s were certainly most apropos:
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity."
Essence of democracy
From the Chinese dictum of one-on-one human relationship, the saying (以眾人望人則易從) mirrors the truth that only with the fullness of admiration will the people willingly follow the leadership. This is surely the direct opposite of what Communism is.
However flawed and cumbersome democracy is, the essence of progress of human beings and human society, to use Walter Bagehot's words, after all still resides in "the polity of discussion."