A SOJOURN in STALINIST SIBERIA Ante Ciliga. the Russian

SIDNEY HOROWITZ (Long Island, NY, U.S.A.) A SOJOURN IN STALINIST SIBERIA Ante Ciliga. The Russian Enigma. Part one translated by F. Fermier and A. Cliff; Part two translated by M. and H. Dewar. London: Ink Links Limited. 1979. 573 pp. $15.95 paper. At first glance, these memoirs appear as an earlier specimen of GULag literature. From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, a plethora of anti-Soviet and later anti-Stalinist tracts poured forth ranging from reactionary polemics to those of the disillusional true believers on the left: Goldman, Eastman, Koestler and Trotskii himself, inter alia. Ciliga certainly belonged to the latter; indeed he was of the extreme left. Like so many sympathizers with the brave new Soviet republic, he decided to see the beacon of hope for himself in 1926. He arrived bearing impeccable credentials-member of the Politbureau of the Yugoslav Communist Party, secretary of the Croatian Communist Party, delegate of the Yugoslav section of the Comintern, participant of the Profintern and member of MOPR (The International Society for Aid to the Proletariat). By his own admission, the author had been a starry-eyed ideal- ist who believed in the possibility of emancipating the toiling masses and constructing a truly humane and egalitarian society. His writings display, however, a strange admixture of self-aware idealism with a baleful, cynical realism. For those like myself who lived through the years 1926-36, when he was domiciled in the USSR, it is striking that his narrative discusses every conceivable interpretation of the cataclysmic events of that decade. It analyzes nuances within nuances and renders a critical extrapolation con- cerning the teleological outcomes of the deveiopments. Ciliga and his three Yugoslav compatriots arrived in the Soviet Union in December 1926, in time to witness the last phase of the 276 internecine struggle for leadership of the CPSU. He was at once impressed by the glaring contradictions of NEP, wealth and cor- ruption in a sea of poverty and fear. He became involved with the Trotskyist left opposition to increasing bureaucracy and Party cen- tralism. Travelling extensively as an honored guest of the Comintern, he noted that in Georgia social differences were wider than before the October Revolution. His criticism of the "new class" or Party apparachiks, specialists and the secret police already in the saddle anticipated Djilas' similar indictment of the Yugoslav Communist Party by three decades. It was also clear that the Comintern, while receiving lip service from the Soviet government, was being converted into an adjunct of Soviet national interests rather than a genuine organ of world revolution. During his years of civil liberty, at times he resided in the Party House in Leningrad, along with highest Party bosses there, Kirov and Komarov. Ciliga taught in technical institutes and the worker's factory schools in order to observe both the treatment and attitude of ordinary people. With reckless candor he became an overt, acerbic critic of the Stalinist hegemony, attending the last desperate street demonstrations by Trotskyists and the other opposition to arrest Stalin's control of the Party's machinery and poli- cies. One might state that he and his friends were almost asking for their arrest and detention, a denouement rendered inevitable as Stalin consolidated his power. The author interpreted the actuation of the first Five Year Plan as a Party struggle against the workers and peasants camouflaged under the slogans of the 1918-20 period of War Communism. "The Revolution of 1928 cost those who were being directed unbelievable suffering, that is they were just an in- strument. The toiling masses saw themselves more and more riv- eted to the condition of slaves and mercenaries of a capitalism that was no longer private but belonged to the state and a new caste." The author and five fellow conspirators' bungled an inept attempt to slip out of the "worker's paradise." He admits to a half conscious desire to do time in Siberia, where he could observe "this vast and fierce country" even as a political exile. On May 31, 1930 he was deported to Verkhne Uralsk for a three-year sentence to begin "his sojourn in Dante's Inferno," but in this case the hell was the icy permafrost taigac of Siberia. He would spend an additional two and a half years in Irkutsk, Krasnoiarsk and Eniseisk, but always as a political prisoner. It is interesting that as under the tsars' Siberian system, the political prisoners were accorded considerably more latitude, at least before 1935, .

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