Isaac Deutscher Memorial Meeting, London, 22 September 1967

Opening of the meeting and two messages

Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, we are met tonight to pay tribute to Isaac Deutscher, the man and his work. But I should like to say at once that we do not propose to turn this meeting simply into a meeting of lamentation. Of course, all of us in this hall and many people outside deeply mourn, in a bitter and personal way, the tragic and premature death of one who was an inspiration and an example to so many.

But I think I may say that Isaac Deutscher himself would not have wished this simply to be a meeting of lamentation and eulogy alone. If at all, what we must try and do, what we propose to do, is, in paying tribute to him and his work, to evoke and to assess the meaning and content of that work and the contribution it has made to that cause which to him was dearer than any other, the resuscitation almost of an international socialist movement. And it is in this spirit that I hope we may see this meeting.

Before calling upon those on the platform to address you, I should like to read two messages which I have received. One is from Bertrand Russell, a message written at the time of Isaac Deutscher's death for the Bulletin of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, and which he asked should be read at this memorial meeting. It goes as follows.

"The respect which I felt for Isaac Deutscher originated in an appreciation of his scholarship but was enriched greatly by my acquaintance with the man. As an historian he was outstanding. His works on the Russian Revolution are a monumental achievement. He was able to show the glory of that revolution whilst never entering into the conspiracy of concealment of its defects which many Western socialists considered necessary. His independence was always repellent to orthodoxy. Isaac Deutscher allowed himself to be used by no one. His acute criticisms of the communist powers could not be exploited in the propaganda of the Cold War, for he embodied profoundly humane convictions which disturbed the complacency of the West by uncovering the barbarity so inexorably linked to its affluence. I associate with him every value which inspired the International War Crimes Tribunal. It is fitting that he was the first to accept membership of the Tribunal. The death of Isaac Deutscher is a severe blow to all who are interested in finding the truth in international politics. His scholarship was careful and impeccable. At the same time, his opinions were those of the man whose feelings are right and just. The combination is rare. Still rarer was his determination to act upon his belief unhesitatingly. He in whom these qualities were combined will not easily be replaced."

And the other message is from Professor E. H. Carr, who writes: "I'm afraid that I shall probably be away at the time of the memorial meeting, otherwise I should very much have liked to be there. I had known Isaac very well for more than 20 years. This is not the kind of occasion on which one would talk about personal relations, but I should like to have said a few words about him in his capacity as a historian of the USSR, for he was a great deal more than a biographer of some of its leading figures. I do not know any writer on the subject who seems to me to have thrown so much light on it, and I have constantly learned from his writings as well as from his criticisms, published and unpublished, of my own. And there is no one with whose views on the subject I have found myself so closely in agreement. It is a terrible loss that his career should have been cut short and that we shall now not have his promised [?] biography of Lenin. This is an irreparable loss, particularly in a field where well-informed and balanced judgment is so rare."

All the people on this platform knew Isaac Deutscher, some of them extremely closely for many years. He was their mentor and their friend. And the first person I should like to call upon to address you is Daniel Singer, the Paris correspondent of The Economist, who stood in relation to him in a manner close to that of a member of a family. Daniel Singer.

Daniel Singer: the man behind the writer

Daniel Singer: Because I had the great privilege of knowing Isaac Deutscher all my conscious life, I have been asked to tell you something about the man behind the brilliant writer, the great historian, the socialist thinker. I must confess that at first I was rather worried. Personal grief is something one cries or expresses in a small circle of friends. And then I remembered a passage in his biography in which he referred to Trotsky as essentially a political man. Obviously the whole monumental trilogy shows that Trotsky was a man of flesh and blood. Similarly, all those who knew Isaac Deutscher can tell you how humane and warm-hearted he was. Besides, born when he was and where he was, he did not storm the Winter Palace or lead the Red Army. And yet his life too was shaped essentially by his political convictions. This is why I shall now try to show how, quite apart from his writing and his exceptional gifts, I think Deutscher's life too has a meaning and a message, here and everywhere, for people of mine and younger and future generations.

True, he was born 60 years ago near Krakow, in a peculiar community, the Jewish community of his birth, wiped out by Hitler. Oppressed and respectful of learning, that community provided more than its share of children for the revolutionary struggle. It provided Rosa Luxemburg and a good proportion of the Bolshevik leadership. But we should not idealize this East European Jewry. It had its class and social differences, its religious fanaticism and superstitions. Only this can explain why a man like Isaac's father, a cultured, well-to-do printer, an admirer of Heine and Lassalle [?], allowed his son to be trained in the Talmud [?].

How Isaac's religious career ended at the age of 13 most of you probably know, but the story is worth telling again, because it shows in the child the spirit of the man. To check his growing doubts about the existence of God, he picked the night of Yom Kippur [?] and the grave of a great rabbi [?] to swallow his ham sandwich and his tears. Young Isaac was already defying gods.

If not a great rabbi, he was going to be a great poet. Mystical to start with, then a futurist, he showed such promise in his teens that critics hailed him as the star of tomorrow. But already he felt trapped by his environment. He left Prado [?] for the capital. It was in Warsaw, in my parents' home, that the young poet came into contact with Marxist socialists. The young man was ripe for the change. Only recently he described how impatient he then was to change the world. Brought up amid collapsing empires and crumbling societies, amid pogroms and social upheavals, in a decrepit capitalist society where social injustice hit the eye, he was not going to cultivate his poetic garden, accepting passively the world and his doom. He was going to fight with others to change it.

The rebel became a revolutionary. Isaac Deutscher joined the Communist Party. There he found an outlet for his talents and energy in both illegal and semi-legal action. Carrying out propaganda in the army, lecturing, editing papers and pamphlets, the young man was rapidly climbing the party ladder. But already then socialism was, for him, inseparable from respect for man, and therefore for truth. The Stalinist disease was spreading beyond Russia's frontiers. The violent campaign was being waged against Trotsky's followers. The issues at stake were important, including an assessment of the rise of Nazism. Isaac Deutscher was not content with just repeating the indictment. He read both sides of the case.

In 1932 he was expelled from the party and became one of the leaders of the Trotskyist opposition. There followed several years of difficult propaganda but also of learning. Typically, shaken by his expulsion, Deutscher went to the sources of classical Marxism to test his convictions. It was then that he studied Das Kapital so thoroughly and emerged from this study with the feeling that he now dominated much vaster horizons. Incidentally, in recent years he was puzzled by his British critics. I am thinking particularly of an academic clown performing on television and in the Sunday papers. He was wondering how such an intelligent man could cling to such an old-fashioned doctrine. Deutscher was puzzled because he could not understand how men born after the Copernican revolution [?] still argued about astronomy in terms of Ptolemy [?].

