Poor, Persecuted Stalinists!

With the fall of Russian communism and its puppets more than a decade ago, followed by the extensive opening of secret archives in both West and East, historians and journalists who had studied the crimes of the Soviet regime anticipated that a certain reasonable balance would take hold — especially among Western intellectuals, who for decades let their opposition to anti-communism draw them into excusing or even supporting Stalinism.

We can now see that such faith in the discernment and honesty of the American academic and literary classes was misplaced. Few prominent figures have come forward to admit they were wrong — or even to participate in the revised judgment of twentieth-century history. Indeed, in an alarming and depressing development, the partisans of anti-anti-communism have now rallied and begun a full-scale counter-attack.

An example of this new “re-revisionism” is furnished by the reaction to “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers by a Midwestern academic named Alexander Stephan. Based on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, “Communazis” revives all the bad qualities of 1970s-style apologetics for Stalinism: evasive phraseology, selective memory, and, above all, one-sided focus on alleged abuses by the American authorities.

The theme of Stephan’s book is, of course, outrage that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would ever have interested itself in the activities of Communists, which Stephan pairs with considerable irritation that anybody, anywhere, should ever have questioned the idealism, good faith, and even the nobility of Stalin’s intellectual mercenaries.

This deceptive perspective shows even in the book’s title. “Communazi” was used by J. Edgar Hoover to undermine the World War II anti-Nazi alliance between the United States and Russia. The word, Stephan writes, “compressed Communists and Nazis into a single idea at a time when the United States and the USSR were wartime allies, implied that the alliance was purely tactical — and laid the groundwork for the totalitarianism theory of the McCarthy era and the Cold War.” It had had nothing, you see, to do with Stalin’s intentions, and the totalitarianism of both the Nazis and Communists had no relation to their mutually beneficial relations or their shared concept of an ideological party state. Rather, the Cold War was all a “theory” — if not a malign semantic invention — of J. Edgar Hoover.

Of course, ordinary Americans in 1939, and again after 1945, understood in a visceral and fearful way that Hitler and Stalin were twins, accurately dubbed, by Trotsky, the “totalitarian double star.” If Stalinism had remained what it was when Moscow was aligned with Hitler from August 1939 to June 1941, why would it have been anything but necessary and just for the American authorities to put under surveillance, isolate, and otherwise obstruct the foreign agents of Moscow? Stalin needed the West only to help him extricate himself from his abusive marriage with Hitler. But Stephan and others seem to think that Stalin’s atrocities during the Cold War were not simply a continuation of the direction assumed long before, but rather a defensive reaction to harassment by the FBI.

The three outstanding “victims” of FBI monitoring cited in “Communazis” are the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the novelists Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers. Stephan has written his book on the apparent assumption that nobody reading it will be aware that Bertolt Brecht was one of the most extreme devotees of Stalinism in its worst period, the 1930s. This was, after all, the author nicknamed “the poet of the GPU” by the former high Communist functionary Ruth Fischer. Stephan admits, without any elucidation, that while in the United States from 1941 to 1947, Brecht spent an inordinate amount of time with Soviet “diplomats” known to be spies. But there is evidence that Brecht actually served as a secret police agent.

Brecht’s reputation as the bard of Stalin’s hangmen rests mainly on his play Die Massnahme, or The Measures Taken. This work was written in 1930, during the aftermath of Stalin’s adventures in China in the late 1920s, when German, American, and other foreign Communists dispatched to Shanghai and Canton drove thousands of ordinary Chinese workers to a meaningless and brutal death. The play depicts as praiseworthy the essentially gratuitous murder of the most idealistic of a group of Chinese radicals by his own comrades. (Incredibly, this ghastly exercise was presented as a cantata, with the musical score composed by Hanns Eisler, another individual described by Stephan as a martyr to the FBI.)

Stephan mentions The Measures Taken several times, but never hints at its content. It is, of Brecht plays, the least-often performed today, for the good reason that it demonstrates baldly and even insolently that the worst anti-Communists could say about the immorality of the movement — that communism requires the suicide of conscience — was true. It was an uncanny harbinger of the destruction of millions by the Stalinist order within a decade, but Brecht and Eisler saw nothing disturbing in the proposition that any cruelty the party demanded, no matter how inhuman, was necessary.

