LITMIR.BIZ

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who opposed the regime.

      This does not mean a totally negative attitude toward religion. In the early stages of human development, when the general level of knowledge was low, religious attitudes, which were presented as having a divine origin, suppressed barbarism in human relations and contributed to the establishment of at least some order. But times are changing, and religious organizations are increasingly playing a negative role. Although some positive elements in terms of preaching to do good remain, they can be replaced by rational education and, at the same time, by eliminating the damage caused by religious institutes.

      The experience of “building communism” clearly showed that using state levers, as before religious levers, to “educate the new man” was counterproductive. As soon as people began to be evaluated by party organizations and labor collectives, not by their actual labor achievements, but by their “moral character,” the proclaimed principle of the socialist state “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work” was violated. As a result, people felt the obvious injustice of the whole system, which freed them from the need to act justly themselves, which in turn led to widespread deviation from both proclaimed moral requirements and the demands of the law, ultimately leading to the collapse of the entire system.

      The collapse accelerated precisely when the command and administration system that formed the backbone of socialism began to transfer real powers to labor collectives within which everything was decided absolutely by personal relationships based on the observance of group morality. The first scientific study, which I actually supervised, concerning sociological problems of production brigades at the Shchelkovsky Pumping Plant in Moscow Region in 1968, showed that the alleged advantage of granting rights to such brigades was in fact an absolute nonsense, because workers distributed wages equally, without any connection with the real achievements of each – “so not to offend anyone”. I must confess that I, and probably others who came to similar conclusions, did not try to emphasize them, because it undermined the slogans of the CPSU (Communist Party of The Soviet Union). And any speeches against the general line not only had no chance of success, but were fraught with danger for their authors. Later, however, a group of comrades submitted to K. U. Chernenko, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, my proposal to include in the CPSU Program an item on combating groupocracy (my term), which was the basis of the corruption that increasingly flourished in Soviet society and eventually ruined it. K. U. Chernenko included this clause in the draft of the Program, but he was already suffering from the consequences of fish poisoning after eating a fish given to him as a “gift” by Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs V. V. Fedorchuk, and after a while he passed away. The new General Secretary M. S. Gorbachev deleted it…

      More generally, what is needed is a departure in principle from the standards of behavior that have spilled over from tsarist Russia into the pseudo-socialist Soviet Union and also proved characteristic of Hitler’s Germany. In the remarkable preface to Sebastian Haffner’s book, The Meaning of Hitler. Politics of Crime (Anmerkungen zu Hitler), the translator Nikita Eliseev writes: “I swear, if schools in Russia still teach “Taras Bulba”, then after the passionate monologue of the son-killer Taras, I would advise teachers to acquaint teenagers with this text (from another book by S. Haffner, Defying Hitler (Geschichte eines Deutschen), (this is about Hitler’s “military training camps” – Evgeniy Belilovsky) “It is indubitable that a certain kind of happiness thrives in such camps, it is the happiness of comradeship. It was a pleasure to go for a cross-country run together in the morning, and then to go naked into the communal hot showers together, to share the parcels that one or other received from home, to share too the responsibility for misdemeanors that one of your comrades had committed, to help and support one another in a thousand little ways. We trusted one another without reserve in all the actions of the day, and had boyish battles and fights. We were all the same. We floated in a great comforting stream of mutual reliance and gruff familiarity… I, for my part, do not wish to deny it. And yet I know for certain, and emphatically assert, that this very comradeship can become the means for the most terrible dehumanization – and that it has become just that in the hands of the Nazis”. This happened because, according to S. Haffner,

      “Comradeship is part of war. Like alcohol, it is one of the great comforters and helpers for people who have to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions… If it is separated from these, if it is exercised only for pleasure and intoxication, for its own sake, it becomes a vice. It makes no difference that it brings a certain happiness. It corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium. It makes them unfit for normal, responsible civilian life”.

      This applies not only to Hitlerism, but to the Hitler-Stalinist model of socialism in general. S. Haffner recalls, “Hitler himself called it the “socialization of people. Why should we need all that – socialization of banks and factories” he had said to Rauschning. “What does it matter once I have the people firmly fitted into a discipline from which they cannot escape – we are socializing the people”. And then S. Haffner, who wrote this book during the period of mature socialism, points out: “Surely it is an interesting point that none of the present socialist states confined themselves to the socialization of the means of production. They expended a great deal of effort on also “socializing the people” in other words organizing them collectively, as far as possible, from the cradle to the grave, pressing them into a collective “socialist” way of life, “firmly fitted into a discipline from which they can no longer escape”. Further on, S. Haffner provides practical examples of the similarities between the way of life in the Third Reich and East Germany, which was part of the Soviet bloc.

      S. Haffner does not stipulate it clearly enough, but it is necessary to stipulate: it is not the collectivism in general that should be condemned, but the forced collectivism, participation in the collective and submission to its will, regardless of the goal set by the collective and even more so the one set for it from above. Comradeship and collective interaction, as such, if aimed at good ends, cannot but be welcomed: man is a social being, and such comradeship is especially important amidst a common trouble: war, epidemic, etc.

      However, the existence of collective associations opposing other associations and collective mutual assistance in their ranks undermines the unity of the population of any state and can become a threat to the existence of both the state and the members of these associations. It is precisely the responsibility of every Jew for every other Jew, as stipulated by Judaism, was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust: the criminal actions of Jewish bankers during the global economic crisis were in fact one of the causes of the tragedy of the German people, and according to the above-mentioned doctrine of Judaism all Jews had to answer for it, and they did, right up to Auschwitz. Something similar happens in the U.S. with respect to black people: they became united in their defense of “their” criminals, who are often treated too harshly by the police, sometimes killing those who show even the slightest resistance – without any condemnation of the criminals themselves; this creates an image in certain layers of society of the black population as a criminal community, which reinforces the racism which in turn motivates the unjustifiable brutality of the police – such a vicious circle. The only way out of this vicious circle is to consider people as individuals and to strongly discourage any consideration of particular group associations and the activities of those associations in defending “their own” against “outsiders.

      In general terms, the main vice of all systems is the very division of humanity into large and small, groups struggling with each other, from nations and classes to teenage gangs. The United States has become the most advanced country in the world precisely because it has overcome this division to the greatest extent. But in the U.S., too, there is an increasing confrontation among different parts of society. If previously there were vestiges of slavery, then after they were successfully overcome, began a shift in the other direction – they began to establish mandatory quotas for members of certain groups, etc. However –

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