Marxism was not for Deutscher a new challenge for abstract disputation and useful quotations. It was a very unsparingly critical method of thought. Nor was it a fatalistic doctrine for would-be failures. It was for the oppressed an instrument of struggle for the transformation of the world and of man. Studying was public work. Deutscher, with one assistant and a sub-editor [?], was publishing pamphlets and short-lived magazines. He also wrote his first major work, the history of Pilsudski's [?] Poland. But as the police were knocking at the door of our flat where Isaac was then living, his manuscript had to be burned in the kitchen. The net of the police was closing down. Hitler's armies were soon to strike. And Deutscher, the internationalist, felt the need for a larger stage. In 1939 he came to this country. War soon broke out. He felt terribly lonely in this strange town.

[Tape break]

It was only a year or so later that he was to meet Tamara. Tamara, who to the very end was going to be his companion, his critic, his collaborator. Tamara was going to help him in the hours of tension and solitude. Meanwhile, the Polish government in exile sent the subversive Deutscher to a disciplinary camp in Scotland. He was to emerge from there thanks to his pen. The future master of English prose was still struggling with the language, but his analytical power was sufficient to impress the editor of The Economist. His journalistic performance on The Economist, on The Observer, but also in Tribune, is public knowledge. One day somebody will write a book about the wartime revolution in Fleet Street. What I want to mention here is that Deutscher remained true to himself.

One illustration will be enough. He told me that during the war his only difficulties on the Observer were connected with his criticism of the Soviet Union. Because of the struggle of the Russian people, he was not going to forget the concentration camps, quite the contrary. A few years later, in the Cold War, often the very same people went after Deutscher as an apologist for Russia.

From journalism he turned to writing books. The choice of biography was in a sense accidental. What mattered was to reach a fairly wide public with his message about Russia. It mattered to him as a socialist to give a balanced view of the first workers' state. It was important to remind people that the nationalization of the means of production was necessary but not a sufficient condition for establishing socialism. It was important to treat the Soviet Union as a species of its own, a post-capitalist society, since this was the only way in which Marxist tools of analysis could be applied to its performance. It was vital in the Manichean days of the Cold War that somebody should rise above the caricatures of workers' paradise or land of slaves. How important it was we got some idea in the period of disillusionment following Khrushchev's superficial indictment.

Others will tell you how Deutscher the historian and politician fulfilled this indispensable task. I just want to mention two points the books show about the man. The first, once again, is respect for truth in all its complexity. It would have been easy to describe Stalin [?], the beloved father [?], as just Cain, the gravedigger of the revolution. For a man with Deutscher's background, it required much greater effort to describe him in Marxist terms as a product of primitive socialist accumulation. Similarly, Trotsky had Deutscher's full sympathy and admiration, but he did not write about him like a socialist realist about Stalin [?] or a [inaudible]. He showed his greatness and his tragedy in the gap between theory and practice, and his hero's superhuman effort to close that gap.

The second point the books show is Deutscher's basic optimism. Look once again at the monumental trilogy, with its beautifully balanced sentences reflecting a balanced analysis. In its subtle construction, the final chapter, "Victory in Defeat," echoes the earlier "Defeat in Victory." True, like his hero, Deutscher would have stood on the side of the wretched even if their struggle had been hopeless. But he did not think that it was hopeless. He had no magic formula, neither magic shortcut nor secret timetable. His faith rested on his belief in man, who ultimately would choose socialism rather than madness and suicide. He kept this deep conviction throughout the terrible period he lived through. He kept it in years of despair when the best revolutionaries were to be found in Stalin's concentration camps, in years of horror when Nazi order reigned over Europe, in years of disenchantment when the West seemed to have entirely forgotten its socialist heritage. It could then be said of him what [?] said of [?]: never had any man lived in such close communion with the sufferings and the strivings of oppressed humanity and in such utter loneliness. But he lived long enough to see brighter lights on the horizon, to hear his message echoing around the world.

I am convinced that Deutscher's life, like his work, had a universal meaning. What was so exceptional in this life, beyond his extraordinary talent and character? True, he turned to socialism not because of the consciousness of his class interest. Yet this, as he said, goes for every intellectual joining the socialist movement. True, he was born in a Jewish community that has vanished. But Jews, after all, have just given proof that they are no more immune to nationalism than anybody else. At the same time, Deutscher was confirming in an interview the internationalism that was inseparable from his socialism. Genuinely, anything nationalist was alien to him. There is no dividing line between his Polish and his English values. There is continuity between the young man impatient to change the world and the member of the Russell Tribunal or the author of The Unfinished Revolution. This is why his example is valid for us too.

On this occasion we are painfully aware that man is mortal. But this is no reason for him to become a plaything of fate. For us, for whom there is no god, no Caesar and no personal solution, Deutscher has shown the only way to dignity: by struggling to change the world, by fighting for the socialist transformation of mankind. Deutscher is no longer with us. What this must mean to Tamara, his companion, I can guess, judging by the emptiness I feel myself. He was so young. Age is not just a question of years. If by youth we mean the refusal to submit, to surrender, to yield, then Deutscher was the youngest of us all. And he had so many plans, so many projects, so much still to accomplish.

But what we must remember is what he had achieved in his lifetime. He was fond of saying that Russians one day would be his most voracious readers. And certainly that day will come when in his books they will discover their past, a knowledge without which they cannot properly build their future. But already now, elsewhere, his analysis of Soviet society helps socialists to consolidate their faith. Cuban Jewish [?] children, unorthodox Italian communists, American fighters against the war in Vietnam and Japanese students, the New Left throughout the world finds encouragement and inspiration in his work. His life, like his work, is an example.

There is no socialist man, because as yet there is no socialist society. When one emerges, it will be too rational to erect tombs in its Red Square. Men who have helped mankind to reach the socialist future will be celebrated in history books and in the memory of future generations. I cannot pay a greater tribute to Isaac Deutscher than to claim that, seeing him born in the wrong time and in the wrong place, he will figure prominently next to Trotsky in such a revolutionary party.

David Horowitz: the heretic and the old and new left

Chair: The next speaker upon whom I should like to call is David Horowitz, who perhaps exemplifies as well as anybody can the close links which came to be established in the last years of his life between Isaac Deutscher and that new rising generation of intellectuals and socialists in whom we place so much confidence. David Horowitz.

David Horowitz: At this painful time, when the memory of the man himself is still vivid in our minds, those of us who knew Isaac Deutscher have a duty to bear witness to the life and to the work. In him, the tragedy of human death, the irrevocable loss of a being utterly unique and irreplaceable, is magnified to such dimensions that it is understood by tens of thousands who knew him only through his books. How much more, then, is it to us, to whom he was a teacher and a friend? Tonight, however, I should like to speak about him in personal terms only as they reflect upon the public life, upon his place and role in the revolutionary movement, in which he will be seen by future generations to have been a most vital figure. For with Deutscher, the revolutionary deed was the word.