In a secret speech in Moscow, Stalin said of the bloody Chinese events of 1927, “There have been massacres, and there will be more of them.” Stalin’s comment was not officially made public; why should it have been when Moscow had literary and artistic mercenaries like Brecht and Eisler to indoctrinate the public by performance of sophisticated musical dramas? Later in the 1930s, Brecht is reported to have responded to the reproach that the defendants in the Moscow purge trials were innocent by saying: “The more innocent they were, the more they deserved to be shot.” This attitude runs like a thread through his work. What compelling moral argument could there have been, aside from talent that had been grossly and willfully corrupted, to allow the likes of Brecht and Eisler refuge in the United States? And if there are some arguments for granting them shelter, why should they not have been watched by the FBI, given their prior exploits?

Even so, the monitoring activities undertaken by the FBI and the other intelligence agencies never really amounted to much. The Stalinists were interrogated and followed around, their mail was opened, and their telephones were tapped, and that’s about it. Stephan, like others, seeks insistently to draw a moral equivalence between the Bureau and the Soviet KGB — but even a child should be able to see the difference between reading someone’s mail surreptitiously and the frame-up, imprisonment, and murder of millions of government leaders, prominent intellectuals, and ordinary people. The distinction between losing a job and losing one’s life seems impossible for American leftist intellectuals to grasp.

Stephan’s coy silence is no less outrageous when he turns to Feuchtwanger. Feuchtwanger’s novels are unread in America today, and do not merit much commentary. It has also been mercifully forgotten that he gained worldwide infamy at the height of the Russian purge trials by publishing a whitewash of them, entitled Moscow 1937, which Stephan describes as “a controversial travel report.” (Indeed, Moscow 1937 may well have been directly subsidized by the Soviet secret police.)

Remarkably American investigators knew quite a bit about Moscow 1937, which they brought up with Feuchtwanger. Nonetheless, Stephan alludes to the interrogation while delicately omitting any description of the writing in question.

Indeed, he seems to have adopted as his own the evasive pattern of replies pursued by Brecht and Feuchtwanger. In a piquant moment, a representative of the Immigration and Naturalization Service asked Feuchtwanger to compare his enthusiastic description of the Stalin regime in Moscow 1937 to his critical views of Andre Gide — the nihilist and homosexual novelist who did tell the truth about Stalin. Perhaps these investigators were not the provincial boobs they have been painted to be.

Feuchtwanger defended his pamphleteering in favor of the Moscow trials by citing American ambassador Joseph E. Davies, author of the equally discredited Mission to Moscow, which had declared that the old Bolsheviks killed by Stalin were Nazi spies. Pressed as to whether, even after Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech excoriating Stalin’s crimes — the INS interviews took place in 1957 and 1958 — he still held to the view that the trials were veridical and just, Feuchtwanger insisted that his outlook was that of a historian, not a politician, and therefore, his account of the trials could be taken as accurate.

Anna Seghers, the major third example in “Communazis”, is a meaningless name to the contemporary American literary public. But, once again, Stephan shows his customary refusal to face recently-published evidence.

He notes without the slightest elaboration, for instance, that Seghers’s husband, Laszlo Radvanyi, “was accused . . . of having raided a meeting of Trotskyites in April 1943 along with three other German-speaking exiles,” including a well-known Soviet operative, Otto Katz. In fact, the event was one of the most famous political riots to take place in Mexico. It occurred during a memorial meeting held for Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, two Polish Jewish Mensheviks who had been murdered by Stalin’s minions and then outrageously slandered by Moscow as Nazi spies. A third figure honored was the Italian-American labor leader Carlo Tresca, who had been murdered by a Mafioso likely paid to do so by the Communists. The “raid” was a mass attack by some two hundred Stalinists of various nationalities, all armed, some with machine guns. The main target was probably the ex-Trotskyist novelist Victor Serge — of whom Stephan should have heard, since, unlike Seghers, his writings remain read and appreciated.

German Stalinists, directed by Katz, played a major role in the persecution of dissident leftist exiles in Mexico as alleged pro-Nazi “fifth columnists.” In the United States, the FBI had been tasked to thwart this campaign by the State Department, which believed that the Stalinist attempt to use the wartime alliance against their political critics diverted attention from the real fight against German agents.

Stephan is blind to the implications of all this. For him, the FBI’s shadowing Stalinists is much, much worse than Stalinists’ trying to kill their isolated and powerless opponents. He huffs at length over the FBI’s investigation of Seghers in connection with twenty-four coded letters sent to New York from various Latin American locations. The letters were not released to Stephan by the FBI, but by his analysis they “seem to have involved the real or suspected activities of the ‘NKVD’ and ‘Comintern apparatus’ in trying to free the murderer of Trotsky” from a Mexican prison.

