What the reds were doing under the bed
David Caute
THE SECRET WORLD OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov Yale, £16.95, pp.368 By the 1960s the Cold War consensus was falling apart. American journalists and historians launched a critical reappraisal of what is wrongly, but unstoppably, called McCarthyism. Ten years later 'revisionism' (as it became known) was in full flood. The FBI and CIA were pilloried by commenta- tors who did not flinch from challenging the standard Western view of the Cold War as a defensive response to unilateral Soviet aggression. Sniffing the green in the red, mainstream publishers began to issue senti- mental memoirs with titles like The Romance of American Communism. Dili- gent sleuths 'proved' the innocence of the major demon-traitors, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.
Clearly revisionism was itself going to suffer a comparable attack sooner or later: this brings us to RTsKhIDNI (the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History). With the collgpse of Communism and the disintegra- tion of the Soviet Union, the seals on the state archives burst open. Western schol- ars, often richly funded — this book acknowledges the assistance of no less than five foundations — swooped in search of scoops. Worthy Russian scholars and trans- lators were hired to plough hectically through the Cyrillic mysteries of the Soviet files. What is now beginning to emerge from RTsKhIDNI is an abundance of Dead Sea scrolls.
What have they revealed? A great -deal of interesting peripheral detail. But the larger claims tend to be extravagantly inflated in the market place — even when neatly dovetailed into the lachrymose con- fessions of former Soviet generals and KGB supermoles. The Secret World of American Communism is a collaborative effort: two American scholars, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, have joined forces with F. I. Firsov, formerly employed in the Comintern Archive. Pre-RTsKhID- NI scholars are likened by the authors to the deceived figures in Plato's cave: 'Most people saw only the shadows on the walls . . . The opening of the Comintern's archives frees us all from the cave.' (Noth- ing like it since the Angel Gibreel began unloading his Koranic verses.) Let is be s'id that Klehr, Haynes and Firsov fall far short of the melodramatic archive-abuse recently displayed in Stephen Koch's Double Lives. Their approach is on the whole sober and discriminating. Ninety-two documents are reproduced in this volume, many of them in part, with a linking commentary. The focus is on 'the clandestine activity of the American Com- munist Party and Soviet espionage in the United States.'
The polymorphic 'truth' about American Communism lies, of course, beyond the reach of any archive. As the authors them- selves point out, the overwhelming majority of Party members had nothing to do with espionage. But what was the 'hard core of permanent cadre who devoted their lives to the movement' up to? Overthrowing the United States Government by force? Sig- nalling the Soviet marines on to the beach- es of Maine (the Russians Are Coming)? No evidence of that (as yet).
The clandestine Communist apparatus had the following main objectives. (1) Imitating Stalinist paranoia by purging itself of Trotskyites and `Lovestoneites' obsessively rooting out renegades and unreliable elements. (2) Keeping the clan- destine apparatus clandestine. (3) Finding out what the White House and State Department were thinking about USSR were the wartime kisses genuine or swivel- eyed? (4) Picking up American defence technology, especially during the develop- ment phase of the atomic bomb (the Man- hattan project). (5) In the 1950s there was also an underground network designed to shelter individuals liable to prosecution under the Smith Act.
Only a minority of ultra-radical revision- ists failed to recognise that Western Com- munist parties. were always instruments of Soviet state policy. The authors of this book are guilty of unpardonable exaggera- tion when they claim that 'the predomi- nant' view among scholars is that the notion that American Communists main- tained a secret underground or assisted Soviet intelligence is without any credible basis.' Indeed, most of the scholars they quote are palpably innocent of such naivety.
But here I find myself among those indicted and must declare an interest. In 1978 I published The Great Fear: the Anti- Communist Purge under Truman and Eisen- hower. Though I took pains to point out that one could logically deplore the scale, style and hysteria of the purge while keep- ing an open mind about unresolved allega- tion of Communist-inspired espionage, in The Secret World of American Communism the sun is on my back as I toss banana skins around Plato's cave.
Take the case of Elizabeth Bentley, who became famous on the basis of her hugely publicised confessions. I read: 'David Caute painted her as unbelievable.' I did not: I said that 'her reliability as a witness has often been challenged' (and in fact the authors agree about that). Now consider the two sentences cited below. The first is mine, the second is the authors' claim to be quoting me: 1. Bentley . . . had joined the CP in 1935 and (so she said) had been ordered to 'go under- ground' three years later.
2. . . she joined the Communist party in 1935 — `so she said,' to use Caute's ever-dis- trusting phrasing.
I would be more inclined to put this error down to fragile scholarship but for further cases of misrepresentation too slanted to be inadvertent.
In general, the documents reproduced in this book shed little or no light on the major causes celebres of the Cold War, notably Hiss and the Rosenbergs. The authors claim that some of their documents demonstrate the general credibility of Whittaker Chambers. Quite so. The world Chambers described was a real one — though Chambers kept chang- ing his story whenever he caught sight of Nixon's five o'clock shadow. The Great Fear of the Fifties will never be document- ed into a rational response to a pressing danger.
The anti-Communism of the klieg lights, the Hearst press, the Legion and the Loyalty-Security program was not the principled anti-Communism of Americans for Democratic Action (though not a few distinguished Liberals got their fingers sticky on the CIA lollipop). The Soviet threat, whether real or perceived, served as a pretext for reversing the New Deal and keeping Negroes in their place. The patriotic commentary to this book reflects a continuing anxiety about national identity — the term `UnAmerican' isn't quite buried. RTsKhIDNI, meanwhile, will con- tinue to disgorge its scrolls as the dollars pour in, and the shadows on the cave wall will not rest.
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