Useful Idiots

Willi Münzenberg was a brilliant German revolutionary who became communism’s successful promoter-organizer in the democratic world. His great achievement was the invention of the idea of the “popular front” in the 1930s–the era in which Western intellectuals adopted the slogan “no enemies on the left” and made Red-baiting a cardinal sin. Münzenberg’s propaganda and organizing ideas on behalf of the Soviet Union, heavily financed by Moscow, reached everywhere. As a friend of Vladimir Lenin, whom he had known and admired before the Revolution, Münzenberg was appointed, writes Stephen Koch, “the de facto director of the Soviet Union’s covertly directed propaganda operations in the West.”

Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals is a treasure house of information about a time in which famous American and European intellectuals knowingly supported a murderous totalitarian regime in the name of democracy. In America, the Communist slogan became “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism,” and banners so inscribed were mandatory exhibits during the Popular Front era. (There was even a ribald parody, composed no doubt by a Trotskyite, called “The Girl with the Popular Front.”)

Münzenberg was an elected member of the Weimar Reichstag. After Hitler’s coup d’etat in 1933, he fled to France where he lived until his mysterious death at the age of fifty-two in 1940 while the Soviet-Nazi Pact was in effect. I say mysterious because his decomposed body was found in a forest near Paris, at a time when both dictators would have wanted him dead but Stalin even more so. Around his neck was a noosed cord. Stalin believed that Münzenberg was a secret Trotskyite, says Koch, which undoubtedly led to his death.

Everybody (except Trotskyites) was welcome in the Popular Front. Münzenberg’s appeal to intellectuals went like this: Of course, we disagree about capitalism, about minorities, about taxes, about a lot of things, but we can agree and work together to fight racism, fascism, and Nazism, even though we are Communists and you are not.

Then Münzenberg or his subordinates would produce the rabbit out of the magician’s hat–an organization with secretaries, mimeograph machines, phones, meeting rooms, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, the works, and above all, professional revolutionaries, fulltime, just as Lenin had demanded in his famous cookbook, What Is To Be Done? Koch shows that the seduction of the intellectuals helped the Soviet Union to an unimagined degree through espionage and systematic betrayal of America.

I can give firsthand experience about how Münzenberg’s Popular Front worked. In the spring of 1936, a Communist friend phoned that several of his friends had decided to fight “reactionary” alumni associations by organizing a national liberal alumni association to be headquartered in New York. Since I had been editor in chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator a couple of years earlier, and since I was beginning a short career as a fellow-traveler, I was invited to the organizing meeting in some Manhattan Upper West Side hotel. I was delighted to see a few Columbia alumni plus about seventy-five alumni of other schools.

We organized ourselves on the spot as the “Progressive Intercollegiate Alumni Association.” The chairman, a Methodist minister from Columbia’s Teachers College, was already in place. Nobody thought of asking, least of all me, how the minister had become chairman. After a couple of biweekly meetings, at which we passed long-forgotten resolutions, I was told in a whisper after adjournment by a lady, the wife of a Daily Worker editor, that it had been decided to let the organization die. She had gone around to several individuals like myself and told them the party’s over.

Well, I asked, who decided to let the organization die? No answer. The new approach, the lady told me, would be for members to join existing alumni associations and conduct the fight from within. Why should we disband when we were doing so well? I remonstrated. She didn’t tell me that the party line had switched (on Moscow’s orders) from Third Period confrontation to Popular Frontism. She turned away. I shouted back at her: “Shouldn’t we at least have a meeting to discuss it?” No answer. “Well, I’m coming to the next meeting and will ask for a vote,” I told her. She shrugged and kept walking.

I came to the next meeting prepared to fight but there was nobody there to fight with. I found two other hardy souls, both members of the Socialist party whom I had known at Columbia. We waited and waited, avoiding eye-contact. Finally the three of us departed rather embarrassed. It was a lesson on the power of the Communist party line.

I tell this story to reinforce the new edition of Koch’s story of Willi Münzenberg and the amazing power Lenin and then Stalin exercised over intellectuals the world over through the Comintern branch offices that passed as various nations’ unique Communist parties. The party commanded: Organize alumni into one organization. Done. The party commanded four months later: Do not organize alumni into one organization. Done.

This kind of thing could happen because even intellectuals like Leon Trotsky could profess at the Soviet Communist party Congress in 1924: “The party in the last analysis is always right because the party is the single historic instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental problems. . . . I know that one must not be right against the party. One can be right only with the party, and through the party, for history has created no other road for the realization of what is right.”

“A revolutionary,” Stalin would later add, “is he who without arguments, unconditionally, openly and honestly . . . is ready to defend and strengthen the USSR, since the USSR is the first proletarian, revolutionary state in the world.” Stalin’s words legitimized a decision made somewhere at Communist party headquarters in lower Manhattan–interpreting somebody’s orders in Moscow to mean that the Progressive Intercollegiate Alumni Association must be disbanded.

While Koch’s book revolves around Münzenberg, he also tells the story of another Soviet agent named Otto Katz: How he exploited the “will-to-believe” of leading American intellectuals and artists, how he helped establish Stalinism as a moral force in the democracies, and how he turned these “useful idiot” Americans, especially in Hollywood, into cash cows for Stalinism. Otto Katz (aka André Simon) was only one of many Soviet agents who were brilliant in tactics and strategy, judging by Koch’s narrative. Katz boasted, “Columbus discovered America but I discovered Hollywood.” In the end his successes did him no good. He, like Münzenberg and other high apparatchiks paid the price: execution during one of Stalin’s purges.

What Koch misses is Stalin’s pernicious “social fascism” thesis in 1928, which unquestionably helped Hitler’s accession in 1933. In his desire to break the hold of the German Social Democratic party on the German working class, Stalin announced that socialists and fascists were one and the same. Overnight socialists in the Stalinist vocabulary became “social fascists,” meaning that socialist democracy was the real enemy of the proletariat, not Nazism. Therefore there could be no united front with the German Socialists nor a joint general strike even though Stalin’s rejection meant Hitler’s triumph. In fact, so confident were the German Communists about the correctness of the Stalin line that they even coined a boastful slogan, “Nach Hitler, kommen wir“: After Hitler, we will come.

Koch also documents the Nazi-Soviet collaboration almost from the beginning of Hitler’s accession, a collaboration whose climax was the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, and the beginning of World War II. The Popular Front, says Koch, became, first, a smokescreen for Stalin’s overtures to Hitler and, second, a smokescreen to blanket the Great Terror, the purges, and the Moscow Trials.

Koch’s Double Lives is worth recommending to a new generation of readers. They will find it hard to believe that intelligent people like Beatrice and Sidney Webb could have written in praise of Stalin’s driving millions of Russians from their homes and consigning them to a Siberian wasteland. Koch’s book is a history of the recruitment of the “useful idiots” who believed in the purity and virtue of the Bolshevik government. We’ve read parts of this history in masterworks like Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Richard Pipes’s multivolume history of the Russian Revolution, and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes’s collaborative volumes about the American academy. But Koch’s focus on the treason of the intellectuals is a major contribution to the history of an era whose like, we must pray, we will not see again.

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a columnist for the Washington Times.