Up from communism.

My father was a communist. As is often the case, what attracted the father repelled the son. Of course, I don't mean to imply that my anticommunism was merely the consequence of a conflict of generations: I read a fair bit and went to see for myself. The latter was something my father never did: reality didn't interest him. Indeed, he resigned as a member of the British Board of Trade's Anglo-Soviet committee when it became clear that, at some point, he would actually have to go to the Soviet Union, rather than merely pontificate about it. But the generational conflict gave the whole question of communism a personal edge that perhaps it didn't have for others of my age and situation.

I remember the day my mother threw out the Little Stalin Library (I wish now that she hadn't). My father was by then, if not less firm in the faith, at least less vociferous in it. The Little Lenin Library went out too, more for reasons of space, I think, than for ideological ones. Nevertheless, quite a lot of literature--communist, Marxist, and merely Progressive (at least, progressive in its day)--was left behind.

Among it, of course, was the History of the Civil War in the USSR, edited by Gorky, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kirov, Zhdanov, and Stalin (the names of Gorky and Kirov appearing in black boxes to indicate that they were now dead, though naturally with no indication given as to the causes of their deaths). The maroon-brown cover, the front board with a bas-relief of a revolutionary scene, conferred a quasi-religious feel to the book: which was, of course, entirely appropriate. I am not sure whether my father had actually ever read it; I strongly suspect it was for him more an icon than a work of reference.

Then there was G. V. Plekhanov's Materialist Conception of History, and the first English edition of V. I. Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, published in 1927, which--astonishing as it now seems to me--I once read from cover to coven (It was, of course, compulsory reading--and regurgitation--for generations of Soviet students, the sine qua non of graduation in anything from Egyptology to entomology.) I had not previously suspected that such bile and rancor could be introduced into books on subject matter so abstruse and recherche. Here was a mind for which no disagreement was possible without the hurling of insults and the expression of murderous hatred: on a single page taken at random, we learn that other writers were "pygmies and miserable scribblers" and Ernst Mach, the great German physicist and philosopher, was responsible for a "pestilence." On the page opposite is displayed, in all its bilious glory, the theocratic cast of mind that led Lenin to establish the first modern totalitarian state:

 
   A subtle and continual falsification of Marxism, 
   crafty and constant dissemination of 
   anti-materialist doctrines disguised in a Marxian 
   garb--this is how modern revisionism 
   must be characterized--in the field of political 
   economy, in questions of tactics and in philosophy 
   as a whole, in both its epistemological 
   and sociological aspects. 

For Lenin, there were but doctrines, only one of which was true: his. All others were heresy, the work of the devil, and philosophy and philosophers were to be dragooned by the imperative mood followed swiftly by the bullet. Disagreement was enmity, and the death of enemies the only solution to that enmity. If ever a literary style were the man himself, Lenin's was Lenin: you could deduce his bloodthirstiness from the quality of his prose.

Growing up in a country that appeared--no, was--as peaceful as it was possible for a country with a large population to be, I was surprised by the venom that I found in my father's books. It seemed to come from another country altogether, like a message in a bottle from over the ocean. For example, there was a memorial volume to a man called John Cornford, the son of the classicist F. M. Cornford, a communist student at Cambridge who was killed on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War after only four months as an international volunteer. The book, part anthology of his writings, part recollections by others of his life, was dedicated, without irony, to "All Advanced and Progressive Mankind"--a category to which I have never really belonged, being myself thoroughly Backward and Retrogressive. Cornford was an aspiring poet, and the poem he wrote at the age of twenty-one in Spain to his girlfriend, very shortly ...