The Hero as Sucker

EL CAMPESINO: LIFE AND DEATH IN SOVIET RUSSIA (218 pp.)--Valentin Gonzalez and Julian Gorkin--Putnam ($3.50).

Valentin Gonzalez, a fiery, black-bearded Spaniard, was once a Communist hero --and why not? The man had all the makings : 1) he was a landlord-hating peasant who could kill an enemy and sleep soundly afterwards; 2) he was a fine troop commander, a tough, natural leader who became a living legend during the Spanish civil war; 3) he was a Communist.

"El Campesino," he was called--The Peasant--and all over the world the leftist press worked overtime to make him a dazzling symbol. Ilya Ehrenburg, one of Russia's top journalists, fawned over him. Picture posters of him were tacked up all over the U.S.S.R. Then something happened, and The Peasant lost his hero's rating. El Campesino's Life and Death in Soviet Russia tells what happened, and it was really quite simple. The Peasant went to Russia, saw Communism in practice and kicked over the traces.

There have been many books about disillusioned Communists, some of them excellent, most of them stereotyped. Hardly a week passes without its book about Soviet slave camps. But El Campesino's story, direct, terse and without presumptions to literary grace, has the persuasiveness of crushing truth. Though it has none of the art of Darkness at Noon, it belongs beside Koestler's book on the shelf set aside for the literature of human shame.

When Franco defeated the Loyalists, El Campesino was a division commander. At the last possible moment, he escaped to North Africa in a motor launch, made his way to France and got a hero's welcome from the French Communists. Next he was sent to Moscow, where he was lionized and appointed to the Frunze Academy, the U.S.S.R.'s most important military school. Against his will, he was to be groomed for the Russian army. To his disgust he was forced to accept a new title and name: "Komisaro Piotr Antonovich."

Commissar Antonovich quickly became a nuisance to his new masters. For speaking his mind, and especially for criticizing Russian officers and Russian blunders in Spain, he was expelled from the military academy. He asked for permission to leave the country. Instead, he was ordered to a pick & shovel job on the Moscow subway.

From then on, El Campesino's chief idea was to escape. In 1944, he managed to get as far as Teheran, and thought he was safe. An informer tipped off the Russians, and one day the NKVD closed in, kidnaped him and hauled him back across the frontier. For a time he was shut up in Lubianka prison and put through various physical and psychological "persuasions" to sign a phony confession of spying for the British and Americans. He refused, and then began four years of prison camps in Siberia and Turkestan. His brief descriptions of Lubianka, the slave camps and the tortures that were devised to break him are set down in the passionless reporting of a recorder who has known terror so well that it has become conventional.

In January 1950, he escaped to Persia once more, and this time made it stick. El Campesino lives in France now, but the French Communists do not cheer him as they used to. The word has got around: he is no longer a hero.

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