Masaryk Station (John Russell) by Downing David

Author:Downing, David [Downing, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781616952228
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2013-06-18T05:00:00+00:00

At the Rugen Island conference centre, the morning’s topic was ‘Material Incentives: For and Against.’ It was, Ströhm thought, in many ways the crucial issue. Workers were accustomed to working for money, and deciding how hard or enthusiastically they would work according to how much they were paid, so the Party couldn’t hope to do away with material incentives in the short run. But if socialism was the goal, then a start had to be made in weaning the workers away from this way of thinking—seeds had to be sown. The question was how.

No satisfactory answers emerged, but the discussion itself was fruitful, perhaps even hopeful. Which was more than could be said for the afternoon session on ‘Central Planning and the Political Process’. This seminar made Ströhm profoundly uneasy; the subheading could have been ‘Managing the People’. All in their own interest, of course. The Party always knew best, after all. It had the information, the statistics—it knew what was actually possible and what was reckless utopianism. The latter was an enduring curse—offering what couldn’t be delivered would, in the long run, lead to mass unhappiness and unrest.

The responsibility for such decisions could only be borne by the Party. An over-reliance on democratic procedures would open the door to a bourgeois resurgence, with all that that implied. The workers would again be seduced by the one big lie, that the free-for-all was fair to all, when in fact it was just a lottery, and a heavily rigged one at that.

No, they couldn’t go down that route. The Party would consult of course—no worker’s voice would go unheard—but since it alone spoke for all, it had to have the final say. There would have to be safeguards against abuses of power, but the power itself could not be questioned. Not yet.

It was a delicate balance that had to be struck and, not surprisingly, there was some disagreement as to how that should be accomplished, with some delegates arguing for more openness inside the Party, others less inclined to see the need. Ströhm was in the former camp, and might have argued his case a trifle too forcibly, for that evening, after another sumptuous dinner, he was publicly taken to task by Hans Gerstein, one of the two Central Committee members who were attending the conference.

‘You people who spent the war at home,’ Gerstein began. ‘All very heroic, no doubt, but hardly a learning experience. While you were hiding from the Gestapo, those of us lucky enough to be in Moscow were learning how to run a country. Yet here you all are, looking down your noses at us!’

He was more than a little drunk, but Ströhm could see he meant it. ‘Surely we can talk openly among ourselves?’

‘A naive point of view, Comrade Ströhm. Any divisions weaken us. Unity is everything. We must accentuate what unites us, not what divides us.’

‘If we don’t talk things through in an open manner, how can we sure we have reached the right decisions?’

Gerstein snorted.

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