Principles and Heresies

There is, if I read the signs aright, great danger that, as we view the dramatic spectacle of the devaluation of Stalin and speculate about the motivations and inner-power struggles involved in it, we shall speculate about everything but the substance of the matter and ask every question but the serious one. That question is the one Communists themselves always address to developments of importance: what is the objective historical meaning of these events?

To guide us in finding the answer, there exists a primary set of data, but one which the “experts” seem systematically to ignore. This is the fifty years history of the politics of the Bolshevik Party. That party, under the Czar, in revolution, and in power, steadily, if not unerringly, has pursued a policy and has more than half achieved a goal, World Communism, always guided by a basic philosophy and a methodology of strategy and tactics — Marxism-Leninism. Protean though its expressions, it has remained in the minds of those who hold it monolithic in its essence. Those who died, denigrated in the purges of the thirties, were inspired by it no less and no more than their master executioner (this is the great insight of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon).

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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There is, if I read the signs aright, great danger that, as we view the dramatic spectacle of the devaluation of Stalin and speculate about the motivations and inner-power struggles involved in it, we shall speculate about everything but the substance of the matter and ask every question but the serious one. That question is the one Communists themselves always address to developments of importance: what is the objective historical meaning of these events?

To guide us in finding the answer, there exists a primary set of data, but one which the “experts” seem systematically to ignore. This is the fifty years history of the politics of the Bolshevik Party. That party, under the Czar, in revolution, and in power, steadily, if not unerringly, has pursued a policy and has more than half achieved a goal, World Communism, always guided by a basic philosophy and a methodology of strategy and tactics — Marxism-Leninism. Protean though its expressions, it has remained in the minds of those who hold it monolithic in its essence. Those who died, denigrated in the purges of the thirties, were inspired by it no less and no more than their master executioner (this is the great insight of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon).