Part II How Communism Began
1 — Marx — And the “Science” of Communism
The principle of communism is not new. Some primitive societies practiced a limited brand of communism in that the whole tribe lived in common and shared property, food, and housing. But modern-day communism, known as the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” is just a little over a century old.
This kind of communism is also known as “scientific socialism” to distinguish it from “Utopian socialism,” which, according to the Marxists, is unplanned and does not operate on “laws” of society. “Utopian,” or early, socialism predated Marx; and its exponents, such as Robert Owen, believed in making society socialist by peaceful means. Many of these men were visionaries, hence the word “Utopian.”
A few years before the American Civil War “scientific socialism” stemmed from the mind of an egotistical, crabby, stubborn man who from student days showed no interest in productive labor to support his family and who used to pawn his overcoat in the middle of winter to buy a few loaves of bread. This man was born in Germany, became an exile in France and Belgium, later lived and wrote in England. From his extensive writings he is known as the “originator” of communism and is today regarded with the greatest respect by communists everywhere. His name was Karl Marx.
Marx was born in Trier, Germany, in May, 1818, the son of a prosperous German lawyer. He was an intelligent child, but temperamental. At school his marks were superior, and his capacity for work, a trait that was to continue all through life, tremendous. But he did not make friends easily, perhaps because of self-pride. He made arrogant remarks and wrote satirical verse. He was a “smart” young man, but already vain, bitter, and rebellious.
Strangely, his heart held an inner love for a home-town girl, Jenny von Westphalen, a devotion to remain bright despite the utter squalor, poverty, and despair that lay ahead. Jenny, four years older than Karl, was the daughter of a government official in Trier. She was beautiful, charming, and of a socially high rank, much higher than that of the Marx family. She, too, was desperately in love, but she feared to tell her parents. What would they think—the daughter of Privy Councillor Ludwig von Westphalen marrying Karl Marx?
Young Karl was obsessed. He wrote feverish love letters and poetry. “... a new world has opened for me,” he wrote his father in 1837, “the world of love... art is not as beautiful as Jenny.”
The time for marriage, however, was still distant. Karl was away at school. Then, after graduation, he did not have a job and did not seem to care to find one—another lifelong trait. He preferred to dabble in atheism, socialism, and polemics. After seven long years Jenny was still waiting, but finally, on June 12, 1843, they were married.
Marx had hoped to teach but drifted into journalism. He wrote acidly, pouring ridicule on everything and everybody with whom he disagreed. Strongly influenced by the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher who preached materialism, Marx had become an atheist and called for war against religion, a war that was to become the cornerstone of communist philosophy. In 1842 he became editor of a new left-wing paper, the Cologne Rheinische Zeitung, and immediately launched into bitter tirades against the Prussian government. As expected, the authorities took action, the paper was suppressed, and Marx, a short time later, went to France. Finally, in 1849, with his family, he went to England, where he was destined to remain until his death in 1883.
Marx was a man with few friends. But one friend, Friedrich Engels, a fellow German whom he first met in 1842, was to become his intellectual comrade, his financial support, his faithful champion. Engels, a vivid contrast to the morose and crotchety Marx, was gay, mannerly, from a wealthy family, and interested in having a good time. He too was an atheist and a revolutionary, a fact that deeply offended his father, a leading textile manufacturer and churchman. He would provide money for school, the elder Engels said, but none for revolutionary activities. Conflict was inevitable. “If it were not for my mother... whom I really love,” young Engels wrote, “it would never occur to me to make even the smallest concession to my fanatical and despotic father.”
Marx and Engels were close friends for some forty years. Engels, most appropriately, can be called the “collaborator” of Marx. He had an encyclopedic memory and his far-flung interests and knowledge of industrial techniques supplied Marx with important information. He also wrote independently and, in some instances, under Marx’s name (For a list of writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, see pages 333-337.) Together they conceived and formulated the doctrine of communism. They were the parents of “scientific socialism.”
Engels spent much of his time in Manchester, England, tending to his father’s business, while Marx lived in London. Engels was tall and thin, blue-eyed, two years younger than Marx, and a lover of horses and women. He lived for years with one girl without marriage and then, upon her death, with her sister. He finally consented to marry the latter on her deathbed.
Marx, in contrast, lived in squalor. He was often sick; he suffered from boils, headaches, and rheumatism. Jenny’s health began to give way. Her seventh child was born dead. She became wretchedly nervous, irritable, and upset. “Daily, my wife tells me she wishes she were lying in the grave with the children,” Marx wrote in 1862. “And truly I cannot blame her....”
Marx did not have a regular job but depended on pittances, especially from Engels. He lived from pawnshop to pawnshop. It is a bitter irony of history, indeed, that the founder of communism should be literally kept alive by a wealthy industrialist, and that a “capitalist’s” son, turned communist, should become the second “father” of this revolutionary movement.
The great classics of communism, such as Das Kapital (Capital), were “hacked out” amid the most trying conditions. For a period the Marx family lived in two furnished rooms on Dean Street, Soho (London). Listen to this description translated from an article by Gustav Mayer:
In private life Marx is a highly disorderly, cynical person.... Washing himself, combing his hair, changing his underwear and shirts are a rarity with him.... He is often lazy for days, but if he has a great deal of work, he works day and night with untiring endurance. Very often he stays up the entire night and then lies down on the couch fully dressed at noon and sleeps through until evening, undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of family life.... The room overlooking the street is the parlor and the bedroom is to the rear. In the entire apartment there is not a single piece of clean and good furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and ragged; everything is covered with finger-thick dust, everywhere there is the greatest disorder. In the center of the parlor stands a large table covered by an overhanging oilcloth. It is cluttered with his manuscripts, books, newspapers, the children’s toys, scraps of cloth from his wife’s sewing as well as some tea-cups with chipped rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, a lamp, an inkwell, drinking glasses, a Dutch claypipe, and ashes. In short, all this conglomeration is piled high and on one table. A junk-shop would have to cede honors to this extraordinary ensemble. When stepping into Marx’s room the coal and tobacco smog makes one grope around the room as in a cave until one’s eyes gradually develop a tolerance to these fumes and one is able to make out, as if in a fog, a few objects in the room. Everything is dirty; everything is full of dust. As for sitting down, that is a really dangerous matter. Here is a chair with only three legs; over there the children are playing at cooking on another chair which happens to be still unbroken. Sure enough, that is the one which is offered to the visitor, but without any effort to clean off the food. You sit down at the risk of ruining a pair of trousers.... Such is a faithful picture of the family life of the Communist chief, Marx....
Money was always short. Little Franziska died before her first birthday. There was no money for the funeral. A pittance was obtained from a neighbor which, as Jenny says, “... paid for the small coffin in which my poor child now sleeps in peace.” Marx sometimes couldn’t go out of the house: his overcoats were pawned. His wife was sick, but he couldn’t call a doctor. There was no money for medicine. “For a week or more I have kept my family alive feeding them bread and potatoes, and it is questionable whether or not I will be able to scare any up today.” Another time he complained, “... the children are without clothes or shoes in which they can leave the house.”
But Marx was stubborn. He kept plugging away, writing, reading, denouncing “capitalist” poverty, and letting his family starve. No wonder a remark, attributed to his mother, was made that instead of writing about capital it would have been better if Karl had made some. The main source of help was money from Engels, from a relative, or from writings. The “only piece of good news we have,” Marx wrote to Engels on February 27, 1852, “is from my ministerial sister-in-law [wife of the Minister of Westphalia], namely, the news about the illness of my wife’s indestructible uncle. If the brute dies now, I will be out of this mess.” Marx, in scornfully referring to his wife’s uncle as “indestructible,” meant the fellow simply would not die. On March 2, 1852, Engels replied, “My congratulations on the news of the old... inheritance-obstructor’s illness and I hope that the catastrophe will finally take place.”
If the mind of Marx was perverted and biased, it was at the same time sharp and keen. He was a deep student of history, philosophy, and economics. Sitting in his dingy apartment or in the British Museum, this German-born social theorist surveyed the world. In his arrogant pride he thought he could recast it on his own terms; through his writings and his revolutionary organizations he undertook to do so.
“The Moor,” as his children called him because of his coal-black hair and eyes, developed as his first line of attack an atheistic view of the world. He joined two very old ideas: (1) That everything in the universe, whether a blade of grass, a human being, or society itself, is constantly changing and at the same time is in conflict. This is called dialectics. (2) That God doesn’t exist and the world is composed only of “living” matter. Hence, man is walking dust, without spark or image of his divine Creator. This idea is called materialism; hence, dialectical materialism. (For a fuller definition of this and other communist terms, see the Glossary.)
This concept was to undergird the whole communist “world outlook.” Human society, as well as the physical universe, Marx said, is affected by this outlook. The principles have universal application. Noncommunist thinkers, as well as human experience, have punctured many holes in the thesis; but to communists it applies with the same certainty as does the law of gravity.
Constant and bitter struggle is not bad, Marx said, because it achieves progress. In fact, he viewed the whole recorded history of the world as a story of class struggle. Mankind, he said, has always been divided into classes: groups of people who have special interests, ideals, and ways of doing things. These classes, he added, have been struggling from the very beginning of time, and still are.
Marx explained this struggle by means of a special formula, commonly called the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, which he distorted from the philosophy of the famous German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. Here is how it works for communists:
Start, for example, Marx said, with a certain economic class (a thesis). This class is the dominant power in society, controlling the means of production, the way houses are built, the kind of clothes worn, and so forth. Soon an opposing class arises (an antithesis) which seeks to overthrow the first class. It has different ideals, motives, and ambitions. What happens? A fight occurs and soon a new class (synthesis) emerges which, according to Marx, incorporates only the best of both old classes. (Why some of the bad does not seep in, too, Marx does not explain.)
Then the process starts all over again. This is history, for as Marx held, historical materialism was nothing more than applying the concept of dialectical materialism to society. The new class (synthesis) is now dominant and thus becomes, in turn, a new thesis. It directs how to build houses, who gains wealth, etc., but, following Marx’s ideas, another opposition class arises (a new antithesis). They struggle, a new synthesis is obtained, and again the world is off on a new cycle.
These ideas obviously are distorted and theoretical. But to understand modern-day communism, it is essential to grasp the underlying theory. False as it is, this theory is the spark that kindles the communist flame
This class struggle, in Marx’s reasoning, always produced a higher stage of civilization. First, years ago, came slavery. The slave-owning class, as expected, developed its own “antithesis” (meaning its rivals, who wanted to abolish slavery). A struggle ensued and feudalism developed, representing the best of both opponents. But feudal society, then the dominant class, was attacked by its own “antithesis,” forces within its body which opposed its ideas. For hundreds of years this struggle continued, issuing forth finally in a new “synthesis” (capitalism), again representing the best features of both rivals.
When Marx wrote, history was still in the capitalist stage, but he said it could not remain there. It must (there was no alternative) move on to communism. The capitalist class had already developed its own “antithesis,” which Marx identified as the “proletariat” (the working class), which was striving to overthrow the old system.
