Tom Red's Schooldays

CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION (447 pp.)--Wolfgang Leonhard--Regnery ($6.50).

It is not often that the author of an autobiography consents to an introduction n which he is compared to a subhuman being. Such is the case of Wolfgang Leonlard, an ex-Stalinist official of East Germany, whose dismal career has apparently foundered on the dismal hope that "national Communism" would be better than the all-too-togetherness of a universal Moscow state. Soviet Expert Edward Crankshaw met Leonhard in Yugoslavia, where, says Crankshaw in his foreword, "he was rather like one of those legendary young men who . . . emerge from the jungle emitting strange sounds, having spent their childhood or adolescence in the exclusive company of wolves--or bears."

The strange sounds from the Communist jungle make a gruesome and highly revealing composition. The book gives, perhaps for the first time, a complete account of a Communist education from grade school to commissar level.

Life with Mother. Leonhard is the sort of stylist who would rewrite Alice in Wonderland as The Bourgeois Illusions and Degenerate Fantasies of a British Middle-Class Female Child. He was 13 when his mother, a German Communist and a refugee from Hitler in Sweden, took him to the Soviet Union. There were thousands like them in Moscow. It was 1935, the eve of the Great Purge. Little Wolfgang was lodged, with other foreign youngsters, in Children's Home No. 6, then briefly among Russians in a grim Dotheboys Hall called the Spartak Children's Home. At school, the teacher vanished after having made a slip of the tongue and garbled a current slogan of Stalin's to read thus: "[We] will make them think twice before they stick their Soviet snouts into our hogs' paradise."

One day Leonhard got a postcard from Mother; she had been sentenced to five years in a concentration camp for K.R.T.D., i.e., "counterrevolutionary Trotskyite activity." This did not shake the boy's faith in the system, or that of his schoolmates, many of whom had been similarly orphaned. Wolfgang worried about Mother sometimes, but not enough to prevent his getting excellent marks.

After a spell in a top Soviet prep school, he went on to two other educational experiences--a brief exile in Kazakhstan (for no reason except that all Germans had to go) and an unhappy love affair (his girl was recruited into the NKVD).

The Old School Lie. Leonhard finally came of age in what was surely the world's weirdest school. Even its name was a lie. The No. 101 Technical School for Agricultural Economy at Kushnarenkovo in the Ural region was not what it seemed to be--the boys would never cheer for Good Old Ag. Tech. It was a front name for a Comintern school, training foreign Communists to take over in their old homelands when the Russians won the war. The first odd thing about Tom Red's schooldays was that the hero had to change his name (he chose Linden). It was one step in the dehumanization process to which the curriculum was bent. His old pals from Moscow greeted him as a stranger. It was a rule; no one was to know anything about anybody.

Every traditional schoolboy value-loyalty to comrades, gaiety and spontaneity--was smothered in great quilts of priggish guff. Wolfgang found that the bully was esteemed by the teachers. When one pupil from Hamburg Sunday-punched a little fellow half his size, the smaller student was denounced for having behaved in a "provocative" manner. Wolfgang was reported for having remarked that some Spanish girl students were very pretty; this kind of frivolity would not do. The result was an episode recorded like "My First Communion" in a pietistic work--"My First Self-Criticism." He duly denounced himself, but he could never quite feel the same again about little Emmi. who had turned him in. From these case-history-hardened boys and girls, the Russians drew the personnel that took over in East Germany. Walter Ulbricht, a grim, humorless and inhuman man. even by Communist standards, was their leader, and Leonhard became one of his lieutenants. But in 1949 he fled to Yugoslavia, sided with Tito against Moscow, but remained a Marxist. The book is fascinating as a sort of Communist Candide--but it is far less amusing. It was written, after all, not by Voltaire but by poor, simple Candide himself.

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