What I remember most about Isaac Deutscher was the sense I always had in his presence of listening to a voice from a wholly different and incredibly cultured world. His conversation was rich with the reminiscence of names and places which I did not know. And even when familiar, they were spoken of within a framework which is fascinatingly remote. I felt with Deutscher as though through him I were contacting a living past and touching deep down into the wellsprings of European culture, of revolutionary culture, and the still vibrant outlook of the classical Bolshevik era. I believe that when Deutscher listened to me and to others of my generation, he also had the experience of communicating across an immense pattern of culture and historical time, and that while we searched his phrases and sentences for roots, he peered into ours seeking response.

Exactly what response he saw can only be guessed. But I remember the light which flooded his face when he returned from his trip to Berkeley and Washington, and the thrill with which he spoke of the great Vietnam protests to which he had been invited by the American New Left. It was this New Left to which Deutscher looked, and I know that much of the precious time that he lavished all too prodigally on me and others like me was a token of the faith and hope that he placed in our generation. Nor was it an accident that the terrible isolation from the left which Deutscher experienced during most of the post-war years was broken finally only by this new generation.

Deutscher, the biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, left no autobiographical statement. Yet in fragments of his work, which like all art contain a large element of introspection, we can see reflected the essential features of his own life and can begin to understand his relation to the old revolutionary left and the new. Ten years ago, Deutscher gave a lecture under the title "The Non-Jewish Jew," in which he discussed six Jewish heretics, including Spinoza, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Heine [?]. As Deutscher often used a literary image to bind up complex theoretical themes in his larger works, so he began this lecture with a symbolic story. When still a child, he had come across a scene in the Midrash from the narrative of Rabbi Meir, the great pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy, who took lessons in theology from a heretic bearing the nickname Acher, "the stranger." Once on a Sabbath, Rabbi Meir had gone out on a trip with his teacher and had listened so intently to the words of wisdom falling from heretical lips that he failed to notice that they had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on the Sabbath. At this point the great heretic indicated to his pupil, the rabbi, that they had reached the boundary. Whereupon the rabbi went back to the Jewish community while the heretic rode on beyond the boundaries of Jewry.

The young Deutscher was deeply impressed by the figure of Acher and the enigmas which his story posed to an orthodox viewpoint. Why, the boy wondered, did Rabbi Meir take his lessons from the heretic? Who was he? He appeared to be in Jewry and yet out of it. He showed a curious respect for his pupil's orthodoxy when he sent him back to the Jews on the holy Sabbath, but he himself, disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the boundaries. What made him transcend Judaism? These were the questions that agitated the young Deutscher. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising that the biographer of the heretic Trotsky should, in the middle '50s, more than a third of a century later, still be compelled by the Haggadic tale. Indeed, how well the figure of Acher fits Deutscher himself. For was not Deutscher also the heretic of communism, the heretic who in the post-Stalin decade became a teacher, mainly to rank-and-file communists, but also to not a few rabbis of communism as well?

[Tape break]

To those of us who [inaudible], to those of us who were groping in the '50s for an explanation of the brutally irrational distortions which had cramped the life of the socialist movement, the almost lone voice of Deutscher came as a blinding revelation. And was not Deutscher the heretic stranger who appeared to be in communism and yet not in it, to be of communism and yet not of it, who, like Acher, showed a curious respect for his pupils' orthodoxy and a care lest they wander beyond the boundaries of Marxism and of communism and become lost? Was it not Deutscher who, alone among European socialists, was invited by the American New Left, to whom his Marxism itself was heretical, to address them at their great anti-war teach-in? And was it not Deutscher who proclaimed at Berkeley to this New Left the urgency of giving back to class struggle its old dignity and of restoring meaning once again to the idea of communism? Listen again to the voice of Deutscher's communist pupil. For so many of us, he was a regenerator of hope. In him we found the link between humanism and socialism, which allowed us to rediscover Marx himself and our own history.

Indeed, was not the very essence of Deutscher's work the transcendence of communism in the Hegelian sense of preserving the best, the real achievements of the old, even while surpassing and annulling it towards the new? In the figure of Acher, Deutscher had come to recognize not only a Jewish tradition, but also a prototype of those revolutionaries of modern thought, from Spinoza to Marx, who had found Jewry too narrow, too archaic and too constricting, and looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond it. Such an ideal, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Deutscher himself found in the struggle for an international socialist society.

In 1926 Deutscher joined the Polish Communist Party and entered the revolutionary ranks. Then, as the Russian Revolution, isolated by the failure of the revolutions in the West, began to succumb to the despotism and backwardness of the Russian environment, Deutscher joined the Trotskyist opposition, which was fighting a losing battle within the revolution to arrest its departure from Marxist and socialist norms. In 1932 he was expelled from the party for spreading panic about Nazism, and during the next years he continued his opposition, exposing the mass terror in Russia and the purge trials in which the old Bolshevik leadership perished. In 1938, however, when, convinced that the Third International was morally dead, Trotsky launched its successor, Deutscher demurred. The creation of every one of the earlier internationals, argued Deutscher, constituted a definite threat to bourgeois rule. This would not be the case with the Fourth International, because no significant section of the working class would respond to its manifesto, and it would become a mere collection of sects. It was necessary to wait.

It was at this point that Deutscher's lonely sojourn began, a sojourn that made possible his unique contribution to the world revolutionary movement and its future regeneration. For having belonged to those whom Stalin had cruelly defeated, Deutscher set about to systematically examine why Stalin had succeeded and why the historic development had taken the course that it did. In the end, Deutscher came to see Stalinism differently from Trotsky. He saw it not as a usurpation of Bolshevik power, but as a distorted evolution of a current within Bolshevism itself, brought out by its isolation and the autocratic backwardness of its environment. He saw in Stalinism not a Thermidorian bureaucracy arresting the revolutionary development, but a bureaucratized revolution carrying through that development with the barbarous means and primitive outlook of its native surroundings.

For this, Deutscher was made a heretic and an outcast on the left. Damned by the Stalinists for maintaining his Marxist ideals and outlook against the debasement of the revolution, denounced by the Trotskyists for recognizing that the brutally realized achievements of the Stalinist bureaucracy were revolutionary, Deutscher remained totally isolated throughout the first decade of the Cold War. Then the historic development took a new turn, and it was these very traits for which he had been damned that now made him a teacher and inspiration to the generation of '56 and to those of us who grew to political maturity afterwards.

For us, too, the Stalinist development of Soviet Russia had historic substance and validity. The forced march from the age of the wooden plow to the era of Sputnik and the atom bomb may not have been a socialist march in the classical Marxist sense, but it certainly represented a tremendous leap towards liberation in terms of that two-thirds of the world's population that was still sunk in the mire and misery of underdevelopment and backwardness. Deutscher, above all, recognized the ethical significance of this ascent and the revolutionary, if brutal and wasteful, role of Stalinism in presiding over it. At the same time, he possessed that critical attitude towards Stalinism, that Marxist criticism of its deeds and claims, which he owed to Trotsky and the left opposition, and which was absolutely crucial for us, and so vital to any regeneration of the revolutionary left in the West. To this regeneration, which he above all else strove for, and to which he dedicated his genius, Deutscher made still another essential contribution.