Communism, Marx proclaimed, represented the new “synthesis” of the capitalist-proletariat struggle and the apex of all history. At this point, said Marx, conflict would now cease, although, again, he does not say why. This new world would be the “perfect” and “final” society: stateless, classless, godless, where all property used in production would be held in common, and human activities would conform to the principle “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Marx, with shrewd cunning, applied these concepts to the society of his day. He aimed this appeal to catch everyone who was greedy, ambitious, discontented, or downtrodden. Also, since the Industrial Revolution had led to some very real social abuses, the doctrines of Marx appealed to many sincere idealists and reformers who were impatient with slower and more gradual methods of improvement. The class struggle, Marx said, was now in progress between the “capitalists,” who owned the tools of production, such as factories, railroads, mines, and the “proletariat,” or people employed by the capitalists—the wage earners, the “propertyless,” the “exploited.”
When Marx wrote, capitalists were the dominant class. According to his interpretation, they set economic levels, what wages could be paid, what standards of living the workers could have, what social customs would prevail. They were the greedy “exploiters,” wanting more and more profits. But, said Marx, according to his “law,” capitalists were digging their own graves. The very rise of capitalism, Marx emphasized, called into existence its conqueror, the proletariat. The higher the state of capitalism, as then rising in France and England, the greater the number of workers required to tend the mills, mines, and shops; hence, the larger the proletariat would become. Wealth would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the masses would become increasingly poor. Thus, conflict between the two classes was inevitable.
Already, Marx said, this conflict was in progress, as witnessed by European strikes, lockouts, and revolutions. The proletariat was striking against its oppressors, and the result of the struggle would be communism. The working class was destined to win. That was the “law.” This was the way Marx viewed history and how he distorted events and situations to support his thesis, which followers were later to call a “science.” This “science” has long since been disproved by man’s experience and the record of events and situations in the free world.
In this struggle between the capitalist class and the proletariat, what is the role of the Communist Party? The Party, said Marx, was to be the vanguard of the proletariat. Most workers are stupid, uneducated in Marxism, and duped by capitalists. They could never start a revolution by themselves. They need guidance, the job of the Communist Party. Communists are wide awake, intelligent, and, most important of all, “learned” in Marxism. They know the “laws” of revolution, the “mysteries” of the development of society. Their task: to be the “general staff” of the revolution.
What about force and violence? Must they be used? Marx emphasized that capitalist society, most naturally, would not voluntarily turn over its factories, banks, and money to the workers. Moreover, it would probably organize a “counter-revolution”—which means defending itself. Hence, under the leadership of the Communist Party, the workers must, if necessary, be prepared to use force, that is, violent revolution. If the capitalists submit peacefully, good; if they resist, slaughter them.
But this is not all. After power is seized, opposition will remain which must be stamped out, utterly, completely, mercilessly. Again, this is a job that cannot be left to an untrained, untaught proletariat. It is a job, according to Marxist thought, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, conceived as a transitional stage between actual revolution and the arrival of the highest and final form of communism.
Who would direct the dictatorship? The Communist Party, of course. And what would it do? It would serve as a steam-roller, liquidating through sheer force all “capitalist” elements. Then, and only then, could new “socialist” construction begin. The dictatorships in Russia and the satellite countries with their secret police, slave labor camps, and mass regimentation are living examples of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in action.
These were, and are, vicious principles, destined to shake civilization to its roots. In 1848, Marx, in collaboration with Engels, prepared the platform of the Communist League, a revolutionary organization which included a large number of German exiles. This was the famous Communist Manifesto, the first sweeping blueprint of communist aims. The language is violent, the threats dire. “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism,” it starts off, and ends by calling for a violent overthrow of existing society. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.... Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Well-intentioned and goodhearted men, Marx said, cannot be depended on to improve society. They are dabblers and botchers who make things worse. Mere social reforms strengthen capitalism, prolong “exploitation,” and keep the corpse alive. Tear capitalism down, completely. Use force and violence. Set up a communist government!
To the very end of his life Marx remained a ruthless fighter. Invective, anger, and abuse were his weapons. He defiantly defended his position against all comers. He bitterly denounced all who dared disagree with him, such as Ferdinand Lassalle, the German Socialist leader, and Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist. He fought wordy battles that lasted for years. Always, by skill or skulduggery, he tried to impose his point of view. If he found that impossible, he worked furiously to destroy his opponent.
In 1864 Marx was involved in founding the First International, a motley group of “radicals,” “have-nots,” “socialists,” and “anarchists.” A number of congresses were held, but little was accomplished. Finally, in 1872, after many feuds and quarrels in which Marx was deeply involved, he succeeded in having the group’s headquarters transferred from London to New York, then considered a remote outpost. This was a move made out of spite, Marx preferring to see the organization die rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. In 1876, at a congress in Philadelphia, it was dissolved. The First International’s chief legacy to the cause of world communism lay in giving international structure, for the first time, to communist ideas.
Here is another irony of communism. This man who attacked the domination of the capitalists showed his own dominating nature again and again. In theory, he was “for” the common man and wanted to correct the ills of society. In practice, his fanatical intolerance and overbearing ego made him a tyrant, an autocrat, a dictator.
Marx’s character helped shape the whole philosophy of communism and, as we shall see, forged a hideous instrument of power for those who were to follow him.
2 — Lenin — And the Russian Revolution
Marx and Engels formulated the basic doctrines of modern communism. However, they supplied few guides to everyday revolutionary activity.
Remaining in the Marx-Engels stage, communism might well have been drowned in an ocean of angry words, manifestoes, quarrels, and personal feuds. If so, the world today would be a much different place for all of us.
But there was another man, whom Marx and Engels never knew, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. It was Lenin’s destiny to lead the first successful communist revolution, about which Marx and Engels had dreamed so long. He was the man who took communist theory and galvanized it into communist organization and action. Lenin’s activation of communist theory resulted in the seizing of power in Russia. Lenin stands today, just after Marx and Engels, as the movement’s third force. More than any other man he is the “developer” of modern-day communism and the father of Party structure and dictatorship. His importance is reflected in the communist description of its way of life as the “science of Marxism-Leninism.”
Today Lenin’s prestige has been inflated even more as a result of the “downgrading” of Stalin. He is looked upon as the “ideal” communist leader and, in the words of N. A. Bulganin, Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers, “the great founder of our party and the Soviet State.”
Lenin was born April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk (changed after Lenin’s death in 1924), a town on the Volga River, deep in Russia. His father was a school inspector and a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Vladimir, one of six children, was a model student. He had a great capacity for concentration and could quickly answer his father’s questions about schoolwork.
Youth, however, was short-lived; Lenin soon was on the way to becoming a “revolutionary.” It is interesting and important to note here, as with Marx and Engels, that atheism was the first step toward communism. At the age of sixteen, as he later said, Lenin ceased to believe in God. It is reported that he tore the cross from his neck, threw this sacred relic to the ground, and spat upon it.
Soon after, in 1887, when Lenin was seventeen, Alexander Ulyanov, his elder brother and boyhood hero, was hanged in the courtyard of Schlusselburg Fortress in Saint Petersburg, later known as Petrograd and Leningrad, along with four companions, charged with conspiracy to assassinate the Czar of Russia. Alexander was a member of People’s Will, a revolutionary organization. This event deeply affected young Lenin.
In the fall of 1887 Vladimir entered Kazan University and soon became involved in student disorders. He was arrested and lived for a while under police surveillance. A short time later, at the age of eighteen, he started reading Karl Marx and soon was expounding Marxist principles to his sister Anna and organizing Marxist discussion groups. In 1891, in Saint Petersburg, he passed his law examination with honors and was admitted to the bar. Although young in years, he was “old” in disposition. At the age of twenty-four, a companion remarked, Lenin already had a tired-looking face. His head was entirely bald, except for fringes of hair at the temples. “The most striking thing about him,” went another description, “was his large head, with its large white forehead. His rather small eyes seemed perpetually narrowed, his glance was serious....”
Within a few short years Lenin was to dominate the Russian Marxist movement. This man who loved to play with children, who, after he became dictator of all Russia, occasionally liked to sleep in a hayloft rather than in a bed, was utterly cynical and ruthless. In one instance an associate in Stockholm complained that couriers were not delivering newspapers on schedule. “Please send me their names,” Lenin curtly ordered. “These saboteurs shall be shot.”
Another time a companion complained about his work. Shut up, were Lenin’s orders. “I will turn you over to the party court; we will shoot you.” Without tenderness, with not a muscle responsive to mercy, he had one goal—revolution. For twenty years, whether as an exile in Siberia or as a wandering conspirator in Europe, he kept working, dreaming, and thinking about revolution. Guided by his “evil genius,” he never deviated from that goal.
Russia, by the 1880’s, was seething with discontent. A strong revolutionary movement, dating from the 1820’s, was in rebellion against the despotic Czarist regime. Many of the suggested revolutionary programs were impractical. Some demanded greater voice for the peasants or industrial workers; some espoused violent revolution; others, democratic reform. But on one point they all agreed: there must be a change. The more radical groups believed in political terrorism. Their violent escapades, however, such as assassinations, led only to greater oppression.
Marxist writings had early found their way into Russia. The first language into which Marx’s Das Kapital (originally written in German) had been translated was Russian. Many revolutionaries were attracted by these new communist ideas. In 1883 a Marxist group was founded. Ten years later, when Lenin joined an underground group in Saint Petersburg, the movement was strong.
These early Russian Marxists, however, were deeply divided. They were babblers of theory, not apostles of action. Lenin immediately undertook to change the situation. But in December, 1895, he was arrested, imprisoned, and later exiled to Siberia.
In 1900 he was released and fled from Russia, more ardent than ever for revolution. With fiendish devotion and intensity he set about the task of creating a revolutionary organization that could seize power in Russia.
For most of the time after 1900 Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda, lived as exiles in Western Europe, going from city to city, often under aliases. Nadezhda in writing about Lenin gave a vivid account of their life in cheap boardinghouses. In Switzerland, on one occasion, they stayed in a room where the windows could be opened only at night because of the “intolerable stench” of a nearby sausage factory. Another time they took their meals at a house where, in the words of Lenin’s wife, “the very ‘lower depths’ of Zurich” congregated.
Lenin was happiest when he could talk revolution. Nadezhda was constantly on guard to protect his health. Many times Lenin, engrossed in revolutionary activities, would work himself into a highly nervous state. One time, Nadezhda writes, he “came home after a heated debate... I could hardly recognize him, his face was so drawn and he could barely speak.” She encouraged him to take a vacation. In London, Lenin “developed a nervous illness called ‘holy fire.’” Nadezhda, after consulting a medical student, painted him with iodine. She, however, couldn’t prevent her husband, lost in thought while pedaling a bicycle, from running into the back of a tram and “very nearly” knocking out an eye.
Borrowing from the autocratic character of Marx himself, Lenin made Marxism a highly disciplined, organized, and ruthless creed. How can revolution be achieved? Not by democratic reforms, ballots, or good will but by naked, bloody violence. The sword is the weapon. Everything must be dedicated to this aim: one’s time, talents, one’s very life. Revolutions do not just happen. They are made.
