Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic by David Caute

Author:David Caute [Caute, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Philosophers, Political, History, Modern, 20th Century, 16th Century
ISBN: 9780300192094
Google: wx1oM6FXs-4C
Amazon: 0300212321
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-06-24T22:00:00+00:00

Shelley remained true to the Jacobin-Republican ideal: it was as a Republican, and not as a patriot of the England of George III, that he greeted the fall of Napoleon, that ‘most unambitious slave’ who did ‘dance and revel on the grave of Liberty’. Deutscher extends his praise to those, like Jefferson and Goethe, who refused to identify themselves with either Napoleon's military despotism or the Holy Alliance, Europe's ‘hypocritical deliverers’. Deutscher clearly saw himself in this light, refusing to choose between Stalinism and the North Atlantic Alliance, stationed in his ‘watchtower’. ‘What a pity and what a shame it is that most ex-communist intellectuals are inclined to follow the tradition of Wordsworth and Coleridge rather than that of Goethe and Shelley.’7

Unlike the admirable ‘heretic’ (himself), the ‘renegade’ does not break with the Party bureaucracy in the name of true communism, he goes on to break with communism itself. ‘He no longer throws out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.’ The ex-communist renegade advances bravely in the front rank of every witch-hunt, his blind hatred leaven to the forces of reaction. ‘He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of all’, camouflaging his guilt by a show of extraordinary certitude and frantic aggressiveness. Indeed, he may be heard denouncing the mildest brand of the welfare state as ‘legislative Bolshevism’. (None of the contributors to The God That Failed did so.)

Deutscher claims that the genuine ‘heretic’ like himself ‘cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist Holy Alliance without doing violence to his better self’. Some years after Deutscher produced this essay, Leopold Labedz commented sardonically that the ‘heretic’ ‘will refrain from breaking with communism, notwithstanding the Leningrad affair, the hanging of Kostov and Rajk, the Crimean case, the Slansky trial, and the doctors' plot’. Yet, added Labedz, was it not noteworthy that this particular ‘heretic’, while suffering from an inverted apostasy complex, contrived to defend Stalin's Russia ‘in the most influential press organs of the wicked Holy Alliance’?8

Isaiah Berlin wrote to David Astor (14 May 1958), linking Deutscher with ‘other perverters of truth who squeeze the facts into iron frameworks of doctrine, against all that their hearts or consciences tell them’. It was no surprise that Deutscher regarded Koestler, Borkenau and other ‘renegades’ as behaving ‘indecently in attacking their old gods’. Deutscher might have a quarrel within the Communist Party, but he totally rejected the Western world. Not a single idea could be found in his articles since Stalin's death that ‘a Russian Communist could radically dissent from’.9

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