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The Secret World of American Communism. - book reviews
National Review, June 12, 1995 by Eric Breindel
The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (Yale, 348 pp., $25)
OVER the last two decades, most historians of Communism in America -- perhaps not surprisingly -- have tended to sympathize with the American Communist enterprise. Many are "red-diaper babies" -- i.e., the children of Party members and/or sympathizers. Others, to be sure, came to their radical-Left sensibilities without familial encouragement. In either case, however, their purpose has been to depict the CP as an indigenous populist movement -- linked to the Soviet Union by bonds of admiration, but otherwise authentically American.
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A need to advance this view preoccupied the Party itself virtually from its inception. The cause took on particular urgency during the Popular Front period. Indeed, Earl Browder, the CP's secretary general from 1930 to to 1944, coined the Party slogan "Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism" precisely to refute charges that American Communists were an alien element -- in effect, creatures of Moscow. Communists preferred to depict themselves as "liberals in a hurry," just as they claimed credit for much of the New Deal.
Indeed, if one's only knowledge of the subject were gleaned from studies by sympathetic historians and memoirs by former activists, one could easily conclude that the CP played a key role in establishing everything from the Social Security system to the National Labor Relations Board. Such books tend to refer to the USSR only in passing -- as if the Soviet Union were a distant, symbolic presence, rather than a daily factor in the life of the American Communist Party.
If establishing an image of distance from Moscow was desirable during the Popular Front years, it became imperative immediately after the Second World War -- for two reasons.
First, news of Stalin's monstrous crimes -- confirmed by Khrushchev in 1956, but scarcely unknown prior to the "Secret Speech" -- required American Communists to insist on their discrete "American" identity.
In addition, Soviet espionage in the U.S. was beginning to dominate the headlines. From the Amerasia affair to the Hiss case to Judith Coplon to the Rosenbergs, the question of Communist disloyalty was emerging as a central issue.
In The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes -- two pre-eminent students of the American Communist movement -- together with Soviet archivist Fridrikh Firsov, demonstrate that espionage was a central Party function, not some rare aberration in which overzealous comrades occasionally indulged. The authors do so, moreover, on the basis of documentary evidence unearthed in the Comintern archive and in the archive of the CPUSA. Both collections are located in Moscow.
We learn that espionage was approved at the highest level of the American Party; that Browder himself was engaged in "clandestine work"; that Browder's own sister was a long-term NKVD employee; and that his successor as Party leader, Eugene Dennis, was a Comintern agent.
Even more important, Klehr & Co. demonstrate that the key Soviet espionage networks here were either CP subsidiaries or outgrowths of Party cells. The documents give independent confirmation that Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other refugees from the Communist underground spoke the truth. It's also clear that they and others engaged in espionage with the knowledge and approval of the aboveground CP.
In short, The Secret World of American Communism puts paid to the lie that the CPUSA was a traditional American political party, entirely distinct from any espionage cells that might have been created by the Soviet clandestine services. (Admittedly, this comes as no surprise to NR readers; but the degree to which the Left has been successful in convincing the public at large on this point should not be underestimated.)
For obvious reasons, this subject is crucial to an understanding of the Party's role in American life: the CP, after all, could not claim to be a traditional American political party if it also devoted itself -- even in part -- to spying on the U.S. Government.
Thus the importance to American Communists of insisting on the innocence of, say, the Rosenbergs and Judith Coplon. These were public Party members or sympathizers; their espionage work, therefore, linked the Party itself to Moscow.
By contrast, a captured Russian spy such as Rudolf Abel (arrested by the FBI in 1957, Abel was swapped for downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1961) posed no special threat to the CPUSA. Abel (real name: Willy Fischer) was a Soviet citizen and KGB officer who happened to be stationed in America; his role was akin to that of a CIA agent based in the USSR. And, indeed, Abel -- an "illegal" who had assumed the identity of a dead U.S. citizen -- took pains to limit his contact with American Communists while he lived here.
It's well to recall that Earl Browder himself, shortly before his death in 1973, acknowledged that the CPUSA had been involved in espionage. To be sure, Browder presented the matter in a decidedly benign fashion: "We [the Party] had people who would inform us from the enemy camp because they sympathized with our position," he explained to a UPI correspondent, going on to note that "we didn't consider it espionage."
