defending the necessity of “exposing” Communists during the McCarthy years.47
The great ideological and political struggles that pitted liberals against conservatives, socialists against communists, the left and center against fascists intensified with the coming of the Great Depression. Like a litmus test of one’s political loyalties, one’s attitude toward the Soviet Union separated people who otherwise might have been allies. Communists by the 1930s were unquestioning supporters of Stalinism and the General Line. Their democratic critics included liberals and Europe’s Social Democrats, among whom the exiled Mensheviks used their contacts within the country to contribute knowledgeable analyses in their journals and newspapers, most importantly Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald). To their left were varieties of Trotskyists, most agreeing with Trotsky that the Soviet Union had suffered a Thermidorian reaction and become a degenerated workers’ state.48 For Trotsky the USSR was ruled, not by a dictatorship of the proletariat, but by “a hitherto unheard-of apparatus of compulsion,” an uncontrolled bureaucracy dominating the masses.49 Stalin’s personal triumph was that of the bureaucracy, which perfectly reflected his own “petty bourgeois outlook,” and his state had “acquired a totalitarian-bureaucratic character.”50 Impeccably Marxist, Trotsky provided an impressive structuralist alternative to the more common accounts based on national character or rationalization of the Soviet system as an effective model of statist developmentalism.
Along with Menshevik and Trotskyist critics of Stalinism, and Communist enthusiasts for Stalinism, an array of intellectuals, often referred to as “fellow-travelers,” were swept along by the exciting transformations taking place in the USSR. Frightened by the virulent anti-Communism and violence of the fascists and Nazis, they buried their doubts about the evident poverty and brutality in the Soviet Union, at least for a while, and lauded the achievements (dostizheniia as the Russians exalted every success) of the Soviet system. The popular French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944), author of the multivolume Jean Christophe, praised the Stalinist “revolution-from-above” of the First Five-Year Plan and accepted the invitation of his friend, Maxim Gorky, to visit the USSR in 1935. He was “fascinated with Stalin as an intellectual man of action, a kind of philosopher-king who bridged the old divide between thought and action.”51 Even when he was plagued by doubts about the state terror of the late 1930s and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Rolland kept his personal pledge to Stalin, whom he addressed as “dear comrade,” that it was his duty to defend the heroic victories of the Soviet Union.52 On the French Left, however, Rolland was outflanked in his sympathy for the Soviets by the French Communist biographer of Stalin, Henri Barbusse (1873–1935), whose “authorized biography” dueled with the critical account by ex-Communist Boris Souvarine (1895–1984).53
In the second half of the 1930s, the threat posed by fascism intensified the personal, political, and psychological struggles of the politically minded and politically active. While some continued to embrace Stalinism, even as it devoured millions of its own people, as the best defense against the radical Right, others denounced the great experiment as a grand deception. The show trials of 1936–38 swept away loyal Bolsheviks, many of whom had been close comrades of Lenin, for their alleged links to an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite” conspiracy. John Dewey, novelist James T. Farrell, and other intellectuals formed the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, and the “Dewey Commission” traveled to Coyoacan, Mexico, to interrogate Trotsky. It concluded that none of the charges leveled against Trotsky and his son was true.54 But equally eminent intellectuals—among them Dreiser, Fischer, playwright Lillian Hellman, artist Rockwell Kent, author Nathaniel West, and journalist Heywood Broun—denounced the Commission’s findings and urged American liberals not to support enemies of the USSR, “a country recognized as engaged in improving conditions for all its people” that should “be permitted to decide for itself what measures of protection are necessary against treasonable plots to assassinate and overthrow its leadership and involve it in war with foreign powers.”55 Confusion and self-delusion about the USSR affected even the American ambassador to Moscow, the political appointee Joseph E. Davies. The ambassador attended the trial of the prominent Communist Nikolai Bukharin, who was innocent of all charges of treachery, and left convinced that Old Bolsheviks had committed terrible, treasonous crimes.56
Stalin himself delivered the body blow to the faithful with the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fellow travelers found it hard to travel down this road, and Communist parties around the world hemorrhaged members. The New Republic, which had supported the Soviet Union for decades, reversed itself when Stalin attacked Finland. Many who had resisted the concept of “totalitarianism,” which collapsed Stalinism and Nazism into a single analytical category, suddenly saw merit in this formulation. In 1940 Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, an excursion through the prehistory and history of Marxism in thought and in power.57 Once a Communist, later an admirer of Trotsky, Wilson questioned the sureties of his earlier faith and ended up with praise for Marxism’s moral and social vision, while rejecting the authoritarianism and statism of the Soviet model.58 Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), the son of Hungarian Jews, explored his loss of faith in the Communist movement in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940). Basing his hero on Bukharin, Koestler told the story of an idealistic Soviet leader, Rubashov, who agrees to confess to imaginary crimes as his last contribution to the revolutionary cause. Along with George Orwell’s dystopian novels, Koestler’s exploration into the mind of a Bolshevik would become one of the defining literary portraits in the anti-Communist arsenal in the post-war years.
With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, attitudes shifted once again, spawning an outpouring of writing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Some 200 books were published in the United States in 1943–45 alone. Ambassador Davies’s memoir, Mission to Moscow (December 1941), sold 700,000 copies and was memorialized in a splashy Hollywood film that lauded Soviet achievements, “convicted” those charged at the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland, and portrayed Stalin as a benignly avuncular patriarch. A grotesque piece of war propaganda, playing fast and loose with historical fact, the film was widely panned in the press, and leading “progressive” intellectuals, including Dewey, Dwight Macdonald, Wilson, Eastman, Sidney Hook, Farrell, and the leader of the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas, signed public protests against it. Four years after the film’s opening in 1943, Warner Brothers reacted to the onset of the Cold War by ordering all release prints destroyed.59
One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the period was by the Russian-born émigré sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff (1886–1970), whose The Great Retreat showed in detail how the Soviet state had abandoned its original revolutionary program and internationalist agenda in the mid-1930s and turned into a traditional Great Power.60 Instead of the radical leveling of social classes of the early 1930s, Stalinism introduced new hierarchies based on wage differentials, education, party affiliation and loyalty to the state. This Great Retreat represented the triumph of the “national structure,” Russian history, and the needs and desires of the people over “an anonymous body of international workers.”61 Rather than betraying the revolution, the Retreat signaled its nationalization and domestication, the victory of reality and “objective facts” over utopianism and radical experimentation. The book appeared in 1946, just after the highpoint of Soviet–American cooperation, clearly a reflection of the Yalta spirit of the immediate pre–Cold War years. Timasheff predicted that the revolutionary years were over; faith in the Marxist doctrine had faded, and a future development toward democracy was possible. Here he echoed his collaborator, fellow Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) of Harvard, who in his Russia and the United States (1944) proposed that Russia and the United States were meant to be allies, not enemies, and that the two societies were indeed converging along the lines of all other highly industrialized societies. This “convergence thesis” would eventually become standard in the modernization literature of the 1950s, and both in its introduction and its elaboration formed part of a general political recommendation for understanding, tolerance, patience, and entente between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.