It was best indicated, perhaps, by a passage which Deutscher wrote in Tribune in February 1945, at a time when the Stalinist terror had almost a decade to run. He wrote:

Just as it is possible for a strong adherent of capitalism to stick to its democratic form and to oppose capitalism in totalitarian form, so it is also possible and necessary for socialists to fight for socialist democracy and against the totalitarian distortion of socialism. However, the difference between capitalism and socialism is that capitalism historically gravitates towards fascism, while socialism gravitates towards freedom. The defender of the democratic form of capitalism is, in a sense, revolting against the inner logic of the social system he defends. The defender of socialist freedom as against a quasi-socialist totalitarianism is in the long run in harmony with the trend of history that must eventually steer away from the totalitarian backwaters into the open skies of a free society.

It was Deutscher who, by analyzing the roots of Stalinist despotism with the tools of Marxism, and by prophetically indicating the direction in which the historic development was pointing, restored to my generation that confidence in Marxist theory and that revolutionary optimism without which there can be no revolutionary action. For this alone, we and revolutionary generations to come will pay him homage. Thank you.

Marcel Liebman: Deutscher as a historian

Chair: [Inaudible] Deutscher's very long book, a history of the Russian Revolution, which Marcel Liebman has just published in Belgium and France. Before calling upon Mr. Liebman to speak, I think I might perhaps say that there is a typical side to Isaac Deutscher's interest in that book. For when Marcel, a friend for some years of Isaac Deutscher's, sent him the manuscript of the book, Deutscher didn't merely acknowledge the receipt of the book, or send it back with some comments, but, as so often with other people's writings, particularly of people whose minds he respected, went through it, took time, argued, and sent back criticism and comment as well as felicitation and eulogy. It is because of this typical side that I have great pleasure in calling upon Mr. Liebman to address you.

Marcel Liebman: Ladies and gentlemen, I could of course approve every word of Bertrand Russell's message and all his remarks on the significance of Isaac Deutscher for history and for socialism. I'm afraid I view my contribution to this meeting in a rather dry way, to which I try to stick. But before trying to assess Deutscher's significance as a historian, I just want to say this: that for young, less young, Marxist intellectual workers he meant of course a shining example, but much more than a shining example. He brought us, in very barren and difficult surroundings, in a sort of intellectual and political desert, he brought to all of us a sense of dignity which we lacked for many reasons which are well known.

This being so, what I'll try to do is to outline briefly what was Isaac Deutscher's original contribution to the history, but more than to the history of the Russian Revolution, also to the interpretation of the revolutionaries and of Soviet Russian society and evolution. It goes without saying that there are two categories of historians who had absolutely nothing in common with Isaac Deutscher, and from whom he dissociated himself in a very sharp way. They were, first of all, the conservative historians and observers of Soviet Russia who seem to have been unable to digest October and the aftermath of October and who still consider the October Revolution not as a social phenomenon which ought to be described and analyzed but as a social disaster, and because of that do not succeed in analyzing, but only succeed in exposing and denouncing.

And, as a sort of paradox, side by side with that school of historians and observers, there is another category of historians or pseudo-historians, the friends or the pseudo-friends of the Russian Revolution, who have come eventually to found what has been rightly called the Stalinist school of falsification. It goes without saying that Deutscher had nothing in common with either category of those historians. What is, I think, more interesting is to compare Deutscher's approach and interpretation of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Russian evolution, to compare his approach to this huge and complex problem with the approach of some Marxist, socialist, left-wing critics of Soviet Russia, because in this field its originality and its depth and insight are very well exemplified and illustrated.

I would say, very briefly, that the differences, sometimes the disagreements and the divergences, between Isaac Deutscher and those Marxist and socialist critics of Soviet Russia can be summarized in three different points. First of all, the nature of Soviet Russia under Lenin's leadership. Secondly, the fight in Russia for Lenin's heritage. And thirdly, the nature of Stalin's Russia and, above all, the nature of Soviet society as such.

The first point is the interpretation and even the description of Russia under Lenin. It is for the socialist admirers and friends of the Russian Revolution a too easily admitted idea that there existed a very sharp contrast between, on the first side, Russia under Lenin, which was presented, and a sort of nostalgia was not alien to this representation, as a perfect example of popular and proletarian democracy, a sharp contrast between that regime and, on the other side, Russia under Stalin from 1922 or 1924 onwards.

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Lenin's Russia, the fight for Lenin's heritage, and Stalinism

The sharp contrast has been very clearly expressed in a fairly recent resolution voted by a congress of the Fourth International, saying, and I quote, "Stalin destroyed the proletarian democracy prevailing in the years of Lenin and Trotsky." The whole picture, and I would rather use the word fresco to give the idea of the dimension of Deutscher's description of the Russian Revolution, the whole picture, accurate, precise, I would say scientific, which Deutscher gave of Russia under Lenin, runs counter to this simplification, which was not, of course, deprived of any truth, but which was exactly a simplification.

What Deutscher showed with such authority and accuracy was that the conditions which prevailed in Russia, not in 1924 or later, but already in 1920 and 1921, left very little room for the democratic ideals of men like Lenin and like Trotsky. After the Civil War, with its terrible human and material damage, the Russian working class was, to quote the very words of Isaac Deutscher, atomized by the economic disaster of the Civil War, in a context where one could almost say not only that the vanguard of the working class but the very working class itself had diminished and had been dispersed by the effects of the Civil War. In such surroundings a Soviet democracy of the kind which had been created by October had become impossible. In other words, it is much too simple to speak of Lenin's democracy and to oppose Lenin's democracy to Stalin's suppression of that democracy.

A second point on which Deutscher dissociated himself from the very simplified interpretation of the Russian history in the '20s was about the fight for Lenin's heritage. Here it's too often accepted, or it was too often accepted, that the main cause for Trotsky's defeat and the main cause for Stalin's triumph was the sheer savagery of Stalin, the sheer brutality of his method and the terror which he used so abundantly against his enemies. Of course, this is part of the truth, but only part of the truth. What Deutscher showed was that the tactical mistakes which Trotsky made in the '20s were also of great importance, and of which one can give two important examples. First, the fact that Trotsky didn't use the weapon he had in hand, namely the political weapon, Lenin's testament, Lenin's anti-Stalin testament. And secondly, the refusal of Trotsky to draw an alliance with the right communists, the right wing of the Communist Party, Bukharin and his friends. Deutscher goes even so far as to say that because of these mistakes Trotsky committed, and I quote his words, "political suicide."

But even those tactical mistakes are of secondary importance as compared to the main cause, which according to Deutscher explains Stalin's triumph in the '20s and in the '30s. And this main cause is the economic, social and political conditions of which I said a word a minute ago. In an isolated state like Soviet Russia, in a country so badly prepared for the huge tasks of socialist construction, in a country where so many conditions were the conditions of a very backward society, and given that isolation, for which of course Stalin was not quite irresponsible, the ideals of proletarian democracy inside the party and inside Soviet society, these ideals which were an important part of the program of the left opposition, were bound to be defeated.

