The Soviet Union Is Dead:
The "Russian Question" Remains
Part I: The Communist Past -- Myth & Reality

Julius Jacobson is co-editor of New Politics.

THE TURBULENT 30S OPENED ON A LANDSCAPE already scarred and battered by cruel and corrosive winds generated by the Crash of 1929, eroding faith in the American Dream, uprooting the lives of countless Americans, leaving in their wake an army of unemployed numbering in the millions. Particularly when viewed through a radical lens, the social panorama circa 1930 resembled a wasteland: the trade unions were all but decimated, and the Left was barely visible, seemingly impotent and irrelevant to American life.

Yet, during the Great Depression, America's industrial proletariat, so quiescent in 1930, revealed its amazing and inspirational capacity for renewal and struggle; so much so that by the middle of the decade workers laid siege, sometimes literally and often successfully, to what had only yesterday appeared impregnable citadels of corporate America. The working class not only built its unions and achieved economic gains but was able to wrest important social and legal concessions from both the governing political party and the judicial guardians of American capitalism.

That millions rallied to newly created industrial unions in the CIO (and to the AFL craft unions) and tens of thousands occupied factories in the famous sit-down strikes was more than a manifestation of "the instinctive self-mobilization of the masses" as some radical theorists would have it. There was an element of spontaneity in the powerful upsurge of class struggle militancy. But most decisive was the indispensable engagement of political activists who were members of organized parties or sects, and a large number of politically experienced, unaffiliated radicals who had developed organizational and administrative skills in one or another wing of a broadly defined Left, and contributed to building and shaping the contours of a renascent trade union movement.

Aiding the upsurge in trade union strength and militancy was perceived by the Left as a good in and of itself. But many socialists were additionally motivated to participate in the great labor struggles by the prospect -- so they really believed -- that workers would follow through on the revolutionary implications of taking over a factory to advance their economic interests, that they would be politically radicalized by their experience, develop a social consciousness transcending bread-and-butter demands, grow receptive to socialist ideas and, before long, nourish and flesh out the Left's gaunt structures. Others had the more modest, still exhilarating expectation, that out of the struggle between capital and labor there would emerge a broad independent political party of the working class -- a labor party.

It never worked out that way. The socialist movement benefited hardly at all, not even in the short run; and the labor party vision proved ephemeral. Several reasons for these failed expectations are central to our discussion of the "Russian Question" and will be touched on later. But to set the stage for that discussion it is important to note that socialist optimism in the 30s, more precisely the mid-30s, led to higher levels of political commitment and at times to an almost frenetic degree of activism. More public forums ("educational work"), more street corner meetings ("agitational work"). Endless leafletting of working-class neighborhoods, hawking or distributing party literature on the streets, at housing projects or outside factory gates. There was the missionary assignment known as "contacting" -- uninvited proselytizing visits to the homes of those who, somehow or other, wound up as "contacts" on a well-guarded list of possible recruits. There were the additional time demands on comrades expected to be involved in trade union work, or active in unemployed councils or neighborhood and social organizations. And for those in such "fractions" in non-party organizations, there was the additional obligation to meet with one another and with party leaders to discuss what policy and strategy to pursue in their unions and "outside" organizations.

And there was more, considerably more, to absorb the 30s' activist, above all in the intensely ideational revolutionary Left of my experience where local branch meetings, citywide conferences and national conventions were often turned into ideological battlegrounds in what appeared to be the Permanent War of the Questions, as opposing factions fought over the Trade Union Question, the American Question, the Negro Question, the Woman Question and the Jewish Question, the National Question and the International Question and always, of course, the Organizational Question and ... the list is almost inexhaustible. The debates were never polite exchanges. If polemical thrusts had lethal force, most in the revolutionary movement I knew would have perished prematurely, eliminating the cadre who cranked the handles of antiquated mimeograph machines spitting out pages (not always legible) to be manually collated and stapled into volumes of discussion articles, Majority and Minority Reports, Theses and Resolutions; nor would there have been an audience.

The intensity of factional combat in the War of the Questions was often excessive, to say the least, as a debated Question frequently escalated into what was called a Split Question leading to further fragmentation of an already badly fractured socialist left. Unfortunately, any number of leftish chroniclers seized upon the fierceness of those debates to disparage, even mock, our concerns. Yet, whatever the incongruities and sectarian excesses, those debates reflected an admirable appreciation of the relevance of ideas and principles to building movements of struggle for social transformation. More than that, an objective reading of the "sectarian" literature of the period -- polemics and "internal" bulletins included -- revealed a level of sophistication, knowledge, passion and literateness that might benefit many academic historians, theorists and activists today.¹

Of all the Questions, the preeminent one was the notorious "Russian Question." When the "Russian Question" was on the agenda. discussion and debate often spilled over until late at night at some eatery favored by radical habitués where stale danish washed down by incredibly bad coffee only seemed to stoke the appetite for discussion and mapping factional strategy.

Here, too, some chroniclers of the Old Left -- more accurately of the old socialist left -- dismiss the concentration on the Russian Question in an unseemly offhand manner as the hallmark of Talmudic sectarians preoccupied with the recondite minutiae of Russian history. More egregiously -- since almost all factions debating the Russian Question shared a common opposition to Stalinism -- this charge of sectarianism is a political judgment, accompanied as it often is, by innuendos and explicit criticisms that the socialist Left was more concerned with promoting "anti-Communism" than getting down to the nitty-gritty of building progressive movements in the U.S. That criticism is without the slightest merit. The Russian Question deserved to be a central concern of American socialists. It still does! In a fundamental way the Russian Question did relate to the nitty-gritty of building progressive movements in the U.S. When one looks at the critics closely, as we will do, it becomes apparent that what irks so many was less the authentic Old Left's concern with the Russian Question than the fact that the results of the relevant discussion, study and debate led many to an uncompromising repudiation of Stalinism.

The Relevance of the Russian Question

THE RUSSIAN QUESTION LOOMED SO LARGE IN OUR POLITICAL (AND PERSONAL) LIVES precisely because, among other reasons, it did relate to building and advancing progressive and radical causes in the U.S.: in many ways, both subtle and apparent, almost all major international and domestic questions and events were linked to the Russian Question. In the early 30s Stalinism had already consolidated its power in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Party had the ultimate say in determining what course could be taken by a national party affiliated to the Third International, subordinating the interests of the working class in all countries to those of the Soviet Party/State. Above all, in countries where Communist parties were mass movements it was impossible to understand and intelligently respond to critical moments in national history in isolation from the Russian Question. The relative ease of Hitler's rise to power (the German Question) cannot be explained if divorced from the disastrous policies imposed on the powerful but subservient German Communist movement by the Soviet Union during the so-called "Third Period." The shattering defeat of the Spanish Revolution (the Spanish Question) cannot be fathomed without taking into account the manipulation, cynicism and treachery of Soviet involvement. A study of the Russian Question also sheds light on the evolution of the French Popular Front, as well as the historic events in China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the colonial and semi-colonial world.

The Communist movement in the United States was a significant force in the trade unions during the 30s and 40s, primed to adjust its trade union activity to conform to Soviet ambitions. If one is not blind to the American party's slavish fidelity to the Soviet Union, it becomes clear that the Russian Question had a profound effect on the American Trade Union Question. The direct relevance of the Russian Question to American political life is illustrated in the formation of the Communist-dominated Progressive Party and the calamitous Wallace presidential campaign of 1948 which was pressed on a hesitant CPUSA by the Soviet Union to satisfy Cold War objectives, suggesting that in a fundamental sense the Progressive Party was less an American phenomenon than a phenomenon that happened in America.

Though it is essential to appreciate the international scope of the Russian Question, there are other, more transcendent, reasons why the stormy debates of the 30s should not be allowed to collect dust in some antiquarian corner of the academic world. For the debates involved core theoretical conceptions and values of revolutionary socialism, i.e., Marxism. By the late 30s most participants agreed with Trotsky's damning indictment of the Soviet government as a "totalitarian abomination" that paralleled fascism. While there was a wide consensus about the abominable nature of Stalinism, many insisted -- as did Trotsky -- that despite the brutal dictatorship, the USSR remained a "workers state," albeit a "degenerated" one, to be defended "unconditionally" in the event of war. Others in the movement protested that a totalitarian society that deprived the working class of all social power, illegalized all political parties except the one in power, destroyed all democratic institutions and democratic rights, and ruled through the knout could not be given the blank check of "unconditional defense" by socialists.

Such differences, battled over in the 30s were never purely academic and took on a political immediacy when the Soviet Union invaded Poland, occupied the Baltic countries and made war on Finland in 1939-40. Inevitably, the view of the USSR as even a degenerated form of a workers state, along with its more general implications that a modern Party/State could be both a "totalitarian abomination" and "socially progressive," was challenged and repudiated by a section of the socialist Left.

Many of us emerged from those debates with the conviction that a workers prison could never be a workers state. I would prescribe a study of 100 pages of fierce polemics in the 30s in defense of the basic Marxist principle of the indivisibility of democracy and socialism as an antidote to the counterpositions developed in 1000 pages I have read in the 90s which describe, as often as not in the most convoluted argot, all the "ambiguities" and "complexities" of democracy, in preparation for the bad news that democracy is not really central to socialism, that socialism need not mean freedom and that authoritarian movements and totalitarian societies, past and present, can, after all, be "socially progressive" and/or "historically justifiable." If we were obsessed then, so long ago, with the Russian Question it was only because we were obsessed with socialism. The Russian Question was and remains the question of socialism. That is why, for example, so much passion and mimeograph ink was expended in debating the alleged causal link that many within and outside the movement sought to establish between the Stalinist terror and the theory and practice of Leninism. We were concerned, too, with the arguments of critics, often ex-radicals such as Max Eastman, grown hostile to socialism, who not only insisted that Stalinism flowed from Leninism but inveighed against "Stalinism/Leninism" as a frightful malignancy that grew within the womb of Marxism. (Earl Browder and Max Eastman had this much in common: both believed in the ideological unity of Stalinism/Leninism/Marxism. They shared more than that: Browder was a prominent shaman in a Stalinist cabal to distort Leninism beyond recognition and to disembowel Marxism; Eastman was an intellectual high priest in a more traditional right-wing cabal to discredit the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism and to defame Marxism.)

Those were the issues then and they are of even greater moment today since journalists and historians, from right to left, increasingly assume the identity of Stalinism and Leninism and, in this age of new conservatism, routinely extend the causal chain to include Marxism. For if it could be established that Stalinism did indeed flow from Leninism and Leninism was a natural child of Marxism we would have to concede, as we weep, that the Russian Revolution, which had been a sustaining source of inspiration and hope for the socialist Left, was a monumental social travesty, and that socialism, at least Marxian socialism, was a monstrous lie and the fount of incalculable human misery. (We will take up the alleged affinity of Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism in the second part of our discussion.)

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NO TENDENCY IN THE ANTI-STALINIST OLD LEFT had all the answers to the Russian Question. However, I believe that the analyses which have best withstood the test of time evolved in a tendency in the revolutionary socialist Left (i.e., the Trotskyists) in the late 30s which sought to establish itself as an independent revolutionary party in the 40s -- the Workers Party -- later known as the Independent Socialist League and perhaps best known as the Shachtmanites, in tribute (whether intended as such or not) to its leading personality and theoretician, Max Shachtman. It was an extraordinary movement whose contributions to socialist theory and courageous continuation, during World War II, of the finest class struggle traditions of revolutionary socialism are only now beginning to receive the interest and appreciation they deserve. Its analysis of Stalinism culminating in the theory of a new parasitic Stalinist ruling class -- bureaucratic collectivism -- was its unique contribution to socialist theory.

But the theory of bureaucratic collectivism did not serve its proponents well as a crystal ball. We had no illusions about the viability of Stalinism, understanding better than most the inner contradictions of the Stalinist state that made it infinitely more fragile than it appeared on the totalitarian surface. But we did have illusions about a post-Stalinist future. We believed, almost assumed, that a corrupt and inefficient bureaucratic collectivist state would be superseded by some form of a democratic order. We foresaw (or dreamed of) a resurgent, socialistically-oriented working class with its natural allies found among the intelligentsia that would resist all efforts to privatize the nationalized economy. All an illusion, dashed for the historic moment.

I do not intend to draw the bow of pessimism too far. The subsequent disappointments notwithstanding, the toppling of the Wall, the liberation of the Baltic nations, the disintegration of the Stalinist empire in the East, the crumbling of Communist Party rule and the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a prison house of nations remain extraordinary achievements which represent an enormous advance over the Old Regime and create possibilities for fundamental progressive change denied in a single Party/State. But there can be no denying that what adds to the timeliness of the debates of the Russian Question is the ominous turn of events, foreseen by no one, in much of the post-Communist world, above all in the blood-soaked Balkans and in the tortured lands of the former USSR.

In the Russian Republic -- as in most nations of the dismembered USSR -- there is the anomaly, tragic and farcical, of leading elements of the former Communist ruling class, driven by personal and social instincts of survival, mauling each other as they scramble and strain to self-metamorphose into the executive committee and financial elite of an artificially created and militantly anti-Communist bourgeoisie. A unique kind of one-dimensional "class struggle" in which a ruling class is fiercely fighting to overthrow itself; from corrupt Party apparatchiks to corrupt would-be bourgeois statesmen, from Communist bosses in economic ministries into industrial magnates of such avarice and ruthlessness as to make the 19th century robber barons look like Robin Hoods and philanthropists by comparison; or while former Party ideologues and the occasionally recalcitrant, but usually obedient, economic managers of the old Communist system convert into passionate disciples of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, et al. and, preaching the new gospel of the market, seek their fortunes as nouveaux riches capitalist speculators and swindlers. It is all part of the process of shock therapy, which translates into shock for the vast multitude below and therapy for the Party bureaucrats turned entrepreneurs on top.