Lenin conceived of the Party as a vehicle of revolution. Marx, in his philosophical abstractions, had never thought out the day-to-day composition of the Party. Lenin did. The Party must be a small, tightly controlled, deeply loyal group. Fanaticism, not members, was the key. Members must live, eat, breathe, and dream revolution. They must lie, cheat, and murder if the Party was to be served. Discipline must be rigid. No deviations could be permitted. If an individual falters, he must be ousted. Revolutions cannot be won by clean hands or in white shirts; only by blood, sweat, and the burning torch. These ideas were all inherent in Marxist thought, but they waited for Lenin to translate them into organized action.
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (which was the Russian Marxist Party) met in convention in Brussels. The proceedings were later transferred to London, after Belgian authorities had warned several of the delegates to leave the city. One session of the congress was routed by an army of vermin.
A dispute arose. Should Party membership be restricted or open to anybody? Lenin fought for restricted membership and won. His group was called the Bolsheviks (the majority); the losers became the Mensheviks (minority). The Party, Lenin said, must be composed only of trained revolutionaries. To allow anybody, curiosity seekers, the halfhearted, weaklings, to join would reduce the Party’s discipline, striking power, and fanaticism. The masses couldn’t be trusted to make a revolution. They would run at the first sound of gunfire. What were needed were men willing to die because the Party told them to die. This principle of Party organization remains in full effect today throughout the communist world.
Lenin was an able propagandist and agitator. He thought chiefly in terms of battle plans, tactics, and strategy rather than of theories or philosophical abstractions. In 1900, from his exile in Europe, he helped found a revolutionary paper, Iskra (the Spark), printed in Germany but smuggled into Russia. (A young ex-seminary student in southern Russia, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, later known as Stalin, was a reader of Iskra.) This paper offered directions to the secret revolutionaries in Russia, told them the “line” to follow, urged better Party organization. In addition, Lenin pounded out his “rules of revolution” in articles and pamphlets that were widely circulated in the Russian underground.
Though militant himself, Marx was never able, in his detached atmosphere, to instill the spirit of militant action into communist policy as did Lenin. The crafty Russian, brought up in an atmosphere of revolutionary agitation, did not shrink from any crime. He held that there could be no hesitation or vacillation. Use any weapon—knife, hatchet, or gun—to achieve your aim, he urged. A man was either your friend or your foe. Find out quickly. If a friend, clasp his hand; that is, as long as he served a purpose. If a foe, take drastic action.
All during his lengthy exile Lenin was constantly studying, writing, debating, and expounding revolutionary principles. Like Marx, he used the facilities of Western democracy, such as the great library of the British Museum, to undermine the very freedom that gave him this opportunity. Nadezhda tells of his studies in the Geneva library:
He would again take out the books left unfinished the day before. They would be about barricade-fighting or the technique of offensives. He would go to his customary place at the little table by the window, smooth down the thin hair on his bald head with a customary gesture, and bury his nose deep in the books. Only rarely would he get up, and then in order to take down a dictionary from a shelf and search for the explanation of some unfamiliar term. He would then stride up and down for a while, resume his seat, and in a tense manner rapidly scrawl something in minute handwriting on little squares of paper.
These studies, as later events were to prove, helped produce practical and concrete ways of making revolutions:
[Lenin, says Nadezhda] not only read through, thoroughly studied, and thought over everything that Marx and Engels had written on revolution and insurrection. He also perused numerous works on the art of warfare, considering the technique and the organisation of the armed insurrection from all standpoints. He was occupied with this work much more than people realised, and his talk about “shock” groups during the civil war and “groups of five and ten” was not the chatter of a layman, but a well-thought-out proposition.
Lenin labored day and night for seventeen years in perfecting his plans for the revolution. His opportunity was to come in November, 1917.
In March, 1917, revolution erupted in Russia. The German army had defeated Russian troops. The Czar’s government was tottering, and a liberal regime, later headed by Alexander Kerensky, assumed control. The Czar was forced to abdicate. This was the signal for Russian revolutionaries of all types to return to Petrograd: Lenin from Switzerland, aided by the German High Command; Leon Trotsky, later to become a high official in the Bolshevik regime, from New York City; Stalin from Siberian exile.
Lenin plotted against Kerensky, eagerly awaiting the moment he could overthrow the new government. He created dissension in the armed forces. He refused to cooperate with the government except on his own terms. All the time he was desperately building up and training his Bolshevik Party. Lenin had a “sixth sense” in diagnosing revolutionary situations. He knew when to act and when not. Like a crafty tiger, he was circling his prey. Lenin was the true leader of the Russian revolution. Stalin, fresh from Siberia, was relatively unknown, but he was learning the skills of deceit and murder that were soon to catapult him to power.
In the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. Lenin became the dictator of all Russia. Communism had made its first breach in the wall of capitalism. (The revolution occurred on October 25, 1917, according to the Eastern calendar then in use in Russia. Hence, the term “October Revolution.” Under the Western calendar, later adopted by the Soviets, the date is November 7, 1917.)
The Bolsheviks immediately instituted a terroristic “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx had conceived the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitory period for the establishment of a communist society. Lenin, however, dipped it in blood and gave it a prominence and ruthlessness that shocked the entire world. The secret police, then known as the Cheka, instituted a reign of terror; capital punishment was meted out widely. A search for enemies rocked the country. Pravda, the Party newspaper, urged drastic measures.
The Czar and members of his family were executed by the Bolsheviks and their bodies destroyed. Here is an eyewitness account by Leonid Krassin, a member of the early Bolshevik government, as related by his wife, Lubov Krassin:
... we went through a period of so-called “Terror”.... About six hundred to seven hundred persons were shot in Moscow and Petrograd, nine-tenths of them having been arrested quite at random or merely as suspect of belonging to the Right Wing of the S. R.’s [Socialist Revolutionaries, a Russian revolutionary party], or else of being counter-revolutionaries. In the provinces this developed into a series of revolting incidents such as arrests, executions en masse, and wholesale eviction of bourgeois and educated people from their houses, leaving them homeless.
The test of loyalty was often to what class the individual belonged, the extent of his education, how he was dressed, how much food he had in his house. If his pantry was too well stocked or his clothes too new, he might be accused of being an exploiter and sent before an execution squad.
This was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action. This was a first step toward what Marx proclaimed as the “final” and “perfect” state of society, which is as visionary now as it was then. Millions of Russians found themselves gripped by a tyranny incomparably worse than that of the Czar.
Oddly, despite the predictions of Marx, communism seized power in a country where Marx would least have expected it. Marx had prophesied that the revolution was destined to occur in a highly industrialized nation. Russia was industrially backward.
During the years 1917-20 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight for survival, first against the German army, then in a war with Poland. Also, the White Russians, a vigorous anti-Bolshevik group, assembled powerful military forces. A bitter White-Red civil war raged.
Lenin’s answer was a policy of “war communism.” Most industry was nationalized. Trade and commerce were officially abolished. The government undertook to distribute manufactured articles to the people. In agricultural regions food supplies were openly confiscated. Poor peasants were assembled in committees to spy on their richer neighbors who might be hiding grain. The setting of class against class was an established tactic of communism.
By 1921, when the last “enemies” had been driven from Russia, the nation was a shambles. The Bolsheviks, trying to adapt Marxist theory to a nation predominantly rural, had compounded confusion. Industrial production was down, peasants were in open revolt. Private incentive had been ruined. By 1922 famine raged, with tens of millions of people starving or on a semistarvation diet. Some estimates place the loss of life at five million. This was Russia’s introduction to communism.
Fanatical Lenin, after years of working for the revolution, would not let it slip away from him now. He struck back furiously. Slave labor camps were increased; dreaded secret police compelled conformity; churches were closed. “Enemies of the people,” those who opposed the Bolsheviks, were ruthlessly executed. Uprisings were cruelly suppressed.
However, terror was not the answer. In March, 1921, sailors of the Red navy in Kronstadt, formerly strong Bolshevik supporters, rebelled. Lenin, with his keen sense of timing, realized that a change had to be made.
The result was the NEP—New Economic Policy. Capitalist practices, so denounced by the Bolsheviks, were temporarily introduced to save the Russian government. Peasants were now allowed to keep surpluses of grain after taxation, instead of having them confiscated. They could even dispose of their surplus products as they chose, and private trade was allowed to develop. In the industrial field many businesses were returned to private owners, although the government retained control over larger concerns.
To the surprise of Bolshevik leaders the NEP proved a relative success. It gave them the breathing spell they so desperately needed to consolidate their gains. Both agricultural and industrial production jumped. Lenin never lived to see the final results of the temporary NEP, but the revolution was no longer in immediate danger.
Lenin’s scheming mind was laying the groundwork for extending the communist conspiracy throughout the world. In March, 1919, Lenin founded the Third International (better known as the Communist International or Comintern). The Third International was a keystone of Soviet policy, whereby Moscow, through Bolshevik discipline, could guide the activities of communists around the world, including those in the United States. To the communists, victory in Russia was only the first step. The whole world, they said, must go communist. “... victory is ours,” Lenin proclaimed at the First Congress of the Comintern in 1919; “the victory of the world Communist revolution is assured.” In early days the regime confidently expected communist revolutions in Western Europe. A communist regime sprang briefly into power in Hungary, another flickered in Germany. Although no permanent communist successes were achieved outside Russia, an effective agency of conspiracy now existed to undermine noncommunist governments.
The skill of Lenin simply cannot be overestimated. He introduced into human relations a new dimension of evil and depravity not surpassed by Genghis Khan or Attila. His concept of Party supremacy, girded by ruthless and ironclad discipline, gave communism a fanaticism and an immorality that shocked Western civilization. Countless individuals, some in high places, simply did not believe that men could behave as did the Bolsheviks; that brutality, terror, and the utter meaninglessness of human dignity could be a policy of state. But that was the contention, and the legacy, of Lenin.
Underlying all of Lenin’s thoughts and actions was the use of naked force to achieve Party ends. He held that there could be no permanent coexistence between communists and noncommunists. The latter must be liquidated, by force if necessary. “Marxists have never forgotten that violence will be an inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of capitalism on its full scale and of the birth of a socialist society.”
Dictatorship is power based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate war of life and death....
As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace: in the end, one or the other will triumph—a funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism.
Lenin liked to use the word “ruthless,” which is a clue to his thinking:
There is still too little of that ruthlessness which is indispensable for the success of socialism....
... capitalism cannot be defeated and eradicated without the ruthless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters....
Contempt for death must spread among the masses and thus secure victory... the ruthless extermination of the enemy will be their task....
This is the Lenin who has always been hailed by the Moscow ruling hierarchy as the guiding genius of communism in Russia and in this country. In fact, with the downgrading of Stalin, Lenin became increasingly extolled in Russia as the “guide to communist action.” Nikita Khrushchev, speaking before the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in February, 1956, stated categorically:
The central committee has always and undeviatingly been guided by Lenin’s teachings on the party.
Lenin taught us that a line based on principle is the only correct line. Never to deviate a single step in anything from the interests of the party....
