A Critical Comment

In publishing this article more than one year after it was written, the editors are most uncharitable to the author. But they may be doing a service to those who shared his illusions during the time of the million flowers. It is too obvious that all the tenses in Mr. Fejto’s article now are wrong, and a floored fighter does not have to be knocked down again. In retrospect, the friends abroad of the so-called revisionists inside the Soviet empire appear to have been led into a tragic error by personal loyalties and information from onesided sources. It was only natural that these friends and partisans of the reformist intellectuals in Hungary, Poland, and even in Russia, should have overestimated the importance and the prospects of those for whose victory in inner-Party conflicts they hoped; they had more than an intellectual stake in their cause. And inasmuch as confidence is a prerequisite for success, or even for the conception of a strategy, their error today looks much nobler than the bland pessimism of those who had no policy vis-a-vis the turmoil of the Thaw and now can gleefully say, I told you so. The fact that Mr. Fejto was wrong does not make his opponents look any better; nor does the fact that Mr. Djilas is a ...