It goes without saying that Deutscher never gave up his deep and so justified admiration for a man like Trotsky. Nobody better than Deutscher understood and explained and described the greatness, the political, moral and intellectual greatness of a man like Trotsky. But when this is said, it remains, and here one must pay one more eulogy to Deutscher's objectivity, to his extraordinary power to control his own feelings and to appear as the rational and lucid historian, when this is said, one must stress the words which have been used by Deutscher to describe Trotsky's fight in the '20s, when Deutscher said that Trotsky was a fighter against his time. Being a fighter against his time, his defeat wasn't only the result of Stalin's wickedness. It was not only the result of Trotsky's real mistakes. It was mainly the result of the conditions prevailing in Russia and in Europe in the '20s.

And the third point, which I want to make very briefly, the third difference, and even the agreement, which occurred between Deutscher's account of Russia's evolution and some serious Marxist socialist critics of Soviet Russia, is that the whole interpretation Deutscher gave of the nature of Stalinism, and the whole interpretation he gave in very broad and general terms of the nature of Soviet Russia, went counter to clichés, counter to very easy formulas and even slogans and admitted ideas. And here too Deutscher, who was such an admirer of Trotsky, didn't hesitate to criticize Trotsky on a point where Trotsky's ideas seemed to Deutscher rather weak. I quote Deutscher when he wrote the following sentences: "When Trotsky wrote that the film of the revolution was running backwards under the influence of Stalin, he meant that it was moving towards planned economy, industrial expansion and mass education. And these, despite all bureaucratic distortion and debasement, Trotsky himself recognized to be essential prerequisites for socialism."

In other words, the picture of Stalinism as a regime which was killing democracy, which was the very negation of socialist values and of Soviet and socialist political and social structures, this picture is true, but was only a part of the truth. Side by side with these mistakes and defaults and crimes, there were economic achievements of a society which had abolished capitalism and of which the leading bureaucracy refused to restore capitalism. And here again, this very balanced view, this so objective view, gave rise to discussion, sometimes to criticism, of which one example was given by the American Trotskyist J. P. Cannon when he said that Deutscher was a Bernstein of Trotskyism.

Whatever one may think of the whole picture and the whole interpretation Deutscher gave of the evolution and of the future of Russia, and perhaps one could say that this picture and this interpretation was in some way optimistic, even in those parts of Deutscher's work where discussion is possible, it remains a fact, a fact which has all the strength of an undisputable fact, that among all the historians, among all the observers, friendly, less friendly, hostile, critical, among all the observers of Soviet Russia, there is only one who is outstanding for the coherence and the depth of his vision of the whole history of Soviet Russia. And that man is obviously Isaac Deutscher.

I want to conclude by quoting the final words of Engels in his introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France, and I quote: "The social democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' Well and good, gentlemen. Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat." One can use the very same words as Engels used and say the philistine has been filled with wholesome contempt at the words "scientific socialism." Well and good, ladies and gentlemen. Do you want to know what scientific socialism looks like? Do you want to know what Marxism looks like? Look at Isaac Deutscher's work. That was scientific socialism. That was living Marxism.

Perry Anderson: style and content in Deutscher's work

Chair: I should now like to call upon Perry Anderson, the editor of New Left Review, a paper with which Isaac Deutscher had established friendly, if often critical, relations.

Perry Anderson: Other speakers tonight have stressed that Isaac Deutscher was a historian, a Marxist and a revolutionary. I would like to say a few words about the connections between these three dimensions of him as a man. In particular, I would like to say something about the form of his writings, that is their style, and the content of them, that is their themes. Deutscher's writings on Soviet history and society are very much more than a mere local chronicle of what happened in Russia from 1900 to the present day. Their sweep, their depth and their brilliance won him an audience throughout the world. But in the 30 years of his life and work in England it is significant that he was never given any place in a university until, at the end of his life, he was invited to give the Trevelyan lectures in Cambridge as a visitor.

There was no accident in this. Deutscher's work was profoundly threatening to capitalist society and to its ideological institutions. He was hated and feared as a Marxist by the mediocre academicians who dominate these institutions. They did everything to ensure that he was never allowed to teach a younger generation personally and directly, even on one occasion vetoing in desperation his nomination to a university chair when it had already been offered to him. The result of this long and relentless ostracism was that Deutscher had to earn much of his living as a journalist in London, as Marx did before him. That journalism produced essays of great and permanent importance, as it did with Marx. But those who saw him, obliged to devote so much of his time to it, were aware that it was at a cost to his historical work itself. His biography of Lenin might now perhaps have been written if he had not had these constant financial pressures on him. This was the daily price he paid for his Marxism in this country.

It was not just the fact of his Marxism which made him so feared by bourgeois historians, of course. It was its quality. Deutscher himself once wrote that he had, and I quote here, "a heightened sensitivity to the style of all reasoning on social and political problems." He goes on: "I thought that I could recognize the quality of any socialist or communist statement by its language and form." Now this dictum certainly applies to his own work. His prose, as all of you will know, was superb English. But this was not just a literary gift, this is the point I want to insist on. It expressed very deeply Deutscher's relationship to Marxism as a philosophy.

Nothing is more striking in his work than its complete freedom from the technical language of Marxism, what is usually called its jargon. This freedom was in fact the measure, not of Deutscher's emancipation from Marxism as a philosophy, but of his effortless control of it. His Marxism was classical in an age of alloys. That is to say, it was so natural to him that he could speak it and use it without resorting to any specialized or technical idiom. Jargon is only the index of the difficulty which a Marxist has in overcoming his normal, inherited habits of thought and speech. It is like the arbitrary, clumsy constructions of someone who is learning but has not truly mastered a foreign language. Deutscher, on the contrary, moved within Marxism so freely and spontaneously that he made it appear often as simply identical with intelligent argument.

C. Wright Mills once described Deutscher's historical work as a gigantic insinuation. An insinuation of what? Of the truth and actuality of Marxism, of course. It was an insinuation because it never stated the axioms of Marxism systematically and explicitly. Deutscher's work was its own proof in practice. Deutscher's classical clarity was thus unique amongst the great Marxist intellectuals of the West. Virtually all the other creative Marxists of recent decades, Gramsci, Lukács, Sartre [?], Althusser [?] or Marcuse, have expressed themselves in a difficult and complex vocabulary, often very removed from ordinary language. I do not think this is a criticism of them. They produced the Marxism they could, which is our Marxism, in the insurmountable [?] historical conditions in which they found themselves.