While we erred in our optimism, our analysis of Soviet society elaborated years ago provides valuable insights today for an understanding of the historic roots of the emergent reactionary forces in the post-Communist world, above all in the former USSR. They provide the insight that this embryonic bourgeoisie, which could not have sprung from some mythical forehead, and the spreading manifestations of reaction, which threaten to plunge some former subjugated nations that made up the Soviet Union into new forms of barbarism, were all spawned by Stalinism. The link between the threatening present and the Stalinist past is more profound than the continuity of personnel noted above -- former Communist apparatchiks seeking fame and fortune as capitalist tycoons. The Yeltsins, Rutskois and Zhirinovskys and the legion of former apparatchiks have demagogically succeeded in turning the legitimate democratic struggle for national independence into its ugly opposite, a manifestation of primitive national chauvinism; the emergence of neo-fascism, of monarchism, the boldness of anti-Semites; the nexus of a political, economic and purely criminal mafioso -- whatever the incompatibility of these post-Communist personalities and phenomena -- all share a common birthright as the legatees of Stalinism. To couch my point in the idiom of the Old Left debates of the Russian Question: each and every diverse and contradictory form of reaction in the ex-Soviet Union flows from Stalinism. To expand the point a bit, in reverse form, the social structure, the politics, the "culture," the personnel, all the social impulses and contradictions of Stalinism-in-power turned the USSR into a fertile breeding ground for parasites and parasitism, for bigotry and banditry which flourished under the old regime but now appear in new guise, more overt, sometimes bolder in post-Communist society.

Take the current frightening manifestations of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, as fascists and unreconstructed Communists lock arms in joint struggle against "foreigners" (non-Great Russians) and "kikes"; a rewind of the days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact when Molotov and von Ribbentrop embraced, and German and Soviet troops fraternized on Polish streets. One need not go back to the terrible days of the Black Hundreds and Czarism to find the antecedents of Pamyat and a host of rabidly anti-Semitic organizations. Russian anti-Semitism today is the patrimony of the Communist system. As the old anti-Stalinist Left long ago noted, anti-Semitism was endemic to Stalinism; not a social "aberration" or an "excess" but something that oozed out of the pores of the totalitarian ruling Party, contaminating all levels of society. Stalin killed tens of thousands of Jews, as Jews, the famous and the obscure, rivalling the number who fell victim to Czarist pogroms. The large-scale killing of Jews abated under Stalin's successors, as did the terror, in general. Yet, even under Khrushchev, anti-Semitism was tolerated, often inflamed by the regime, and "the thaw" did not save numerous Jews executed for "economic crimes." Nor did Gorbachev make any serious effort to counteract anti-Semitism deeply rooted in his Party and in Soviet society during his tenure. He never took on Pamyat but he callously used the plight of Jews as a bargaining chip in his dealings with the West.

As with anti-Semitism, a root cause of ethnic and nationalist violence within and between the former Republics of the USSR goes far deeper than the fall of Communism. The violence can be traced to the rise and consolidation of Communist power. The Communist State embraced a multiplicity of subjugated nations, less a Union of Republics than an internal empire dominated by an all-powerful Party in which the Great Russian Republic was more equal than all others; a prison house of nations whose wardens kept the empire intact in many ways, not least of all through the use of terror. The Soviet imperium offered neither means of expression nor possibility of redress of legitimate ethnic and national grievances against the Party/State and, conversely, the Kremlin had neither the will nor the capacity to find progressive resolutions of them. Instead, the Party manipulated rivalries for its own advantage and had not the slightest compunction about liquidating vast numbers of national subjects or sending into exile entire peoples when it was thought to serve some higher Party purpose. Against this background it is not surprising that with the sudden collapse of the Communist empire, legitimate and long suppressed nationalist feelings which surfaced could be manipulated by demagogues who could effectively play on both legitimate national sentiments and ancient tribal prejudices and rivalries to preserve and enhance their personal careers. Just as Yeltsin, the-Communist-apparatchik was reborn as Yeltsin-the-capitalist-apparatchik, so were many of the pseudo nationalist demagogues, in their earlier guise, the viceroys of Soviet imperialism, willing to silence dissenting voices in their assigned republics by whatever means Moscow thought necessary.

But the patrimony of Communism is more disastrous than the sum of its details. What is most depressing is the social vacuum, at best the mere absence of concrete and significant manifestations of a democratic consciousness, of an independent working-class presence, of progressive social activism, of an organized and influential socialist voice. Consider the bloody confrontation between Yeltsin's forces and those of Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. That neither side could rally truly large numbers either to defend or assault the Parliament would have been more encouraging were it not for the fact that neither were there organizations which could rally thousands to protest the depredation of both sides.

There are, of course, individual voices of conscience and several small working-class, democratic, anarchist and socialist groups but that their voices were not multiplied a thousandfold on the streets of cosmopolitan Moscow, a city of nine million, when basic democratic rights were threatened by two contending authoritarian-oriented forces cannot be solely attributed to fear. Both the bloodbath and the lack of a popular response from below are the tragic consequences of Stalinism's innate impulse to destroy the institutions, the symbols, the history, the traditions of socialism. It sought to destroy socialist consciousness and the socialist culture in the name of "socialism," and to convince everyone that the USSR and its ruling Communist Party were the natural heirs of the best in the socialist tradition. Many in the West and the Third World swallowed this myth whole or in part, accepting the Soviet Union as a shining beacon of progress or, at least, as a progressive alternative to capitalist imperialism. The additional tragedy is that Soviet citizens also accepted the myth that the Party of Stalin and Gorbachev were the spiritual and political descendants of Marx. But since the misery of their lives under Communism carried more weight than the drivel dished out by apologists for the Party/State, their equation of Communism and socialism had the effect of turning them against socialism.

Estranged from socialism, millions of Soviet citizens were more easily seduced by the myth of the market as a potential cure-all for all the misery inflicted on them in the tortured past by a bureaucratic collectivist state. The allure of the capitalist market is not difficult to understand. Standing atop the economic ruins left by the decades-long inept and corrupt command economy, they see Paris and London, Rome and New York, Berlin and Madrid and all the other capitals of really existing capitalism and what they see seems to confirm all the fabled reports of fashionable boulevards, boutiques filled with luxury goods and chic shoppers, supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs at affordable prices. And they know that whatever the economic variations among these Western meccas, all accept the primacy of capitalist forms of private property and the sanctity of the capitalist market. If capitalism could produce such abundance in the West, then capitalism could surely do the same for them. They despise the collectivist system that has produced such hardship and chaos and refuse to believe that socialist forms of collectivism could be any different from the really existing collectivism they have had to endure under the old regime. Collectivism is collectivism! No form of it is acceptable. They are tired of being part of social "experiments," opposed to "utopias," a term of opprobrium to describe both the terrible Communist past and socialist projects for the future. They yearn, instead, for what the Russians call a "normal" life, the "normality" of abundance that they see in the West based on its capitalist organization of private property, profits, and that fabulous market.²

We of the American Left know that these are largely illusions not that different from the false hopes of the vast numbers who, earlier in the century, sought refuge in the U.S., a haven to escape repression and grinding poverty. Just as it was difficult then to convince a poor Jew living in a Polish shtetl in constant fear of pogromists that America was not really the Goldene Medina so it is difficult today to impress on the consciousness of the people of the former Soviet Union that in the U.S., too, there is unemployment, poverty, insecurity and a mounting meanness of spirit that has always afflicted this nation. What does register is the reality than an unemployed miner in West Virginia has better prospects and a higher standard of living than an employed coal miner in the Donbas; and that an elderly American trying to scrape by on a fixed income is better off than a humiliated Moscow pensioner trying to peddle her/his old pair of boots or some family heirloom to buy a life-sustaining loaf of bread.

Meanwhile standing on top of the economic and social debris that was the Soviet Union are right-wing ideologues taking copious notes for monographs, books and important lectures on the background and lessons of the post-Communist crisis. The chaos of post-Communist societies is presented as the bitter fruit of Stalinism which, they insist, was the natural emanation of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. A number of these ideologues, emboldened by the disintegration of "really existing socialism" trace the travail of the Russian people back to an earlier sinister source -- Marxism -- and, more generally, socialism. Some do not stop there. With Sherlockian doggedness, they stay on the trail of totalitarian precursors and are rewarded by the discovery that Soviet despotism and its disastrous aftermath, according to Richard Pipes, derived from "the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought ..."

And the lessons do not end with this assault on the Enlightenment. The penultimate lesson is that the collapse of Soviet society proves that capitalism is the highest stage of social evolution. In the breathtaking formulation of Professor Martin Malia "...the Soviet failure has demonstrated that the market is part of the social order of nature."

The scholarly promulgation of the historical progression -- Enlightenment/Marxism/Russian Revolution/Stalinism/post-Communist disorder -- with the Soviet debacle offered as evidence of the noble impulses of triumphant capitalism adds wider dimensions to the Russian Question. But right-wing ideologues of the Malia school are not the only ones surveying the wreckage that was the Soviet Union. Representatives from another political current are also on the scene, also taking notes, and they come up with altogether different lessons than those of the right, although from a socialist perspective they are no less noxious. They have sifted through the evidence of violence, corruption and other manifestations of social decay, and quickly reached the verdict, announced with a touch of nostalgia, that the defunct "really existing socialism," despite its "flaws" (but, then, nothing is perfect) was a positive force for good. One of the more colorful deans of this school is Alexander Cockburn, an icon for many in the Left and a lifelong apologist for Stalinism who yearns for what was "relatively speaking, a golden age for the Soviet working class" during the pre-perestroika years when the Soviet Union befriended the world's poor and oppressed in the spirit of "proletarian internationalism."

Cockburn's affection for the ancien regime does not have as wide an appreciative audience as Martin Malia's anti-socialist polemics and joyous jubilate, Glory to "the Market," but within a broadly defined Left, Cockburn's wistful regard for the Brezhnevian age of stagnation and his nostalgia for the bygone years of the Red Army's demonstration of "proletarian internationalism" in Afghanistan does not seem to diminish his popularity. At best, his apologias for "really existing socialism" are viewed with unseemly toleration; at worst, they are applauded.

That this school of apologetics has survived the collapse of "really existing socialism" also underscores the need for the Left to keep the Russian Question toward the top of its theoretical agenda.

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IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF NEW POLITICS I WILL EXPAND THE DISCUSSION of the affinity between Stalinism and post-Communist society with a more intensive review of Stalinist despotism, "really existing socialism," and the Gorbachev phenomenon. I will rebut in greater detail bourgeois ideologues, such as the above mentioned Martin Malia who uses the collapse of Communism as a launching pad to distort the history of the Russian Revolution and calumniate Marxism as a root cause of Stalinist totalitarianism. I will also take a closer look at the ruminations of Alexander Cockburn, who manipulates the chaos of post-Communist society to air and promote his nostalgia for the better old days of "really existing socialism." As a theoretical framework and to set the stage for this discussion, the debates on the Russian Question in the Old Socialist Left will be reviewed with special emphasis on the theory that the Stalinist bureaucracy was in fact a new exploitive totalitarian ruling class.

What follows now is a review of American Stalinism, which, as I will argue, cannot be adequately understood except as an aspect of the Russian Question. In a broad historical sense it is a subsidiary aspect, but for the American Left it is of major importance. This is because of the increasingly popular school of left-wing revisionist historians determined to prove that the U.S. Communist movement, above all in its halcyon years, during the Great Depression of the 30s and the Great Patriotic War of the 40s, enjoyed a semi-autonomous relationship to the Soviet Union and was responsive to American events even if that meant ignoring or flouting Moscow instructions.

If these revisionist historians used their analytical skills to objectively examine the Russian Question in depth, they might realize that the Stalinist state did not, because it could not, allow its American political appendage the degree of independence they invent. Perhaps that is why they never discuss the Russian Question. To do so might reveal the extent to which American Communism was a Soviet dependency; and to probe the question deeply would disclose the full and unrelieved horror of Stalinism. An American Communist Party revealed as slavishly obedient to a totalitarian state is not compatible with the more positive image of a party engaged in the good fight during the 30s and 40s. Better, then, to avoid serious discussion of the Russian Question and settle for a few fragmentary comments that usually begin with a ritualistic repudiation of Stalin's crimes and a note of regret about Soviet violations of democracy.

But inevitably the mythicization of American Stalinism promotes illusions about the Soviet Union. More often than not, in their brief comments, distress about Soviet terror is amended and often contradicted as they offer a more "balanced" account emphasizing Soviet "achievements": industrialization, the elimination of illiteracy, the victory against Hitler, aid to the Third World, etc. -- the stock and trade of timeworn and discredited Soviet apologists.

Since the revisionist account of U.S. Communism is laden with historical error it is a disservice to American radicalism and serves to obscure the truth about a reactionary totalitarian state. It is therefore both useful and important to approach the Russian Question by way of an examination of the American Communist Party and those who would revise its history.

I HAVE TAKEN NOTE OF THE INTENSITY OF THE WAR OF THE QUESTIONS in the Old Left. That calls for a major amendment implied above but which should be made more pointedly here. The war of the questions was the exclusive hallmark of the anti-Stalinist Left. From roughly 1930 until Stalin's death, this democratic tradition was alien to American Stalinism just as democracy was anathema to the Stalinist Party/State. In the American Communist movement there were no ideological wars, not even skirmishes, since there were virtually no Questions, if by a Question one means not a dictum but a substantive issue thrown open to membership debate and then discussed, amended, accepted or rejected. By this definition of a Question -- what other is there? -- there was never a critical Question on the agenda of the Communist Party in that period; not the American Question or the International Question or the Trade Union Question or any other Question centered on basic political, theoretical, or strategic issues. Instead, there was a Line on everything -- an American Line, a Negro Line, an International Line, a Line about the agricultural crisis and a Line about art, etc., transmitted to the rank and file by the Party leaders above and determined and monitored by forces very, very far away.

As for a debate in the Communist Party on the Russian Question, the very notion is fantastically absurd, wildly hilarious. Disputation in Communist circles about any aspect of Soviet society or Soviet intent, even in whispers, was unthinkable. Can one even imagine the bedlam that would have ensued if a loyal Communist with many hashmarks on his/her Party sleeve, had the temerity to take the floor at a Party gathering and begin her/his remarks with: "We are all grateful for Stalin's glorious contributions to humankind but I think that, possibly, Stalin is somewhat mistaken on the question of ...." The reader can fill in the blank, guessing whatever our mythic aberrant Communist might have had in mind, since it is certain that he/she would not have remained on the podium long enough to identify the doubt. We know how such a display of bad manners would have been dealt with where the Party held state power. Here, fortunately, punishment for such a breach of Party etiquette could rarely be more painful than verbal pillorying and summary expulsion.

