‘Reds’ Review: Communism in the U.S.A.

The Soviet Union cast a long shadow over American fellow travelers, who contorted their beliefs to follow the party. 

By Joseph Epstein. He reviews the book Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism by Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at New York’s Hamilton College. Excerpts:

"the Soviet Union was a powerful state apparatus organized for antisemitism, deliberate starvation of its own people, the establishment of grim gulags, the murder of millions and the deadening of the souls of those compelled to live under its crushing political system."

"anyone of the least political acumen knew the brutal game the Soviet Union played. Anyone, that is, but the members of the American Communist Party. “Many of us were easily deceived,” noted Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian who himself joined the party in 1939. “We were credulous because we felt we had to be.”"

"In 1919 Eugene V. Debs, who would win 3% of the popular vote in the next year’s presidential election, declared: “Every drop of blood in my veins is Bolshevik.” Debs would later recant, noting “there is certainly something that is radically wrong with the policy of the Soviet Union in dealing with those who are not in accord with its program.” Debs himself never became a member of a communist party in America."

"American communism was from the beginning and ever after politically hostage to the Soviet Union."

"What would entice one to join this American communist party?"

"Then there is the general challenge, first noted by George Orwell, that those on the political left often feel from people to the left of them: that they are too timid in their views, are not really on the bus, are themselves part of the problem."

"Intramurally, there was no shortage of squabbles and skirmishes, even schisms."

"[John] Dos Passos abandoned his leftist politics when he encountered firsthand the devious politics of the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War and would become a strong anticommunist."

"A strong faction of otherwise leftist American intellectuals, while retaining their socialism, came to declare themselves anticommunist."

"Some did spy for the Soviets"

"The Communist Party of America was never more than a branch office of Soviet Communism, and rather a minor branch office at that."

"The chief problem that Soviet communism presented to American communists was the requirement to toe the line—and a most jagged, not to say crooked, line it often turned out to be."

"There was the Soviet Union’s break with, and eventual assassination of, Leon Trotsky, a figure much admired by many American Communists. There was the Nazi-Soviet pact on the eve of World War II, through which Stalin promised nonaggression while Hitler invaded his European neighbors and the two dictators fatefully (and secretly) agreed to divvy up Poland. There were the Moscow Trials, during which once-revered old-line Russian Communists were put on trial by Stalin’s secret police, found guilty and executed for treason. There was Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech,” during which Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader seemed to do an about-face, describing and acknowledging the monstrous crimes of the recently deceased Stalin. Then there was the brutal Soviet suppression of a rebellion in Hungary later that year, and (12 years later) a similar attack against restive Czechoslovakians. Through all this and more, members of the American Communist Party had to adjust to sudden ideological shifts if they were to remain in the party."

"the party took its orders from Moscow, and the Russian party also financed the American Communist Party; in 1987 its annual cash subsidy to the American party was up to at least $2 million. In the great tradition of American politicians, Gus Hall, a leader of the American Communist Party and its hopeless presidential candidate in the elections of 1972 through 1984, was accused of stealing from these funds for his personal pleasures, an accusation that Mr. Isserman seems to believe to be true."