Deutscher, who came from the borderlands of the October Revolution, was heir to a different tradition. It gave him an ease with Marxism that allowed him to write massive historical works which yet won a worldwide non-sectarian audience. These works were themselves something of a contrast to much Western Marxism. They were not a philosophical discourse on method, as has preoccupied so many contemporary Marxists, from Lukács to Sartre [?], [inaudible]. They were about the central, substantive problem of 20th-century socialism, the destiny of the revolution. Deutscher's writings on Russia, which were apparently particular and specific works of history, were actually also universal elements of any Marxist theory. For no socialist or revolutionary politics today is possible without a preliminary judgment on the major experimental laboratory which the century has so far provided to verify or modify Marxist ideas of socialism.

In Deutscher's writings, history becomes politics, and politics becomes revolutionary theory. There was no accident in this. Deutscher, for those who knew him personally, was as a man above all a revolutionary. It was his revolutionary passion which determined the distinctive focus and themes of his work, once circumstances had separated him from the possibility of active political practice. Deutscher, exiled from Poland, rejoined the revolution by writing the epic of it, an epic which is also in a sense the theory of it. Deutscher, whom circumstances isolated from political struggle so relentlessly after the '30s, succeeded in being more immediately and truly political to the end than any other major Marxist writer of his generation. He was a model of the revolutionary thinker in the Bolshevik tradition. In contemporary Britain, nothing was more unfamiliar or more exemplary. Thank you.

K. S. Karol: Russia, Deutscher's book on Stalin, and Cuba

Chair: I should now like to call on K. S. Karol, also an old friend of Isaac Deutscher's.

K. S. Karol: Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to begin this tribute to Isaac Deutscher with a few souvenirs from a country which was the object of his passion and study, namely from the Soviet Union. I was born in Poland from the same background, or comparable background, to Isaac Deutscher, but one generation later. And as it happened, by the vicissitudes of war, at the age of 15 I was confronted with the Soviet reality in practice. I happened to be a Soviet citizen because Poland didn't exist anymore, and I had to share for several years, for seven years, the life of the generation of Russians the same as myself.

There is usually an image that Stalin's Russia and Russia of that period was one vast jail. I wouldn't deny that there were jails in Russia, and I was myself for a time in one of them, but the image is not true. In Stalin's Russia people could and were allowed to discuss and to speak, particularly in privacy and particularly young people like my friends with whom I was in the army and subsequently in university. But what we were discussing was mostly about the present, without knowing too much what was happening in the past after the revolution, but with some feeling that those were dangerous things, that a lot of people had suffered from there, and that it is better to look only to the future without caring too much about the past and about discussing too much about ideas. We were studying, of course, Marxism, or what was the version of Marxism which was in the official manuals. These were things which were admitted as a kind of obvious truth and were applying mostly to the world outside, because after all what Lenin was writing concerned, for three quarters if not four-fifths of his work, tsarist Russia and the pre-revolutionary society, how to make a revolution in that kind of a country. And this Marxism was, I wouldn't say, something which was passing completely without influence, but it was not considered as a possible instrument to discuss the present or the future.

The present and the future were connected with Stalin, because for us, for this generation of Russia, after all it was Stalin who led us during the war. Even if we knew that probably the man was sometimes rather dangerous, there was also a conviction: where is Stalin, there is victory, and therefore it was better to follow that pattern. But particularly I must say that in the years of '44, '45, on the eve of victory, there was a kind of liberalization in Russia. One could speak much more freely, and there was a period of great hopes for the future, hopes which were connected with the prospect of the imminent victory. But nobody had a real idea what this better future would really be and how it would happen. We were expecting something, hoping for it, but, as I repeat, without discussing either ideas or the past history. Those closed chapters were supposed to be closed forever, or rather irrelevant.

As it happens, you know that in the years immediately after the victory, already in '45, started things which we didn't expect. Our comrades who were coming from prisoner camps, instead of being with us, were taken into other camps, another kind of camps, which were called the checking camps. They started immediately, a kind of new wave of difficulties. And the contrast between the official rhetoric and the daily life was becoming more and more unbearable. Well, nobody could explain what it was and how it was, and that was at that time that I left, in 1946, Russia. Two or three years later I came to Paris, again with those feelings that after all it was a country which suffered more than any other for the victory during the war. It was the country in which I was brought up and I didn't want to be against it. At the same time it was a country whose shortcomings I knew too well from my experience to be able to deny them or to defend it. With this divided feeling, with this divided mind, when I started to contemplate the career of journalism, I had the occasion first to read Isaac Deutscher's book on Stalin and subsequently to meet him.

It would be an exaggeration, and I don't think that any tribute needs exaggeration, to say that this one book has explained to me everything I lived in my experience. But it is certainly true that this book and this hypothesis for the future which Isaac Deutscher has brought in this book was really a revelation for me, something which

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has tremendously put into a real perspective what I knew from facts of life, from my passage of life in Russia. And it also gave me an example that it is possible to be a critic of Soviet Russia, a critic of this form of socialism, without becoming either an enemy of Russia or even an ally of Soviet Russia's enemies. Therefore, I owe a great debt to Isaac Deutscher as a personal example of what his works have brought to me.

But I must add that the experience later has shown to me that not only was Isaac Deutscher right in his analysis of the evolution of post-revolutionary Russia, but the knowledge of this analysis is fundamental to this generation of Russians and of the whole people in Eastern Europe, because I maintain, I have many friends both in Russia and in Poland, and I saw and I can confirm that it is not possible to close a chapter of history and to say it didn't exist. It just is bringing a kind of cynical mentality, something which is incompatible with socialism and with a society which nevertheless is a society in transition to socialism. I had the feeling some of them were coming with a great, big enthusiasm after the 20th Congress, others coming later with enthusiasm after Khrushchev's removal from power. But none of them can maintain this enthusiasm for long, because they don't dare and they can't digest the past. As a result there are phenomena of depoliticization, which are at the root of all difficulties in Russia and which sooner or later will be overcome, because I don't think that this country can really develop with this non-political or apolitical generation.

But the second revelation to me was precisely very recently in Cuba, where I met a new generation of communists who, perhaps because of the distance and of age, made the revolution themselves without studying and knowing very much about the past dramas of the workers' movement in Europe. But once in power, once trying to build socialist Cuba, they discovered very soon that they need ideas and they need historical knowledge. Nothing is more impressive today in Cuba than to see precisely this generation of men discussing with passion works, the polemics between Preobrazhensky and Bukharin, the things which happened in Russia years ago, not because it is of academic interest, but because they know that the revolution is to be taken from the place where Lenin left it, and not from the later part.

They don't accept the view that it is impossible to change man, that it is impossible to free him from the money civilization, from all forms of alienation. They don't accept the view that political incentives don't work. They don't accept the view that after the revolution the new generation is becoming less revolutionary. They believe that there should be more. In order to get an answer to these problems, they are studying precisely the same discussions that there were in Russia in the time after the revolution, when the same problems were to be solved. And they believe, I hope rightly, that what has happened in Russia is not necessarily a historical phenomenon but a local, particular deviation. And I saw that of course the works of Isaac Deutscher are of unique contribution because there are not many alike. One can get today, and many people are reading, texts of Preobrazhensky or other economists who are participating in the discussion in Russia. But to have the whole picture of what has happened in Russia after the revolution, what has happened with one generation, why this particular form of deviation has occurred in Russia, they need this broad Marxist analysis. They need to know the society in order not to make the same mistakes as the young Russians. We need to know that history and their society in order to overcome them.