We must be guided by these wise injunctions of Lenin in all our activity.
In April, 1956, a Moscow journal, International Affairs, also made clear the pre-eminence of Leninism in Russia:
Using the brilliant plan left by Lenin.... All the complex questions of home and foreign policy are decided by the Party, basing itself on the teaching of the immortal Lenin. That is why the Soviet people recall the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky [Soviet poet]:
“Lenin
is now
the most live of all living,
Our weapon,
our knowledge,
our power.”
These sentiments have been echoed by communists in the United States. In January, 1957, for example, Eugene Dennis, former General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA, wrote, “... it is essential at all costs to consolidate and build the CPUSA as a strong Marxist-Leninist political party of the working class.”
Another American Party leader, Hyman Lumer, stated in February, 1957:
... he [Lenin] showed... the need for a vanguard type of party, armed with the Marxist theory of scientific socialism and possessing a high degree of unity and discipline.... In its essential features, this is no less true today than it was when Lenin first formulated it.
Lenin could not have anticipated the lofty pedestal on which he was to stand in Moscow a generation after his death. However, his nation and the Party were to pass under the control of an ambitious, scowling, mustached revolutionary from the province of Georgia in south Russia, Joseph Stalin, who until recently was regarded as the fourth great personality of communism.
3 — Stalin — A Fallen Idol
In January, 1924, after a long illness, Lenin died, leaving open a struggle for power that was to last until the 1930’s.
The Russian dictator sensed, some time before his death, the evil influence of the man who had squirmed his way to the position of the Party’s General Secretary. Joseph Stalin, a cobbler’s son, had been an old-time Bolshevik. Born in 1879, he had attended a seminary at Tiflis, in the Caucasus, but in 1899 had been expelled. Already he was involved in revolutionary activities. From 1902 until 1913, according to the communists, he was arrested seven times, exiled six times, and escaped five times from exile.
Plodding by nature, Stalin lacked the brilliance of his chief rival, Leon Trotsky. However, his grasp of the Russian mentality was tremendous. Years as an agitator, prison inmate, and political schemer gave him an insight into communist intrigue that other Party leaders seemed to lack. Working silently but meticulously, he was quick to exploit any opportunity to increase his personal power.
Stalin liked to represent himself as the heir of Lenin, the man predestined to carry on the Bolshevik revolution. This claim is not borne out, however, by a “testament” prepared by Lenin shortly before his death. “Comrade Stalin,” wrote Lenin, on Christmas Day, 1922, “having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.”
Then Lenin added a postscript dated January 4, 1923, a full year before he died:
Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position....
However, the time for action had passed. Lenin was too sick to implement his testament. The result: a terrific struggle between Stalin and Trotsky for power.
Trotsky (real name Bronstein) was born in 1879 (two months earlier than Stalin). Early a revolutionary, he spent many years as an exile from Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution he served as Lenin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and later did much to organize the Red army.
Many differences separated Stalin and Trotsky, the chief one being Stalin’s idea that Russia should concentrate on making itself powerful first, before undertaking extensive revolutionary action abroad. Trotsky, on the other hand, believed that the Russian revolution could survive only if communist revolutions were promoted in other countries. Both desired world conquest. Their dispute, clouded by a personal hunger for power, centered on how to achieve it. Stalin was the winner. Trotsky was exiled by Stalin in 1929, eventually finding refuge in Mexico. He was assassinated in 1940, reportedly by a secret communist agent.
Joseph Stalin was the fourth “top leader” of communism, claiming “divine” ancestry from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Until his death in 1953, Stalin played a major role in the history of Russian and world communism, as a “continuer” of the work of Lenin. It was Stalin who, through murder, deceit, and brutality, gave communism power, firmly establishing Bolshevik control in Russia and spreading communism to other countries. However, he also was to become the first of the “Big Four” to be denounced by the communists and to have his name blackened by successors.
In carrying on the revolution Stalin became the interpreter of Marxism-Leninism. Under his rule the state, which Marx had visualized as “withering away,” became even stronger, an agent of sheer oppression. The army, navy, secret police, and all political structures of the state grew ever more powerful and permanent. Slave labor camps multiplied. Soviet society became ironclad, more rigid than under the most autocratic Czar. Army officials, Party henchmen, industrial managers, all emerged as classes, each jealous of the other. The “workingman,” whom Marx had extolled, was now an inferior class, exploited and downtrodden.
Stalin carried to the extreme Lenin’s concepts of the Party as a fanatical, disciplined group. To Stalin the Party was not only a tool to seize and maintain power but also a method of liquidating all personal opposition and a means of educating the masses in the communist way of life.
The Party, for this reason, was kept “pure,” meaning completely loyal, disciplined, and blindly obedient. Party schools, cadre training, and regimented discipline were needed to saturate the members in communism. Weaklings were purged, expelled and exiled to Siberia, or executed. In Soviet Russia, and all her satellites, the Party was constantly “Bolshevized”—made “more perfect in communism.”
One result of this insistent demand for discipline under Stalin was the increasing crystallization of Marxism-Leninism—already a harsh and regimented code—into an even more rigid, static, and often sterile body of doctrine. Like a shrinking garment, communist doctrine pressed ever more tightly on communists everywhere. Every action now had to be “justified” by theory. If the theory didn’t fit, then it had to be reinterpreted. To deviate was to court disaster. Stalin, though not so good a theorist as Lenin, liked to pose as Marxism-Leninism’s “expert” interpreter.
This ossification of communist doctrine, under which the individual was afraid to take any initiative, contributed largely to the violent reaction against Stalin after his death. His successors realized that some breathing room was absolutely essential, although during Stalin’s reign they were content to serve, without protest so far as the record shows, as the executors of his policies.
Stalin also identified communism with nationalism and imperialism: Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism.
To him, communism seemed an ideal vehicle for Russian world conquest, and so, once communism was firmly entrenched in Russia, he embarked on a policy curiously similar to that of Czarist imperialists like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
Aided by disturbed world conditions between 1939 and 1953, Stalin started the Soviet chariot of conquest. He directly annexed a number of areas, such as eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Finland, eastern Czechoslovakia, part of Roumania. Then, using communism as an ideological adhesive, Stalin created a Soviet orbit: Yugoslavia, China, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, North Korea, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, East Germany, Albania, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and North Indochina (where bloody fighting was in progress at the time of his death). No wonder William Z. Foster in February, 1956, could boast that seventeen countries were “actually building Socialism or are definitely orientating in that direction,” having a total population of 900,000,000! He adds: “They constitute the beginning of the new Socialist world.” Note the use of the word “beginning.”
Native communist parties, aided by Moscow, were often the instruments of subjugation, Trojan horses of the twentieth century. At other times Russian military power paved the way. Peoples with long traditions of freedom were betrayed into slavery. Significantly, no entire country has ever gone communist and become a satellite by the free choice of election.
This grandiose conquest was abetted by Stalin’s inheritance of the tools of Marxism-Leninism, a way of life that is imperialistic, overbearing, and dictatorial. Some individuals may accuse Stalin, alone of the communist “Big Four,” of being responsible for the terror of modern-day communism. Marx, Engels, and Lenin, however, are also fully accountable, and so are Stalin’s henchmen, who still rule in the Soviet Union. Stalin may have been the active agent of conquest in our generation, but his knives were sharpened on the diabolical teachings of his communist predecessors.
Even in Stalin’s time cracks had begun to appear in the communist empire. In 1948 a terrific fissure, the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia, rocked Moscow. Currents of discontent, leading to national communism, spread through the European satellite nations. (National communism holds that nations can find their own way to communism and need not slavishly copy Moscow, yet also implies full confidence in the aims and doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, whose application will result in world communism.) “Treason trials” sprouted in many places: Vladimir Clementis and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia; Laszlo Rajk in Hungary; Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria. These high Party officials, all old-time communists, along with others, were executed. In Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, a deputy premier, was expelled from the Party and imprisoned. Stalin’s tyranny became even more strongly entrenched.
Few observers, even in Russia, however, could have guessed the intensity of hatred that lay under Russian tyranny. Less than four years after Stalin’s death the power of freedom was to erupt in Hungary. Poland swayed on the verge of revolt; unrest swept other satellites. Ironically, Gomulka, expelled as a traitor, now became Party boss of Poland; Rajk, along with others, was “rehabilitated.” The “sorrowing” communists even dug up his body, staged a giant funeral, and buried him again, this time with honors. Stalin left a precarious legacy for his successors.
But in barely a generation Russia had moved swiftly forward in its campaign of world conquest. In the name of Karl Marx (who, in his day, had roundly denounced the imperialism of the Czars) and by the application of his doctrines, Stalin had created a dictatorial empire far beyond the dreams of any Czar. Such a dictatorial empire grows out of the very nature of Marxist thought and is inevitable wherever it is applied. In the Kremlin the dream of world conquest still persists. It threatens free peoples everywhere.
This Russian conquest was made possible, in large measure, by the tremendous strengthening of the Soviet state. In 1928 the first of a series of Five Year Plans, designed to strengthen heavy industry and collectivize agriculture, was launched. Step by step the New Economic Policy, adopted by Lenin in 1921, disappeared.
The government now undertook to control everything. Production quotas, which had to be met, were set. Compulsory labor increased. Private trade disappeared. A system of rationing was introduced. Consumer goods virtually disappeared.
In rural areas small farms were abolished. Peasants were compelled to live in giant cooperatives. Many of the more well-to-do farmers, called kulaks, were dispossessed and shipped to Siberia. Entire families were liquidated. The secret police became more active.
As under Lenin’s “war communism,” the Five Year Plan brought untold human misery. The forced collectivization of agriculture caused a shortage of food. Transportation broke down in many areas. In the Ukraine, the food basket of Russia, famine reappeared. Millions of people died. Disease stalked the land.
But Stalin held firm. Heavy industry must be expanded—steel mills, automobile and tractor factories, railroads. Coal mines must be operated. Armaments must be expedited. Stalin was preparing the base for world conquest. The price in human suffering and privation was incalculable, and unimportant.
At the same time Stalin was furthering a communist society. Art, literature, education, and the press were harnessed to the struggle. A new generation dedicated to following Stalin’s will was being created. No opposition was tolerated. In 1936 Stalin brought forth a Soviet constitution, a document glittering with supposed “rights” for the people but actually a mask for ever-increasing tyranny.
From 1934 to 1938 was a period of great purges. The world witnessed the spectacle of gigantic public trials of old Bolsheviks such as Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, both former presidents of the Communist International, and A. I. Rykov, a former Premier, all accused of treason. Even Yagoda, former head of the secret police, was brought to court. Many, as comrades of Lenin, had fought to create the Bolshevik revolution. Now they were denounced as arch traitors. Nobody knows how many thousands were killed in these blood purges. But one thing was obvious: Stalin was liquidating all possible opposition.
Inevitably Stalin became, in communist eyes, a virtual god on earth. He was pictured as the world’s greatest military genius, scientist, author, critic, statesman, popular hero, thinker and engineer.
