This view of history as a perpetual struggle fostered Soviet ruthlessness, for ‘to
adjust yourself to the movement of history you must carry out the tasks before you without
flinching’. Seeing history as consisting of the conflict between classes, with themselves as
history’s ultimate winners, the Soviet leaders regarded individuals as soldiers in an army,
and other, non-Communist nations as necessarily antagonists in a death-struggle.
struggle went on within the state as well as internationally, and justified the unlimited and
unhesitating use of the coercive apparatus of the State. For Communists the state was like a
‘pistol wrested from the grasp of the enemy but not to be thrown away until it has been
used to shoot the enemy. So long as enemies occur anywhere no holds are barred. There is
no argument against suppression, deception and violence except the right to be free of such
treatment. But history does not confer such rights equally on victors and vanquished’
Here the true meaning of ‘realism’ becomes apparent. To be a ‘realist’ was to
recognise the true course of history, and that which following this course demanded. And
politics was – and should be –the control, the exploitation, if need be the crushing and
silencing, of the ‘unrealistic’ by the ‘realistic’, the blind by those who truly saw. At the
same time, the belief that one possessed knowledge of ‘the Truth’ actually gave rise to a
dogmatism, a ‘sovereign contempt for history and empirical evidence’ and imperviousness
to criticism and doubt, which blinded such self-avowed ‘realists’ to truth.
respect for reality of revolutionary fanaticism set the stage for, and gave way to, the cynical
contempt for truth of Stalinism. If one knew the ‘truth’ about what was necessary and right
The Soviet Impact on the Western World (London: Macmillan, 1946), 92-5.
62
Berlin, untitled and undated talk (probably delivered late 1940s), MS IB 599, 12-13.
63
‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’, 3.
64
‘Soviet Russian Culture’, 153-5.
25
Convention