On Vartan İhmalyan’s political autobiography, Bir Yaşam Öyküsü (A Life Story) (11)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: İsmail Bilen (5)

With this post, we come to the end of our series examining Vartan İhmalyan’s political autobiography Bir Yaşam Öyküsü (A Life Story).

Naturally, beyond what we have explored in this series, there are many other distinct and important aspects of İhmalyan’s book that merit attention -including those which the author at times touched on only superficially, or passed over in deliberate silence. Who knows, perhaps in the future we may return to these aspects of the book in other contexts.

In this series, we have sought, to some extent, to examine how the triumvirate (Zeki Baştımar, İsmail Bilen and Aram Pehlivanyan), who held control of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), responded to the criticisms and demands raised by the party’s cadres abroad [*] in the mid-1960s. In this context, we have suggested that the main driving force behind the triumvirate’s attitude was their desire to preserve their considerable material privileges and interests. Only when this fundamental factor is borne in mind does the full meaning of the triumvirate’s sordid bureaucratic manoeuvres -including attempted stabbings and acts of crude physical violence- against TKP members abroad become clear.

Moreover, this small three-man sub-bureaucratic caste, which had turned its own privileges into the very purpose of the TKP’s existence abroad, could not escape, from time to time, becoming a subject of ridicule even among their peers, owing to the shallowness of their theoretical grounding. On this point, İhmalyan gives İsmail Bilen as an example:

(…) I. Bilen was not at all liked by the Soviet citizens who knew him. I have never heard a single good word about him from any Soviet citizen acquainted with him. On the contrary, I have often seen him mocked for his ignorance and pretentious airs. More than once, I have been asked, in a mocking tone, “So, how is your General Secretary I. Bilen managing the party?” (p. 231)

However, İhmalyan and the other TKP members who clashed with the triumvirate -being Stalinists themselves and dependent for their livelihood on the wages they earned in those countries- did not inquire into the material conditions underlying their disputes with the party leadership. They made no effort to develop an analysis centred on the struggles of classes and other social groups, nor to build a line of struggle upon such an analysis. They became lost in the whirlpools of philosophical idealism and one of its crudest offshoots, impressionism. They failed to grasp the reality that, from within the transitional socialist society born of the October Revolution, a bureaucratic stratum had emerged which, over time, came to seize state power. [**]

The institutionalised socio-economic privileges -inflated incomes, special shops, weekend retreats (dachas), private hospital rooms and privileged healthcare, exclusive educational opportunities, and the possibility of travel abroad- seized by the bureaucratic caste that had usurped power in the Soviet Union and distributed in accordance with the Stalinist party hierarchy, were sustained in the very cells of the transitional socialist economy born of the October Revolution, and were poisoning the entire organism.

Figures such as Zeki Baştımar, İsmail Bilen and Aram Pehlivanyan, meanwhile, continued to exist in a subordinate position within the Soviet Union and other Stalinist countries aligned with it. They functioned as a sub-bureaucratic stratum -a relic of the old years of working-class internationalism- acting in line with the foreign policy interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

İsmail Bilen (1977)

The members of this subordinate, sub-bureaucratic caste enjoyed material privileges considered appropriate to their rank -consequently somewhat inferior to those held by senior party officials in the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes. Preserving these material privileges, along with the political positions on which they rested, was therefore their chief concern.

So, what exactly were the material privileges enjoyed by the TKP triumvirate? We find an answer to this question in A Life Story, particularly in relation to İsmail Bilen. In a speech delivered at a meeting of the TKP Moscow Group on 31 May 1965, Sabiha Sümbül provided the following account on the matter:

Marat’s wife receives a salary of 300 leva from Bulgaria on behalf of our party. Why doesn’t this woman work? Assistance is meant only for the disabled. I can call someone who lives off the earnings of Bulgarian workers a parasite. How many people can even afford to go to Karlovy Vary today? Yet Mara (Marat’s wife) has the right to go there every year on behalf of our party. Mara doesn’t work -neither for the Soviet party nor for the Bulgarian one. Where did she earn such a privilege? (…) According to reports from Bulgaria, Marat had a whole wagon of goods brought from Germany. He has bought a flat and is having a summer villa built. He also owns a car. The Bulgarian people view this with disgust.

(…)

Where does Marat get all this money? Moreover, Marat has one house in Moscow, one in Germany, and another in Bulgaria. Is this becoming of a communist leader? (…) Can the income of a family that does not work possibly cover such expenses? While the Russian people in Moscow are suffering from a housing crisis, our party leader has kept a three-room flat empty for eight years. (pp. 271–273)

In 1937, Leon Trotsky made the following observation about those who formed the leading cadres of foreign communist parties -people who for years had been sustained by the Kremlin bureaucracy, enjoyed considerable material privileges, and had gradually lost the qualities a communist ought to possess:

It is necessary to clearly understand that the apparatus of the Comintern consists of people exactly the opposite to the type of a revolutionist. A real revolutionist has his own self-conquered opinion, in the name of which he is ready to make sacrifices, including even the sacrifice of his life. The revolutionist prepares the future and because of that it is easy for him to endure all sorts of difficulties, deprivations, and persecutions during the present. In counterpoise to this the bureaucrats of the Comintern are full-blown careerists. They have no kind of opinion and subordinate themselves to the orders of the authority which pays them. Since they are agents of the omnipotent Kremlin, each of them feels himself a small “superman.” Everything is permitted them. They lightly libel the honour of others since they have no honour of their own.[***]

[*] In the TKP’s jargon, “the foreign cadre.”

[**] The breaking of the Soviet working class during the civil war (1918–1921), in which 18 European states supported the counter-revolutionaries; the acute need for specialists and managerial layers arising from the backwardness and poverty of the Soviet economy; the loss of momentum of the world revolution and the resulting isolation of the Soviet state; and other factors -all contributed to a shift in the balance of power that weakened the working class while strengthening the hand of the emerging bureaucracy.

[***] Leon Trotsky, Answers to Questions of Journalists on Verdict of Dewey Commission, (December 1937)

Concluded

Also see:

Who was Vartan İhmalyan?

The period in which İhmalyan wrote his political autobiography

Vartan İhmalyan’s superficial impressionism

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: Aram Pehlivanyan (1)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: Aram Pehlivanyan (2)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: Aram Pehlivanyan (3)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: İsmail Bilen (1)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: İsmail Bilen (2)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: İsmail Bilen (3)

From Vartan İhmalyan’s pen: İsmail Bilen (4)