A Workers' Paradise? Not Exactly

The communists of Eastern Europe did not win over the support of artists by terror alone. They also seduced them.

On my last day in Poland, I stopped by the National Gallery in Warsaw. The Gallery is a story in itself: built in the 1930s, destroyed by the Germans, badly rebuilt by the communists, now under restoration with European Union funds. The collection was looted and what remains is heavy with socialist realist works now too embarrassing to show. About two dozen of these depressing canvases were mounted in the gallery's modern wing with an apologetic little introduction, inviting visitors to regard them as representatives of their times.

A couple of the paintings revealed saving graces of irony. One, "The Stakhanovite," (a reference to a Soviet miner celebrated as a hero for over-producing his coal targets) shows a grim-faced woman cheerlessly selling a fish. Another portrays a charwoman squarely facing the viewer, clutching a little pamphlet titled "Matisse."

The day before visiting the gallery, I'd finished a re-read of Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind. Published in 1953, the book by the future Nobelist painstakingly analyzed the process by which artists - writers in this case - were led to cooperate with communism. More than half a century later, the book still strikes fire, a tribute to Milosz's fearful gift for compressing vast horror into a single unforgettable image.

Often, as I am sitting on the terrace of a Paris cafe or walking through the streets of a large city, I succumb to a certain obsession. I look at the women who pass, at their luxuriant hair, their proudly lifted chins, their slender throats whose lines awaken delight and desire -- and then I see before my eyes always the same young Jewish girl. She was probably about twenty years old. Her body was full, splendid, exultant. She was running down the street, her hands raised, her chest thrust forward. She cried piercingly, "No! No! No!" The necessity to die was beyond her comprehension -- a necessity that came from outside, having nothing in common with her unprepared body. The bullets of the SS guards' automatic pistols reached her in cry.

The moment when bullets pierce the flesh is a moment of amazement for the body. Life and death mingle for a second, before a bloody rag falls to the pavement and is kicked aside by an SS boot.

I want to focus here on just one of those sparks.

As brilliant as Milosz's observations are, they are not infallibly prophetic. Writing in the 1950s about the generation that came of age in the 1930s, Milosz describes communism as a vicious but nevertheless hypnotically attractive intellectual system. The communists did not win artists by terror alone. They also seduced them. It was this seduction that fascinated Milosz, and his book set out to analyze the process by which it occurred. One important element of the seduction process: the removal of hope for anything better. Communism was the future, like it or not - so you'd better like it.

Here's the arresting thing: Milosz in 1953 is not sure that communism isn't the future. OK, maybe it's not the future for the United States. But for the rest of Europe? What else is there? The old 19th century bourgeois way of life had been swept away. Religion is dead or dying. American consumerism with its promises of refrigerators and automobiles seemed tawdry and anyway beyond the reach of impoverished Europe. What would human beings live for?

Except it turned out that communism was not the future. Its ability to appeal to the mind was fading even as Milosz wrote. As a system of power, communism collapsed within Milosz's own lifetime, a lifetime already halfway spent as of 1953. As a system of belief, it had died long before. And consumerism? Consumerism proved not only unexpectedly successful, but unexpectedly inspiring. Maybe consumerism not a cause to live for. But draw a line through the middle of Europe. On one side of the line pile comfortable apartments, well-made clothes, attractive public spaces, functioning cars, fresh food, tropic vacations, and the newest electronics. On the other side, deprive people of everything except the knowledge of what their neighbors now possess. In that case, consumerism becomes an overpowering revolutionary force on the impoverished side of the line, and the bulwark of the status quo on the abundant side. Communism in Europe was wrecked by many things of course, and indeed some of them anticipated by Milosz. But for all his vision, Milosz did not anticipate the subversive power of the East's inability to provide its population with bananas in winter.

Reading Milosz, the mind inevitably turns to radical Islam, our own century's version of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. Milosz's example should teach us to be humble about our predictive power. Surely this story too will end in ways very difficult to foresee. But Milosz at least can offer some confidence: the story will end. Lies fail. The human spirit does assert itself, even against overwhelming odds, in the most unexpected places and ways. As Milosz powerfully observes in The Captive Mind: "A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt."