Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan enduring a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan.’15
In bohemian circles, there was still much praise for Moscow’s artistic freedom, avant-garde theatre, movies and poetry. As the US economy boomed in the 1920s, intellectual socialists were out of touch with the day-to-day issues of the working class. It was only during the crisis of the 1930s that the Soviet Union and Communism started to enjoy broader US support and clandestine help. The crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism (seen by the left as capitalism with murder) proved to be the catalyst for the growth of the US radical left. Marx’s theory of historical determinism was in vogue.
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The closing of all American banks on 4 March 1933 marked the nadir for capitalism as the entire nation went into a state of traumatic shock. The illusion of permanent prosperity that had captivated and motivated everyone during the boom evaporated. The deepening economic crisis caught intellectuals such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and socialist writer Upton Sinclair unawares, but they soon recovered to take the lead in asserting that American capitalism was undeserving of support or survival. From 1930 onwards there had begun a quest that took many on a journey leading far from their social, political and philosophical starting points. Along the way some fell into the waiting arms of Soviet intelligence. This was the era when Communists joined the US government, not just to gather useful information for their Soviet controllers but also to influence government policy for Communist ends. Dozens of agents such as Nathan Silvermaster, Lachlan Currie and Harry Dexter White found careers in government service, in particular in the Treasury and the Labor Department.
The battering of the Great Depression dispelled political apathy. No one could remain indifferent to the capitalist system that was creating havoc and misery. Liberalism was the first political casualty of this political awakening. Its spokesmen had failed to foresee the catastrophe and, the radicals believed, were unable to explain its causes, cope effectively with its consequences or offer answers. In their search for a solution many turned their eyes abroad. If the Russians were achieving full employment and economic growth with their backward technology, surely the Americans could do far better with their advanced facilities? In the US, the factories were built but now lay idle, so the priority was a plan for the economy to put America back to work. The leftward move, coupled with the feebleness of right-wing opinion at the time, made the Communist movement the unchallenged attraction. The starry-eyed saw a promised paradise in the land of the Five-Year Plans, while the more grounded were impressed by the achievements of a planned economy operated on the foundation of nationalised property. A Soviet-style economic policy might provide the means of propelling the US economy forward, eliminating the scourge of mass unemployment.
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Blamed for causing the Depression, Hoover won only 39.7 per cent of the popular vote in the 1932 presidential election, a dismal result, and in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced him as President. Roosevelt’s reforms derailed the leftward political momentum in the US. A stream of radicals were hired into the federal government to enact depression relief measures adopted from their leftist agenda. Faith in the vitality of American capitalism revived with the economic upturn. Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed to provide support for the millions of unemployed, to grow the economy and to enact reform to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. It was attractive for some Communists who, as members of the Democratic administration, could be anti-fascist fighters, defend the cause of labour and promote the aims of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union while pursuing a government career with a good salary. It was no wonder at the time that Soviet spy rings flourished unhindered at the heart of the American government. But New Deal reform did not extend much beyond the end of the recession in 1937, when urgent plans for war displaced domestic concerns. And as the vision of an imminent proletarian revolution was eclipsed by the war shadows, the slow journey back to a belief in democracy quickened into a stampede. Patriotic fervour swamped the radicalism of the thirties. Conservatives still depict the Red Decade as an ugly spectacle of rampant subversion in America.
One clear demonstration of the broad appeal of the radical message at the time, but not of the socialist name, was given by the writer and politician Upton Sinclair. Having founded EPIC (End Poverty In California) to pursue a solution more radical than Roosevelt’s New Deal, Sinclair came close to becoming Governor of California in 1934. He wrote after his defeat that ‘the American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket, I got 60,000 votes and running on the slogan to “End Poverty in California” I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a frontal attack; it is much better to out-flank them.’16
Sinclair was a lifelong Socialist who had become frustrated with the New Deal’s inability to end the Depression at a stroke. Rather than putting the unemployed on relief, Sinclair proposed, via EPIC, to put them to work within a state-organised ‘production-for-use’ economy distinct from the capitalist marketplace. Under his scheme, the state would take over idle farms and factories, allowing the jobless to grow their own food or produce clothing and other goods. Any surplus could be traded, through a system of barter, only for other goods produced within the system. Considered the front-runner in the election, Sinclair was subjected to intense attacks from both Republicans and Democrats as ‘a communistic wolf in the dried skin of the Democratic donkey’.17
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The Soviet students tripping down the gangplank in the summer of 1931 arrived with fixed expectations and preconceived ideas about America. The views of Shumovsky and his fellow Soviet students were based on their own political ideology, reinforced by selective imported left-wing reading and popular culture including movies. Long before the Revolution, the idea of America had exercised a profound fascination for Russians, and not just for its technological successes. There was a hungry market in Russia for American movies and cheap novels about cowboys and gangsters.18 An unusual import was the staging of selected American dramas. Several American plays were produced in Moscow, notably The Front Page – famously adapted in 1940 for the screen as His Girl Friday starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell – which was rechristened Sensations for a Communist audience. Giving theatre-going Muscovites a further taste of the life and times of the windy city was a staging of Chicago, a ‘tale of America’s foremost big gun and bullet city’ depicting the life of Roxie Hart and today more renowned as a musical. Hollywood movie styles inspired domestically produced Soviet films, which often emulated the style and stunts of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops in delivering their ideological message. In one popular movie, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,19 an American philanthropist, fearful for his own safety having heard lurid tales of bloodthirsty Communists, brings a cowboy to Moscow as a personal bodyguard. The cowboy, played by a Moscow circus clown, is a carbon copy of Keaton, while Moscow’s finest do a passable impression of the Keystone Kops. The philanthropist falls victim to conniving White Guards spinning impossible tales such as that the iconic Bolshoi Theatre was dynamited by the Communists. Mr West returns to the US, and the arms of his relieved wife, knowing that tales of bloodthirsty philistines destroying Moscow are untrue. As the students arrived in America, like Klivans they felt the need to tackle prejudices about the new Russia similar to those held by Mr West and many Americans.
Two Russian satirists, Ilf and Petrov, summed up Russian expectations of arriving in depression-hit New York:
the word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.20
They
