Even the evident negative aspects of a huge country in turmoil did not dampen the enthusiasm for Stalin's revolution from above. Popular historian Will Durant travelled to Russia in 1932, witnessed starvation, but was still able to write, 'The challenge of the Five-Year Plan is moral as well as economic. It is a direct challenge to the smugness and complacency which characterize American thinking on our own chaotic system.' Future historians, he predicted, would look upon 'planned social control as the most significant single achievement of our day'.[36] That same year the Black writer Langston Hughes, already interested in socialism, visited the USSR with other writers to produce a documentary. Inspired by what he saw - a land of poverty and hope, struggle but no racism or economic stratification - he wrote a poem, 'One More "S" in the U. S. A.', for his comrades. Decades later the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy brought him before his committee to discuss publicly his political involvement with Communists.[37]
Journalism occupied the ideological front line. With the introduction of by-lines and a new emphasis on conceptualisation and interpretation instead ofsimple reportage, newspapermen (and they were almost all men) evaluated and made judgements. Reporters became familiar figures in popular culture, and, as celebrities back home, those posted in Russia gradually became identified with one political position or another. Of the handful of American correspondents in Moscow, Maurice Hindus stood out as a sympathetic native of the country about which he wrote. Unlike those who relied on Soviet ideological pronouncements or a reading of the Marxist classics as a guide to understanding what was going on in Russia, Hindus chose to 'be in the country, wander around, observe and listen, ask questions and digest answers to obtain some comprehension of the sweep and meaning of these events'.[38] He befriended men and women of letters, like John Dewey and George Bernard Shaw (whom he guided through the USSR on a celebrated trip), and once was prevailed upon by F. Scott Fitzgerald's psychiatrist to allay the novelist's fears of a coming communist revolution in America. To his critics, Hindus was naive, apologetic and even duplicitous. One of his fellow correspondents, the disillusioned Eugene Lyons, considered Hindus to be one of the most industrious of Stalin's apologists.[39] Whatever his faults or insights, Hindus developed and popularised a particular form of reporting on the Soviet Union - one emulated later with enormous success by Alexander Werth, Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser, David Shipler, Andrea Lee, Martin Walker, David Remnik and others - that combined personal observations, telling anecdotes and revealing detail to provide a textured picture of the USSR that supplemented and undercut more partisan portraits.
The Christian Science Monitor's William Henry Chamberlin came as a socialist in 1922 and left as an opponent of Soviet Communism in 1934. In those twelve years he researched and wrote a classic two-volume history of the
Russian Revolution that, along with Trotsky's account, remained for nearly a quarter of a century the principal narrative of 1917 and the civil war.[40] The Nation's Louis Fischer was an early Zionist, who became disillusioned when he served in the Jewish Legion in Palestine and came to Russia in 1922 to find 'a brighter future' in the 'kingdom of the underdog'. His two-volume study of Soviet foreign policy, The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), was a careful rebuttal to the polemics about Soviet international ambitions. Lyons was very friendly to the Soviets when he arrived in Moscow at the end of 1927 and wrote positively about Stalin in a 1931 interview before he turned bitterly against them with his Assignment in Utopia (1937). Duranty, the acknowledged dean of the Moscow press corps, stayed for a decade and a half, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, refused to recognise the great famine in Ukraine of that year and often justified what he observed with the phrase, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking
eggs'.[41]
Several European journalists were more critical earlier than the Americans: Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian reported on the famine months before his American counterparts; and Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt was refused re-entry after he wrote about the violence of mass collectivisation. One of the most dramatic defections was by Max Eastman, a Leftist celebrity, formerly the bohemian editor ofthe radical journal Masses, who had enjoyed notoriety as the representative of the Left Opposition in America and promoted Trotsky's line in Since Lenin Died (1925) and Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1926). The translator of Trotsky's extraordinary History of the Russian Revolution (1932), he attacked Stalin's cultural policies in Artists in Uniform (1934). By the mid-1930s his doubts about Marxism led him to conclude that Stalinism was the logical outcome of Leninism, a position that Trotsky rejected.[42] In time Eastman became a leading anti-communist, even defending the necessity of 'exposing' Communists during the McCarthy years.[43]
The great ideological and political struggles that pitted liberals against conservatives, socialists against communists, the Left and Centre against Fascists intensified with the coming of the Great Depression. Like a litmus test of one's political loyalties, one's attitude towards the Soviet Union separated people who otherwise might have been allies. Communists by the 1930s were unquestioning supporters of Stalinism and the General Line. Their democratic critics included liberals and Europe's Social Democrats, among whom the exiled Mensheviks used their contacts within the country to contribute knowledgeable analyses in their journals and newspapers, most importantly Sotsialis- ticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald). To their left were varieties of Trotskyists, most agreeing with Trotsky that the Soviet Union had suffered a Thermido- rian reaction and become a deformed workers' state.45 For Trotsky the USSR was ruled, not by a dictatorship of the proletariat, but by 'a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion', an uncontrolled bureaucracy dominating the masses.46 Stalin's personal triumph was that of the bureaucracy, which perfectly reflected his own 'petty bourgeois outlook', and his state had 'acquired a totalitarian-bureaucratic character'.47 Impeccably Marxist, Trotsky provided an impressive structuralist alternative to the more common accounts based on national character or rationalisation of the Soviet system as an effective model of statist developmentalism.
In the second half of the 1930s the threat posed by Fascism intensified the personal, political and psychological struggles of the politically minded and politically active. While some embraced Stalinism, even as it devoured millions of its own people, as the best defence against the radical Right, others denounced the great experiment as a grand deception. The show trials of 1936-8 swept away loyal Bolsheviks, many of whom had been close comrades of Lenin, for their alleged links to an 'anti-Soviet Trotskyite' conspiracy. John Dewey, novelist James T. Farrell and other intellectuals formed the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, and the 'Dewey Commission' travelled to Coyoacan, Mexico, to interrogate Trotsky. It concluded that none of the charges levelled against Trotsky and his son was true.48 But equally
37
Langston Hughes,
38
Maurice Hindus,
40
William Henry Chamberlin,
41
Engerman,
42
Alan M. Wald,
43
Ibid., p. 273. Eastman himself denied that he was ever a 'follower' of Trotsky though he was closely associated with the opposition to Stalin and Stalinism. (See his 'Biographical