Here are some of the accolades:
Long live the wise leader of our Party and people, the inspirer and organizer of all our victories, Comrade Stalin! (N. S. Khrushchev, October, 1952)
... Stalin’s work will live through the ages, and grateful posterity will, like us, glorify his name. (G. M. Malenkov, March, 1953, who in 1957 was junked like Stalin)
... During those hard and grim days for our Motherland, the greatness of our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, was revealed in all its magnificence. (N. A. Bulganin, December, 1949)
On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. The communist world went into mourning. His funeral was a state spectacle. His body, like Lenin’s, was entombed in Moscow. Speeches extolled his “greatness.”
The whole world wondered, What next? First a triumvirate, Malenkov, Molotov, and Beria, assumed control. Less than a year later Beria, head of the secret police, was executed as a “traitor.” Then Malenkov, generally regarded as the Number One leader, was deposed as Premier. Later, Molotov, the old-time Bolshevik, was ousted from the Foreign Ministry, as was his successor, Dmitri T. Shepilov, former editor of Pravda. All three were denounced in 1957 as “enemies” of the Party. (Still later, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Red Army hero, was ousted as Soviet Defense Minister.)
Gradually new faces began to appear, especially that of Nikita S. Khrushchev, a Politburo member, who became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a powerful position. N. A. Bulganin, one of Stalin’s “political” generals, assumed the job of Premier. These two, referred to as “B and K,” became the most prominently known leaders.
Significant changes, both in foreign and domestic policies, appeared. But underneath, as the suppression of the Hungarian revolt was to prove, lay the ruthless policies of Stalin. Under Malenkov, attempts were made to encourage the production of consumer items, but with his fall, stress reverted to the old Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. In the foreign field, “B and K” made a widely heralded trip to Yugoslavia, there to woo Tito back into the Moscow camp. The “Big Smile” was radiant at the Geneva Conference of July, 1955, attended by heads of state of France, England, the United States, and Russia, and during highly publicized visits of “B and K” to India and Great Britain.
The cult of Stalin, which had reached nauseating proportions, was toned down. Emphasis was laid on collective leadership. Then, on the night of February 24-25, 1956, came the bombshell that shook and shocked communists around the world—the bitter denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. It was as devastating a speech as was ever delivered by one man against another. Copies of the speech, not made public in Russia, found their way to the West and in June, 1956, were released by our own Department of State.
Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the “great Stalin” who had been idolized by all communists as a man who could do no wrong, as a murderer, pathological liar, and perverter of Marxism-Leninism. In fiery language and with specific names and dates, Khrushchev accused Stalin of mass terror, deporting whole populations, forging false evidence against alleged enemies, being a coward during World War II, and possessing a vanity that led him to believe he was a god. Khrushchev in his systematic destruction of Stalin dealt with such matters as:
1. Mass terror:
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position—was doomed to... subsequent moral and physical annihilation.
Stalin put the Party and the NKVD [secret police] up to the use of mass terror....
Mass arrests of Party, Soviet, economic and military workers caused tremendous harm to our country and to the cause of Socialist advancement.
2. Suspicion and distrust:
Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today,” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent Party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “two-facers” and “spies.”
“It has happened sometimes that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail.”
... after the war... Stalin became even more capricious, irritable and brutal; in particular his suspicion grew. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions. Many workers were becoming enemies before his very eyes. After the war Stalin separated himself from the collective even more. Everything was decided by him alone without any consideration for anyone or anything.
3. Illegal arrests:
[In one case, Stalin curtly told an official:] “If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head.”
When Stalin said that one or another should be arrested, it was necessary to accept on faith that he was an “enemy of the people”.... And how is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired.
4. Abuse of power:
It is clear that here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power. Instead of proving his political correctness and mobilizing the masses, he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the Party and the Soviet government.
5. Isolation from people:
Stalin separated himself from the people and never went anywhere. This lasted tens of years. The last time he visited a village was in January 1928 when he visited Siberia in connection with grain deliveries. How then could he have known the situation in the provinces?
6. Love of self:
You should have seen Stalin’s fury! How could it be admitted that he, Stalin, had not been right! He is after all a “genius,” and a genius cannot help but be right! Everyone can err, but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made any mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity.
The cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person....
Khrushchev, telling how Stalin, in his own hand, wrote flattering statements about himself for his own biography, said: “This book is an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader,’ ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations.’ Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens.”
And then Khrushchev says, Stalin even had the audacity to add, again with his own pen, “... Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”
No mention was made by Khrushchev of any anti-Semitic crimes committed by Stalin. However, on April 4, 1956, an article entitled “Our Pain and Our Solace” appeared in the Warsaw Yiddish-language newspaper Folks-Shtimme, which charged that Jewish culture had been largely liquidated under Stalin and many Jewish leaders executed. To date these allegations have never been denied by the Kremlin and American communists have reluctantly accepted them as true. On April 13, 1956, the East Coast communist paper, the Daily Worker, in an editorial entitled “Grievous Deeds,” made mention of the earlier Polish “disclosures... that a large number of Jewish writers and other Jewish leaders were framed up and executed and that Jewish culture was virtually wiped out” in the Soviet Union. These monstrous deeds of anti-Semitism in Russia have had profound repercussions among communists in the United States.
No single event in Party history so unnerved communists abroad—and inside Russia too—as did the Khrushchev attack. Where did it leave communist leaders who year after year had fawned upon Stalin as the greatest of all leaders? Weren’t they also responsible for such terrible perversions? What was this system called communism, represented as noble, when its chief exponent was a murderer, falsifier, and bigot?
History alone can tell the reasons for, and the ultimate effects of, this violent denunciation. We know about the growing unrest within Russia and the eagerness of the government to appease demands for a higher standard of living. We know how communists like to find scapegoats on whom they can place the people’s hate and distrust, especially if the scapegoat is dead. We know of the jealous jockeying for power that is inevitable in any communist hierarchy.
Moreover, there also appeared to be an effort to rid communism of the growing “dead hand” of Stalin who, in his old age, had become capriciously tyrannical and personally maniacal. His successors saw how this crust of sludge, through fear, terror, and ossification of communist doctrine, was crushing initiative.
But the essential elements of Stalinism, brutality, illegality, ruthlessness, remain. In October, 1956, the Hungarians revolted against their puppet government, only to be violently attacked by Soviet tanks and troops. Nothing could illustrate better the unrepentant Soviet heart. Moscow still firmly controls her satellite empire. Nowhere in a communist country have truly free elections been held. Communist subversion against the free world continues. Atheism remains a dominant doctrine. Unremitting support for Moscow is still demanded of communists everywhere. Speaking before the East German Parliament, Khrushchev made this point clear by stressing the “holy duty” of every communist to help strengthen the communist world.
Apparently realizing he had gone too far in criticizing Stalin, Khrushchev backed up and started to praise the late dictator, showing that in actual fact Khrushchevism was actually Stalinism in a different dress. At a diplomatic reception in Moscow in early 1957, Khrushchev commented boldly:
As a Communist fighting for the interest of the working class, Stalin was a model Communist.... We have criticized Stalin, we still criticize him, and if necessary we will do it again. But we do not criticize Stalin as a bad Communist as far as the interests of the working classes are concerned.... God grant that every Communist should fight for the interest of the working class as Stalin did.
What can we expect in the future? Let Khrushchev himself answer: “Those who expect us to abandon communism will have to wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.”
“What will the [Soviet] policy be like?... We will do the same, but with more emphasis.”
This is the enemy we face today.
4 — How U.S. Communism Began, 1919-21
The world-wide dangers of the communist conspiracy started with the Russian revolution in 1917. There and then, for the first time, a communist party seized control of a nation. Almost immediately this conspiracy spread to the United States, seeking to take root by undermining our institutions and traditions.
The Communist Party, USA, first emerged in Chicago, Illinois, in 1919. In the beginning it seemed little more than a freak. Yet in the intervening years that freak has grown into a powerful monster endangering us all. Here is the story:
An emergency convention of the Socialist Party was scheduled to begin in Machinists’ Hall, 113 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, on August 30, 1919. The air was charged with tension. The socialists were badly split. The left wing, thrilled by the Russian October Revolution, wanted to establish a Communist Party. The rightists opposed.
The procommunist left-wingers, however, could not agree on a program of action. One group wanted to use the emergency convention to take over the Socialist Party. Another group objected, wanting to set up a Communist Party right away.
A battle quickly developed. Men famous in the history of American communism—Benjamin Gitlow, John Reed, Charles Ruthenberg, Alfred Wagenknecht—were present. Each was trying to assemble followers for his point of view.
One group, the Reed-Gitlow group, refused entrance to the Socialist Convention, retired to another room in Machinists’ Hall (later to the IWW Hall, 129 Throop Street), and on August 31, 1919, founded the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP). Wagenknecht was named Executive Secretary. (John Reed, incidentally, was to become the Party’s first “martyr.” An American, well-educated, a poet, writer and newspaperman, Reed was in Russia during the October Revolution. Completely captivated, he wrote a book, Ten Days That Shook the World. He later returned to Moscow, participated in Comintern meetings, and died there in 1920. Reed was buried in the Kremlin.)
A rival group, together with a number of foreign-language federations, met at Smolny Hall, headquarters of the Russian Federation, 1221 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago. Its members criticized the Communist Labor Party as not being truly communistic. The CLP returned the retort, and all attempts at reconciliation failed. On September 1, 1919, this rival group formed the Communist Party of America (CP). Split off was a group from Michigan that was later to form the Proletarian Party. Ruthenberg was chosen as Executive Secretary of the CP.
Not one but two Parties, the CLP and the CP, each claiming to be the true representative of communism and bitterly maligning the other, came out of the Chicago turmoil. The CLP set up headquarters in Cleveland, the CP in Chicago. The Communist Party was born in America amid confusion, bickering, and partisanship, a condition that was to haunt it for years.
The communists of 1919 were a motley lot, vastly different from the highly disciplined, efficiently operating Party of recent years. Though not lacking zeal or fanaticism, they had little Party training or discipline. They varied in extremes from bitter die-hards, who were ready to do anything for the “cause,” even throw a bomb or lead a riot, to comical show-offs, attracted by violent language and subversive possibilities. Many believed revolution in the United States was imminent.
The great majority were foreign-born. Many had difficulty speaking English. The Communist (June 12, 1920) states: “The Communist Party, from the very beginning of its existence, found its work hampered because it had in its ranks only a few men capable of expressing Communist principles in the English language.” The comrades lacked a practical understanding of American affairs, especially in the trade union field. Soon all kinds of wild-eyed plans arose. Each leader became his own interpreter of Marx and Lenin. Cliques, quarrels, and personal rivalries were rife.
The Russians (those who had been born in the “home of the revolution”) thought they should play the predominant role. They argued: Wasn’t Lenin a Russian? Didn’t the revolution start in Russia? Hence they, the Russian-born, obviously had an “insight” denied all the others. They should be the leaders.
On one point, however, all agreed: obedience to Soviet Russia. Every communist considered Lenin a god and the Russian Bolsheviks models of perfection. These were the men who had made the October Revolution. They were the teachers; the Americans, the learners. Soviet Russia, at this time, was assuming an authority over communists in this nation that it has never relinquished. This control was to become ever more pronounced, inescapable, and dangerous.
