Max Shachtman
Balabanoff's Memoirs
Source: The New International: A Monthly Organ of Revolutionary Marxism Vol 4,
No. 11, November, 1938. Pg. 348-350.
The memoirs of Angelica Balabanoff make up a sad book. Not because, like so many
of her contemporaries in the radical movement, she has lost interest in the
struggle or her socialist convictions, for she ends her recollections with a
staunch re-affirmation of her ideals. "My belief in the necessity for the social
changes advocated by that [international labor] movement and for the realization
of its ideals has never been more complete than it is now when victory seems so
remote....The experience of over forty years has only intensified my socialist
convictions, and if I had my life to live over again, I would dedicate it to the
same objective." It is a sad book because it reveals that for all the
passionately revolutionary spirit that animated her in four decades of activity
in the working class movement, she did not succeed in mastering the simple
lesson that Lenin tried to teach her friend Serrati at the Second Congress of
the Comintern in 1920:
Comrade Serrati said: we have not yet invented a sincerometre -- this is a new
French word which means an instrument for measuring sincerity -- such an
instrument has not yet been invented. We do not even need such an instrument,
but we already do have an instrument for judging tendencies. It is a mistake on
comrade Serrati's part -- I should like to speak about this later -- that he did
not apply this long familiar instrument.
It is such a failure -- or inability? -- to replace subjective judgments, based
on trifling personal incidents, by political judgments, that brought her own
political life of the last two decades particularly to such a tragically futile
conclusion. The same failure results in a deep discoloration of the pages of her
memoirs.
Rebellious daughter of a wealthy and reactionary Russian family, she left her
native Ukraine for Western Europe to take up studies which soon led her into
active participation in the socialist movement. Moved by a genuine compassion
for the exploited and oppressed, and a powerful spirit of indignation at all
iniquity, she became, after joining the pre-war Italian Socialist Party, one of
its most stirring and popular agitators. Her teachers, friends and associates
were the Old Guard of Italian socialism -- Antonio Labriola, Turati, Treves,
Modigliani, Lazzari, and later, Serrati and Mussolini. Of the last-named, then a
neurotic bitter young exile in Switzerland, she became the patron, nursing him
politically into leading positions in the party, until he became a member of the
Central Committee and editor of the official organ, Avanti! Her pictures of the
later Duce, of his timorousness and braggadocio, his characterlessness and
inspired mediocrity, are savage and telling.
Master of several languages -- she was a talented translator at international
assemblies -- and associate of the internationalist left wing which, with
Mussolini as its spokesman, effected the expulsion from the party of the
patriots in the period of the Tripolitan war of 1912, she became, when the World
War broke out, a central figure in the movement to reconstruct the collapsed
Second International. The Zimmerwald and Kienthal anti-war conferences of the
internationalist socialists -- she was secretary of the Zimmerwald International
Socialist Commission from its inception --were to a large extent due to her
persevering work. She joined the Bolsheviks on the eve of the revolution and in
1919 was chosen by them as first secretary of the Communist International. She
broke with the Comintern, and sided with the Serrati wing of the Italian
Socialist Party, when the latter refused to adopt the famous "21 points" and to
break with the reformists of the Turati-Treves-Modigliani group. For the last 15
or more years, she has been the leader of that tiny fraction of Italian
socialism which embraces all that is left of the once mighty "Maximalist" group,
which its real leader, Serrati, abandoned before his death to rejoin the
Communist International.
Her break with Lenin and the Bolsheviks -- her estimate of them forms, next to
her evaluation of Mussolini, the bitterest part of her volume of portraits and
judgments -- was inevitable; and the reason why remains, to her, uncomprehended
down to the present day. There lies the nub of the tragedy of her political life
and of her book. The torrential sweep of the Russian revolution sucked her into
the Bolshevik party, but only for a brief period of time. Looking back upon it
in 1938, and sitting in lofty judgment on the Bolsheviks, she explains the
collapse of the Third International by the moral leprosy of Zinoviev -- symbol
of all that to her was inherently vicious in Bolshevism; the degeneration
reflected in the recent trials "was developed under Zinoviev himself" and the
frame-ups and confessions "were implicit in the development of the Bolshevik
method, the Leninist strategy, since the Revolution ... the Bolshevik leaders
were capable of anything to achieve their own political and factional ends... ."
