Marx and Soviet Reality. Daniel Norman (1955)

XIV: Instead of a Conclusion

It is not just coincidence that Adoratsky’s request that Engels’ Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom be published in Bolshevik [11] should have been vetoed by Stalin in 1934 – as was the conclusion of Marx’s Revelations on the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century in the Sochinenia [12] the previous year.

Nor that, under the modest title ‘On an Article of Engels’, the Soviet despot should have printed his letter (of 19 July 1934) to the Politbureau, expressing this veto, on the eve of Hitler’s attack on Russia (Bolshevik, no 9, May 1941) [13], that is, after he had perpetrated the very ‘robberies’ and crimes Engels so emphatically condemned in his essay.

It is only natural that Marx and Engels should be censored by the heirs of the Tsars, their manuscripts (such as Polen, Preussen und Russland, etc) withheld from publication, the MEGA stopped, its editors deported, while Herzen and other pan-Slavists have their edition of complete works. If ‘Marxist’ Russia had not been purely a myth – I hope these pages will be of some help in unmasking the deception – a scholarly edition of all Marx and Engels’ writings would have been available long since. [14]

It is perhaps a sign of the times that the news of the transfer of Marx’s coffin from one grave to another and the appeal for a monument should have found its way into the press of the world, while the joint appeal of my master, the veteran French Socialist, Bracke-Desrousseaux [15] and of my friend Maximilian Rubel [16] for the publication of a Western scholarly edition of Marx and Engels’ complete works, has not found any echo. Yet this is the only kind of monument they would have desired, being very much against any kind of ‘cult’ [17] – it was partly for this reason that Engels directed that his ashes be scattered into the sea.

I would like to join in the hope that the free world will soon come to understand that it is not only a duty but in the interests of civilisation to give Marx and Engels a fitting memorial: a MEGA. For not only do their writings contain one of the most ardent defences of Western civilisation against barbarism, but clearly indicate the alternative contained in our society: a revolutionary evolution towards a Socialism which implies freedom and democracy, or the inferno of barbarism, that is, a totalitarian, managerial society of which Fascist and Soviet regimes are the illustration and for the avoidance of which their message is a most powerful appeal to mankind.