Introduction' to Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1955), pp. 7-20.)
45 Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, trans. Max Eastman (1937; New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp. 19, 47, 61.
46 Ibid., p. 52. 47 Ibid., pp. 93, 97,108.
48 The Case ofLeon Trotsky: Report ofHearings on the Charges Made against Him in the Moscow Trials by the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry (New York: Merit Publishers, 1937); Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938). See also, Alan Wald, 'Memories of the John Dewey Commission: Forty Years Later', Antioch Review (1977): pp. 438-51.
ronald grigor sunt
eminent intellectuals - among them Dreiser, Fischer, playwright Lillian Hell- man, artist Rockwell Kent, author Nathaniel West and journalist Heywood Broun - denounced the Commission's findings and urged American liberals not to support enemies of the USSR, 'a country recognised as engaged in improving conditions for all its people' that should 'be permitted to decide for itself what measures of protection are necessary against treasonable plots to assassinate and overthrow its leadership and involve it in war with foreign powers'.[44] Confusion and self-delusion about the USSR affected even the American ambassador to Moscow, the political appointee Joseph E. Davies, who attended the Bukharin trial and later wrote that he was astonished that such crimes could have been committed by Old Bolsheviks.[45]
Despite forced collectivisation, the consequent famine and the Great Purges, many on the Left retained their passion for Soviet socialism until Stalin himself delivered a body blow to their faith with the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fellow-travellers found it hard to travel down this road, and Communist parties around the world haemorrhaged members. The New Republic, which had supported the Soviet Union for decades, reversed itself when Stalin attacked Finland. Many who had resisted the concept of 'totalitarianism', which collapsed Stalinism and Nazism into a single analytical category, suddenly saw merit in this formulation. In i940 Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, an excursion through the prehistory and history of Marxism in thought and in power.[46] Once a Communist, later an admirer of Trotsky, Wilson questioned the sureties of his earlier faith and ended up with praise for Marxism's moral and social vision while rejecting the authoritarianism and statism of the Soviet model.[47] Arthur Koestler, the son of Hungarian Jews, explored his loss of faith in the Communist movement in his novel Darkness at Noon (i940). Basing his hero on Bukharin, Koestler told the story of an idealistic Soviet leader, Rubashov, who agrees to confess to imaginary crimes as his last contribution to the revolutionary cause. Along with George Orwell's distopian novels, Koestler's exploration into the mind of a Bolshevik would become one of the defining literary portraits in the anti-communist arsenal in the post-war years.
With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, attitudes shifted once again, spawning an outpouring of writing on Russia and the Soviet Union.
Some two hundred books were published in the United States in 1943-5 alone. Ambassador Davies's memoir, Mission to Moscow (December 1941), sold 700,000 copies and was memorialised in a splashy Hollywood film that lauded Soviet achievements, 'convicted' those charged at the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland and portrayed Stalin as a benign avuncular patriarch. A grotesque piece ofwarpropaganda,playingfastand loose with historical fact, the film was widely panned in the press, and leading 'progressive' intellectuals, including Dewey, Dwight MacDonald, Wilson, Eastman, Sidney Hook, Farrell and socialist Norman Thomas, signedpublic protests against it. Fouryears after the film's opening in 1943, Warner Brothers reacted to the onset of the Cold War by ordering all release prints destroyed.[48]
One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the period was by the Russian-born emigre sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff, whose The Great Retreat showed in detail how the Soviet state had abandoned its original revolutionary programme and internationalist agenda in the mid-1930s and turned into a traditional Great Power.[49] Instead of the radical levelling of social classes of the early 1930s, Stalinism re-established new hierarchies based on wage differentials, education, party affiliation and loyalty to the state. The Great Retreat represented the triumph of the 'national structure', Russian history and the needs and desires of the people over 'an anonymous body of international workers'.[50] Rather than betraying the revolution, the Retreat signalled its nationalisation and domestication, the victory of reality and 'objective facts' over utopianism and radical experimentation. The book appeared in 1946 just after the high-point of Soviet-American co-operation, clearly a reflection of the Yalta spirit of the immediate pre-Cold War years. Timasheff predicted that the revolutionary years were over; faith in the Marxist doctrine had faded and a future development towards democracy was possible. Here he echoed his collaborator, fellow Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard, who in his Russia and the United States (1944) proposed that Russia and the United
States were meant to be allies, not enemies, and that the two societies were indeed converging along the lines of all other highly industrialised societies. This 'convergence thesis' would eventually become standard in the modernisation literature of the 1950s, and both in its introduction and its elaboration it was part of a general political recommendation for understanding, tolerance, patience and entente between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.
The Cold War and professional sovietology
In late 1945 American public opinion was generally positive about the Soviet Union. A Fortune poll in September showed that only a quarter of the population believed that the USSR would attempt to spread communism into Eastern Europe. By July 1946 more than half of those polled felt that Moscow aimed to dominate as much of the world as possible.[51] Within government and in the public sphere opposing formulations of the Soviet Union contended with one another. Vice-President and later Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace used Russian character to explain why a 'get tough with Russia' policy would only result in tougher Russians. Others like Walter Lippmann warned that not recognising Soviet interests in Eastern Europe would lead to a 'cold war'. But far more influential, and eventually hegemonic, were the views of a number of State Department specialists, most importantly George Kennan, who did not trust the Soviet leadership.
In 1946 Kennan sent his famous 'Long Telegram' from Moscow, reiterating that Russian behaviour was best explained by national characteristics. The inherent, intractable, immutable characteristics of the Russians as 'Asiatics' required the use of countervailing force to contain the Soviets' aggressive tendencies. When he published his views in Foreign Affairs, famously signing the article 'X', Kennan abruptly shifted his position from considering Marxism largely irrelevant to emphasising the importance of Marxist doctrine. 'The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today', he wrote, 'is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.'[52] Soviet ideology included the idea of the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism and the infallibility of the Kremlin as the sole repository of truth. Though his explanation had changed from national character to ideology, Kennan's prescription for US foreign policy remained the same: the USSR was a rival, not a partner, and the United States had no other course but containment of Russian expansive tendencies.[53]
44
'An Open Letter to American Liberals',
46
Edmund Wilson,
48
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black,
49
Nicholas S. Timasheff,
51
John Lewis Gaddis,
52
'X' [George F. Kennan], 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct',
53
The point about the shift from national character to ideology is made convincingly by Engerman,