Fools for Communism

Still apologists after all these years

Glenn Garvin from the April 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

� Columbia's Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, staking his bid as founder of what might be called the Smiley-Face School of History, denounces "the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages in the history of the Soviet era." He wasn't talking about pesky American historians using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out new horror stories about J. Edgar Hoover but about a Moscow exhibition on the Soviet gulag. What possible good could come of learning the details of that?

Foner, Von Laue, and Thurston are not lone nuts, the academic equivalents of Mark Lane and Ramsey Clark, but important revisionist historians. The revisionists, mostly baby boomer survivors of the New Left, have been conducting their own Cold War with traditionalist historians for nearly four decades. Unlike in the rest of the world, in academia their side was victorious. Since the 1970s, it's been an article of faith in historical journals and university presses that the United States rather than the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to world peace and political freedom.

The revisionists' dominion over the domestic side of Cold War history has been even more total. That's been written as melodrama, with the U.S. Communist Party, or CPUSA -- a collection of amiable folk singers, brave anti-segregationists, and Steinbeckian labor organizers -- trying to rescue the maiden of American democracy from the railroad tracks where McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had tied her down. The revisionists reluctantly gave some ground on the nature of the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost allowed some ugly facts to bubble to the surface, but they were adamant on the U.S. side: The Communist Party was just a lefty variant of the Republicans and Democrats, and people like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent martyrs, the victims of a demented witch hunt.

That myth was reduced to rubble by a series of crushing blows in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, in 1992, the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin threw open the Communist Party's records, including the enormous collection of documents held by the Communist International, or Comintern, which directed the affairs of foreign Communist parties during the first half of the century. Two years later, the Russian SVR, the cash-strapped successor to the KGB, allowed brief and limited access to some of its old files to a handful of Western historians in return for a substantial gratuity. And finally, in 1995, the U.S. government released thousands of KGB cables intercepted and decoded in the 1940s in a top-secret operation known as Venona. In all, some 2 million pages of new documents became available, a historical payload of unfathomable proportions and inestimable impact.

The new picture of American Communists that emerged looked nothing like the one painted by the revisionists. The CPUSA was founded in Moscow, funded from Moscow (as late as 1988 Gus Hall was signing receipts for $3 million a year), and directed by Moscow; the Comintern reviewed everything from the party's printing bills to its public explanations of the nuances of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the slightest misstep could bring scorching rebukes.

Worse yet, it really was a nest of spies: Hundreds of CPUSA members had infiltrated the American government and were passing information to the KGB. They honeycombed the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services. Virtually all of the revisionists' martyrs really were spilling secrets to the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and a pair of Roosevelt aides, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, who died (White of a heart attack, Duggan of a jump or fall from a window) after being questioned by HUAC. The CPUSA would do literally anything for Moscow, even kill: Party members were intimately involved in assassination plots against the heretic Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, and later they would assist in unsuccessful KGB plots to break his murderer out of jail. More than 350 spies, nearly all CPUSA members, are identified in the Venona cable traffic alone. One KGB cable gave Earl Browder, the party chief from 1930 to 1945, credit for personal recruitment of 18 spies. Another wondered how the KGB would ever operate in the United States without the help of the CPUSA.

If a similar treasure trove of documentary evidence about the Civil War had been uncovered -- say, establishing that Lincoln's government had been riddled with Confederate spies and that several of his cabinet members were secret slaveholders -- half the university presses in America would have burned out from overuse. But the revelations of CPUSA peonage to Moscow have produced only a handful of books from U.S. historians. Among the most notable have been three by Klehr and Haynes: The Secret World of American Communism, The Soviet World of American Communism (both co-authored with Russian documentarians), and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.

Klehr, who teaches at Emory University, and Haynes, a historian with the Library of Congress, were among the first American scholars to examine the Communist Party archives thrown open in Moscow. Though traditionalist historians with a leery view of American Communists, they were hardly McCarthyite mad dogs. As recently as 1992, in The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, they scoffed at the idea that the CPUSA was a colony of would-be Borises and Natashas. "Espionage was not a regular activity of the American C.P.," they wrote. "The party promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union's intelligence services. To see the American Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of Fifth Column misjudges its main purpose."

What they found in the Moscow archives convinced them otherwise. However many fluffhead folk singers and guilt-tripping Hollywood glitterati it may have contained, the CPUSA, they wrote three years later in The Secret World of American Communism, was also "a conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power."

For conceding their mistake, Klehr and Haynes have undergone the intellectual equivalent of a Stalinist show trial by their fellow historians. A constant stream of articles in academic journals and lefty magazines -- even an entire conference sponsored by New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies -- has pilloried them for everything from "triumphalism" (that is, they're glad Stalin didn't win the Cold War; can you imagine a historian of World War II being drummed out of the profession for expressing gratitude that Hitler didn't win?) to accepting funding from conservative foundations (which, unlike the tens of millions of dollars the CPUSA took from the Kremlin, might come with secret strings attached) to starting the Vietnam War, destroying affirmative action, and dismantling the welfare state.

That bit about Vietnam came from a piece co-authored by Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University, who in a movement rich with unintentional self-parody nonetheless towers above the rest. We might even call her the Lucille Ball of anti-anti-communism, though, to be sure, she would never be so gauche as to associate with a pre-revolutionary Cuban like Ricky Ricardo. A prodigious apologist, Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded: "Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase "non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death to the Soviet Union.