One cannot begin to understand the atmosphere, and the functioning of the American CP in its most Stalinist period, or grasp the social essence of Soviet totalitarianism, if one fails to recognize that debate, even a mild exchange of views about the nature of Soviet society or the wisdom of its international policies or its instructions to its American affiliate was even less likely than the Pope chairing a debate in the College of Cardinals on the question, "Does God Really Exist?"

OF COURSE, THERE WERE DISCUSSIONS AND DISAGREEMENTS (AND PERSONAL RIVALRIES) within the Communist Party. But they were confined to its upper echelons and even there, controversy had strict limits. One could argue about how best to apply a policy laid down by the Comintern (or later the Cominform) and by Stalin but never to dispute it. Or when problems arose for which there were no ready answers to be found in Moscow directives -- a rare circumstance -- different positions were argued within the leadership. But if these differences threatened to escalate out of control, disturbing the sacred "unity" of the Party, or if they had the potential of turning into a genuinely substantive disagreement, then a final determination was made, not by the American rank and file, but by Comintern representatives or by a hegira to the highest authorities in Moscow whose decision was final and irreversible (except subsequently by the Soviet Party itself).

The evidence that American Communism was totally subservient to the Stalinist Party/State, that its basic dogma and political strategy were not determined by the needs and interests of the American masses, has become so clear, accessible and abundant that one might have expected the umbilical tie of American Stalinism to Soviet Stalinism no longer needed to be proved. Nevertheless, we are informed by one of the contemporary academic left historians that the Communist Party, at least in the 1940s, was "Standing On Its Own Feet."³ These historians, however, have never been able to demonstrate that the Communist Party during Stalin's reign ever raised any part of its anatomy from a prostrate position to anything higher than a supplicant's kneel, certainly never elevated itself to "standing on its own feet." Yet, the preeminent view in the literature of the Left remains that the American Communist Party in the 30s and 40s was, again in the words of perhaps the most sophisticated and challenging of the revisionist historians, Fraser Ottanelli,

a diverse and adaptable organization rooted in the social and labor struggles of the time and capable of adjusting to the complexities and historical peculiarities of the nation's society and the pressures that derived from them.

Space does not allow a fully detailed rebuttal to such mythology masquerading as history, but at least we can remind the reader, in summary fashion, of the historical record which reveals that the American Communist Party was only as "diverse" as the Russian party would allow, that it was "adaptable" only to what the Kremlin would permit and, above all, that its response to the peculiarities and pressures of American society were prescribed, proscribed and conditioned by its ideological imperative of "adjusting to the complexities and historical peculiarities" of the Soviet Party/State and the pressures that derived from it.

Does American Stalinism circa 1930-1953 call for any less harsh judgment? Consider the historical record.

American Stalinism in the Third Period

IN THE EARLY 30S ALL NATIONAL TRIBUTARIES OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL were directed into a Moscow-created ideological and political phantasm, popularly known as the Third Period. The "first period" from 1917-1924 was one of international revolutionary offensives, followed in the "second period" by four years of capitalist stabilization, and now, according to Comrade Stalin by a Third Period of renewed revolutionary struggles led, of course, by Communist parties that would crush the bourgeoisie which, the General Secretary reassured his followers, was not only weakened everywhere by a cyclical crisis but was spasmodically gasping for breath in its final death agony.

This Third Period was marked by an ultra-leftism which, viewed in purely intellectual terms, was quixotic to the point of madness. Not the least of its idiosyncracies was the theory of "social fascism" which twinned social democracy with fascism. Placed in historical context, however, the theories of the Third Period were not really mad, merely insidious. For the pseudo-revolutionary claptrap that accompanied Stalin's gross exaggeration of capitalism in profound social crisis was useful as both ideological adornment and weapon in his late 20s campaign to crush the last vestiges of an already defeated Bukharinite "right" in the Soviet Union. And mopping up the last outposts of dissidence from the "right" or from any other direction under the banner of Third Period ultra-revolutionary rhetoric was the preliminary to the extermination of millions of peasants, workers and intellectuals in the subsequent years of forced collectivization, forced industrialization and the Great Purges.

Thus what appeared on the surface to be irrational served the retrograde purpose of consolidating the stranglehold of a totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy over all of Soviet society. Outside the Soviet Union, Third Period policies benefited neither the working class nor the national Communist parties. In Germany, it had horrifying consequences for the German working class, the German nation, the German Communist Party and for all of humanity. The only ones who gained from the Communist Third Period were the Nazis, since the refusal of the powerful Communist Party to propose and press collaboration with the even more powerful Social Democratic Party in a genuine anti-fascist united front (excluded by Party dogma of the moment which insisted that the Socialist Party was itself a fascist or even worse, a "social fascist" party), virtually guaranteed the triumph of Hitlerism. Loyalty to Moscow took precedence over the literally life and death question of crushing Naziism. If the huge German CP would not deviate from a suicidal policy arranged in Moscow, what possibility was there that the relatively minuscule American CP would adjust its "policies to the complexities and peculiarities" of American society, as Ottanelli assures us was the case, when that conflicted with American Stalinism's primary allegiance to Moscow?

At least in Germany, the ultra-left rhetoric of the Communist Party came from a massive organization with hundreds of thousands of members which commanded the support and respect of millions of workers, youth and intellectuals. Hence, when we note that the Third Period policies of the German Communist Party were at odds with objective national realities, the measure of that criticism must be adjusted to the fact that the German CP, by virtue of its enormous strength, was itself one of the "objective realities" of pre-Hitler Germany. When the Communists boasted that even if Hitler came to power they would make short shrift of him ("After Hitler -- Our Turn") one must remember that it was the boast of a Party that won nearly six million votes in the 1932 elections and even had its own para-military organizations. (Of course, after Hitler, instead of it being "Our Turn," the powerful Communist Party collapsed without a fight. However, that is for another discussion.)

But when the feeble American Communist Party, marginal to the objective realities of American life, railed against Roosevelt the "fascist" and Norman Thomas the "social fascist," when it interpreted episodic manifestations of militant struggle in the early 30s as evidence of a pre-revolutionary situation in the U.S., when every strike and demonstration was a precursor of an imminent struggle -- that the Party would lead, naturally -- to create a Soviet America (never mind, for the moment how frightful the prospect of a Stalinist version of a Soviet America), when the Communists sought to build "revolutionary" dual unions under Party control in a country where the traditional unions were battered to near oblivion -- then the Third Period, American Stalinist-style, unlike Germany, was marked more by farce than tragedy. More pertinent here, is that the gross contradictions between the antics of the Third Period and the social realities revealed the extent to which American Communism in the early 30s, already congenitally incapable of standing on its own feet, had placed itself in political servitude to Moscow.

On the heels of Hitler's accession to power, the German New Order made it imperative that the Soviet Union respond with a new foreign policy that would oblige Communist movements everywhere to phase out the pseudo ultra-left of the Third Period. Gradually at first, the retreat from sectarianism and revolutionary bombast would give way to the conciliatory politics of the Soviet Union's hoped-for "Collective Security" of a political and military alliance with the major Western powers (only yesterday denounced as imperialist and fascist). Mid-1933 to mid-1935 was a transition period, when the line from Moscow was not always certain, yet the American CP with its political antennae constantly adjusted and readjusted, the better to receive Moscow's message clearly, sought to keep Party propaganda and actions within the Comintern's shifting guidelines.

Many revisionist historians, anxious to Americanize the Party, would like their readers to believe that the gradual shift from ultra-left sectarianism to policies that appeared to be related to American realities were the result of CPUSA initiatives. As when Fraser Ottanelli writes:

Eventually the bitter experiences of the first years of the deep depression, followed by the eruption of working-class militancy and the ominous expansion of fascism in Europe, exerted pressures on the leadership of the CPUSA to reconsider the Party line. (p. 49) (emphasis added)

Simply not true. American Communists might have felt more comfortable with the changing line but the operative "pressures on the leadership" did not come from the leadership's independent reevaluation. It came from Moscow, and only from Moscow.

One more example of Ottanelli's mythmaking:

The experiences and failures of the TUUL [the "revolutionary" dual unions led by the Communists] combined with the growth of the AFL and the independent unions, as well as the strengthening within them of the pro-industrial union forces, led the Party to abandon dual-unionism in favor of returning to traditional unions. (p.51)

This is absurd on the face of it. If Ottanelli had a better understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union he might have realized that on questions as important as trade union policy, changing the American line was a Russian prerogative. At least he understands that to formally abandon dual unionism, permission was required of Higher Authorities:

By the end of 1934 red unions had been effectively discarded. However, in order to formalize its doings and to officially disband the TUUL, the Party needed to secure the approval of the Comintern. Consequently, in December 1934, Browder addressed the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International] in Moscow, claiming that the new situation in the United States required the Communist party "to shift the main emphasis to work within the AFofL." At a meeting in mid-January, following Moscow's endorsement, the Party's Central Committee announced the decision to liquidate the TUUL, ... (p. 55) (emphasis added)

Compare this to the previous quoted passage which claims that the Party, on its own initiative apparently, abandoned dual unionism in response to changing events. Now we are told that "in order" to "officially disband" the dual unions, it was necessary "to receive the approval of the Comintern." It is hard to reconcile the two quotations. If the American Communists, on their own initiative could have achieved the de facto dissolution of the dual unions, why did they need Moscow's approval? Is it possible that a Party that felt compelled to obtain such approval could have "effectively discarded" the TUUL unless it knew, formally and/or informally, that this was in compliance with what Moscow wanted?

It would have been helpful had Ottanelli called attention to the charade of Browder in Moscow pretending that it was the CPUSA that decided "to shift the main emphasis to work within the AFofL," when Browder knew, as did everyone at the ECCI meeting, and as all scholars of American Communism should know, that what "required" the CPUSA "to shift" was far less the "new situation in the United States" than what Moscow perceived to be the new situation and new needs of the Soviet dictatorship following Hitler's rise to power.

The Popular Front -- From Red Flag to Old Glory

IT IS TRUE THAT DURING THIS TRANSITION PERIOD (from 1933 to 1935) Moscow held the American party on a longer leash because clear signals on all questions were not always forthcoming from Moscow since it dropped Third Period postures at an uneven pace. In August 1935 the leash was shortened with the famous speech by Comintern Secretary General Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. The Popular Front was now unambiguously set in place. The Third Period was definitely over and all parties of the Comintern knew what was expected of them. Yesterday's "social fascists" were now coveted as allies in a sought after united front of all progressive and democratic forces to crush the menace of fascism. Class collaboration, reformism, chauvinism, etc., all the reputed attributes that turned treacherous social democrats into treacherous "social fascists" were now the ideological and political baggage of Communist movements everywhere. An American Communist going into hibernation at the close of 1934 and awakening a year later might well have retreated to the bliss of somnolence on seeing that his/her comrades had capitulated to "social fascism."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the fascist of early 1935 was transformed by the wave of Moscow's wand into the popular leader of the progressive wing of the American bourgeoisie. Yesterday's fascist was now the Communists' choice for reelection as President.⁴

Meanwhile Earl Browder carefully put his Third Period revolutionary cloak into the Party's political blanket chest and was soon waltzing around on the national political stage resplendently outfitted in a new Party costume tailored from an American flag (with a Moscow address on the couturier's label). Emblazoned on his new Party dress, in large, bold letters was the aphorism that summed up Browder's momentous contribution to Marxist thought, "Communism Is 20th Century Americanism."⁵

For exactly four exhilarating years, the Communist Party sang the Star Spangled Banner (not metaphorically) at its meetings, wept for Paul Revere, exalted the Founding Fathers and generally celebrated the American Experience in its press, at Party functions, in its expanding network of front organizations. It all paid handsome dividends to the Party which grew geometrically, became a power to reckon with in the trade unions while its conglomeration of front organizations continued to proliferate.

The revisionist historians are generally most attracted to the Communist Party during this Popular Front phase. The Party seemed to address itself realistically to American problems, discarding all the "revolutionary" excesses of the Third Period. It helped build unions and was active in campaigns for racial equality. All very appealing to the revisionists. And the Party was successful in its Americanization drive; equally appealing. Because it was successful the Party must have been correct in what it was doing. I don't want to debate here whether or not the Party was "correct," in some abstract way, during the Popular Front (it was certainly correct for the Soviet Union). I don't believe that to be the case but it is a tangential matter. More important to establish about the essential nature of American Communism is that whether the Party, in one or another phase, had a ludicrous position or a "correct" position, the position taken was always whatever the ruling party of a totalitarian system decreed.

What if, at the Seventh World Congress, Dimitrov had called for the sharpening of the ultra-left policies of the Third Period? Large numbers of Party members might have left; that was often the case after a sudden change in line. But the Party itself would have been unmoved by defections or any other damage to itself, and as certain as night follows day it would have unanimously lauded the genius of Dimitrov and Stalin, and surpassed past performances in vituperative condemnation of Roosevelt-the-fascist in 1936. That is the reality of American Communism which eludes revisionist historians. "Correctness" had nothing to do with adopting or changing any Party line; loyalty to the Soviet Union had everything to do with it.

Some historians, Maurice Isserman, for example, prefer to think of the Popular Front as Communism's reformist phase, something reminiscent of classic social democracy. They are quite mistaken.

The united front against fascism had as its larger purpose to gain friends for the Soviet Union (and neutralize opponents) among bourgeois politicians, labor leaders, industrialists and the populace at large. This readiness to collaborate with sections of conflicting classes was altogether different in kind from the class collaborationism of reformist social democracy. The CPUSA's class collaborationism did not stem from ideological illusions about bourgeois democracy, about gradualism and incremental change, nor was it driven by the need to compromise with capital in order to protect a vested interest in the organized labor movement, as with traditional social democracy. Class collaborationism was not endemic to American Stalinism but was simply driven at a specific time by the Party's exclusive allegiance to the Soviet ruling class. E. Browder was no E. Bernstein.