The history of the Communist Party in the United States since 1919 is characterized by two main trends: (1) the development of a disciplined Party structure or, in the words of William Z. Foster, “the building of a Leninist Party of a new type,” and (2) the complete and unquestioning subservience of the Party to Soviet Russia. Every word and deed, hope and aspiration, of American communists over the years has promoted these two objectives.
The conventions of the CLP and CP were over, but “civil war” continued. Communists roamed the country, denouncing each other.
Just a few weeks after the Chicago conventions Charles Ruthenberg, Executive Secretary of the Communist Party (the “American Lenin,” who died in 1927 and whose ashes lie buried in the Kremlin), mounted a platform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He began his address. The Communist Party was the heir of the revolutionary spirit and its rival, the Communist Labor Party, was wrong. The CLP, he charged, was “centrist,” a vile word to communists, just like the Party in Germany where the communists had failed. But his group, the Communist Party, was without sin. It represented the thoughts of the victorious Bolshevik Party of Soviet Russia.
When would the revolution come? Ruthenberg did not know; tomorrow or next week. But he was optimistic. The communists, he said, had better hurry to learn how to run the government.
Communist Labor Party orators replied in kind. They denounced their opponents. They alone held the sacred communist truth. Splinter factions, and they were many, raised their voices. They attacked everybody but themselves. American communism in these early days was bedlam.
There were other complications. Just a few weeks after the founding conventions, in the fall of 1919, the federal government and local authorities initiated prosecutive action against the communists.
As a consequence the communist movement went underground. Comrades met in secret hide-outs, maintained underground headquarters, and sent messages by couriers. Hidden printing presses poured out propaganda.
Underground or not, the “civil war” continued. The cramped quarters did not hinder the oratorical artillery. The inter-Party strife became fantastically bitter.
Moscow did not like either this bickering or the enforced underground work. The Kremlin wanted a single, unified Party, able to operate legally (above ground) as well as illegally (underground). Communism simply could not thrive on factional fights or in stuffy undercover cellars.
Moscow intervened through the Third International, an organization designed by the Soviets to control Communist Parties in other nations and to serve as an instrument of world revolution. The founding Congress of the Comintern, which opened March 2, 1919, in the Kremlin, was a bizarre affair.
The “delegates” were chiefly make-believe, picked from prisoners of war, visitors in Moscow, or “rubber-stamp” friends. The main problem was to find as many nationalities as possible. This was an “international” organization. That these individuals were not truly representative of their “home” groups did not matter. England was “represented” by a Russian emigré; Hungary by a prisoner of war.
The proceedings were impromptu. It is related that Lenin, during one session, sent Angelica Balabanoff (later to become General Secretary of the Comintern) a note on a scrap of paper instructing her to take the floor and announce the affiliation of the Italian Socialist Party with the International. She replied that she could not. She had not been in contact with Italian Socialists. They were “loyal.” There was no doubt of that, but she could not speak for them.
Lenin’s answer was prompt, scribbled in another note: “You read Avanti [their newspaper] and you know what is going on in Italy.”
The Comintern soon became a powerful weapon of communist control. The Second World Congress of the Communist International, held in Russia during July-August, 1920, adopted the notorious twenty-one points of admission for Comintern membership. These were basic rules that every Communist Party must accept before being admitted. The twenty-one points established an ironclad discipline, a single type of Party structure from which there could be no dissent. Here are some of the conditions:
—All party publications must have communist editors.
—If communists cannot carry out their work legally, “a combination of legal and illegal work is absolutely necessary.”
—Vigorous and systematic communist propaganda must be carried on in the army. If forbidden by law, it must be pursued illegally.
—Each Communist Party must develop communist agitation in rural areas, within trade unions, workers’ councils, and other mass organizations.
—“Parties belonging to the Communist International must be built upon the principle of democratic centralism,” that is, “organized in the most centralized manner,” controlled by “iron discipline,” and with a leadership possessing power and authority.
—Parties operating legally must “make periodical cleanings” of the membership to weed out dissenters.
—“Every party that desires to belong to the Communist International must give every possible support to the Soviet Republics in their struggle against all counter-revolutionary forces.”
—“All decisions of the Congresses of the Communist International, as well as the decisions of its Executive Committee, are binding on all parties affiliated to the Communist International.”
Here is the final, clinching point:
—“Members of the Party who reject the conditions and theses of the Communist International, on principle, must be expelled from the party.”
The Comintern made its position clear: either join on its terms, involving complete surrender, or become a renegade. Later congresses elaborated on this communist discipline. In July, 1921, for example, an order was issued by the Comintern Executive Committee that national congresses were to be held after the Comintern congresses so that they could ratify decisions. The Fourth Congress (1922) ruled that all Comintern delegates should arrive in Moscow uninstructed. Lenin was determined to make the Comintern the iron fist that controlled communism throughout the world.
The Third International exercised supervision not only by instructing American communists who flocked to Moscow but by sending representatives, or “reps” as they were called, to this country. These individuals would openly sit in communist meetings, participate in decisions, and issue orders. The “reps” represented Moscow, and that fact alone was proof of their communist “divinity.”
The Comintern “reps” contributed to a picturesque period in the history of American communism. Many were riffraff European Bolsheviks, of various nationalities, themselves knowing little about communism, who were hurriedly dispatched to the United States. Often, by their inept actions, they made American leaders more confused than ever. To gain admittance to the United States, they often used fake names, false passports, and special “covers.”
This sounds like a crude system, and, in the light of present-day communist “diplomacy,” it was. Nobody would imagine an official Soviet representative so identified in today’s communist meetings or American communists openly going to Moscow to receive instructions. This “crudity” has been polished. The same channels of communication are still open, but more “professional” ways of supervision have been perfected.
Soon after the 1919 founding conventions, the Executive Committee of the Communist International sent a letter to the two underground Parties, the CP and CLP. The split, said the Comintern, had harmed the communist cause in the United States. Unity must be established “in the shortest possible time.” The letter recommended the calling of a joint convention. The condition for unity was acceptance of the program of the Comintern.
This meant that personalities must be submerged, cliques ousted, and a uniform, standardized structure instituted. The concepts of a small, tightly knit Party (as taught by Lenin) must be put into practice. The Russian mentality must be imposed on every Party member. The Comintern was emphatic:
... unity is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The Executive Committee categorically insists on its immediate realization.
In May, 1920, a “unity” convention of the Communist Labor Party and a faction (led by Ruthenberg) of the Communist Party was secretly held at Bridgman, Michigan, resulting in the formation of the United Communist Party of America (UCP). The delegates, as a security measure, used assumed names. The Communist, in a special convention issue, was secretive: “Sometime recently, somewhere between the Atlantic and Pacific, between the Gulf and the Great Lakes, two groups of elected delegates assembled as the Unity Conference of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party.” A Comintern “rep” was present.
Many elements of the Communist Party, however, refused to go along and boycotted the new UCP. A chief point of dispute between the CP and CLP was the position of the foreign-language federations: should they be autonomous within the Party, having the right, if they desired, to withdraw, or be completely subject to the will of the Party? This issue touched the very heart of communist doctrine. No Communist Party could ever allow a member the “right” to withdraw. The misguided members seeking to retain some of these “rights” were swimming upstream, destined to failure.
Finally in May, 1921, after another year of bickering, the UCP and the remainder of the CP formed the Communist Party of America, Section of the Communist International, at a secret two-week convention at Woodstock, New York. The group’s program, among other things, provided that the Communist Party would work for violent revolution, preparing “the workers for armed insurrection as the only means of overthrowing the capitalist state.” The convention officially accepted the twenty-one points for admission to the Comintern. The CP was now a complete prisoner of Moscow.
By early 1921 an “outward” unity was achieved in the communist movement, but the second problem still remained: bringing the Party into the open. The Third Congress of the Comintern (June-July, 1921) defined the problem:
The Communist International draws the attention of the Communist Party of America (unified) to the fact that the illegalized organization must not only serve as the ground for collecting and crystallizing the active Communist forces, but that it is the Party’s duty to try all ways and means to get out of the illegalized condition into the open, among the wide masses.
The outline of the Party of today was beginning to take shape, the true Party conceived by Lenin, having both a legal and illegal apparatus. The legal aspect would be necessary to conduct communist propaganda among the noncommunist masses, to infiltrate organizations and operate communist fronts. But the underground must exist, for the revolution, the final aim of the Party, could never be anything but illegal. The underground apparatus would handle espionage, super-secret Party work, and would always be ready to expand if the legal Party, because of “capitalist” opposition, could not operate fully. The Communist Party at all times has desired both an upper and a lower level.
In December, 1921, the Workers Party of America was formed, a “legal” outlet for the underground Communist Party. The founding convention, held in New York City, was organized, controlled, and directed by Party leaders. Acting as a front for the underground communists, the Workers Party set up “open” headquarters, issued a “public” paper, and operated in full view. The communist movement now had a dual setup: the underground Communist Party, affiliated with the Third International in Moscow, commonly known among members as Number One, and the Workers Party, not so affiliated, known as Number Two. They were, however, the two faces of the same communist coin.
Those were turbulent days in the American communist movement. Party leaders were grotesque characters, making speeches in underground meetings, sitting in secret conventions (sometimes in the middle of woods), or traveling to Moscow. They usually had several aliases for use on fake passports and in Party correspondence or to be given to the police if arrested.
Their obsessive love was Soviet Russia. Communists of all varieties streamed to Moscow. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, John Reed, “Mother” Bloor visited there. Many had business: to attend Comintern meetings, to serve as “representatives” of the American Party, to enroll in a communist school. Others went as plain sight-seers, to view at first hand this land of “paradise.” Sometimes whole groups would go, as for example a delegation that sailed in 1927 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution.
The visitors were received cordially and treated well unless reason existed to the contrary. Some actually got to see the great Lenin. William Z. Foster, telling of seeing Lenin for the first time in 1921, commented that “It was one of the most inspiring moments” of his life. They attended Comintern Congresses, talked to high Party officials, looked around the town. They were being primed for their roles, puppets to fight the communist battle in America.
Then back they came to tell their comrades of the marvels of this new land. In speeches all over the country they shouted communist propaganda:
Russia is the only “real democracy” on earth; the working people are better off in Russia than in America.
Never has the American communist movement expressed itself in more revolutionary, violent, and bitter terms than in the early 1920’s. Party leaders shunned the cautious, evasive double talk of today’s communists. They believed in violent revolution and said so. The underground communist press was filled with revolutionary statements. One journal tried to outdo the other in the use of violent language.
The Party was controlled, just as it is today, by a very few. Moreover, policy, at all times, was subject to the approval of the Kremlin, acting through the Comintern. Loyal Americans should always remember that the Communist Party, USA, has never existed as an independent organization. Soviet control was instituted at the very beginning. Acceptance of the twenty-one points confirmed the imprisonment.