I think that after my trip to Cuba, and after seeing how Cubans are passionately interested in those problems and what their attitude is towards the work of Isaac Deutscher, the day will come, and perhaps sooner than we believe, that indeed the same will happen in Russia and everywhere in the socialist world. And that day will be the greatest reward for Isaac Deutscher, because he devoted his life precisely for those men and for this future.

Lawrence Daly: Deutscher and the British labour movement

Chair: Our last speaker is Lawrence Daly, General Secretary of the Scottish Mine Workers Union. Isaac was perforce in many ways not involved in the British Labour movement in any direct sense, but he had a boundless belief in its potentialities. It is fitting that we should have one of its best representatives speak to us tonight. Lawrence Daly.

Lawrence Daly: Comrade Chairman and comrades, when Isaac Deutscher was serving his period of compulsory labor in the Polish Army's disciplinary camp in Scotland during the war, I, unknown to him of course and he to me, was serving my period of compulsory labor under British wartime regulations only a few miles away in the Scottish coal mine. And I only emerged from that coal mine about three years ago. But for many years before that, my mind had been acting as a very imperfect vehicle for the conveyance of some of the ideas of Deutscher, as much as I understood them, to at least a number of my comrades who worked in that coal mine.

I've had Deutscher's books and Deutscher's works and his writings discussed by admittedly very small numbers of coal miners on the surface of the mine and deep in the bowels of the earth. And this was an experience which was not unique in my own village and in my own coal mine. It has been repeated in other parts of the British coalfield. And I've no doubt the same can be said in almost every major industry in Britain, in shipyards, in factories, and so on. The numbers of places in which such discussions have taken place and the numbers of people, above all the numbers of active trade unionists who have been involved in these discussions, is, alas, still far too few.

But I think that increasingly, through the educational activities of the trade union movement, though sometimes it is not intentional, through trade union students learning from WEA [?] lecturers, tutors in extramural classes and so on, and sometimes from other activists within the movement directly associated with political groups and parties, many thousands more are coming to understand that here is and was a historian and political analyst who could enable them to understand many of the problems which puzzled them, particularly in relation to the communist world, especially from the late '40s onwards.

I did not have the privilege of knowing Isaac Deutscher in those years. Indeed, I met him briefly for the first time this year in the city of Stockholm, for only four days. Throughout that time our private conversations together could not have lasted for any more than two or three hours, and that was mainly confined to our journey together back over to London at the end of the Tribunal's first session. But as I had a conversation on the plane coming over with a very lively and congenial companion, I could hardly have believed that it was credible that we would be gathered here paying tribute to his memory in such a few months. There was no apparent physical sign of his impending collapse, nor could it have occurred to me that I would be honored by being requested to pay tribute to him from this platform.

But although my association was a very, very brief one, my intellectual association, if you like, although it was always a one-way traffic, had extended over a considerable number of years. He had indeed been influencing my thinking for a long time before 1967 and the thinking of a considerable number of other people in the British Labour and trade union movement. Many of the activists in the Labour movement have not only read his historical works but have followed from time to time his periodic political commentaries in journals like Tribune and so on. And indeed, in recent years, his contributions to journals like the New Left Review and Socialist Register have, I think, been among the very best and most instructive of his works as a political analyst.

It is perhaps an indication of the principled character of the man, perhaps also of his keen sense of smell, that from the very beginning he refused to be associated in any way with the Congress for Cultural Freedom [?] in the columns of Encounter. I think there's a very important claim that can be made on Isaac Deutscher's behalf. His books, certainly his books on Stalin and Trotsky, enlightened thousands of active trade unionists, people who are not only trade union conscious but politically conscious, and they undoubtedly played a very important part in rescuing some thousands of people in this country, dedicated workers in the labor movement, from a kind of mummified Marxism within whose confines they had been constricted. For many of those activists, he burst asunder those constrictions of both Stalinism and reformism.

It was, I think, typical of his passion for objective truth that although he was an admirer but not an idolater of Trotsky, he himself in his book on Stalin should have chronicled the evidence which, as Deutscher himself said, refuted Trotsky's claim that Stalin in the pre-1917 period had been [inaudible]. And perhaps it was the very same passion for objective truth that led him from 1932 onwards to have no direct association or participation in any particular political party. There will be those who will claim, and for all I know they may be right, that this was a source of weakness. But I am certainly convinced that at the very same time it must have been a profound source of intellectual strength. Certainly his isolation or independence never allured him into the camp of those for whom the god had failed. He was bound, it seemed to me, to the international revolutionary movement, with all its disagreements and all its deficiencies, by powerful emotional and intellectual ties. Unlike people like Koestler, his disillusionment with Stalinism, which came rather earlier than Koestler's, did not lead him into making a choice of the yogi or the Colonel Blimp as the alternative to the commissar.

Now, his recognition of the historical inevitability of, and the moral justification for, political agitation and revolutionary action was very profound, in spite of his knowledge of the grave distortions which disfigured the very movement which gave these actions birth. His profound historical insight enabled him to answer well in advance the critics, the negative critics, of the revolution. I was looking today at The Guardian and I came across a review of Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs by Emmanuel Litvinov. And I thought it would be of interest to quote you, if you had not seen it, what Litvinov said at the beginning of his review. He said: "Only in our century would one bother to make a distinction between the miseries inflicted upon the people by Hitler on the one hand and by Stalin on the other. It is about time we acknowledge them to be the left and right profiles of the same evil." Almost 20 years before, in the final chapter of his severely critical biography Stalin, Deutscher had answered the Litvinovs by saying: "The fact cannot be ignored that the ideal inherent in Stalinism, one to which Stalin has given a grossly distorted expression, is not domination of man by man, or nation by nation, or race by race, but their fundamental equality. Hitler was the leader of a sterile counter-revolution, while Stalin has been both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution."

Deutscher's deep historical perspective has enabled him not only to answer the Litvinovs in advance but to guide many like myself who have had their difficulties and doubts at different periods. But the fact that Deutscher's works are not readily and freely available today in Prague or in Moscow or in Peking is an indication of how much the distortions of the revolution still remain. And perhaps more serious and significant for us in Britain is the fact that although his works are freely available here, he is still unknown to all too many thousands of even active people in the trade union movement in the hundred and one industries in Britain. In some cases, cases which involve some of the most active and dedicated people in our movement, he is to their minds, even though in most cases they have not read him, already anathema. They have read his critics very briefly.