The shift to the Popular Front was in no way a decision of the American CP. And the contending forces in the class struggle were not that different in late 1935 from what they had been earlier that year. There was certainly nothing that new about the New Deal Administration to call for such an abrupt reversal, and while the growth of industrial unionism was an exciting new element, that would hardly have required an authentic party of the Left to abandon basic class struggle principles, to strike the red flag and hoist Old Glory. A stronger case could be made for the opposite view that the circumstances surrounding the emergence of industrial unions should have inspired higher levels of commitment to political and economic class struggle militancy. (In any case, in mid-1935 when the Popular Front was officially installed, Communists were not yet fully committed to building the CIO.)

The Popular Front line was imposed on the American CP by Comintern fiat. Those Communists who didn't approve had the option of resigning from the Party. They did not have the choice of dissent. The Party would soon invoke the Spirit of '76, and the Declaration of Independence would make the front pages of the Daily Worker but nothing remotely resembling the principles of Jeffersonian democracy could be tolerated in the internal operation of the American Stalinist party.

The Stalin-Hitler Pact

THE POPULAR FRONT PHASE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM came to a sudden shocking halt with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed on August 23, 1939. Shortly before this infamous rapprochement that sparked World War II, Earl Browder had dismissed the notion of such an agreement as an anti-Soviet canard. "There is as much chance," he said, "of a Russo-German agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the Chamber of Commerce." Six weeks later the Pact was signed without noticeable improvement of Browder's prospects for heading the Chamber.

Browder and the CPUSA were caught totally unprepared. How could he explain a rapprochement whose possibility he had just dismissed with ridicule; and how could the Party reconcile the "Democratic Front" with the image of a smiling German Ambassador von Ribbentrop and Stalin warmly exchanging toasts including those to Der Fuehrer Adolf Hitler? It was a Party nightmare. For a while the Party press stammered a few rationalizations. It even continued to print a few kind words about Roosevelt -- but not for long. And a few very harsh words about the Nazi Blitzkrieg in Poland -- but not for long. Stalin and the Comintern straightened out Browder and their American party; first, with a series of direct communications laying down the line and then with the Red Army's own invasion of Poland on September 17, which made it bloody clear that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was not simply a defensive non-aggression treaty but was part of a joint prearranged agreement for aggression against Poland and, with Hitler's permission, for Russian conquest of the Baltic nations and the assault against Finland.

By September 3, Browder and the Party were clearly on course, i.e., the Russian Stalinist course. On that day all the old chauvinist crap and anti-fascist affectations highlighting the Popular Front were unceremoniously tossed overboard while Browder neatly folded his patriotic costume and carefully put it back in the Party blanket chest (who could tell when he might need it again?) whence he pulled out and slipped into the threadbare garments of Third Period ultra-leftism. It was now Browder the revolutionary who thundered against the war between Germany and the Allied forces as an imperialist war. It was the duty of Communists to lead in the struggle to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war." (Including in Germany, the Soviet ally?) But in this imperialist war there was no equivalency of evil. British imperialism was the main aggressor while the German nation was the victim of a brutal blockade. Of course, Naziism was bad, too, but not that bad at the moment, and anyway, as Comrade Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov wisely explained, "Fascism is a matter of taste." Through omission and commission Stalinist parties everywhere -- the U.S. was no exception -- had become apologists for German fascism, while the Soviet Union became an active military collaborator of the Wehrmacht in Poland. (Collaboration existed on other levels, as well.)

As for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the good Dr. Jekyll of early August turned into the hideous Mr. Hyde of September. In a December 1938 encomium to FDR, the President was exalted as "the symbol which unites the broadest masses of the progressive majority of the people." Even a week after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, the Party was enthusiastic at the prospect of a third term for FDR who "has best expressed the hearts and minds of the people." In only a matter of weeks this symbol of the progressive majority and voice of the hearts and minds of the people would stand exposed as "the political leader of the warmongers" and the "tool of financial oligarchs," moving in the same direction as Hitler did in 1933 and -- shades of the Third Period -- of being, after all, a sort of fascist.

The policy of the American Communist Party during the Nazi-Soviet alliance was so indefensible, so reactionary, so contradictory to everything said for the previous four years and so blatantly a demonstration of its feudal servitude to the Soviet/Party State that it is difficult sometimes to understand why so many revisionist historians and scholars cannot fully recognize these realities and their implications. It is not that they approve of or even condone the Party's adaptation to the Pact. Some are even quite critical but given the nature of the offense, rarely sufficiently, and often angered but all too briefly. In fact, revisionist histories of the American Communist Party generally dispose of this period in a relatively few pages and hardly ever see it as damning evidence of the Party's subordination to Moscow. As, for example, when Fraser Ottanelli writes:

During the years of the Depression and World War II the increase in Communist strength, broadened influence, relative acceptance, and their ability to make significant contributions to the labor and social struggles of the time, were direct consequences of their search for political policies, language, and organizational forms which reflected the country's circumstances, culture and singular political system as Communists understood and articulated them. This process, sometimes termed "Americanization" transformed the Party into the leading left-wing organization in the country; it was initiated and defined, in its various phases, by United States Communists. (emphasis added)

This paean of praise for a U.S. Communist Party-that-never-was is immediately followed -- in the same paragraph -- by a less fanciful account:

The new directions of the Comintern and Soviet foreign policy of the Popular Front period provided new opportunities and more room to maneuver for those within the Party who were pushing for a revision of past sectarian policies in favor of the adoption of a new line that would enable them to deal with the challenges that had emerged from the complex political and economic situation that had developed during the Depression. (emphasis added)

In his first two sentences he would have us believe that the twists, turns, reversals and contradictions in this period (what he euphemistically refers to as one of its "various phases") had its source (the "direct consequences") in "their" -- the Party's -- efforts to Americanize itself, to relate to American circumstances and culture; that it was the U.S. Communists who not only "defined" new policies but "initiated" them. That would have been startling news to the Comintern, no less surprising to the CPUSA leadership and incomprehensible to a more objective historian. In fact, Ottanelli has his own doubts, otherwise he could not end his paragraph on the contradictory note that it was the "new directions" of the Comintern and the interests of Soviet foreign policy that "provided new opportunities" and "room to maneuver" for those in the CP who felt most comfortable with the Popular Front policy.

Can a movement really think for itself, initiate and define its own history when it is the Comintern and Soviet interests which determine the opportunities, the room to maneuver within which the Party can function? That would be like boasting of the freedom of a prisoner who is at liberty to move and maneuver within his cell.

In the above quotations, Ottanelli is summing up the CPUSA "during the Depression and World War II." That means from the end of 1929 until Spring of 1946. During that time there were four somersaulting "phases" (and the beginning of a fifth, the Cold War period, already visible in 1946). But Ottanelli concentrates only on two phases -- the Popular Front (the second phase) and the Soviet-American wartime alliance (phase four). The reason for such selectivity should be obvious. These Americanization periods are most congenial to Ottanelli and other revisionists, since they seem to offer the best evidence of a more politically free-wheeling movement responsive to specific American needs and circumstances. However, the Depression did not begin with the Popular Front but six years earlier when the ultra-left vagaries of the Comintern's Third Period were most clearly at odds with American realities and more clearly imposed on its American affiliate. Better then, in his conclusions, to drop those years down the memory hole.

And World War II did not begin with the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. The war began with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Between the time of the signing of that Pact and its unilateral abrogation by Hitler, nearly two years later, the Party was in its third phase in the years covered in Ottanelli's summary but he skips that phase as well. And for as good, or as bad, a reason since his creation of a fictionalized Party initiating and defining its various phases falls apart by any objective reading of how the Party responded to and behaved for the duration of the Hitler-Stalin alliance.

It is important to note that during that period the Party lost much of the political capital it had accrued in the broad progressive and labor movements during the headier days of the Popular Front. Despite the enormous erosion of its influence the Party's loyalty to the Soviet/Party State was unshakened.

While its peripheral influence declined precipitously (a number of its front organizations were shattered) the Party, itself, was not nearly as adversely affected. Approximately 85% of the membership remained loyal, along with an even higher percentage of the leadership. Most shocking was that relatively few of its many Jewish members defected. The fact that the Party was already so steeled that it could withstand the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was the most telling evidence of its moral bankruptcy, its political and organizational subservience to Moscow. This servility was just as pronounced during the Popular Front although less grotesque.

None of this is to suggest that Ottanelli and other revisionists are unaware that acceptance of the Moscow line during the Nazi-Soviet Pact revealed, in Ottanelli's words, the Party membership's "attachment to the Party, their faith in the USSR, and their strong sense of duty to defend the Workers State were such that most Communists submerged their doubts and accepted their leaders' explanations virtually without debate ..."

"Their strong sense of duty" is at best a rather pallid description of the membership's unconditional approval of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. It even suggests a sense of nobility in their devotion to principle. Actually, thousands of American Communists were no doubt deeply disturbed by the Pact, instinctively finding it repugnant. But given the nature of the Stalinist movement, they had no way of expressing their private feelings within the organization. Despite deep misgivings, they were impelled by their political and psychological conditioning and their perverted sense of discipline to demonstrate their uncritical support of the Pact and overriding loyalty to the USSR.

The "Great Patriotic War"

THE DILEMMA OF HOW TO RETAIN A FOOTHOLD IN LABOR AND PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS and, at the same time, meet its primary obligation to defend the Nazi-Soviet alliance was resolved by Adolf Hitler on June 21, 1941 when he scrapped all agreements and friendship pacts with Moscow, unleashing the Wehrmacht's massive assault against an unprepared Soviet Union. A disbelieving Stalin was sent into shock.

Now everything was different. Just as ancient alchemists sought to transform base metals into gold, Communists argued that the forced entry of the Soviet Union into the war as a Western ally, transformed an imperialist war into a democratic war. Exactly how the deeply rooted imperialist impulses behind British aggression, exposed by the Communists until June 21, could have been dissipated by the German assault on the USSR and not previously by German aggression against Poland and the Low countries, and by its conquest of France is a mystery that the Communists could not explain. But magicians are notoriously secretive and, in any case, Communist prestigitators (otherwise known as theoreticians) were less concerned with rational explanations than with doing and saying whatever they believed was helpful to the defense of the USSR. That had long been the Party's guiding principle.

On June 22, Browder peeled off his anti-imperialist outerwear, returned it to the Party blanket chest and out came the Yankee Doodle Dandy costume that really was more becoming to him. The patriotic gore gushed out of the Party organs in torrents. Roosevelt, of course, was no longer a warmonger. He was not enough of a warmonger to suit the Party. The pre-June 21st "anti-war" chant, "The Yanks Are Not Coming," had the "Not" deleted. The Party campaigned for U.S. entry into the war, denouncing as traitors, the pacifists and anti-war activists whose support they had so recently sought. Said Browder:

We have in the United States a group of pacifist societies who, in the name of peace, are counseling unconditional surrender to the international bandits. Whatever their motives, such pacifists have become no better than the conscious agents of Hitler and Mussolini. (The People's Front, p.333)

Once the U.S. entered the war, the CP's campaign to prevent any interference with the prosecution of the war became even more frenzied. Above all, there could be no interference with war production. What to do about John L. Lewis -- wooed by the Party before June 21 -- who led his miners out on strike? The Communist response:

There is not the slightest doubt that Lewis is working and has worked for the past two years at least as an integral part of the pro-Nazi fifth column, aiming at a negotiated peace with Hitler, and at the Nazi subjugation of the United States itself. ...this is treason. (emphasis original) (The Communist, July 1943.)

The Party suggested that jail might be the best way to handle A. Philip Randolph who it denounced as fascistic and a Nazi tool because he sought to organize mass struggles against racism on the home front and in this country's segregated Jim Crow army perpetuated by the Roosevelt Administration. What of the leaders of the anti-war Trotskyist movement convicted and imprisoned -- the first victims of the Smith Act? They got what they deserved. Throw away the keys. Stalin would not have let these fascist mad dogs off so lightly.

By then, widely recognized even by the business community as the extreme right wing in the trade unions, the Party supported the No Strike Pledge and acted as the watchdog of American capitalism in the interests of defending the Soviet Union. The Communist rank and file basked in Earl Browder's revealed wisdom as he explained that "We Communists are opposed to permitting an explosion of class conflict in our country when the war is over." Class conflict, Browder explained, would be promoted only by those motivated more by private greed than love of country. Ronald Reagan never said it better. Harry Bridges -- who might or might not have been a member of the Party, in his case only a technical difference -- raised the patriotic anti-labor ante in exchange for postwar Soviet-American harmony with the promise that "The strike weapon is overboard, not only for the duration of the war, but after the war, too."

The surface chauvinism of the Party exceeded anything it said or did during the Popular Front years when it led major militant strikes, and never offered capitalism the equivalent of the wartime No Strike Pledge. And during the Popular Front the Party wept over a forgotten Paul Revere and posthumously graced our Founding Fathers with honorary membership in the American Communist Party. Whatever else there is to say about Paul Revere and the Founding Fathers, they were, on the whole, committed to the good fight to free the Colonies from the tyranny of the British Crown. There is little, then, to match the Party's wartime jingoism epitomized in Earl Browder's famous offer in December 1943 "to clasp the hand of J.P. Morgan" if only he would endorse the postwar alliance envisioned at Teheran. Of course, to have grasped the financier's hand Browder would have had to turn necromancer or gravedigger since the billionaire banker and enemy of labor had died earlier that year and was, presumably, entombed. But that was just a detail and, as Browder later explained, it was the thought that counted. He was correct. It was the thought that mattered and this underlying thought really had nothing to do with the class collaborationist Party line during the wartime Soviet-American alliance, just as denunciations of Roosevelt as a warmonger had nothing to do with commitments to militant class struggle and anti-imperialism. The underlying thought that in its own way tied everything together was how best to defend the "Socialist Fatherland."

And it is the consistent application of this primary thought that proved so damaging to the Communist Party once the war ended and it became clear that the wartime Grand Alliance could not possibly survive the irreconcilable social and class antagonisms of Soviet and American imperialism. Even before the shooting war had ended, the Cold War had begun and Communist parties everywhere were called upon to renew the struggle against capitalist imperialism. The American Communists, now back in patched-up revolutionary overalls, in accord with Moscow's wishes, pursued policies in the labor movement and in the broader domestic political arena that left the Party particularly vulnerable to the vicious, punitive anti-Communism of Trumanism and McCarthyism and to the unconscionable surgical methods used by the bureaucratic leadership of the organized labor movement to solve its "Communist problem." But the fact that the Party followed the Moscow line like lemmings was only further evidence that thoughts about the Soviet Union always took precedence over thoughts about the welfare of the American party or the mass of American people.