Party business of the underground apparatus and the above-ground Workers Party was supervised by the Secretariat, a group usually consisting of three of the most trusted leaders. A larger group, the Political Committee of some seven to ten comrades, handled many of the Party’s day-to-day affairs, such as manipulating a strike, designating a new Party official, planning infiltration tactics. The Secretariat, elected by the Political Committee, however, handled the most confidential matters, items not even brought to the attention of the Political Committee: the safeguarding of records, receipt of subsidies from abroad, maintaining contact with Russian espionage agents. These activities were too confidential even to be mentioned in minutes.
Relations between the Comintern in Moscow and American communists were almost like those between feudal lord and serf. Moscow wanted to know everything: the background of Party leaders, how a certain strike was getting along, the strength of the Party in various localities. The “reps” did not hesitate to criticize. In one Political Committee meeting a letter from the Comintern “rep” was read. It contained the following criticisms:
—Lack of information received relative to the Party convention;
—The Party’s campaign on a certain issue, though going well, was not strong enough. The “rep” recommended a pamphlet be written;
—Editorials in the Daily Worker [the Party’s newspaper] were politically incorrect;
—The Party had not taken a correct position against certain enemies of Russia.
The minutes of the meeting indicate that a motion made to accept the letter was “carried unanimously.” The Comintern’s influence was felt in practically every communist meeting. Every move of the American Party was watched from Moscow. No wonder a joke making Party rounds went as follows: Why is the Party like the Brooklyn Bridge? Because it is suspended on cables!
Besides controlling its over-all policy, the Comintern used the Communist Party in a variety of ways, especially to help the new Soviet government in its work. In one instance the Comintern sent over a “rep” known as Comrade Loaf. He sent a statement, which was read at the meeting of the Political Committee in New York City presided over by Max Bedacht, as Acting General Secretary, outlining his need for assistance in collecting information on the American labor movement for the Communist International. The Political Committee agreed to help.
In another instance, Moscow referred a request for a visa by an official of the New York Jewish Daily Forward to United States comrades. Moscow in these years often used the Communist Party in the United States as a consular clearinghouse, seeking its advice as to whether visas should be granted or denied. In answering this request, the already inherent anti-Semitism of communism dictated the decision. The Soviets were advised that the visit of the Jewish Daily Forward representative would be detrimental to the Soviet Union and the communist movement.
On occasions, also, the Comintern helped the Party by arranging to receive cordially American visitors sponsored by the Party, thereby hoping to create a favorable impression of communism. A prominent author, for example, desired to visit Russia for The Modern Quarterly. The Political Committee instructed that a letter be written to Moscow requesting that he be given a royal welcome. The Party wanted him to be favorably impressed. Then, it hoped, he would “paint a glowing picture” of the Soviet Union.
Russian control, moreover, was implemented through the operation of another institution, the Lenin School in Moscow. This training center was an adjunct to the Marxist-Leninist Institute. Founded in the 1920’s, the Lenin School had for its purpose the training of an international corps of communist leaders. These graduates, regardless of the country in which they operated, acted in accordance with the discipline and policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Each Communist Party was assigned a quota of students. To be eligible, students had to have a working-class background with experience in a trade, shop, or union. They had to be under thirty-five years of age, either a charter member or a member with at least five years’ experience in Party work, and possess a “clean” Party record. The Comintern studied the students’ background and approved those selected by the Party to attend. As a general rule, students traveled to Moscow under assumed names and with fraudulently obtained passports.
The original Lenin School was located in an old Czarist palace. Students and faculty lived under strict security conditions. The curriculum included not only Marxist-Leninist tactics but the theory and practice of organization, underground and conspiratorial operations, and the tactics of revolution and civil war. The students were taught how to erect stout barricades, conduct guerrilla warfare, and handle firearms. The Soviets wanted rough-and-ready revolutionists, men who would kill, murder, blow up trains, and start revolutions.
Many of the top leaders in Communist Parties around the world are graduates of the Lenin School. The National Committee of the Communist Party in the United States today includes such graduates of the Lenin School as Eugene Dennis, Claude Lightfoot, Carl Winter, Simon W. Gerson, William Weinstone, Nat Ganley, Steve Nelson, and others. Former Lenin School graduates also include such well-known communists as Betty Gannett, Gus Hall, Albert Lannon, Phil Bart, Rose Wortis, Loretta Stack, Henry Winston, and numerous others. The Lenin School became so notorious that it, like the Comintern, was discontinued. After all, it had turned out thousands of graduates, and the communists probably thought it had fulfilled its usefulness.
The American Communist Party began to grow up. From an infant, mostly mouth and little body, it gradually began to take on shape and form. It was soon to increase its participation in American life.
5 — The Party Grows Up
Prior to 1921 communists in the United States had been so concerned with their own private squabbles and organizational problems that they had little time for external activities.
After the 1921 “unification,” however, the Party, although still weak, emerged with greater stability. It was now being equipped with two striking arms: (1) the underground Party apparatus and (2) the above-ground, or “false-face,” apparatus of the Workers Party.
The time was ripe for communists to move in on American life and American institutions. The first objective was organized labor. Later the battlefront was to be extended to include all aspects of American life up to and including activities of the federal government in Washington.
Prior to 1921, by their own admission, communists had not been particularly effective among trade unions. True, William Z. Foster had helped found the Trade Union Educational League in 1920, but this communist-dominated group had made little headway. The Party at that time had lacked the discipline and training to exploit strikes. Its aims were usually visionary and, above all, too openly revolutionary. During the 1919 steel strike, for example, the Communist Party had issued this proclamation:
THE WORKERS MUST CAPTURE THE POWER OF THE STATE. THEY MUST WREST FROM THE CAPITALISTS THE MEANS THROUGH WHICH CAPITALIST RULE IS MAINTAINED.
The answer to the Dictatorship of the Capitalists is the Dictatorship of the Workers.
No wonder the Party was left in complete isolation. Such impractical statements were but noise and scared away normal trade-union people.
But the communists soon learned. Gradually they worked their way into trade unions, and under the name of the Workers Party propagated their program. Little by little they became more active above ground. In 1924 the Workers Party nominated, as candidates in the presidential elections, William Z. Foster as President; Benjamin Gitlow, Vice-President. In 1925, becoming still more bold, the Workers Party changed its name to the Workers (Communist) Party. The underground Party in the sense of being a separate organization was discontinued, although, as in all Communist Parties, a small underground was maintained. In 1928 communist candidates in the presidential elections polled almost 50,000 votes Finally, in 1929, by discarding the word “Workers,” the camouflage was dropped, and the Party became known as the Communist Party of the United States of America.
During these years the communists multiplied labor troubles and participated in a number of strikes, such as the textile strikes in Passaic, New Jersey (1926); New Bedford, Massachusetts (1928); and Gastonia, North Carolina (1929); as well as the coal strike of 1922, the railroad shopmen’s strike of 1922, and the New York furriers’ strike of 1926. Moreover, they were becoming more active in other agitational fields, such as economic problems, race relations, and nationality groups. The Party, now becoming stronger, was testing its wings in mass agitational work.
Meanwhile the Comintern was developing the type of Party it wanted in America. Gradually many contradictory policies and personality conflicts were eliminated. But important differences still existed. Many communists, for example, thought the Party should remain underground. They opposed founding the Workers Party. In one phase of this fight the communists were divided into three groups, known as the Geese, the Liquidators, and the Conciliators. Another dispute involved the proper method of infiltrating labor unions, with some members being uncertain how far the Party should go to the “left” or to the “right.” In 1923 a bitter struggle developed between factions headed by Charles Ruthenberg and William Z. Foster.
In 1928 and 1929, acting under Comintern instructions, the Communist Party conducted its first big “purges,” the mass expulsion of large groups of members. In 1928 James P. Cannon, an old-time communist leader, was expelled from the Party for possessing Trotskyite tendencies, a reflection of the Stalin-Trotsky fight in Russia. The Cannonites later formed a new party, the Socialist Workers Party, loyal to Trotsky. In 1929 the purge was even more severe. Jay Lovestone, Executive Secretary of the Party, and Benjamin Gitlow, a high-ranking charter member, were expelled.
Stalin took a personal interest in the American situation. Speaking in May, 1929, to the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, he started the line that the communists were to revive after World War II, and asserted that the United States was heading toward a depression that would develop a revolutionary situation.
I think the moment is not far off when a revolutionary crisis will develop in America.... It is essential that the American Communist Party should be capable of meeting that historical moment fully prepared and of assuming the leadership of the impending class struggle in America. Every effort and every means must be employed in preparing for that, comrades. For that end the American Communist Party must be improved and bolshevized. For that end we must work for the complete liquidation of factionalism and deviations in the Party. For that end we must work for the reestablishment of unity in the Communist Party of America.
The Russians, by disciplinary purges, were hammering out a Party “of a new type,” or, in the words of Stalin, bolshevizing it.
In the 1930’s, with the beginnings of the depression, the Communist Party broadened its propaganda-agitation work. Economic disorder was exploited. The Party organized parades, hunger marches, petition campaigns, mass demonstrations. It plunged with vigor into strikes such as the San Francisco general strike of 1934 and the textile and bituminous coal strikes of 1934-35. In November, 1935, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was launched, and communists attempted to burrow themselves in its member unions. In addition, they attempted to convert members of other labor unions, minority groups, especially Negroes and individuals recently arrived in the country.
The Party increased in numbers. By 1930, after the great “purges,” membership stood at 7500. By 1935 it had jumped to 30,000, and to 80,000 in 1944. The Young Communist League, the youth organization of the Party, reached 20,000 by 1938. Communist “cells” were being formed in industrial plants, and Party members had infiltrated governmental positions, some even carrying out espionage. Intra-Party struggles had ceased, with Earl Browder, a native of Kansas, being elected in 1930 as General Secretary. He was to remain “in power” until 1945. Step by step the Party was becoming stabilized, developing its agitation and propaganda functions. Disciplinary machinery maintained “unity” and “correctness of views.” This was a period of accepting new members, broadening struggles, and strengthening organizational structure.
In 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, meeting in Moscow, initiated the “united-front” policy, which provided that communists should work with other groups against fascism. Since 1933 Hitler had become the principal target of Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks, fearing German military power, desperately attempted to enlist the support of the noncommunist world against the Nazis. Russia joined the League of Nations and became a strong supporter of the “collective security” program aimed at holding Hitler in check. Fascism, the communists shouted, represented a danger to everybody, communist and noncommunist. All must work together.
The “united front” is an old Leninist tactic designed to prepare for revolutionary situations. Internationally, the aim is to protect the Soviet fatherland. On a local level it gives the communists an opportunity to infiltrate, manipulate, and take over organizations. Noncommunists are encouraged to participate in communist campaigns with the Party, which always keeps in mind the best way to advance its own interests. If a united-front tactic does not promote communism, it is dropped. A new approach is then developed.
The prewar period was the time of great communist fronts in which so many innocent victims were caught. Literally hundreds of organizations, such as the American Youth Congress, American League Against War and Fascism (later known as the American League for Peace and Democracy), the American Peace Mobilization, and the National Negro Congress sprang into existence. They were created or captured by the communists. All were tailored, through high-sounding names, to attract as many people as possible; the communists had something to offer everybody. The Party during these years moved literally thousands of Americans, causing them, in some way or other, to support the communist cause. Their thought-control nets were busy at work, as will be shown later.