One of the tasks, it seems to me, that we have to perform, and one of the greatest tributes that we can pay to Deutscher's memory, is to do our utmost to eliminate that ignorance and that hostility. I have no objection to any amount of dialogue with a few archbishops or even lesser ecclesiastical figures, but I think it would be more fruitful for our movement if a number of people who have thought, if not actually adopted a very hostile attitude to Deutscher, were to begin even now, though posthumously, a dialogue with the ideas and works of Deutscher. This is not to advocate uncritical acceptance of all of Deutscher's writings. To no person more than Deutscher would that have been more abhorrent and repellent. But his scholarly objectivity, his historical perspective, his dialectical subtlety, the richness and vigor of his prose, and his tremendous courage in presenting and defending his views are qualities which it seems to me no movement requires more than ours here in Britain today. Above all, we require, as part of our tribute to Deutscher, to revive at a new level the spirit of international solidarity which informed every single page of his writings.

This tremendous spirit of internationalism of Isaac's was expressed in the work that he undertook for the International War Crimes Tribunal. I recall that in the course of a single afternoon, on the request of the Tribunal, he drafted an introduction to the final report of the first session which in effect was a powerful clarion call to the international labor movement and would have won widespread acclaim as a new international revolutionary manifesto. I perhaps should apologize for the fact that I was the member of the Tribunal who urged its complete rejection, for reasons which are not the business of this meeting. But my astonishment can be imagined when I tell you that the first person to agree with my proposal was Isaac Deutscher.

It's really a measure of the true greatness of the man that his brilliance and his genius was tempered by a very, very genuine modesty. In the short period that I knew him I found that he could be assertive, he could be impatient, he could be sometimes very angry, and of course often he could be very, very charming, and his anger sometimes was amusing. I will never forget that when he and I arrived at Stockholm, by our separate ways, and got to the first meeting of the Tribunal, through no fault of the Tribunal and no fault of our own we had arrived about a week late, and we discovered to our deep concern that some organizational decisions had been taken with which we were not wholly in agreement. One particular decision about which we were exceptionally concerned Isaac thought ought to be reconsidered by the Tribunal.

I must say I agreed with the chairman, who said, look, comrade, we spent five hours discussing that question two nights ago, and we are not going to reopen the discussion. But Isaac insisted and very angrily said, but you must reopen the discussion. There was he, a Polish revolutionary exile, and I some kind of a queer Scottish nationalist republican. And Isaac said, look, I insist that you reopen the discussion because Comrade [?] and I, the English representatives, are here. However, unfortunately or otherwise, he was overruled. But his contribution to the day-by-day work of the Tribunal and to the mass meetings in Stockholm and Copenhagen, which were held some time before the Tribunal, on Vietnam and so on, were of inestimable value.

It is indeed an extremely severe blow to the International War Crimes Tribunal that we have been faced with his early and untimely demise, because he regarded the struggle in Vietnam as the very heart of the worldwide international struggle for the liberation of mankind from every form of exploitation. And it was remarkable that he was prepared to devote so much time to the Tribunal when he was at the same time so heavily preoccupied with so many other pressing tasks, the most important of which, of course, was the endeavor to complete his life of Lenin, which he told me, even if he were to abandon the work of the Tribunal completely, would take him something like another two years. And it is not the least of our losses that we have to mourn tonight that if the manuscript is ever finished, it will not be finished by his hands.

Closing remarks

Chair: But it is fortunate also for us that we shall still be able to glean his views on the leader of the Russian Revolution from his volumes on Stalin and Trotsky and some of his numerous essays. And of these, I think, certainly one of the most significant, but not the most significant, was his lectures on what he so rightly called The Unfinished Revolution, which I read with great excitement, which seemed to me to concentrate the very essence of Deutscher's own historical and analytical work. His entire opus is a very rich storehouse for [?] revolutionaries. Those who found in the Soviet revolution the final accomplishment of their hope and gave up all critical assessment, those who found in it evil resurrected and sought only to condemn. The point has been made again and again tonight, the integrity with which he addressed himself to the task of that genuine assessment. But I do want to stress, since for some years this has no longer been the case, we are in danger of forgetting it, I want to stress how lonely was the path which he chose to tread from 1939 to the late '50s, when the 20th Congress and so much else beside afforded an extraordinary vindication of so much that had been part of his thought.

As was also said, it was in this recreation of history that Deutscher sought to express his own deep commitment, the consciousness that there was here need for that recreation of the meaning, the essence, the character, the reality, the truth of the socialist heritage, which is our heritage. And it is

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significant, I find moving, the thought which Karol expressed, that just as in the Soviet Russia of the 1940s it was impossible to get through to the truth of the regime, even though being part of it, perhaps because being part of it, it took a later exile to discover that truth, the hypotheses which lead to the discovery of that truth. So I find it moving, in a vindication in our sorrow, that almost 20 years later, when Karol returns from Cuba, he finds there a profound concern with the experience of the revolution and the post-revolutionary years. As he was telling me a little earlier today, Castro and his colleagues argue late in the night about the meaning and reality of Brest-Litovsk, since it is part of an experience which revolutionaries there and everywhere are seeking to integrate. In that attempt at integration, Deutscher's work must obviously play a preeminent part.

And then there is also what I found in my association with him, that extraordinary, vibrant, call it revolutionary, optimism. Not the optimism of blind faith, but the optimism of measured scholarly reflection on the vast currents and sweeps of history, of our present condition. An optimism which admitted errors and difficulties and trials and disappointments and disillusions, but which yet, throughout, despite the frustrations, came through, expressed itself as a living faith, as a belief in the possibility of human emancipation. And I'm glad that in the last years he was again making contact, in a personal and important way, with a whole variety of groupings, new generations of socialists, who were seeing him as they saw no one else of his generation, as an interpreter of a past which they had to reintegrate, as an interpreter too of a present which they wanted both to understand and to fight. And it is so significant to my mind that when those American students sought to express their witness against the barbarism of Vietnam in 1965 and '66, they should have called upon him, as they called upon no other European socialist of his generation, to come and address them and share in their protest against the war.

It is good that there was this rediscovery by him, finding of this new generation, of which he was justly proud, his consciousness that he was, through his work, part of that new generation, of that new hope, a vindication of the long years of lonely travail, a justification, too, of that optimism through the dark and bitter years. Ultimately, as Lawrence says, there remains the work, the inspiration of the work, the teaching, the scholarship. But for those of us who see him as one of us, a mentor, a friend, who accept him as an inspiration, for all of us who feel that in our lives he has contributed, shaped, made easier our attunement to the tasks and the challenge of this epoch, there is surely also the one thing which, beyond all else, he would have wanted, beyond the tributes, beyond the eulogies, beyond the celebrations. There is the one thing that remains and which he would have wanted to have pointed to specifically and directly, and that is a commitment to go and do likewise in our own ways, wherever we may be situated, to bear witness, as he bore witness, against the new barbarism and for the hopes of tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed for attending this meeting.