Moscow's Seignioral Rights

THE VERY NATURE OF THE SOVIET/PARTY STATE REQUIRED IT TO CONTROL the political flow of all its global tributaries. More than that, Moscow assumed, and it was rarely challenged, that it had seignioral rights to arrange the intimate details of the internal life of all affiliated parties. But perhaps in no other Party did Moscow exercise these feudal prerogatives more blatantly than with its particularly submissive American affiliate, notwithstanding the cheerier version of revisionist historians who project a false image of at least a semi-autonomous American movement deeply rooted in the American experience. Moscow acted as the final arbiter for whatever uncertainties or disputes arose in the American party. No No less significant, from the time of Stalin's consolidation of his power until his death, i.e., 1929 to 1953, it was the Soviet party under the personal supervision of Stalin which fired and hired the top leaders of the CPUSA. I don't know that this can accurately be said of any other Communist movement.

Jay Lovestone inherited the mantle of Party Secretary from Charles Ruthenberg upon his death in 1927. Two years later the Party was to hold its Sixth Convention. In the interim, a faction led by William Z. Foster developed in opposition to the Lovestone leadership. The divisive issues were interesting but would take us too far afield. The important point is that in elections to the 1929 Convention the Lovestone leadership had won the support of roughly 90% of the delegates elected in March. The Foster faction was a negligible force. All that would soon change, once Stalin, suspicious that Lovestone had fallen under the influence of the disgraced N. Bukharin, personally intervened. Foster and Lovestone made the requisite pilgrimages to the Stalinist basilica in Moscow, each to plead his case before a court of Comintern Cardinals with the participation of the Pontiff, Josef Stalin. Lovestone, with the support of the vast majority of the Party, was confident. Thus, for all his astuteness, Lovestone was naive and showed terrible judgment in his underestimation of the boundless cynicism of the Comintern and Stalin, unimpressed by such irrelevancies as a "majority." This was made clear by Stalin himself in his verdict, delivered in terms reflective of bureaucratic arrogance and a chilling foretaste of bloodier things soon to come in the Soviet Union.

Do you [Lovestone] think that the American workers will follow your lead against the Comintern, that they will prefer the interest of your factional group to the interests of the Comintern? ...At present you still have a formal majority. But tomorrow you will have no majority and you will find yourselves completely isolated if you attempt to start a fight against the decisions of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. You may be certain of that, dear comrades.

Stalin's "dear comrades" smacked of a mafia Capo's kiss of death, as it would soon be for tens of thousands of Soviet "dear comrades" murdered in the coming decade. For the American party, the kiss of death took the more benign form of the political execution of Jay Lovestone as a Communist leader. Almost literally overnight, Lovestone's most ardent supporters now denounced him for his right-wing deviationism, engaging in a competitive blood sport as to who could impress Stalin most with vilification of the fallen leader. Lovestone's support shriveled to a handful who vainly sought to reassure Stalin that they were loyal to him not to Bukharin. Hadn't they expelled the Trotskyists? Stalin was implacable. Lovestone and his little band were expelled though they continued to plead fruitlessly for readmission to the Party. What does this say of a movement so fickle in its loyalties that it could reverse itself politically, not because of the weight of counterarguments, but simply because of the weight of the Soviet Union and the supreme authority of Josef Stalin?

Having removed Lovestone, Stalin took it upon himself to find a reliable replacement. William Z. Foster seemed the likely choice. But Stalin, always the paranoid, decided (wrongly) that Foster had been soft on Trotskyism. That put a cap on Foster's ambitions for the moment (a very long moment, as it turned out). It was Stalin who decided that the anointed would be Earl Browder even though he had not even been in the country for most of 1927-1928 but stationed in China on a Comintern assignment. Naturally, the Party voted overwhelmingly for Browder to lead it. Although the delegates to the Convention voted for Browder, they didn't really elect him. Browder had already been elected by Stalin; all the Convention delegates did was, in Pavlovian response, to raise their hands to second Stalin's decision.

INFINITE IN HIS WISDOM, STALIN CHOSE WELL WHEN HE SELECTED EARL BROWDER. For Browder's backbone was to be historically proven so supple and his character so free of moral restraint that he had no difficulty at all adjusting to each and every somersault and jolting twist of the Party line determined in Moscow. These were talents Stalin could appreciate. So for 16 years, on Stalin's sufferance, Browder was permitted, through thick and thin, to serve as his leading American lickspittle, no matter the stench of the accumulated blood and gore on Stalin's boots. Too harsh an image? I think not. From the madness of the Third Period, to the Popular Front, to the phony anti-imperialism of the Hitler-Stalin Pact era, to extending the hand of friendship to J.P. Morgan during the Soviet-American wartime alliance -- Browder was there, always at the ready, anxious to do whatever the higher authorities expected and required of him. (This picture of Browder may offend the sensibilities of some of the new historians who romanticize him as the great innovator and Americanizer. The historical record tells us otherwise.)

By the Spring of 1945, Earl Browder had outlived his usefulness. There were visible cracks in the Soviet-American alliance, preliminary indications of antagonisms that would erupt in a Cold War. There was a clear need for Moscow to execute an ideological turn to correspond to the new situation. Above all, the Communist Party in the competing superpower would have to be re-outfitted once again. Class collaborationism would have to give way to militant class struggle. There could be no more talk of Communist-capitalist cooperation; the emphasis would have to be on American imperialism's mounting threat to world peace. To achieve this, Browder's continued presence as Party leader would be a liability. He was too closely associated with a line no longer acceptable. Also, he could better serve Moscow as a necessary scapegoat. It made little difference that Browder's so-called innovations during this period were within Moscow's set guidelines and had met with its approval.

An article by French Communist Jacques Duclos criticizing the Party and chiding Comrade Browder for his alleged errors first appeared in a French Communist publication in April 1945. Apparently the American leadership was taken by surprise. But they knew what was expected of them. In mid-June, just eight weeks after Duclos placed Stalin's dismissal notice to Browder in the Cahiers du Communisme, the Party's National Committee convened. In a remarkable show of gumption, Browder argued that the policy of peaceful co-existence between capitalism and Communism was not altogether wrong and was in accord with the best interests and theoretical pronouncements and directives of the Soviet apparatus at the time. His plea fell on deaf ears. Of the 54 members of the Central Committee there was just one vote for his position -- his own. At the National Convention the following month "Browderism" was unanimously condemned and Browder was formally expelled from the Party in February 1946, unmasked as a "social imperialist." (This did not stop Browder in 1948 from pleading for readmission to the Party so that he could more effectively contribute to the struggle against the scourge of Titoism! Appeal denied, of course. At the September 1948 National Convention with peculiarly Stalinist Alice-in-Wonderland dialectic, the Party declared that "The appeal by Browder for reinstatement is in keeping with his anti-Party activities.") Thus it was that a Russian dictator through a French Communist intermediary, Jacques Duclos, prepared the groundwork for serving the leader of an American party with a dishonorable discharge.

William Z. Foster's moment had finally arrived. The circumstances surrounding Browder's Fall and Foster's Coronation were the nadir of American Communism, when the Party was most starkly exposed as an unadorned prototypical Stalinist movement. And the events were no less revealing of the totalitarian power of the Soviet/Party State over its affiliates. When Stalin removed and expelled Lovestone, he was manipulating a Party of only five or six thousand members with little influence in the outside world whose leader had occupied his post for only two years. But when the Kremlin removed Browder, it was able to effortlessly manipulate a Party that was perhaps over 100,000-strong including its youth section, with enormous influence in the organized labor movement, in cultural institutions, and with a network of front organizations. More than that, the Party even gained a toehold in the centers of political power that it could not boast of even in the heyday of the Popular Front. Party leaders were consulted by and shared platforms with bourgeois politicians, many of whom could appreciate a party that opposed the No Strike Pledge, was ready to put labor and civil rights leaders behind bars if they interfered with war production and generally held out the olive branch to capitalism.

Consider, too, that where Lovestone was admired briefly by the large majority of a tiny movement, Earl Browder was idolized -- raised to the level of a cult figure -- by an even larger majority of a far more meaningful movement he led for 16 years. Everything about him, his speech, his writings, his mannerisms, his family tree, testified to his greatness. When the CP packed Madison Square Garden with a wartime patriotic jamboree that took off with an inspirational rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, the Party faithful and friends were moved to evangelical fervor with the climactic appearance of the favorite son of Witchita, Kansas. Never mind that his voice had little affect and his speeches lacked content. As far as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was concerned, the struggle for a better world was strengthened by "the voice and pen of the man from the heart of America."

Finally, consider that everything that Browder had written or said in implementing the Moscow line during the war was taken as gospel truth. The Party had a huge media operation, from theoretical journals to daily periodicals, publishing enough pamphlets and books to fill a library. In none of this vast production did anyone dispute the Moscow-determined Party line faithfully interpreted by Browder that would soon be reviled by all as the heresy of "Browderism." Even William Z. Foster who grumbled in top leadership circles where he influenced hardly anyone, wrote articles and pamphlets that reflected Browder's views.⁶

Looked at rationally, it is simply mind-boggling that all the Party elders and theoreticians who had promulgated the Browder line (actually, the Stalin-Browder line) in countless texts, and tens of thousands of rank and file Communists who approved of what they read, could be convinced in a few weeks that everything that had been written was wrong, after reading an English translation of a short article (really nothing more than a memorandum) of no intrinsic theoretical merit, that originally appeared in some obscure Communist journal in recently-liberated Paris. That this memo should have had such persuasive powers appears preposterous; but only on the face of it, because it was evident that the reproach signed by Duclos did not originate in Paris but in Moscow and therefore had the force of a Papal Encyclical.

One may ask the same question about the fate of beloved comrade Browder. What were the changed circumstances of power that could induce so many thousands in the Party to suddenly strip Browder of his halo? Overnight, Browder was demonized by former acolytes and sycophants who had surrounded him, their denunciations as brutal as they had been rhapsodic in their recent homage. "Take a trip around the country, unknown, unhonored and unsung, but meet the people, Earl, and learn to be one of them again," raved the same Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who had so recently extolled the same Earl Browder as "the man from the heart of America."

What triggered this extraordinary reevaluation of Browder, the mass hysteria and witchhunting atmosphere was nothing more than a critical reference to Browder in Duclos' little memorandum. But that was enough for all those in the movement who could decode the Duclos document to recognize that, in addition to it being an encyclical call for a change in dogma, it was clearly also a writ of excommunication.

Not only was Moscow's power so great and the nature of American Stalinism such that a single, small document indirectly sent from the Kremlin could oblige Communists to rewrite their textbooks and destroy their leader, it also brought on a rising crescendo of pitiable wailing that was, at once, both appalling and comical. There were mea culpas, confessions and self-flagellation for having sinned along with the "revisionist" Browder. There was about it a touch of the Moscow Trials, in some ways even worse. The atmosphere was captured in the Irving Howe/ Lewis Coser History of the American Communist Party:

Looking back upon this extraordinary spectacle, it is impossible not to be struck by the comparison with the Moscow trials -- except that in a way the American incident is worse. Many of those who confessed in Moscow had been shattered men, victims of years of persecution by a totalitarian state, years of imprisonment and, in some instances, months of physical torture; many of them confessed, it would now appear, in order to save the lives of their wives and children; and even a few of the Moscow defendants like Bukharin, when pressed too hard by Vyshinsky, burst out with a sudden impulse to dignity, a brief display of dialectical brilliance mocking their tormentors. As the occasion for the collapse of once proud and powerful men, the Moscow trials contained an element of tragedy; but here, at the Communist National Committee, there was no tragedy: it was all simply repugnant, an ultimate example of how a totalitarian creed can destroy man's will and dissolve his moral fiber. (p.446)

Of special interest is that the penitents were not importuning the American Communist movement. They were imploring the Russians for forgiveness.

(The anti-Browder hysteria was undoubtedly induced in large measure by the emotional stress at the prospect of being ignominiously dismissed from a movement they had served so loyally, in which so many genuinely believed and through which they achieved a degree of prestige, even fame. But there is little doubt that for many the trauma was aggravated by more material considerations. There were several thousand functionaries in the Party and a large number of others who worked in Party-controlled businesses, cultural institutions and trade unions whose livelihoods would have been at risk if they failed to demonstrate, through demeaning displays of both self-abnegation and idolatry, that they were purged of the sins of Browderism. About four years later those material considerations were decisive for any number of Communist trade unionists who deserted the Party, not for reasons of principle, but in order to maintain the benefits and prestige of their positions.)

CP and the "New Social Historians"

ONE OF THE MOST IRRITATING POSTURES OF THE REVISIONIST HISTORIANS of American Stalinism -- and when we talk about the history of the American Communist Party during Stalin's lifetime and later, we are talking about American Stalinism -- is the conceit of examining the Party as "social historians." They are furious (even if some are respectful at times) with such historians of American Communism as Theodore Draper, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, and Harvey Klehr. Perhaps their main complaint is that these historians failed to probe beneath the surface of Party resolutions and activities to examine the personal lives of rank and file Communists. Had they done so, they might have tempered their condemnation of the Party, since they would come into contact with human beings who joined from the most noble motives; forced to suffer the indignities imposed by a capitalist, racist society, they joined to fight their oppressors. In that struggle to escape the ghetto, the sweatshop and the backbreaking work on an Alabama plantation -- to create a better world -- many were prepared to make enormous personal sacrifices, to undergo economic hardships, beatings and even death fighting on the picket line or for racial justice in the South. Thousands of American Communists were prepared to lose their lives in Spain and many hundreds did.

Perhaps Draper, Howe, Coser, Klehr could have enriched their histories had they woven into them more strands of the human element that concerns social historians. But had they done so, it would not have required a change in their analysis of this very special kind of party. For many of these revisionist historians the mere fact that the CP recruited thousands who were oppressed and idealistic automatically gives the Party moral worth; at the very least, it presumably discredits the militant anti-Stalinism of people like Draper and Howe who saw the Party as reactionary and manipulative. But it simply does not follow that the idealism of recruits influences the organization they join because they feel it addresses their concerns and advances their interests. They could be making the wrong, even disastrous and tragic choice. That was the case, I believe, for those who joined the Communist Party. If I am wrong, it can only be established on the basis of an objective historical analysis of the Party -- what it said, did, represented -- and not at all on the basis of its ability to attract idealistic people.

