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September 1998 - Volume 30 Issue 9

THE SOVIET WORLD OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM By Harvey Klebr, John Hayes, and Kyrill M. Anderson Yale University Press, $35

In 1920 Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, dispatched a secret diktat to the two fledgling American parties that had registered competing claims to the Bolshevik franchise in the U.S. The Comintern, sort of a Russian housemother of the worldwide revolutionary movement, ordered the two squabbling groups to merge and even decreed a name, more hopefully than realistically: the United Communist Party. But the hapless Soviet courier fell into the arms of the police and most aspiring Leninists in the U.S. read their instructions in the New York World. Which is not to say that they followed them very well. Soon there were three American Communist parties; then there were two again, although the fact that they had the same name and each published a journal called The Communist makes one feel sorry for the poor Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to the FBI) agents who had to try to keep all of this straight. Once again the Comintern laid down the law, this time printed on a thin swatch of silk that the Soviet messenger could presumably tie into an ascot to slide by the authorities, if not the fashion police. "The further postponement of the unification of the two Communist groups is a crime against the Communist International," the scarf commanded.

Just like the Comintern's confidential instructions turning up in a newspaper, the American party's fealty to Moscow was no great secret. Nevertheless, it's a significant service for Yale University Press to finally publish Moscow's actual marching orders, as it has done in a recent volume of documents culled from the Comintern's archives. The Soviet World of American Communism is the second installment of this ongoing project.

While it's hard to overestimate the value of the series, it could have been edited better. The two extant volumes are not without overlap, redundancy, and padding. It might not be the greatest of Soviet crimes, but someone should mourn all of the forests felled to print Communist drivel; it's a shame to see Klehr, et al unnecessarily contribute to this wastage.

Moreover, the authors write with a sense of vengeance, overreacting, I would say, to the rampant and often foolish revisionist scholarship on American Communism, which has often portrayed the party as the moral equivalent of the Boy Scouts. Too much time spent in the airless archival world of American Communism can make anyone's prose more blunt and accusatory than need be. Still, the authors' judgements strike me as unfailingly correct and insightful.

Founded in 1919 in Chicago (with government agents taking notes) the U.S. Communist Party was dominated by immigrants who felt a greater bond with the international working class than with most of their putative fellow Americans. They might have been expecting a short hitch: After two years Lenin's Bolsheviks were still in power and revolutionary rumblings could be heard throughout Europe. If Europe's most backward country could leap into the future where the workers could stand like men instead of stooping like beasts, think of what could happen in the world's most forward-looking country!

Thus the Soviet Union became not just the model and inspiration for would-be revolutionaries around the world; it became revolution itself, a star too bright to look at directly but one that would light the hopes of legions who had no other light. "On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer," John Reed, who helped found one of the American parties, reported from the world's first people's republic.

Success had granted Moscow a monopoly on revolution and Lenin wasn't about to give away the farm. In 1920 the second world congress of the Comintern adopted requirements for membership, subservience not least among them: "In reality and in action the Communist International must be a single universal Communist Party, the parties in each country acting as its sections."

The American section of the party could not be accused of not trying to please. Even at its height of influence in the U.S. the American party was willing to sacrifice success to keep Moscow happy. During the Popular Front, for example, the talk about workers seizing the means of production and the bourgeoisie drowning in its own blood had given way to muted rhetoric that emphasized the CPUSA's congruity with America's own revolutionary pedigree. Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism became the party's rallying cry. "This is one of our popular slogans which has influenced large masses," one American party functionary explained to Moscow. "It serves as the main theme under which the Party claims and carries forward the revolutionary and democratic traditions of America." But the Comintern did not like the slogan, so the CPUSA dropped it.

Unfortunately the party's slavishness was not limited to propaganda; its own members, which is to say real people, often found themselves being run over by the train of history without so much as an audible gasp from the leaders of the CPUSA. Consider the little-known tragedy of the Karelian Finns. In the decade after the Russian revolution, more than 10,000 members of the American Communist Party, mostly immigrants to the U.S., returned to the Karelian region of the USSR, near the Finish border, to help build a worker's paradise. During the purges of the late '30s, perhaps more than a thousand of these idealists were arrested as spies; the lucky ones got hard labor in Siberia, the unlucky were shot. "In short, under cover of a working-class movement, these people became the advance agents of fascism aiming at the destruction of socialist economy," the Comintern informed the American party, which adopted the line without a quibble. But as the authors point out:

The charges leveled against these Finns were lies. They had been among the most devoted Communists in North America and had enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to help build a socialist state in Karelia. But despite their innocence, their loyalty, and their American connections, the CPUSA allowed them to go to imprisonment and death without a protest; in fact, American Communists took active measures to silence the voices of those Finns who were able to escape.

While maybe more than a thousand American party members disappeared in the purges, their comrades in the U.S. soldiered on, some falling off after the Hitler-Stalin pact, others dropping by the wayside, or wishing they could, when the U.S. government started prosecuting Communists during the cold war. What shook most of the rest loose was Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956, which most party members, of course, read in The New York Times. The authors write:

But the facts disclosed were not revelations Š . For more than 20 years, both the mainstream press and scholarly books had carried hundreds of stories, refugee accounts, and exposés of the nature and horrors of Stalin's regime. Yet although the insistence of American Communists that the news was a revelation was literally false, it was psychologically true. Since the beginning of the movement, American Communists had worn special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that rendered all else invisible. Š But when Moscow finally opened its own eyes, when Khrushchev Š pointed to the bodies of Stalin's victims littering the Soviet landscape, American Communists saw those bodies as well. And this vision offered a shattering revelation.

For the next 35 years the party hobbled along with about 3,000 members led by the indefatigable Gus Hall. The U.S. stopped jailing Communists after an adverse Supreme Court ruling, although there were not many party members left to arrest. The Soviets keep doling out the secret subsidies, although never enough to please Hall. "I am convinced that our party can be an important factor in slowing down, stopping, and reversing the present reactionary policies of the Reagan Administration," he wrote to Moscow in 1981, pleading for more cash. Six years later, he was still grubbing for more money. "Because our Party works in the decaying heart of imperialism," the ever-optimistic Hall reported, "whatever we do in influencing events in the United States has an impact on world developments."

But by 1989 even Mikhail Gorbachev had basically given up the ghost of Communism, and after Hall badmouthed him the Soviet leader cut off the American leader's allowance. Alas, when the American Communist Party finally did stand up to the Soviets it was, once again, on the wrong side of history.

~Michael J. Ybarra is writing a book about Sen. Pat McCarran
and anti-New Deal conservatism.