Karol's vivid, anecdotal and personal account of his experiences in the Soviet Union during the war is of considerable value in giving insights into one of the great outstanding issues of the historiography of the war: the roots of the resiliences of the Soviet Union in the face of the Nazi onslaught.
Karol, a Polish Jew with family in the Soviet Union, finds himself in Siberia when Poland is partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. He escapes and makes his way to his relatives in Moscow who succeed in getting him to the town of Rostov on Don rom where his family came. Here he resumes his schooling, is renamed 'Solik' (little salt) and joins the Komsomol. As a young party cadre, when the war comes he becomes a political commissar in the air force and in this role we follow him, and his companions through the vicissitudes of the early years of military disaster and revival, from Rostov to the Caucasus. The backbone of the book consists of the adventures of this group of young defenders of the Soviet Union, their friendships, love affairs, aspirations — and makeshift arrangements for dealing with day to day problems.
However across this picture of conscious and committed effort in the face of immense difficulties falls the shadow of the terror. Solik, from the start of his time in Rostov, has to conceal his family identity and recent history, and on 10 December 1942 catastrophe strikes. Solik's past catches up with him (although the reasons for his arrest is never completely clear) and he is dispatched into another, parallel world, the world of the Gulag. This is for him an unassimable experience (it is written about in the third person) and causes a kind of inner withdrawal which persists after his release. The latter parts of the book are marked by a curious kind of split personality: on the one hand Solik continues to live his lite in the Soviet Union and gets married; on the other he plans his departure to the newly liberated Poland International No 8 January/February 1987
He has by no means abandoned a socialist perspective however. His hope is that Stalinism will be overcome through the development of healthier variants of socialist regime in the countries to the west of the Soviet Union. This strategic conception seems to have been a common one among critical communists at that time — it appears for example in the memoirs of the German Communist Wolfgang Leonhard.
Others among Solik's acquaintances have different ideas. There is Kola, who is something of a deep entrist in the CPSU; there is Chourik who hopes that 'after the war Stalin will give a new impluse to Soviet socialism and take it in another direction, more in the spirit of Lenin's State and Revolution or Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme.! These are people who have won the war and feel that they have the right to win the peace as well. Karol considers that the new wave of terror in the Soviet Union after the war was directed against the spirit of these kind of people. The pattern of the 1930s is repeated: Stalinism's counter-revolutionary role in the capitalist world is complemented by a smashing attack on the political vanguard in the Soviet Union War •
itself. The book ends as Karol leaves for Poland where he 'would be able to contribute (his) building block to the construction of this freer and more just society, the dream of which we shared.'
This dream, of course, was to be terminated by a brutal awakening. And Karol writes about his aspirations of that time from a distance. He maintains his objectivity and freshness of vision through the device of writing not about himself but "Solik" — the nickname given him in his Soviet high school on account of the non-socialist associations of Karol (Polish for King). Apart from its function as a facilitating device however the creation of several characters in one -there is Karol himself Solik and then again the 'Pojarnik', the inmate of the Gulag - also reflects the fragmentation of personal history consequent on the shattering experiences of the times. It also reflects the organised hypocrisy of Stalinised Soviet society itself: on the one hand a planned economy, on the other everywhere black market dealings; on the one hand equality, on the other institutional privilege; on the one hand socialist internationalism, on the other virulent nationalism.
This latter aspect is of vital importance to Karol. As he says 'I would not have found it possible to love Klava, nor to feel so attached to my friends, had they shown any nostalgia for a Greater pan-Slavic Russia or to the values that derive from it. On the contrary, they too believed in equality and freedom, in the incessant quest of men and women tor the right to determine their lives, their fate.'
Stalin, however employed this repulsive pan-slavic ideology as an explanation and justification of Soviet war aims. Nationalism and xenophobia allowed — and allow — the Soviet leadership to make themselves understood in the thought world of leaders of imperialist states and creates a language which can even be shared with retired MajorGenerals in Surrey. This popular front has a wide and long reach; the blurb on the back quotes John Berger to the effect that Karol has provided us with a "true book" about, inter alia, a "people's soul". But this is not true; it is about the hearts and minds of internationalist-minded individual poeple and it is this spirit of authentic humanism which will make the book - whatever the contemporary political orientation of the author — so attractive to adherents of Trotskyism, the single organised political current which defended an internationalist humanist outlook throughout the Second World
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Alan Turing Free mind versus national asset JUDITH ARKWRIGHT BREAKING THE CODE (currently showing at the Haymarket and starring Derek Jacobi) tells the story of Alan Turing mathematician and intellectual parent of the digital computer who, working for British intelligence at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, broke the all important German enigma code. This was the plan for a German invasion.
For this achievement