imagine that they would have communicated on lesser issues while leaving aside this matter of the party’s life and death.
From the establishment of PARI in June 1927 up until 1932, evidently Tan Malaka was able to establish some sporadic contact with PKI members who escaped the onslaught of the Dutch secret police, and it was from this milieu that members of the initial PARI cadre were recruited. But there appear to have been no contacts with Moscow. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tan Malaka met Alimin in Shanghai in 1931 and that he agreed to work again for the Comintern. Evidently at that time Alimin, or at least the Comintern, had no knowledge of PARI’s existence, indicating a somewhat less than perfect intelligence system and less than perfect candor on Tan Malaka’s side.
Throughout the 1930s until his move to Singapore in 1937, Tan Malaka’s life in China was spent in seclusion, except for a brief period when Djaos visited him in Shanghai and during their imprisonment in Hong Kong in 1932. On his arrival in Singapore Tan Malaka was, as ever, anxious to avoid detection and managed to pass himself off as a Chinese schoolteacher until the Japanese arrived in early 1942. He did manage to make some contact with former comrades in Singapore during this period and to do some reading in the Raffles Museum. It is dubious, however, that any real knowledge of the world communist movement would have reached him through these channels, and certainly the atmosphere during the occupation was such as to preclude developing any such knowledge.
To conclude the picture, one must look at the state of political awareness of international developments at the close of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, and even up until the time of Tan Malaka’s death in early 1949. In the early months there was virtually no knowledge of developments in the international communist movement. Even the first TASS correspondent to visit Indonesia did not arrive until early 1948.110 Until the exiles from Digul and some who had spent the war in Holland began to return in early 1946, there was probably no contact at all with communists from abroad, and those considered “dangerous” by the Dutch (PKI leaders like Sardjono) were temporarily detained in Timor to delay them from reaching the republic.
Considering the extent and duration of his isolation, it is hardly surprising that Tan Malaka did not fit neatly into one of the Marxist currents of the day. To me what is striking is that he managed to retain his revolutionary zeal and commitment to the task of creating a socialist society. That he maintained this commitment through the intense personal and political demoralization that must surely have accompanied his illness, poverty, and isolation in the thirties; that within a few months of his return to Indonesian political life he emerged as an alternative leader to Sukarno, with a coherent political strategy for the Indonesian revolution winning mass support, is surely remarkable.
The author of this text, Tan Malaka, was a Marxist, whose contributions to the Indonesian revolution were both as a theoretician and an activist. In particular he was an educator, both in a mass sense, breaking the debilitating and suffocating role of the Dutch colonial education system, and in a narrower sense, in being the first Indonesian to articulate the Marxist analysis and to develop and popularize it in mass appeal during the independence struggle.
He projected the unfolding of the Indonesian revolution, in particular the fundamental place of the nationalist struggle in that revolution, and developed a strategy for the PKI in the 1920s and a fighting program for the Persatuan Perjuangan in the 1940s. He provided a link between the ideas and objectives of the pre-1926 PKI and the physical struggle for independence some twenty years later. Above all Tan Malaka was one of the most determined and uncompromising advocates of resistance and struggle for 100 percent merdeka.
POSTSCRIPT
Tan Malaka concluded From Jail to Jail in March 1948. It seems strange that, although he developed a detailed analysis of the Renville Agreement, signed in January 1948, he virtually ignored the February 1948 change of government in which Hatta replaced Amir Sjarifuddin as prime minister.1
Some observers have characterized this change of government as a Putsch and as the first step in the demolition of the PKI that culminated eight months later in Madiun.2 From Tan Malaka’s perspective, however, the overriding question was still 100 percent merdeka and the means to obtain it. The fact that Amir negotiated Renville, and that Hatta continued to defend it, meant for Tan Malaka that the two governments were of similar character according to his fundamental criterion of perjuangan versus diplomasi. And so it would appear: the PKI, having thrown in its lot with diplomasi, would have little to call on in terms of trust and popular confidence when its partners in diplomasi turned against it.3
In early 1948 several ex-leaders of the Persatuan Perjuangan who were pro-Tan Malaka established the Gerakan Revolusi Rakyat (People’s Revolutionary Movement—GRR) as a front of parties opposing the Renville Agreement.4 One of the precipitating factors in the establishment of this front was the PKI’s shift in line during 1948 from all-out support of Renville and the Amir Sjarifuddin government that had brought it about to opposition to the Hatta government that was implementing it.5 Long-time supporters of perjuangan wanted to foil the PKI’s attempt to present itself as the leader of opposition to an agreement that was ever more clearly being revealed as a blow to the republic.
Some considerable shifting in the relationship between the PKI and the GRR was to take place during the month of August and up to the Madiun uprising in mid-September. Muso, former PKI leader from the 1920s, unexpectedly returned to Indonesia from Moscow in early August and immediately began to accentuate this leftward turn taken by the PKI against Renville and towards a policy of perjuangan.
The GRR’s main newspaper, Moerba, appeared on 14 August 1948 with a banner headline reading “Welcome Comrade Muso!” and maintained that Muso’s new fighting policy for the PKI proved that Tan Malaka and the GRR were following the correct communist line, as opposed to the soft, traitorous, and even “Trotskyist” line of the PKI. Whether they really expected Muso to join forces with themselves or whether it was a propaganda ploy is hard to say, but Muso had no such course of action in mind. He denounced Tan Malaka as a traitor and a Trotskyist since 1926,6 and he evidently tried to pry supporters away from the GRR, for as late as mid-September he was reported as meeting with Ibnu Parna of AKOMA (Angkatan Komunis Muda—Young Communist League), one of the GRR constituents.7
In an apparent attempt to fend off the growing influence of the PKI as dissatisfaction with Renville mounted and Muso’s popularity grew, the government released most of the 3 July detainees on 17 August; Tan Malaka was finally released on 16 September. Evidently the government was interested in developing an alternate left-wing pole to undermine the PKI. But polarization between the government and the PKI had gone too far, and armed clashes broke out in Solo and then Madiun.
On 19 September, Sukarno made a fiery radio address, attacking the PKI for “attempting to seize our beloved Indonesia” and asking the people to choose between him and Muso. Muso replied in kind, saying, “Sukarno-Hatta slaves of the Japanese and America! Traitors must die!”8
The PKI did not receive the support of the people. Quickly the Madiun uprising was isolated and then routed, the leaders escaping to the hills with troops in hot pursuit. Skirmishes continued until the Dutch attack in December, but the rebellion was crushed within days and a generalized anti-left sentiment dominated the government.
Tan Malaka’s autobiography ends before Madiun, but he introduces Volume III with a postscript concentrating on the affair. Characterizing it as a “repeat of the Prambanan Putsch of 1926,” Tan Malaka outlines the multiple errors made by the PKI in taking such an action. But while opposing the PKI, he also states his refusal “to be used as an instrument to crush Muso’s PKI by this government, which for two and a half years had let us rot in all kinds of jails” (Volume III, p. 13). He appears to accept unquestioningly the government’s view of Madiun as a conscious Putsch by the PKI and does not entertain the possibility
