Feridun Gürgöz’s political memoirs (4)

What the “Party School” taught

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4

Feridun Gürgöz

In this fourth and final instalment of the series, I would like to focus on a number of observations and recollections that Feridun Gürgöz relates in his book Saat Geri Dönmüyor (“The Clock Does Not Turn Back”) concerning his second visit to the Soviet Union.

In February 1989, or perhaps in early March [*], Gürgöz travelled to Moscow with a small group that included several cadres from the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) to attend a three-month political training programme. As was customary, this programme was to be held at the well-known “Party School”, which operated under the supervision of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was used to train members of foreign communist parties.

Upon arriving in Moscow, the TKP group was not placed directly in the school at the outset of the programme. According to Gürgöz, they were first accommodated for about a week in a dacha outside the city. After this week-long wait, the group returned to Moscow. However, as there was no space available at the main school, they were then taken to the town of Pushkino, some 30 kilometres north of the capital, and accommodated in an annex of the school, where their training would take place.

The Institute of Social Sciences (the International Lenin School), referred to by Gürgöz as the “Party School”

The immediate surroundings of the school presented a scene quite unlike what Gürgöz had expected. The complex in Pushkino lay right next to a village that looked as though it had come straight out of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Gürgöz puts it, the houses in the village seemed almost to press up against the school’s perimeter fence.

The day after they were settled in the school, the TKP group was summoned to a meeting by the school’s security officer:

The officer, a party member in his early thirties -young by our standards- referred in his remarks to the village next to the school, saying something along the lines of “don’t go there; there is nothing to see”. The condition of the village was pitiful. The houses looked as though they might collapse at any moment. The animals’ sheds stood side by side with the dwellings. The roads were unpaved, and as it was winter, the mud was knee-deep. Such was the state of a village some thirty kilometres north of Moscow. (pp. 129-130)

Houses that seemed on the verge of collapse, animal sheds still intermingled with the dwellings, dirt roads, and mud everywhere in winter… This was the scene in a village located just thirty kilometres north of the Soviet capital, in what was supposedly the stage of “mature socialism”. Moreover, this village lay right next to the annex of the Party School used to train cadres of foreign communist parties. Not even the slightest cosmetic improvement had been made -perhaps none could be made- for the sake of appearances.

The content of the political training at the Party School provoked a reaction among some members of the TKP group. [**] One party member, Murat Tokmak (1948-2002), who had previously attended a long-term programme at the same school in 1981-1982, openly voiced his reaction to the striking differences and inconsistencies that had emerged in the content of the lessons over the intervening seven years:

(…) “I attended training here before. At that time, you explained things to me in one way; now you are explaining them differently. Which is correct -the account you gave then or the one you are giving now? I would like to know,” he would say. In fact, what the lecturers were teaching did not please our comrade Sıtkı [Sıtkı Coşkun (1948-1998)] either, though unlike Murat Tokmak he did not express his objections openly. More often, in our private conversations, he would say: “Comrade, don’t pay too much attention to what is being said; things work differently in practice.” (p. 130)

In the Soviet Union, as in other Stalinist regimes, the direction of ideological discourse was largely determined by the needs of the highest political leadership -that is, the privileged bureaucratic caste. For this reason, official ideology could at times undergo abrupt shifts that openly contradicted one another: theses once defended were later abandoned and replaced by new ones. At other times, instead of such direct substitution, recourse was had to shifts in meaning. Yet each of these ideological zigzags was invariably legitimised by the claim that new and decisive steps were being taken on the road to socialism or communism.

Foreign students in the Soviet Union (1963)

In shaping official literature, the education system and cultural policies, the Stalinist bureaucracy made the preservation of its own power, the legitimisation of its privileges and the criminalisation of dissent its central guiding principle. Stalinist ideologues, meanwhile, produced arguments tailored to each new political and economic turn required by the regime. In doing so, they purported to uphold Marxism, yet in essence distorted and falsified it.

By the late 1980s, at a time when the Stalinist regime was rapidly beginning to unravel, these ideological shifts had become far more pronounced and visible, as even passing references to socialism, communism or Marxism were now often avoided altogether. Tokmak’s objection stemmed precisely from this contradiction. From Gürgöz’s account, one can infer -by way of an argumentum e contrario- that the others, including the author himself, refrained from voicing such an objection.

Sıtkı Coşkun, another leading member of the TKP, claimed -apparently without offering any explanation as to why- that what was being taught in the classes did not reflect reality. Moreover, he did so as late as 1989, at a time when the regimes in Eastern Europe were collapsing one after another and the Soviet Union itself was beginning to disintegrate. This was patently absurd and foolish. Yet it was hardly surprising. History offers many examples of opportunism assuming such excessive forms, stretching even the bounds of everyday logic.

With regard to the final weeks of training at the Party School, Gürgöz’s account presents the reader with a rather different scene:

Our last month was spent at the school in Moscow. By then, the season had begun when teaching generally came to a halt. Everyone was preparing to return to their home countries. The belongings of those who had come from African countries were loaded onto lorries and taken to the airport for shipment. Among these items were refrigerators, washing machines, gas cookers -indeed, all kinds of white goods- as well as living-room suites, all newly purchased and sent off to their countries. In other words, the training had largely come to a standstill. (pp. 130-131)

Undoubtedly, the attitude of the teaching staff at the “Party School” -who had become thoroughly alienated from their work and whose sense of discipline had consequently eroded- played a significant role in this slackening of the training. At the same time, however, the rush among cadres from Stalinist parties in various countries to send home refrigerators, furniture and other household goods also offers the reader an important clue to the real state of the so-called international communist movement.

[*] Gürgöz is unable to provide a precise date for the beginning of his visit.

[**] Gürgöz provides the following information about the curriculum at the school:

Relations between the USSR and NATO countries; the USSR’s current peace policy; relations between the USSR and China; the national question in the USSR and the Kurdish question in Turkey; contemporary environmental problems and the measures taken; economic problems in the USSR; how problems arise in agriculture and industry and possible ways of addressing them; renewal and problems within the CPSU; and a series of lectures on human psychology, from which I benefited most, as well as many other topics that I can no longer recall. (p. 130)