Her accusation that Haynes and Klehr were a fascist Leviathan with their tentacles writhing in every right-wing plot of the past four decades appeared in The Nation, which, because it has 70 years of Stalinist apologias to justify, unsurprisingly offers some of the most die-hard resistance to the new Cold War scholarship. It also has contributed some hilarity to the debate, including then-editor Victor Navasky's argument that the word espionage was "out of context" when applied to American Communists during the Cold War. It would be more appropriate, he wrote, to say that "there were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good will."

There's no arguing with at least one part of that sentence: "a lot." One of those people of good will, KGB officer Itzhak Akhmerov, reported back to his bosses that CPUSA spies in America had provided him with enough U.S. government documents between 1942 and 1945 to fill 2,766 reels of microfilm. It apparently was a pretty one-sided exchange, since Akhmerov does not list any Soviet documents that he offered in return.

Ultimately, though, Navasky and The Nation turn from amusing to tendentious to dishonest as they twist and turn to avoid painful truths -- none, apparently, as distressing as the guilt of Alger Hiss, the New Deal aristocrat who pumped State Department secrets to the Soviets for more than a decade. The case against Hiss, the left's protests notwithstanding, has always been overwhelming. Whittaker Chambers, a courier for a spy ring of Washington Communists that reported to Soviet military intelligence, identified Hiss as his contact. A former KGB agent confirmed it.

Numerous witnesses, including maids of both families, reported seeing the men together regularly, and auto registration records supported Chambers' claim that Hiss gave him a car to aid in his transport of documents filched by the spy ring. Chambers produced dozens of summaries and copies of State Department documents, all either in Hiss' handwriting or typed on his typewriter. Though the statutes of limitations made it difficult to try Hiss for espionage, he was convicted in 1950 of lying about his relationship to Chambers.

Comments

Pingback| 10.23.09 @ 6:45PM

Instapundit » Blog Archive » MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: The Cold War Never Ended: Twenty years links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…;A well-known Democratic … October 23, 2009 MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: The Cold War Never Ended: Twenty years later, historians still can’t figure out why the West won. But some people are still making excuses for the losers. Posted at by Glenn Reynolds at 6:44 pm if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('c6738f00-977c-48fd-98da-0afe24da2ee8'); Get the Pajamas TV - V2.0 widget and many other great free widgets at…

Pingback| 10.23.09 @ 7:49PM

Unless . . . « Oh, My! links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

Unless . . . « Oh, My! /* */ /* */ Oh, My! Hit Shappenings – Personal Rants « Now, Dude . . . Unless . . . By jbiii You are brain dead . . . The Soviet Union never disappeared. Just took a few years for re-organization, that is all. If you think not, go here–CBS, screaming libs, no less. Plain and simple. Bamm-Bamm is an amateur in the kiddie pool, and he…

|10.23.09 @ 8:32PM|#

"and a mere 2.5 million arrests"

"and a mere 2.5 million arrests"

I think the low ball number of arrests and the large difference in demographic data (millions more missing) has something to do with you and your family tending to be fired and loose your place to live and ration cards. One arrest can then lead to several deaths / the whole family...

saxon|10.23.09 @ 11:16PM|#

Why would they admit that communism was wrong; the SOBs are trying it again in the West. The red 'intellectuals' have morphed into 'greens' and 'progressives'.

Why go back that far to learn lessons from history; they are talking of Stimulus II and Community Reinvestment Act v2 ... and Barney Frank wants to lend more money to poor people ... it 'd be hilarious, if not actually sad

Andy Jones|10.24.09 @ 12:13AM|#

Communism lost?

Better go ask the ex - CEO of GM about that. Or the (mostly former now, strangely enough) executives that have had their contracts waived with a wave of the Leader's hand.

Somewhere down in Florida, three old guys sitting in a bar by the beach are talking about the old days before the fall of the Soviet Union marooned them in their KGB sleeper identities.

Barak Obama is speaking on the cabana bar TV, talking about why Utah can't drill for oil, or why secret ballots aren't fair for unions, or why America must accept the goals of Islamic terror as legitimate grievances.

They shake their heads.

"It took a while, but we WON!"

fin.

Pingback| 10.24.09 @ 10:12AM

Communism and its Apologists @ Helian Unbound links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…sages concerning the supposed “stability” of Communist regimes in the years immediately prior to the time that most of them collapsed, and their continuing attempts to revise history so as to present Stalin at his most charming. We at least have the consolation of knowing that the remaining representatives of the “New Left” of the 60’s who are still busily decorating…

|10.24.09 @ 10:29AM|#

What the sympathizers and apologists for communism cannot get over is that their analysis of the USSR was dead wrong while that of the Reader's Digest, with its focus on ordinary people and stories of escape from the slavery and oppression of communism, was correct. Being well-degreed does not equal being smart and insightful.

|10.24.09 @ 12:51PM|#

Back during the Cold War I developed the "Nazi" test. I would take a statement by a leftist and substitute Nazi for Communist and Jew for Capitalist and then ask whether he agreed or disagreed with the statement.

If you apply it to the revision on the Great Terror you get Holocaust denial. Perhaps that explains the rise of anti-Antisemitism among Progressives.