In this extract from his unfinished autobiography, Joe Slovo recalls the reaction in the SACP to news of Stalin’s excesses
WE HAD always been taught that the Party was the vanguard of the struggle. But it was the 1950s which gave real meaning to this maxim in revolutionary practice. The central committee (to which Ruth First was elected at an underground conference in the late 1950s) through its Johannesburg-based secretariat, often functioned on an almost daily basis. There was no major event which was not subjected to analytical scrutiny. Long before any of the campaigns waned, the question of “what next” had already been the subject matter of many agendas. And we established our position in the liberation movement by persuasion and example — not, as our detractors allege, by caucus and manipulation.
Despite the post-1953 underground conditions, we continued to practise a good measure of internal Party democracy. The rank and file had the opportunity of debating major policy statements before they were finally adopted by the central committee. The leadership was re-elected at least once every two years at conferences attended by delegates from every district and who outnumbered members of the central committee.
An election system was devised which was designed to achieve a balance between the often contradictory requirements of security and democracy. Every delegate was asked to fill in a blank ballot form with the names of those he wished to see constitute the central committee. The ballot forms were then handed to the general secretary and chairman, whose election had already taken place.
These officials, with two others who had received the most votes (and those names were announced), were given a mandate by the conference to constitute the balance of the central committee (whose names were not announced). In doing so they were not to interfere with the actual voting preferences expressed by the delegates except for reasons of security and to ensure an adequate degree of regional representation. In practice, it was very rare to exclude a candidate who had received the necessary number of votes.
Yet, despite the collectivist and democratic traditions which were maintained even in such adverse conditions, the Party did not go through the turmoil which was experienced by so many others in the wake of the revelations by Krushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The initial response was one of complete incredulity: was it possible that a man whom we had revered as the greatest apostle of Lenin was guilty of such horrendous crimes? And was it conceivable that he could perpetrate the crimes in the name of a party whose revolutionary achievements had no equal in the 20th century? Yet the impossible and the inconceivable had happened!
Individual reactions to the revelations varied; to this day some of my comrades believe that the version of the Krushchev speech published in The Observer is a forgery. But, possibly because of the quick succession of crisis events which followed Krushchev’s February 1956 speech (the treason arrests and the four-year trial, Sharpeville in 1960, the turn to violence in 1961 and the Rivonia disaster in 1963), the Party did not pause to weigh up the lessons of what has been described as the “Stalin period” and the “Mao period” which followed
I believe that the perversion of socialist norms which characterised both “periods” has put back the clock of socialist achievement on a world scale for half a century or more. Perhaps, unavoidably, we talk of “Stalinism” and “Maoism” to describe these perversions, and the very nomenclature hints at purely individual responsibility. But if we throw our first batch of stones at these sinners only, we are ignoring an inquiry into a social process of which they must have been instruments. By attributing to these two leaders a monopoly of sin, we are also perpetuating cultism. No cult (whether of the personality or otherwise) has ever left its mark on history without the blind devotion of congregations of worshippers. We all share in the guilt and the starting-point of any assessment must be ourselves.
We know that our ideology and the form of our Leninist Party structures do not, in themselves, protect us against the terrible abuse of power and the exercise of tyranny in office. We must no longer behave as if it is impossible or inconceivable, and in this way will help to make it so. And since the only value of our judgment on the unhappy period is to assure the future (and not to pronounce a posthumous sentence on the two accused), we should not, as is often done, dilute the lesson by balancing out the good deeds against crimes. At the same time, those who maintain that collective forms of society must inevitably breed such perversions, ignore ignorantly or deliberately not only the achievements of the class which built on the foundations of October 1917, but also the strides which have been made since 1956 to restore socialist morality.
Both Ruth and I lost our innocence in the period that followed the 20th Congress revelations. She was perhaps a little more unforgiving about our complicity than I was and, surrounded by the pressures of her colleagues in English universities, she searched for the answers more avidly than I did. In some ways she risked the worst of two worlds. Her continuing membership of our Party and involvement in its work (despite reservations about many of its foreign policy postures) put her outside the circle of those who were so shaken by the Stalinist experience that they turned complete tail on socialism and the socialist world system.
On the other hand, there were those in our movement who viewed with suspicion her insistence that it is not treason to socialism if our independent judgment leads us to disagree with this or that policy of traditional and respected friends of our struggle. Ruth and I often differed in our individual assessments of these policies and, as many of our friends can testify, we gave one another no quarter in these often-ferocious verbal contests. Even if she was wrong on some of her positions (as I believe her to have been), Ruth’s kind of “deviationism” is an important obstacle to the resurgence of blind cult worship (whether of an individual, a party or a state) in the socialist