The revisionists like to project the flattering self-image of social historians in the democratic historical tradition of E.P. Thompson who examined the lives of working people and how they shaped politics, created their own culture, and influenced history from below. In discussing the experiences of True Levellers, of Diggers and a host of other revolutionary movements from below in the 17th century, or of Luddites and a variety of associations and movements of working-class protest in late 18th century and early 19th century England which were the precursors of the magnificent Chartist movement, Thompson sought to show how workers and the lowly can make their own history and their own culture. But these movements from below were all polar opposites of the Communist Party. When workers joined the Chartist movement it was the continuation of a process in which they were defining their own consciousness and shaping, from below, England's first great, mass democratic movement of working-class struggle.

But when workers, for the best and most understandable of reasons, joined the CP, they were not joining a democratic, progressive movement which working-class recruits could mold into a dynamic instrument of struggle reflecting their needs and interests. They were joining a party committed to an anti-working class, totalitarian state which was exalted as a model of socialism, a party which, reflecting its organizational and ideological commitment to totalitarianism, was, in its hierarchical structure, authoritarian in the extreme. These are historically certifiable realities. Thus, when working people joined the Party it might well have reflected an expanding awareness and consciousness but retaining membership represented a regressive step since that meant surrendering the freedom to discuss, debate, and decide Party policy and being obliged, as well, to allow themselves to be misused and manipulated for as long as they wanted to remain Party members.

I am not questioning the value of examining the history and character of the Communist movement through the prism of social history; merely pointing out its inherent limitations where the CP is concerned. Moreover, the effort of revisionist historians to mimic E.P. Thompson in order to mythicize the CP is not only asocial and ahistorical, it completely misses or obscures the truly tragic human dimension of the CP's history.

It was impossible that most people free of legal compulsion could remain loyal to a party that pretended to be everything it was not. Inevitably, at some point, doubts and misgivings chipped away at the wall of dogma and the demands of Party discipline that prevented them from seeing the Party for what it really was. As the wall cracked, personal tensions mounted since there was no democratic outlet where doubters could express themselves. Either they had to leave or, if they gave any overt sign that they had serious questions about the Party line, they would be expelled and ostracized. Eventually, this is what happened after a month, a year, a decade, sometimes longer, to the overwhelming majority of those who joined the CP in the 30s and 40s. The Party became a revolving door through which literally hundreds of thousands entered bursting with the spirit of idealism and came out the other side, as often as not, demoralized, disillusioned, cynical about politics and sometimes psychologically battered by the experience.

On the darker side of Party life, "social historians" (if they had the objective political inclination) might want to explore the psychological mechanisms at work, as well as to recreate the moral tone and atmosphere of a Party whose members -- rational people in their non-political lives -- could accept and repeat with such fierce fundamentalist conviction the palpable Stalinist absurdity that every major figure (except One), and virtually every secondary leader of the Russian Revolution had become agents or spies for Hitler and Hirohito, were terrorists, saboteurs, etc. (I have yet to see proof that a single member of the Party who took exception to the bloody purges remained a member.) Just think of how extraordinary this is as an example of political and personal pathology.

Non-Communists also accepted the legitimacy of the Moscow Trials. There were fellow travellers who congratulated Stalin for his vigilance and fairness in the pages of the Nation and the New Republic. Unreliable journalists like Walter Duranty who assured N.Y. Times readers that the trials were plausible to him because he understood "the Russian soul." There was FDR's blockhead Ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, babbling on in his memoir, Mission to Moscow, about the anti-Soviet fifth column. But the behavior of so many Party members in this period was uniquely different for its pathological levels of abuse: Party members in a kind of blood frenzy shrieking denunciations of "Trotskyite fascist mad dogs," grabbing leaflets out of the hands of "Trotskyite prostitutes" (usually teenage girls), drawing a swastika outside Trotskyist headquarters in the Bronx (with an almost exclusively Jewish membership). The occasional social contact with a Trotskyist was politically criminalized, and sexual encounters with a Trotskyist an unspeakable perversion, more sinful than Adam sinking his teeth into the apple proffered by Eve. For their transgressions, Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise. However, the Communist who ate the Forbidden Fruit could only be expelled from the Communist Party, hardly a Garden of Eden.

Generally, the revisionist historians acknowledge the subservience of American Communism to the Soviet Union, but that is not allowed to interfere with what they believe is an objective, balanced analysis of the Party's activist role in American political life. Yes, American Communism was slavishly loyal to the Soviet Union, and that was not healthy; for some even deplorable. But didn't they build the CIO? And wasn't that admirable? And weren't they active in the struggle for racial justice in the 30s? Etc., etc. Pointing to the "good" that Communists allegedly did at selective times and specific places in the long history of American Communism becomes the political and moral measuring rod. Why belabor the American-Soviet connection, why concentrate on Party ideology or overviews which can only cloud our view of the "good" the Party did, and might lead one down the primrose path of anti-Communism?

This makes for bad history and worse politics. It is not possible to intelligently and rationally judge a political movement -- above all the Communist movement -- selectively isolating one or another detail of its contradictory history. More profoundly revealing about the nature of American Stalinism is that the decision to work toward building industrial unions was less a decision of the American Communist rank and file than of the Comintern. The CP was not allowed to throw itself wholeheartedly into the campaign for the CIO until relatively late, after the Popular Front, set in place at the Seventh World Congress in 1935, deemed it the right thing to do in accordance with Soviet interests. Had the Comintern developed a foreign policy that was incompatible with building the CIO, the American CP would not have helped to build it.

The fact is that Comrade X who did "good" work in building the CIO in the 30s was the same Comrade X who acted as a scab in the 40s. And Comrade Y who fought for racial equality in the 30s was the same Comrade Y who sabotaged the struggle against segregation in the 40s. That doesn't mean that Comrades X and Y were good Communists in the 30s and bad Communists in the 40s. It means that both comrades were part of a movement which reacted not to what was good or bad for the masses but to what the Soviet Party/State believed best served its interests.

The Revisionist Historians

AN EXAMPLE OF THIS NARROW REVISIONIST FOCUS IS TO BE FOUND in Robin D.G. Kelley's well-received and impressive work, Hammer and Hoe, A History of Alabama Communists During the Depression. Kelley seems to believe that it is not only legitimate to present his subject in virtual isolation, but that it is foolish to be sidetracked into debating such matters as:

...the now infamous debate over the CPUSA's relationship to the Communist International. Although it had been brewing since the "new social historians," who sought to rewrite CP history from the "bottom up," challenged earlier studies by Theodore Draper and others depicting American Communists as veritable puppets of Kremlin intrigue, the controversy reached a climax in 1985 when battle lines were drawn between pro- and anti-Draper forces and a deluge of articles and letters engulfed the New York Review of Books. ... after spending the next four years living and breathing Alabama CP history, the whole debate seems, in retrospect, rather superfluous, even silly.

The deluge that "engulfed" the New York Review of Books was, indeed, a bitter polemical exchange, on both sides, between Draper and his mainly young revisionist critics. The exchange concerned the relationships between the American movement and Moscow, and the American party's history and ideology.

Why should Kelley expect his readers to accept as credible his description of such debates as "superfluous" and "silly" while his concerns with the tiny Alabama Communist movement, detailed in 250 pages of text and another hundred pages of footnotes and references, is presumably more relevant and wise? (This question is not to doubt in the slightest the value of a history of the Alabama CP during this early period.)

There is reason to suspect a larger purpose behind this curt dismissal of a serious and important exchange in the NYRB. By concentrating on the self-sacrifice, idealism and heroism of Alabama Communists -- all of which might be true -- and emphasizing the good they aspired to in the face of savage adversity, there is the not-so-hidden suggestion that American Communism -- and not just in Alabama -- was a positive force in American life without having to come to grips with the counter-arguments of Theodore Draper and others who tell quite a different story.

Yet, for all his disdain for the "silly" and "superfluous" exchanges, Kelley, himself, is trapped in a contradiction that does damage to the case he tries to build for the autonomy, (or semi-autonomy) of American Communism vis-a-vis the Comintern.

Thus, in his preface (page XIV) he assures his readers that:

...because neither Joe Stalin, Earl Browder, nor William Z. Foster spoke directly to them or to their daily problems, Alabama Communists developed strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances that, in most cases, had nothing to do with international crises. Besides, if Alabamians had waited patiently for orders from Moscow they might still be waiting today. Not only were lines of communication between New York and Birmingham hazy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but Birmingham Communists had enough difficulty maintaining contact with comrades as close as Tallapoosa County.

By the time we reach his Epilogue on page 220, we learn of the Alabama Communists:

Yet these women and men, veterans and neophytes alike, shared something in common with the old Party. They responded to the Central Committee and Comintern directives with blind faith, blissful ignorance, and bitter independence -- and in the confusion of world war, Alabama Communists frequently showed signs of all three ... (Emphasis added)

How is it possible that in his preface Alabama Communists had nothing to do with international crises (read: directives from the Comintern) but by the time he reaches his Epilogue, one of their three responses to Comintern directives was that of "blind faith"? (And how could they respond with both "blind faith" and "bitter independence"? Independence could hardly have been that bitter if faith was that blind.) And if the lines of communication between New York, Moscow and Alabama were so hazy on page XIV, how could communications between the three distant points have so improved by the time we reach page 220? It doesn't help Kelley's case to reassure his readers further in his Epilogue that for black Communists in the Deep South "skepticism overruled faith and reinforced their independence." It only makes the picture more confusing.

I am not for a moment questioning the possibility that black Communists in Alabama -- tiny in number -- did not respond to Comintern directives as reflexively as Communists in New York or Chicago were obliged to. Yet, even among Alabama Communists, the Comintern line could be evaded up to a point but not boldly or directly challenged in a spirit of bitter independence.

WHERE KELLEY FINDS THE ISSUES RAISED BY THEODORE DRAPER, and the subsequent contretemps in the New York Review of Books, superfluous and silly, revisionist Michael Brown is deeply involved in the debates and far more combative. He and several colleagues have assembled a number of essays into a portentously titled volume, Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism which, for the most part, has little that is new and even less that qualifies as "studies."

Brown, in his long introductory essay, is infuriated by those traditional historians who have written extensively and most critically about American Communism. His fiercest blows are directed at Theodore Draper. But despite all the tummeling and pummeling, Draper emerges unscathed.

What is almost amusing in Professor Brown's polemic is its affected air of scholarly detachment. He quotes approvingly from Sean Wilentz's comments in the Voice Literary Supplement on the debates that appeared in the New York Review of Books:

It's sad how the history of American Communism can still provoke gang warfare in the intelligentsia. In 1985, half a century after the American CP reached its peak and more than a generation after American Communism all but died, it should be possible to approach the subject with something like detachment. Not, to be sure, dispassion, which is neither attainable nor desirable when studying Stalinism; rather, the kind of distance that informs historical passions and turns them into good history. But where the CP is concerned, memories are long, and old loyalties and grudges live on like folk traditions.

I don't know whether Wilentz would approve today of his sanctimonious advice then. In any case, it is Brown who interests us here, speaking through the voice of Wilentz. And what we hear resonates with the sound of pomposity. Since not to speak with dispassion means to speak with passion, how is it possible to speak with passion and, at the same time, with detachment?"

Although Brown's advice is not altogether coherent, there can be no mistaking the intent: there is nothing about the history of the American Communist Party or, as we know from his other writings, about the history of the former Soviet Union that should unduly ruffle the feathers of the objective historian. That's because Brown is so attached to his illusions about Stalinism in general and its American affiliate in particular. (Would he also give the same sterile advice to a researcher of the Holocaust; that one cannot intelligently study and interpret the past -- in this case, the Holocaust -- unless it is approached with detachment? And doesn't Brown have as many books on his shelf as I do by great revolutionary thinkers whom he admires, as much as I do, and who rarely, if ever, wrote with detachment?)

Most absurd is that Brown's appeal for detachment takes the form of a diatribe against Draper and all those "orthodox" historians whose writings reveal "an almost palpable pathos" and are "predicated on a profound philosophical malaise"; writings that are "outside of social science" and filled with "bitterness," "exemplars of a distinctive polemical genre" marked by "extraordinarily, overtly, tendentious type of satire." Is this what Brown means by detached scholarship?

All this flailing, mainly against Draper, whose two volumes on American and Soviet Communism are recognized even by revisionist historians as significant scholarly achievements, will hardly ruin Draper's well-earned reputation. But Brown makes one charge that he is obliged to document. He writes in the New York Review of Books (August 15, 1985), of "the professional anti-Communism' advocated by Draper." (emphasis added) Unless Brown can document his charge that Draper "advocated" "professional anti-Communism" he is guilty of more than the modest offense of polemical abuse.

Since Brown is such a strong proponent of maintaining the highest levels of scholarship, of writing "good history," one wonders why Ellen Shrecker's article made it into the collection? How could any historian who meets Brown's rigorous standard of viewing the past with "something like detachment" write about "McCarthyism and the Decline of American Communism, 1945-1960" and fail to mention that among the first victims of McCarthyite-type witchhunts were not the Communists but the leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 18 of whom were sent to jail in 1941, convicted for violating the same Smith Act that was to be the legal basis for the persecution of Communists after the war. This omission cannot be excused on the ground that the Trotskyists were jailed in 1941. Rather, given Shrecker's very non-detached political agenda, it is embarrassing for her to acknowledge in an essay denouncing McCarthyism, that in the 40s the Stalinists were pre-McCarthy McCarthyites who, in their patriotic fervor, applauded the jailing of the SWP leaders.⁷ ("The American people can find no objection to the destruction of the Fifth Column in this country," said CP journalist Milton Howard. "On the contrary, they must insist on it.")

