Betrayal Of An Ideal

323 Pages·2015·13.174 MB·English

by  G A Tokaev

BETRAYAL
OF
AN IDEAL
>
INTRODUCTION BY
SIR DAVID KELLY
HARVILL
-
To the memory of my friends
and comrades who died victims
of the Soviet police-state terror.
G. A. Tokaev, Moscow, January, 1943
BETRAYAL
OF
AN IDEAL
By
G. A. TOKAEV
With an Introduction by
SIR DAVID KELLY, G.G.M.G.
LONDON: THE HARVILL PRESS
This is Part I of the Memoirs of
G. A. TOKAEV
Translated from the Russian by
ALEC BROWN
All rights reserved
Printed by The Thanet Press
Union Crescent, Margate
Published by The Harvill Press
23 Lower Belgrave St., London S.W.l
1954
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction by Sir David Kelly . . . . ix
1 How I came to write this book . . 1
2 “ Liberation ” of my country . . 7
3 Childhood . . 16
4 “ Our Revolution ” 25
5 Man Be Human . . 31
6 A brigand’s repentance . . . . 40
7 One man strike . . . . 49
8 Visitors from Moscow . . . . 59
9 The “ new ” morality . . . . 68
10 Loss of identity ....................................... 76
11 A Caucasian in Moscow . . . . 85
12 Leningrad . . . . . . 93
13 I become a student .. .. 100
14 First steps in the opposition . . 107
15 Moscow manners .. 117
16 Moscow the Third Rome . . 127
17 Students’ Commune . . . . 136
18 Stalin’s Counter-revolution . . 143
19 Ordzhonikidze and Alleluyeva . . . . 153
20 First clash with the Party . . 163
21 Expelled from the Party . . .. 171
22 Member of the new elite . . 178
23 The Red Air Force and the Zhukovsky
Academy ....................................... 184
24 Disciplinary arrest . . . . 195
25 Underground . . . . . . . . 203
26 Purge . . . . 213
27 Stalin’s blow against the Right . . 226
CONTENTS —continued
Page
28 Assassination of Kirov 239
29 Consequences of an anecdote . . 252
30 Special Branch treatment 265
31 Death of a revolution 277
Appendix ....................................................... 287
Index _ . . . - - - . 293
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
G. A. Tokaev. Moscow, January 1943 Frontispiece
Facing page
North Caucasian types . . 16
North Caucasian village 49
S. Ordzhonikidze, 1879-1938 .. 152
Nadezhda Alleluyeva with her daughter
Svetlana . . . . . . . . . . 152
Second Congress of the Communist
International, 1920. Lenin in the
centre, Kamenev on his left and
Zinovyev on his right, Stalin in the
background with Bukharin on his right
and Sokolnikov on his left . . . . 169
N. Bukharin, 1879-1938 ........................... 208
M. Yenukidze (shot in 1937) . . . . 208
S. M. Kirov (assassinated in 1934) . . 241
G. Yagoda, 1891-1938 ........................... 241
INTRODUCTION
Colonel Tokaev is the most distinguished of the “Defectors” who
have sought refuge in the West. In this first volume of his auto-
biography he describes, with a direct simplicity reminiscent of
Defoe, his life up to the great “Clean-up” of 1935; and it contains
the most vivid and illuminating picture from the inside of the first
great stage of the Revolution, which has yet been published. There
are two outstanding reasons for this. On the one hand, Colonel
Tokaev spent two years in the Pioneers, six in the Comsomol,
sixteen years as a Party member; was a member of the Officer Corps
of the Armed Forces for fifteen years; and for eleven of them was a
leading Party member and a senior reader at a Moscow Air Academy
of University rank. On the other hand, he was not a Russian, but a
North Caucasian of the Ossetian national minority, born to the full
tradition of a proud independent Patriarchal peasant culture. The
book is pervaded by his own personality, which differs by a whole
world from that of the normal Russian of the great plains, descended
from Serfs and the heir to six centuries of submission to almost
uninhibited despotism. While therefore he became at an early age
an ardent disciple of the Revolution of 1917—and still is—he never
really fitted into it, could never drift into the passive uncritical
acceptance of the new tendencies which transformed it into the
monolithic hierarchic Empire of Stalin. The conflict of the young
idealist’s personality with the hard facts of Soviet life in the twenties
and thirties is real drama, and this dramatic element springs out in
the framework of the simple narrative style and photographic
memory of the author in a way that no literary artifice or straining
for effect, no editorial or journalistic “touching-up”, could achieve.
There is never a false or suspicious note, and indeed the reader is
often reminded, especially in the dialogues, of the best passages in
some of the classic Russian novelists.
Drama came to the author in early childhood, for he lived through
the years of terror in the Caucasus created by the disintegrating
White Guards, and the early chapters hold their own with any
LX
x INTRODUCTION
thrillers that have ever been written, a breathless tale of adventure
and savagery, villainy and heroism. It was this experience which
made him and his brothers, heirs to a tradition of national revolt
against Russia, embrace nevertheless the Russian Revolution in a
spirit of total idealism. The proudest moment of his life was when
he became the star local tractor-driver, while on either end of his
single wooden table were stacked Tolstoy’s War and Peace,
pamphlets by Bukharin, works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin,
Pushkin, Lermontov, Arithmetical Problems, Problems in Algebra,
and the Fordson Tractor Handbook—such was the library of a village
boy of seventeen who had grown up in conditions fully as bad as
those of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. “My education con-
sisted of scenes of bloodshed, degradation, violence and rape.” One
of the queerest, yet most Russian episodes of this early life, is the
story of the White Guard Officer Denisov, who after years of
fantastic savagery—especially at the expense of the Tokaev family—
kidnapped young Tokaev, hoping to use him as an intermediary to
secure his forgiveness and devote himself to preaching and leading
an exemplary moral life—and in fact deliberately surrendered when
there .was no need to.
Tokaev, having survived his first clash with authority when he
was sacked from his Union for insubordination, set off with a
scholarship at Leningrad. At the beginning of his journey he lost all
his papers, money, boots and spare clothes in the train, and his
experiences as a homeless comrade without money or identity papers
were his first disillusionment. The story of his journey to Leningrad
and final establishment there, of his attempt to enter the Kremlin
and see Stalin, would make an admirable film—a perfect tale of the
simple village idealist at cross purposes with Urban authority, first
astonished and then recklessly angry when his word of honour was
not accepted.
This volume is packed with personal incident recorded with stark,
vivid simplicity, including his first love affair with the Trotskyite
girl from Moscow who momentarily overcame his “bourgeois
prejudices” only to reap a whirlwind of rather priggish abuse (“You
are a fool,” she said, “I’ve not been dishonoured by anybody and
I’m not disgusting!”), but years later turned up miraculously when
he was desperately ill in hospital. But all the incidents are beads
strung on one main theme—the betrayal of the original Proletarian
Revolution by “the Stalinist Oligarchy”. “The Revolution produced
its heroes but the Stalin counter-revolution has annihilated them.”
“The Revolutionary sword cut down the ladder of social and