This incident was thoroughly discussed by the historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, their book on decrypted Soviet communications. Venona appeared from Yale University Press — the same publisher that issued “Communazis” — in good enough time for Stephan to consult it. As shown by Haynes and Klehr, the coded letters were detected in the mail between November 1941 and November 1943, and they indeed involved a plot to break Trotsky’s slayer, Ramon Mercader, out of prison.

But such details are unimportant to Stephan, whose only aim is to discredit American authorities. He expostulates that “the zeal and meticulousness of the FBI in investigating Seghers and the mysterious letters . . . appear grotesque and overblown against the background of the military conflicts going on in Europe and the Pacific. The unwarranted scale of the investigation at a time when resources were needed elsewhere confirms the stereotype of Hoover as a man who . . . thought no cost too great when it came to containing the Red menace.” Cloaking himself in imaginary juridical robes, Stephan rails about “financial considerations and the statute of limitations.”

But there is no statute of limitations on murder, and Trotsky was brutally murdered. Was there not, in fact, something admirable in the State Department and FBI helping to prevent his assassin from escaping justice, and more such assassinations from being carried out in Mexico? The notorious Otto Katz, by the way, was hanged in Prague after the war, in the toils of Stalin’s East European purges; his trial swept a number of foreigners, including the American Field family, into secret prisons. (Stephan reveals, although he fails to learn from it, the horrifying additional detail that Brecht apparently had an early warning of the doom facing Katz.)

So why does the campaign to exonerate these terrorist intellectuals persist? Taken on its own terms, “Communazis” is an unimportant and silly little book that willfully misunderstands its own subject. Far more interesting than the book itself is the fact that it hasn’t died the quiet death it deserves. Thus, the historian Martin Jay, reviewing “Communazis” in the New York Times Book Review, protests that the objects of FBI scrutiny “were literary figures . . . who may have romanticized Stalinism . . . but had no access to military or diplomatic secrets.” Perhaps not, but they had the capacity to participate in lethal conspiracies. The poisoning of the Western mind by Stalinism remains a curse upon generation after generation — as Jay himself demonstrates. There was a reason Trotsky described Stalinism as the syphilis of the left.

An even worse review was produced for the New Republic by Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland. If Stephan may be said to possess a selective memory, Herf seems to have no memory. In Herf’s contribution to the Feuchtwanger school of historiography, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, and Seghers were merely “Communist-leaning.” They “intended no harm to the United States” and never supported “goals that were inimical to the interests of the United States in Europe.”

Would he be willing to admit that they “intended harm” to Victor Serge? Or that their goals were inimical to the lives of millions of kulaks, religious believers, Trotskyists, Polish Jewish Mensheviks, and innumerable other victims? The FBI, according to Herf, “learned nothing about Brecht’s political views that was not obvious to anyone reading Brecht’s plays, poems, or political statements.” But the bureau was interested in the consequences of these views, and curiously enough, the INS learned a great deal more from The Measures Taken than Stephan or Herf appears to have gleaned from it.

Herf seems addicted to the kind of crank historical interpretations that have come to be known as “counter-factual.” To him, it is appalling that the FBI was more interested in Communists than Nazis in Mexico.

Well, Trotsky was not assassinated in Canada, which should provide one clue. Further, Herf claims that in Mexico, “for the first time in the history of German communism, Nazi persecution of the Jews before and during the Holocaust assumed a central place in the discourse of the German Communists.” Herf sputters, “With self-assured ignorance, the FBI dismissed this remarkable moment as only a ploy by clever Comintern agents to dupe political innocents.” But Stephan himself shows that Otto Katz had great success in fleecing the German Jewish business colony in Mexico to support his schemes, so the FBI was right after all. And, in any event, it is strange that for Herf the “remarkable moment” outweighs a decade of German Communist silence about the centrality of Nazi anti-Semitism.

How long will it be before the thaw that began in Moscow in 1956, with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, penetrates the American academy? Not even the events of 1989 seem to have been enough, nor the facts demonstrated by the Venona decryptions.

The American historical profession, once a beacon of reason and insight, today remains under the domination of a cult of untruth. In that, curiously, it is much like the Stalinist movement so many of its representatives seek to sanctify.

Stephen Schwartz is author of Intellectuals and Assassins, a collection of essays on Stalinism.