Also, if this volume was designed to "assist teachers and students" to understand Communist history, why print Annette T. Rubinstein's fairy-tale account of her 20-year tour of duty in the Party, "The Cultural World of the Communist Party: An Historical Overview." Are teachers expected to teach and students expected to believe that

...while directives coming down from headquarters to the CP members in a trade union, a consumer's group, a parent-teacher organization, or any other body (often even a local CP club) may have amounted to a great deal of paper -- that's all they amounted to. (emphasis added)

One of the few interesting essays in the Brown collection is Mark Naison's, "Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front." Naison makes no apologies for the Soviet Union which "had evolved into something truly evil, a society in which paranoia, thought control, and murder had become institutionalized." Nor does he apologize for American Communist leaders who "still functioned as though they thought their real constituency, the one that could make or break them as leaders, was in the Soviet Union. Without the slightest embarrassment, they translated the Soviet obsession with internal opposition into a U.S. setting... ." and "what all pop fronters shared was a set of principles and affinities: unwavering support for the Soviet Union, domestically and internationally... ."

All this seems to leave no room for equivocation about the servility of American Communism. But logic does not prevail. Naison still finds that while Party leaders functioned under "tight discipline" "the party rank and file moving in and out of the party functioned with a great deal of autonomy."

Communists were always free to use their feet to walk or run out of the Party. This lawful, inalienable right had absolutely nothing to do with autonomy. Autonomy is manifest only where members have the right to be critical of Party policies and of the Soviet Union and retain membership; and autonomy for the Party as a whole means to sever the umbilical cord tying it to Moscow. Since neither the rank and file nor the leadership enjoyed the right of independent and critical self-expression on substantive questions within the Party, and it was unthinkable that the CP would make important decisions on its own which conflicted with the Soviet line, autonomy was an alien concept in the history of American Communism.

Defending U.S. Communists against the accusations of "cynicism" Naison argues:

Though the Comintern may have employed anti-fascist appeals largely for Soviet raisons d'état, neither the rank and file party membership, or the much larger network of party sympathizers and allies approached this activity in the spirit of mechanical obedience. It did not take much persuasion to make a Jewish printer or a Croatian steelworker hate Hitler, or a black school teacher denounce Mussolini, or an Austrian refugee actor raise funds for victims of the Dolfuss regime. Such individuals, the bones and sinews of the Communist movement, approached the anti-fascist cause with the feeling that their own lives were at stake.

I don't know of any critic of the American CP who would contradict the generalization that the members were often bonded to the Party on the basis of their own experiences and agreed with its positions. But that tells us very little about the "bones and sinews" of either the membership or the Party. If people joined a Party in which they did not believe we would not be discussing a political organization but a political madhouse.

In any case, Naison is making it much too easy for himself. Of course it is understandable why the Jewish printer or the Croatian steelworker were drawn to the Party during its Popular Front phase when it appeared as the champion of anti-fascism. That doesn't address itself to the more pertinent question of what would have happened to the Jewish and Croat workers if they decided that the policy of "collective security" was the wrong way to carry on the struggle. But the most apparent flaw in Naison's defense of rank and file virtue is that he doesn't ask himself or his readers the following: if these ethnic workers did not join the Party in the "spirit of mechanical obedience" when anti-Naziism was being promoted, in what spirit did these workers remain loyal to the Party, and unwavering in their support for the Soviet Union, during the Nazi-Soviet alliance?

I don't know about the Croats but the vast majority of Jewish Party members remained in the Party. Did they sincerely "believe" in the Stalin-Hitler Pact? That is hard to believe. Certainly, the Jewish worker did not support Soviet collaboration with the Nazis with the enthusiasm and in the pure uncomplicated sense in which she/he believed in the anti-Nazi appeals of the Popular Front era. To believe in the Pact, political-psychological reserves based on faith had to be drawn upon so that this atrocious alliance could be rationalized. But doesn't belief that relies on such rationalization require the repudiation of political principles and the sacrifice of moral values? And isn't cynicism precisely about a loss of moral values and rationalizing lies to oneself and others to give them the appearance of truth?

JOEL KOVEL's Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti-Communism and the Making of America covers the period from American entry into World War I until the Soviet system crumbled. Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, he is a felicitous writer, a skilled historian and a trained psychologist who effectively applies his talents to provide insights into the antecedents and precursors of anticommunism which he finds in the mean-spirited ethos and witchhunts of 17th century Puritan New England and in later nativist know-nothing movements. He studies these links from a dozen angles and makes subtle and interesting observations. But what is most striking is that he has achieved what I would not have thought possible -- a book on the hunting of Communists with practically no discussion of the Communists or their movement, and with many pages on the Cold War but virtually no discussion of the Soviet Union. We learn more about Cotton Mather than we do about the Communist victims of McCarthyism, more about Puritan New England than about the Soviet Union and less about the dynamics of the Cold War than about the war against "witches" in Salem.

This basic flaw can be traced to what Kovel calls "(a) few terminological points" about his use of Communism with a capital C and communism with a small c. He uses capital C "to designate actually existing movements, governments, and so on which took life from the Bolshevik Revolution and its many offshoots." To wit: the Communism of the American Communist Party and the Communism of the Soviet Union. He uses the lower case c "to designate whatever inherently belongs to the ideal form of the vision of a classless society." And Kovel explains that the "Soviet system while nominally Communist was, given its hierarchy, exploitation and lack of democracy, neither communist nor even authentically socialist." He then goes on to say "(b)ecause this study is about anticommunism and not anti-Communism, little effort will be made to sort out the vast complexities of the Communist experience except as they cast light on our own ideological system." This writer is the last person to deny the contradiction between the Communism of Stalinist despotism and the communism of social emancipation. But I also know that in the context of a discussion of witchhunts in America during the Cold War to virtually ignore "the vast complexities of the Communist experience" can be a form of apologetics by way of evasion. With this approach, he can feel free to ignore the fact that not long before the foul weed of McCarthyism sprouted, one of the leading anticommunist forces (with a small c) was the Communist Party with a very large C) when it sought to suppress labor militants and radical visionaries during America's wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

While Kovel avoids a discussion in any depth of the Soviet Union, he does not totally ignore it. Early on, he assures the reader that

... I consider the Soviet Union to have been a colossal failure and a wrong turn in the history of socialism. This is especially so for the regime of Stalin which was a period of criminality on a scale scarcely ever seen in human history.

Kovel's libertarian anti-Communism looks promising. But not for long. Just a dozen pages later his abhorrence of Soviet criminality on an unprecedented scale sounds less convincing when he complains that

... Soviet slave labor...is hardly ever seen as a phase, brutal and heinous to be sure, yet related to the industrialization of backward Russia and not to any socialist goal, as such. To call attention to this feature would remind us that the United States has had a vastly more extended slave period as part of its own capitalist, development. Where the black hole [of anti-communism] operates, Communism can never be bad enough. Communism must be all bad, drawn to hell in toto.

The first sentence is a rationalization for Russian slave labor that might have been inspired by Isaac Deutscher whose apologias for Stalinism had a profoundly negative influence on the left that is still apparent. The notion that slave labor was a "phase" that served some historic purpose as a factor in industrializing backward Russia, even though this industrialization was achieved on top of the corpses of millions, and despite the fact that the leading beneficiary of that bloody "phase" was a brutal Communist ruling class, is repugnant and in the ugliest tradition of anticommunism. It is a view worthy of Cotton Mather, not of a socialist. And unless Kovel, or anyone, can find something more convincing than the contributions of slave labor to industrialization, I will remain convinced that Stalinism was indeed "bad, all bad."

I am no expert on pre-Civil War America but I do not recall it being argued that the extended period of slavery in the ante bellum South was "part of" -- which, in the context of his argument can only mean contributed to -- capitalist development in this country. I was always under the impression that slavery was a crippling restraint on the growth of the productive forces. But even if I am wrong, and slavery was a part of the development of American capitalism parallel to the slave labor phase in the industrialization of backward Russia, then, intentionally or not, Kovel is advancing an apologia for chattel slavery in the American South.

Our doubt that Kovel's outrage over Stalinist criminality is more than pro forma is strengthened when he says:

Granted, the Soviets had much that was odious about them, perhaps more[!] than any of the other players at the time. But the question is, did the Soviets belong to the same moral species or not? Should the Soviet Union be regarded as an adversary sharing in a common humanity with whom one has basic disagreements or as an adversary so far outside the human community that the question of agreeing or disagreeing never comes up except in superficial tactical ways?

"[D]id the Soviets belong to the same moral species or not?" Which moral species is Kovel asking about? As a lifelong socialist (therefore a lifelong anti-Communist), I believe that the Soviet Union -- that is the "odious" state that slaughtered tens of millions -- definitely does not belong to the same moral species as those who have a genuine regard for human rights and human dignity. "Should the Soviet Union be regarded as an adversary sharing in a common humanity ..." etc., etc. A common humanity! Soviet despotism had no common humanity to share.

Was the Soviet power "far outside the human community"? I suppose that all of us, Stalin and Hitler, Jacobson and Kovel, belong to the same biological community of homo sapiens, but if we are talking about "human" in a social and moral sense, I would like to think that both Jacobson and Kovel are such irreconcilable adversaries of Stalinism and Hitlerism that some day it would be unthinkable for anyone to pose that question.

One final point on Kovel's failure to discuss Communism or communism in a serious way is his unseemly, abrupt treatment of those who contributed to the famous collection of memoirs, The God That Failed which included André Gide, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Richard Wright, and Arthur Koestler. In several pages that smack of an old-fashioned Stalinist diatribe these intellectuals are denounced in the most personal terms for their anticommunism. Above all, Arthur Koestler, whose opinions are totally ignored, is personally assaulted in psychoanalytic terms: a "narcissist" who was "tormented by hatred and guilt" and whose politics "derived from his inordinate self-regard." And on and on. But about what Koestler, Silone, Gide et al said of their experiences within the Stalinist movement, and the views they developed of Communist society, Kovel has nothing to say.

Radical Representions, Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929-1941 by Barbara Foley is described by her publisher as a work which "recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and subsequent critics." That she recaptures an important literature I do not dispute. I may not agree with her literary taste or her evaluation of individual authors but that is not my concern here. My interest is in the politics of her cultural history.

For all the imposing number of references and substantive footnotes, Foley reveals that she doesn't have a clue about the nature of the American Communist Party or the Soviet Union and their interlocking relationship. Her perception of the fundamentals of Stalinist society and Stalinist parties is impaired by her theoretical framework established with a defiant display of in-your-face know-nothingness when she states flat-out that "[a]t various points in this discussion I shall treat the terms anti-Communist,' anti-Marxist' and anti-Stalinist' as interchangeable."

If we factor out the antis in her formulation what looms up is the suggestion that Stalinism and Marxism are interchangeable. And Foley treats them as such. With this interchangeability of socialism (or Marxism) and Stalinism as a guiding principle, she cannot write coherently and truthfully about her subject.

Consistent with her pro-Stalinist bias, Foley categorically denies that Stalinism sought to subordinate art to politics and denies that "art as a weapon" was a Stalinist homily. In fact

[c]ontesting this view is a major thesis of Radical Representations; I shall demonstrate that most CP writers, while not guided by anything resembling a party line' on aesthetic matters, were in fact uneasy with the view of literature as weaponry and repudiated the notion that proletarian literature should be written as propaganda.'(Emphasis added)

Foley has as much chance of proving this major thesis as I do of proving -- if I were so inclined -- that the world is flat. How can she? Any person even minimally familiar with the history of the American Communist Party knows that the Party did indeed have a line on "aesthetic matters," that the line changed drastically in tandem with changing policies in the Soviet Union, that art was most certainly used as weapon and that in the party's cultural and political life creative writers were pressured to produce propaganda advancing whatever happened to be the Party line at the time. In truth, the atmosphere was such that pressure did not always have to be exerted since self-censorship was so successfully cultivated. To deny that "anything resembling" this was the case is to offer a picture of the Communist world that is as flat as a pancake.

Unquestionably the Party was less rigid on cultural issues than on questions directly political and of vital interest to the Soviet Union. Uncritical support of the Nazi-Soviet Pact or the Peoples Front line was obviously more significant than developing a precise definition of proletarian literature. The Party also understood that trying to enforce precise guidelines, allowing for no flexibility on aesthetic matters would have cost it dearly in the loss of support among intellectuals. It was more important to persuade intellectuals to dishonor themselves by signing Party petitions saluting the Moscow Trials. However, it is one thing to recognize the longer leash allowed Party intellectuals but quite another to insist that there was no Party line at all.

As evidence for her position, Foley quotes an Earl Browder speech to the Party-dominated 1935 Writers' Congress: "There is no fixed `Party line' by which works of art can be separated into sheep and goats." This is supposed to reassure doubters that "as regards literary matters, it [the Party] really had no line at all." To take Browder's word, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is like arguing that the Soviet Union in 1936, already turned into a charnel house, was the world's most democratic society because that year the Stalin Constitution was adopted declaring the USSR a democratic society governed by the rule of law.

Would Stalin lie? Would Browder tell a fib?

If the Party did not insist on aesthetic standards conforming to its political objectives why was it that in 1940 Lillian Hellman's anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine, was attacked in the Communist New Masses while the same play when it appeared as a film in 1942 was highly praised by Communist reviewers? Was it due to differing aesthetic judgments or rather a change of heart because in 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, a vigorous anti-Nazi play was all but verboten, while in 1942 the Soviet Union was at war with its former collaborators?

And if the Party never had a line and never treated art as a weapon what could have moved the well-known novelist and longtime Party member Albert Maltz to complain so bitterly of the Communist "... vulgarization of the theory of art which lies behind left-wing [read: Communist Party] thinking: namely, art is a weapon'."? Was Maltz being misled by anti-Stalinist propaganda? And if the Party had no line why did it react so ferociously to Maltz's criticisms; a barrage so intense that after a few months a battered Maltz capitulated, confessing to his error in a truly pitiful performance.

Foley's no-line thesis is so fallible that she cannot sustain the myth and contradicts it as often as she affirms it. As when she writes: "... on the whole the CP did [her emphasis] function as its writers' ideological leadership; both inspiring them with a sense of revolutionary possibility and setting the limits [my emphasis] within which they could imagine this possibility."

Barbara Foley meet Barbara Foley.

Her discussion of the CPUSA and its relations with the Soviet Union is riddled with contradictions. As with all revisionists anxious to invent a Communist Party with at least a minimal degree of autonomy, Foley places great emphasis on those instances where individual Communist writers took exception to some aspect of Soviet cultural policy. Yet, the reality is such that even she acknowledges that "Soviet cultural developments clearly shaped the outlook and goals of American literary radicals."

