Wolfgang Leonhard (1921–2014)

Wolfgang Leonhard was the son of the socialist writer and activist Susanne Leonhard, whose high-profile revolutionary past made it inadvisable to stay in Berlin after the Nazis came to power. They went into exile first in Sweden and then in Moscow, where they arrived in 1935, when Wolfgang was in his early teens. In this celebrated memoir, he describes his life from that point up to his move to Yugoslavia in 1949, explaining the process by which someone who had spent his formative years at the heart of the Soviet system was gradually pushed to the point where he felt obliged to break away from Stalinism.

In the Soviet Union, Leonhard initially had a comparatively privileged existence in Moscow's Children's Home No.6 and Karl Liebknecht School, both reserved for the children of German-speaking communist exiles. He went on to study English in Moscow and Karaganda (after Germans were expelled from the Western USSR in 1941), and was assigned to the Comintern's secret political college in the wilds of Bashkiria for an intensive course in Marxist-Leninist administration. Obviously intended for a high-level career in the German party after the war, from 1943 he worked under Walter Ulbricht doing newspaper and radio work for the "Freies Deutschland" committee, a PoW organisation trying to promote opposition to Hitler in Germany. In May 1945 he was one of the ten German comrades led by Ulbricht who went into Berlin with the Red Army to set up new civilian administration, and from there he moved into the Agit-Prop department of the Central Committee in the Soviet Zone and became a lecturer at the SED's party college.

(Fun detail: among the ten people on the plane to Berlin with him in May 1945 were Karl Maron, later to be the DDR's police chief and shortly to become stepfather to future novelist [[Monika Maron]], and Fritz Erpenbeck, writer, DDR arts supremo and grandfather of another novelist, [[Jenny Erpenbeck]]. The DDR was an astonishingly small place in some ways...)

Leonhard made friends with Yugoslavian counterparts on a study trip in 1947, and admired the way they were building socialism. He thus had serious "political indigestion" as a result of Stalin's break with Tito in 1948 and the way it was treated in the Soviet Zone. When the SED aligned itself behind Stalin and refused to hear any discussion of the Yugoslav side of the case, Leonhard had irrefutable confirmation that the idea of "a German route to socialism" they had been promoting in the early days after the fall of Germany was an illusion.

Of course, he had had lots of reasons to doubt Stalinism before — the purges of 1936-1938, which resulted in the arrest of his mother (vanished into the Gulag until 1947) and of many other people he knew, for no obvious reason; the sudden switches of foreign policy direction before 1941; the draconian labour laws of 1940; the criticism and self-criticism evenings in the Comintern college, and the dire fate of fellow students who fell foul of them; the difference in living standards between ordinary Russians and party functionaries; Ulbricht's Machiavellian manoeuvres to squash any kind of bottom-up initiatives in the German party, whether from comrades who had stayed in Germany or from social democrats; the SED's absolute refusal to challenge the Soviet occupying power about abuses by Red Army soldiers or the excesses of the "reparations" programme. And much more. But Yugoslavia was the final straw, and in early 1949 he decided that he had no alternative but to leave the Soviet Zone. He escaped to Belgrade in March 1949, and settled down there to work for the German service of Belgrade Radio, but it wasn't long before he decided that he could work more effectively in West Germany.

After writing this memoir, Leonhard worked as a journalist and academic (in Oxford and Yale, amongst other places) specialising in Soviet history and politics. He argues that only someone who has been trained in the mentality of a party functionary could really understand the way the Marxist-Leninist state works.

This is a long book, and it's full of forgotten names and stale political theory, but despite that I found it very engaging. It's always fascinating to get a first-hand view of what it was really like to be on the inside of that kind of system.… (lisätietoja)