Both the analysis and verdict have already served as the pathetic theme for
reviews of the book in the petty bourgeois press, in which the dastardly
immorality of the Bolsheviks is sanctimoniously and invidiously contrasted with
what Professor Douglas calls the "fundamental sincerity" of Balabanoff, "one who
believes that the means as well as the ends of economic action are important".
The explanation lies, however, elsewhere. Balabanoff's book is astoundingly
devoid of political characterizations; it is filled with pictures of good men
and bad men, honest men and crooks, blunderers and seers; and after the
narration of all her experiences in various groups and movements, Balabanoff
terminates her book without informing the reader of what are her specific
political program and her political associations. Yet, while she does not apply
political criteria to herself, it does not follow that such criteria are not
applicable to her.
In international socialist politics, Balabanoff never was a communist but rather
a representative of that wing of Menshevism led by Julius Martov. Its chief
characteristic was a strong literary radicalism, which sometimes went so far as
to bring it into peripheral touch with Lenin's thoroughgoing Marxism, but which
rarely went so far as application in political life. The leaders of radical
centrism could characterize the right wing with no lesser accuracy than did the
Bolsheviks, but unlike the latter, who took seriously the proletarian revolution
and the politics and methods leading to it, they could not bring themselves to a
radical suspension of collaboration with the right wing. That is why even the
most radical of Mensheviks, Martov, could "agree 95 percent" with the
Bolsheviks, yet tax them with being "professional splitters", and devote 95
percent of his blows at Lenin and 5 percent at the right wing with which he
scarcely agreed at all.
This is the reason -- Balabanoff is not Martov, to be sure, but she suffers from
the same political malady -- why she could not remain in the Comintern, and not
the intrigues, real or alleged, of Zinoviev. It is also the reason why her
memoirs, even where they deal with personalities -- and they deal with little
else -- are, with all respect to Professor Douglas' talk about "fundamental
sincerity", hopelessly onesided, splotched and distorted beyond balance and
proportion. All the Bolsheviks are limned with splashes of black, shading off
into blotches of mud; the social democrats, as a rule, are painted in nostalgic
pastels.
Knowing his notorious weaknesses, one cannot be the advocate of Zinoviev; yet,
throughout the early period of the Russian Revolution and the Comintern, he was
the man, next to Lenin and Trotsky, who restored revolutionary Marxism to its
rightful place in the world labor movement and who helped train up a whole
generation-not excluding Balabanoff, for a time! -- in its principles and
traditions. Yet he emerges from her memoirs only as "the most despicable
individual I have ever met".
On the other hand, however, Filippo Turati, leader of the Italian right wing,
whose socialism Benedetto Croce aptly characterized as that of a "democrat á la
Lombard", and who, by his politics, was more responsible than any other man in
the movement for the paralysis of the Italian working class which made possible
Mussolini's triumph, is very gently defended by Balabanoff. "His approach was
often misinterpreted in other countries because it was so typically Italian [!].
Many Italian intellectuals like to appear sceptical of theoretical axioms even
if they are not.... Thus it was that Turati came to be considered [!] a
theoretical sceptic and even [!!] an opportunist." The author's approach, at any
rate, cannot be misinterpreted....
Her description of events suffers also, and to such an extent, from her biased
"approach", that stories calculated to be of telling significance about
Bolshevik depravity end by having a significance only for evaluating her
memoirs. In telling of the slowness of the Moscow courier in bringing her
reports to Stockholm, where she was Bolshevik propagandist in 1917, she quotes ...
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