In 1936 the Spanish Civil War erupted, and the communists in the United States, amid great fanfare, sent about 3000 “volunteers,” commonly known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to aid the Spanish Loyalists. Front groups of many types were formed to collect money, supplies, and medical aid. Those Americans who were the leaders in the movement to send other Americans, of whom some 50 per cent never returned, had no interest as such in either the Franco group or the opposing Loyalist government. They were acting, along with international communism, to advance the Bolshevik cause.
American communists used glittering promises, under-handed tricks, and downright fraud to coax young men to go to Spain. An enlistee might be promised a lucrative position in Spain, cash rewards, or travel accommodations. A young girl would entice unsuspecting men; in return for her favors they would promise to enlist. If necessary, fictitious passports were obtained or enlistees were stowed away on boats. An elaborate “convoy” system was established, individuals being taken from the United States, usually through France, to Spain. Any tactic was used to gain fighting manpower for the communist cause.
The events of World War II were to demonstrate clearly the loyalty of a now disciplined Communist Party to Soviet Russia. In August, 1939, the entire world was shocked: Hitler and Stalin had signed a “nonaggression” pact! Here was Moscow making an agreement with that “Fascist beast,” Hitler, whom it had denounced in bitter terms.
In a few days the pact’s full meaning became clear. Hitler had made a “deal.” German forces invaded Poland. The Russians, much more quietly, moved from the east. Poland was partitioned and Russia annexed a large slice of Polish territory. Hitler now turned toward the west, his “back” secure.
The Soviets were now in the role of “defenders of the peace” and everyone else was an “imperialist warmonger.” If Stalin did it, well, it was right. Hitler, the former enemy, now became a friend and ally. The war between Germany and the Western Allies was termed an “imperialist” war, with no support for the Allies. There was opposition to lend-lease, the draft and military production, support of strikes, circulation of antiwar literature. “The Yanks Are Not Coming” was the slogan. Russia’s war on Finland in 1939-40? That was different. That was not imperialism, said the communists. Round-the-clock marchers picketed the White House, urging that the United States stay out of the European war. The pickets were suddenly disbanded on June 21, 1941. A change in tactics seemed imminent.
The next day, June 22, 1941, the Germans attacked Soviet Russia. The European conflict now became a “patriotic war,” a “people’s war.” The United States must lend support: war matériel, money, and manpower. Russia was being overrun. The revolution was in danger. A virtual nightmare gripped the communists. Employ anything to help the land of Stalin: lend-lease, a second front, immediately. Strikes must be stopped. Send relief to Russia.
All these moves and countermoves are not just history. They stand as an everlasting warning of the way in which communists in America, whatever their claims, serve only one master: Moscow.
Other events in Russia had repercussions in the Communist Party, USA, as they still do today. In 1943 Moscow dissolved the Comintern. One purpose was to mollify Western fear and distrust of communism. Russia, the communists claimed, wanted to be a genuine friend. In 1944, following the new line, the Communist Party, USA, under Browder’s leadership, “dissolved”; actually it merely changed its name to the Communist Political Association (CPA), a “political-educational association.” Here again the idea was to “soften” opposition to communism, make it sound a “little better” to Americans. This was the period when Russia was a military ally and the communists were trying to extract as much as they could from this country. The best tactic, of course, was to be “friendly.” The Communist Political Association did not have the harsh, bugaboo connotations of the “Communist Party,” but it was the same faithful lackey of Moscow.
In 1945 the war was over. Hitler was defeated. Moscow reverted to its former hostile “line”; she denounced the Allies and claimed full credit for destroying Hitler, and Japan too. Communist Parties, including the one in America, were told to be more defiant.
This meant another change for the communists in the United States. In April, 1945, an article was published in a French communist journal, Cahiers du Communisme, by Jacques Duclos, then Secretary of the Communist Party of France. Duclos condemned “Browderism,” the so-called policy of “collaboration” with American capitalism as shown in the CPA. This was “revisionism,” “opportunism,” and a betrayal of Marxism-Leninism. What was needed, according to Duclos, was a militant attack on “capitalism,” not cooperation with it.
The Duclos article initiated a purge in the Party, the greatest since the days of Lovestone and Gitlow. Browder became the scapegoat. An emergency convention of the Communist Political Association was hastily called and by “unanimous vote,” except Browder’s, re-established the Communist Party. Browder was suspended from office and later expelled. This man from Kansas, twenty-five years a faithful servant of the Kremlin, had served his purpose. Foster became Chairman.
“Browderism” was regarded by communists as a direct outgrowth of the Lovestone-Gitlow period. Lovestone had been accused of espousing “American exceptionalism.” By this the communists meant that he viewed American capitalism as something “exceptional,” not obeying the Marxist-Leninist laws, which teach that capitalism, because of internal contradictions, will decay. Lovestone believed that American capitalism was too strong to follow these Marxist rules.
Browder, according to his communist critics, also fell into a similar error. He overestimated the power of American capital and believed that, through planning, America could overcome for some time its economic problems. This theory of “organized capitalism,” these opponents said, was wrong. It revised Marxist principles, weakened the communist movement, and betrayed the “socialist future.”
After 1945 the Communist Party, using Browderism as a weapon, entered into a new period of consolidation and loyalty to Soviet Russia. The Party apparatus was tightened and discipline strengthened. Security commissions, with almost unlimited powers, tested the “loyalty” of members and many were expelled. Increased restrictions on the admittance of new members were set up. The Party press, following the Moscow tack, inveighed against American “imperialism” and heaped abuse on the Marshall Plan, the Greece-Turkey Aid program, and the organization of a West European defense organization. The old-time Stalinist, William Z. Foster, was welding the Party into an anti-American weapon of the cold war.
In 1948, for the first time since the 1920’s, the Party found itself on the defensive when the Department of Justice initiated prosecution against its leaders. The twelve members of the Party’s National Board were indicted under the Smith Act (enacted in 1940), which prohibits any conspiracy that advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence. Previously, in 1941, the government had instituted prosecutions against members of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyites) under this statute. Other statutes since used by the government in the attack on the Party include the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the Communist Control Act of 1954.
In a long trial, running through most of 1949, eleven members were convicted, the twelfth, William Z. Foster, having been severed from the trial because of illness. In June, 1951, the Supreme Court upheld these convictions, and the government subsequently took prosecutive action against additional Party leaders.
This government prosecution was a strong disabling blow against the Party. Many of its top leaders were arrested and convicted. Others lived in fear of arrest. As a result the Party to a large extent went underground in the first large-scale underground operation since the early 1920’s. Party offices were closed, top Party leaders went into hiding, records were destroyed. Courier systems were instituted and clubs broken up into small units, if not completely disbanded. For about four years, from mid-1951 to mid-1955, the Party in protecting itself spent energy, time, and money that otherwise would have gone into agitation and propaganda.
Again, as in previous years, events in Russia determined communist policy in America. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the advent of Malenkov brought the “Big Smile” policy from the Soviet bear, which was continued by Bulganin and Khrushchev. The Communist Party, USA, weakened and largely immobilized in its underground haunts, welcomed the new line. Then, in the summer of 1955, came the Geneva Conference. The Party, sensing a new “political climate,” began to come above ground. Quietly communist leaders reappeared in public, many courier systems were discontinued, and most underground hideaways abolished. By the spring of 1956 most of the Party’s underground had been curtailed and even the communist leaders who had become fugitives from justice began to surrender. This experiment in underground strategy had cost the Party severely.
Now, however, the Party was faced with severe problems of internal disorganization and factionalism. Many Party members had left the movement. Administrative affairs were in a state of chaos. Invaluable records had been destroyed. Party leaders, returning from underground assignments, found that they were often ignored by the ruling hierarchy. Money was scarce. Footholds in noncommunist organizations, such as labor unions, had largely been lost.
Then came Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and charges of anti-Semitism in Russia. In the fall of 1956 came the bloody Soviet intervention in Hungary. No events since the German-Russian nonaggression pact of 1939 had so gravely shaken the Party. Stalin, the man the comrades had revered so long, was proved to be a murderer, thief, and liar. Communist leaders in the United States were stunned and aghast. Immediately, different opinions developed as to the Party’s future policy—opinions that gave rise to severe leadership differences.
One group, headed by William Z. Foster, although accepting Khrushchev’s denunciations, emphasized what “good” Stalin had done for the communist movement. These were the so-called Stalinists, who wanted as few changes as possible in the Party organization. Opposing Foster was a faction headed by John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, who openly advocated disbandment of the Party and establishment of a political association. This action, he argued, would make the Party more palatable to the general public in light of the severe criticisms. In between, many middle-of-the-roaders, led by Eugene Dennis, were not sure just what the Party should do in this, one of its most severe crises.
In February, 1957, the Party assembled in its Sixteenth National Convention, the first since 1950. The convention was under the dictatorial control of a few Party leaders. Much deceitful publicity was released to demonstrate that the Party had declared its “independence” of Moscow, that a new leadership had been installed, and that the Party was entirely American in character. However, Foster and his associates so effectively manipulated the sessions that the same old Stalinist line prevailed.
The Party retained its same old name, continued the majority of its old leadership; it reaffirmed its adherence to the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism; it reaffirmed its acceptance of “proletarian internationalism”; it refused to condemn or even take a stand on the Soviet rape of Hungary; it refused to condemn the tyranny and proven anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union; it did not take a single affirmative step to declare its independence of the Soviet Union; and, in fact, the Soviet-controlled press hailed the Communist Party, USA, for remaining loyal “to the principles of Marxism-Leninism.”
The Communist Party is a highly disciplined tool of the Soviet Union in the United States. In the thirty-eight years since it came into being, it has developed a trained and potentially effective leadership that overnight, should the situation become favorable, could expand into a mass organization of great potential power. No longer does it need to send its promising young leaders to Moscow for training, because its own educational system is now performing that function.
The present menace of the Communist Party in the United States grows in direct ratio to the rising feeling that it is a small, dissident element and need not be feared. As we relax our protection and ease up on security measures, we move closer and closer to a “fool’s paradise.”
Through the Communist Party, the mentality of the Russian Bolsheviks is being transmitted to America, together with the belief that man can be completely redesigned from a child of God into a soulless social cog. The Party member, whether he be a farmer in Missouri, an automobile worker in Michigan, or a lawyer in California, must be made to think, act, and be like other Party members. Many techniques, such as discipline, education, the Party press, recreation, literature, organizational structure, the arts, are used to fashion the “communist man,” the terror of the twentieth century. This is the “man” the Kremlin hopes will place the hammer and sickle above the White House and establish a Soviet America as part of a world empire, with Soviet Russia as the master of all. This is the “man” who, in a recent secret Party meeting, admonished the comrades present that a search of history would show that there has never been a revolution without force and violence and when the time comes, “We will hang and shoot those responsible for the type of government we have today.”