11 - The future of a disillusion

Summary

The real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development

(Albert Einstein, ‘Why Socialism?’)

1. It looks as though the Soviet Union, or the pieces that it may soon become, will embrace capitalism, or fall into a severe authoritarianism, or undergo both of those fates. That is not an original thought. While a certain amount of humane socialist rhetoric survives even now in the Soviet Union, few observers believe that from its present crisis there will emerge a state, or states, characterized by an attractive form of socialism. But it costs me a lot to endorse that unoriginal thought, and I want to explain why.

In 1912 my mother was born, in Kharkov, to secular Jewish parents of ample means, her father being a successful timber merchant. When she was just five years old, the Bolshevik revolution occurred. My grand-father's business continued to provide well for the family during the period of the New Economic Policy, and my mother was consequently quite well-heeled, with plenty to lose, but she nevertheless developed, across the course of the nineteen-twenties, in schools and in youth organizations, a full-hearted commitment to the Bolshevik cause. This she took with her in 1930 when, the NEP having given way to a regime less amenable to bourgeois existence, her parents decided to immigrate to Canada, and she left the Soviet Union, not because she wanted to, but because she did not want to part with her emigrating parents and sister.