One might expect that a good historian, a serious cultural critic and a conscientious Marxist would relate Soviet cultural developments (which, remember, "clearly shaped" American Communists' approach to culture) to what was happening in Soviet society between 1929-1941, the period with which Foley is concerned. Yet, when she discusses the notorious international cultural conference held in Kharkov in 1930, where a hard line on cultural questions was laid down (of which, she says, recalcitrant American Communists were "convinced"), there is no suggestion that Kharkov was a major metropolis in the Ukraine where the large-scale slaughter of peasants and destruction of villages was already under way in a de-kulakization campaign that would take the lives of five million people. As if there was no connection between Stalin's murderous campaign of forced collectivization and the Stalinist campaign to impose a cultural policy on all Communist parties compatible with his drive to consolidate his personal power and consistent with the policies of the Third Period. And when she reports on speeches in the early 30s by such luminaries as Bukharin and Radek, there is no mention of the fact that both would soon be executed. Nor is there an inkling in her discussion of cultural policy debates that countless hundreds of Soviet writers, critics, cultural theorists who participated in the various cultural conferences she refers to would soon be humiliated, persecuted and murdered.

Foley does not completely ignore the "Russian Question" and she is not totally uncritical of Stalinist Russia. But, then, who is other than some fire-breathing dinosaur? Thus she lists her reservations about

the forced collectivization of the peasantry, the proclamation of the end to the class struggle in the USSR in the 1930s [!], the abolition of abortion in 1936, the stress upon Great Russian chauvinism in the Patriotic War, the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the postwar period, the mass incarcerations and executions.

Perhaps to warn the reader who might think that she is succumbing to anti-Stalinism (interchangeable, remember, with anti-Marxism), in her very next breath Foley applauds the

...tremendous achievements that also occurred in this period: the involvement of millions of workers in socialist construction, the emancipation of women from feudalistic practices, the struggle against racism and anti-Semitism, the fostering of previously suppressed minority cultures ...

On socialist construction: Not just "millions of workers" but tens of millions were involved in Soviet construction. That includes, of course, millions of slave laborers and an entire proletariat totally deprived of any voice on the conditions of their labor or on the goal of that construction or the quality of their lives. Foley might want to explain why construction by slave laborers and a brutally exploited working class is "socialist."

On the emancipation of women: Just ten lines above her announcement that Stalinism freed women from feudalistic practices, Foley took critical note of the abolition of abortion in 1936. Wasn't this anti-abortion policy in the spirit of feudalistic practices? And in her research hasn't Foley come across the wealth of documentation that confirms what so many already knew years ago, that the condition of women's lives during the Stalin era was one of utter degradation?

On racism and the struggle against anti-Semitism: Again, a few lines earlier, she noted the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the postwar period. How does that translate into a struggle against anti-Semitism? And isn't she aware of the abundant material documenting the virulence of anti-Semitism throughout the Stalin era and later? As for racism she fails to understand that the outbreak of racism in contemporary Russia had its historic roots in the Stalin era and earlier.

On minority cultures: Another outrageous plaudit. Anyone who reads a newspaper is surely aware that a major cause of the disintegration of the USSR were the profound historic and justifiable grievances of tens of millions of non-Great Russians -- the Chechens, Volga Germans, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, the Moslem people of the northern Caucausus, etc. -- actually a majority of the USSR's population. Not only were their cultures suppressed but entire minority peoples were displaced and sent to the gulag.

Finally, I would like to reassure Barbara Foley that Stalin never abandoned "the class struggle in the USSR in the mid-1930s" but raised that struggle against the working class to previously unimaginable heights.

Imagine the Communist Party in Power!

TO GET AT THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, we can borrow a useful method of discussing a problem favored by the old socialist Left. It was the "what if" approach which was often a fanciful way of getting to the essence of a question realistically. In that spirit I pose the question to all those revisionist historians working long hours to prove that the Communist movement of the 30s, 40s, and later, enjoyed an autonomous or semi-autonomous relationship to the Soviet Union and was such a force for good in American society.

What if by some extraordinary miracle the CP had become the governmental power in this country during that period? Wouldn't this have posed a calamitous threat to democracy? Wherever Communist parties did come to power, whether installed on the tips of Soviet bayonets as in Eastern Europe or riding the crest of powerful mass upsurge as in China, Cuba and North Vietnam, the reigning Communist Party instinctively moved to destroy independent trade unions, clamped down on social activism, illegalized opposition parties, destroyed all civil liberties, instituted purges and arranged executions. Why should one believe that the American Communist Party in power would have behaved any differently? Why doubt that unions would have been dismantled or metamorphosed into Party-controlled state institutions, autonomous social movements prohibited, political opposition criminalized, cultural and social life straight-jacketed?

Former Communist leader Dorothy Healey put it this way:

I would not deny the fact that in the '30s and by and large our concept of what a socialist America would look like would not have included the freedom of dissent, the right to disagree, the right to organize separate parties. We would probably have considered that a political heresy.

Had General Secretary William Z. Foster, through some less than divine intervention, been propelled into the Oval Office in, say, 1948, who among us could doubt that the recently defrocked ex-General Secretary, Earl Browder, would have been summarily dispatched? Why should old rivals and useful scapegoats have enjoyed greater longevity in this imaginary American nightmare than in the very real existing phantasmagoria of Communist Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Cuba, etc.?

Didn't the CPUSA suggest that John L. Lewis be imprisoned for pulling miners out on strike during the post-June 22 phase of World War II, with A. Philip Randolph sent to keep him company in prison because his struggle against Jim Crow in the Army and in the war economy presumably hurt the war effort? Didn't they applaud jailing political opponents during the war and justify "as a necessary war measure" the Roosevelt Administration's rounding-up 120,000 Japanese Americans and sending them off to concentration camps? Is there any reason to doubt that had the Party been in power it would have gone Roosevelt and Truman one better in smashing anything and everything it saw interfering with the war, not so much for the purpose of defeating Naziism as for defending the Stalinist state? And not just to defend the Stalinist state but to consolidate its own power and create a Party/State in the image of Soviet despotism?

When Earl Browder praised Stalin with undisguised elation because, in Russia, "the Trotskyites and Bukharinites have been detected in their nefarious work, rounded-up, and put out of business" can any serious historian believe that in power he and his Party would not have "rounded-up" their enemies and "put them out of business" just as their mentor did? Browder alerted his Party and the nation that "some pacifists have become no better than the conscious agents of Hitler and Mussolini" and that "[t]he time has come to end the fascist menace to world peace" had Browder and party the opportunity is there reason to doubt that they would they have ended this pacifist-fascist threat in a way that would have made Stalin proud?

Are revisionist historians American exceptionalists? Do they believe that a "Soviet America" under Communist auspices would have been any different, an exception to the rule that wherever Stalinist parties came to power civil society was shattered? Consider, too, that the CPUSA sought to approximate an internal atmosphere and procedures that drew inspiration from the totalitarian model in power. Fortunately, the Party had no enforcement powers more menacing than expulsion and ostracism. Nevertheless, the authoritarian impulses were deeply rooted. What is remarkable is that in the period of escalating terror there was more dissent expressed in the Soviet party than in its American affiliate! At least in the early 30s a number of Soviet party members led by Mikhail Riutin signed and circulated a document calling for a halt to the brutal policy of Stalinist collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization and included the demand that Stalin be removed. Not only did Riutin and his comrades attack Stalin but so did any number of anonymous members of the Soviet party who, at great personal risk, managed to get letters and articles to opposition journals abroad.

I have yet to learn of any comparable document originating in the U.S. before the Duclos letter calling for the removal of Earl Browder during his tenure. And in my own research on American Communism, including reading the works of many revisionist historians, I have not come across a reference to a single article or a footnote in the Party press, or an entry in a diary, or a letter from one friend to another which so much as hinted of a disagreement with the Maximum Leader of the Communist movement. Yet we know that of the hundreds of thousands who joined the Party in the Stalin era, not all could have agreed with all the important Party positions that were of vital concern to the Soviet Union. The question then is: If an American Communist Party out of power could achieve this level of conformity on the basis of Party discipline which could only rely on moral suasion and psychological intimidation, what would be the atmosphere in the Party and in society if the CPUSA were the ruling Party and had at its disposal all the state instruments of coercion?

The Nature of Stalinist Parties

OUR CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON THE MISUSE OF SOCIAL HISTORY touches a larger issue debated under the rubric of the Russian Question: What Is the Nature of Stalinist Parties? This question was not that much of a conundrum for those who viewed the Soviet Union as a "degenerated" workers' state from which it followed that national Communist parties were a legitimate but badly deformed wing of the international labor movement.

But what of socialists who perceive the Soviet Union, not as an imperfect workers' state, but as the dominion of a new parasitic totalitarian class with an omnipresent and omniscient Communist Party in command of all aspects of political, social and economic life? From this perspective, servile national Communist parties cast in the same ideological mold and with the same aspirations were neither socialist organizations nor, in any meaningful sense, "of the Left" if one agrees that "the Left" is an umbrella term for a multitude of tendencies whose political common denominator includes a basic commitment to democracy and social justice. Logically, it made as little sense to speak of an organized "Stalinist Left" as it does to refer to "an anti-democratic democrat," or "an anti-socialist socialist," or "an anti-leftist Left." "Stalinist Left" is an oxymoron just as anti-Stalinist Left is a redundancy since to be of the Left is, by definition, to be anti-totalitarian, which also assumes to be anti-Stalinist.

Nevertheless, in our propaganda and political functioning the old socialist left never ignored the paradoxes and subtleties of Communist parties. Although the CPUSA placed itself in servitude to a totalitarian state it was not equated to a fascist party. The American Communist Party was not the German-American Bund. Here, as in all advanced capitalist countries, the Communist movement sought a mass base in the working class and from among oppressed minorities. It functioned within most progressive social movements and laid its greatest emphasis on trade union work. These were hardly the areas of operation for the Bund or the American Silver Shirts.

For all the inner contradictions of Stalinism in power that would prove its undoing, there was a social dynamism to the Stalinist Party/State and its satellite parties rooted in their ideological pretensions which appeared to address the problems of the poor and the exploited, clothed in a language that often bore a surface resemblance to the idiom of proletarian and social solidarity, of Marxism. The Bund or nativist fascist movements here hardly comparable. They sought enlistments on the basis of raw pseudo-populist rhetoric mingling with strident chauvinism and grotesquely racist, anti-Semitic and anti-labor propaganda.

Thus, the contempt we had for the Communist Party ideologically and as a movement wed to a totalitarian state was not translated into a personal-political animus. We did, after all, appear to share certain values and objectives with the Communist rank and file. Communists joined the Party moved by basic human and social values that we shared -- among them, opposition to racial discrimination and all forms of bigotry -- and recruits were attracted to the CP by its lip service to socialist principles. We even laid common claim to certain traditions and heroes: the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution; Marx, Engels and Debs. (Of course, our list included Trotsky whose murder they celebrated and theirs included Stalin, his executioner.)

Yet, for all the paradoxes and contradictions between the generous impulses of the rank and file and the objective realities of American Stalinism as an organized movement, it is the latter which is historically decisive. And the fact that Stalinism used some dialect of the language of socialism and liberation did not disguise its real voice which was heard in the cries of the condemned and the dying in the gulag and torture chambers, and the death rattle of millions succumbing to starvation during the years of de-kulakization and forced industrialization. Stalinism's authentic voice was the forced silence of people denied a voice in deciding their own destiny. While the American party, with a membership which truly sought a better world, spoke to the working class, it listened to, parroted, and obeyed the authorities and instructions of a totalitarian state alien to the proletariat, inimical to socialism. The real voice of American Stalinism was little more than the Kremlin echo.

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Recent Books Noted in this Article

The Communist Party of the United States. From the Depression to World War II by Fraser M. Ottanelli, Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Hammer and Hoe. Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley, University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism edited by Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten and George Snedeker, Monthly Review Press, 1993.

Red Hunting in the Promised Land. Anticommunism and the Making of America by Joel Kovel, Basic Books, 1994.

Radical Representations. Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 by Barbara Foley, Duke University Press, 1993.

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Notes

1. For example, the New International, a monthly revolutionary Marxist publication, between the years 1934-1941 included articles by Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, Hal Draper, Max Schachtman, A. J. Muste, Harold Isaacs, Ludwig Lore, Dwight Macdonald, C.L.R. James, Irving Howe, James Burnham, Daniel Guerin, Alfred Rosmer, Leon Trotsky. return

2. As recent elections in the East clearly indicate much of this faith in the market has eroded in the last year or two. Instead of capitalist "reforms" moving the people a bit closer to perceived Western affluence, experimentation with the market has been accompanied by austerity programs, and the populace driven further into a general state of penury. Nevertheless, illusions about the curative powers of capitalism are prevalent and even the new governments, presumably resistant to market reforms, continue on the same path. return

3. A chapter heading from Fraser M. Ottanelli's The History of the Communist Party of the United States, from the Depression to World War II. return

4. The Party did have Earl Browder running as a formal CP candidate for the highest office, but that was a mere formality since it worked assiduously to rally support for FDR's second term. It was also thought that running a candidate was in Roosevelt's best electoral interests since that weakened Republican's efforts to tar FDR with the Communist brush. return

5. This metaphoric picture of Browder had its more literal moments in Party history as when, in 1936, the Young Communist League, its patriotic sensibilities deeply wounded by the failure of the Daughters of the American Revolution to pay homage to Paul Revere on the anniversary of his famous ride, hired a horseman dressed in Colonial garb and a steed to prance along Manhattan's Broadway with a placard inscribed: "The DAR Forgets But the YCL remembers." Not even Saturday Night Live could have matched that; truth can be more quixotic than parody. return

6. In fact, it was William Z. Foster who headed a Party disciplinary commission that brought about the expulsion of veteran Party leader Sam Darcy for expressing the same reservations about the Party line Foster had. return

7. That this omission was no oversight is proved by her essay on Communism in the labor movement and the role of the government in another collection, The CIO's Left Led Unions (1992) in which there is no mention that during the war Communists in and outside the labor movement operated as if they had a covenant with government witchhunters. return

Contents of No. 18