Joseph Stalin
Most people on the left have some grasp of the odious nature of Stalinism and the fact that Communists — however sincere they were in opposing racism, militarism and the excesses of capitalism — served false gods in Moscow. With archival evidence uncovered after the downfall of the Soviet bloc, little doubt remains on the Kremlin’s role in utilizing Communist Party members as spies in the United States. Most Party members had nothing to do with espionage, but a small secret cadre did. That being said, there is such a thing as “reactionary anti-Communism” — using an exaggerated fear of Communism to oppose progressive reform.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the famed research center on Yiddish culture and Eastern European Jewry — originally established in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) but long centered in New York — hosted two programs in the past month that eagerly drew me in. One was a half-day conference on “American Jews and Soviet Espionage” (Sept. 20), and the other a lecture by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder on his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Eastern European territories which Hitler and Stalin rendered into great killing grounds in the 1930s and ’40s (Oct. 2).
The first program was a kind of reunion for YIVO’s executive director Jonathan Brent, who in his former post at Yale University Press as editorial director of “The Annals of Communism” series, had worked with some of the presenters. Dr. Brent opened the conference with a poignant talk on how Soviet Jews were sucked into spying on each other for a regime that had it in for them anyway. But first, unique for its time, Lenin’s reign had outlawed anti-Semitism and fostered a flowering of secular Yiddish culture. Many leading Bolsheviks– including one head of the secret police– were Jews, and other Politburo figures were married to Jews.
But after Lenin died, it was unhealthy to be a close comrade of his successor, Joseph Stalin. “In this world, nobody is innocent,” Brent explained. The most prominent Jewish literary figures of their time were executed on trumped-up charges. (Brent is the author of Stalin’s Last Crime — HarperCollins, 2003 — about Stalin’s apparent plan for a massive purge and deportation of Soviet Jews, just before his death in 1953.)
Harvey Klehr, in collaboration with John Earl Haynes, mined archival Soviet materials after the fall of the Soviet Union to document the role of American Communists in espionage. In his talk, Klehr indicated that the Soviets obtained the atomic bomb through the theft of American secrets (mostly by a non-Jewish agent, Klaus Fuchs).
The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, where the YIVO is currently housed with other Jewish cultural institutions.
Klehr stated right off that Jews were not as prominent in the Communist Party-USA as some other ethnic groups. For example, in the 1920s, the largest group in the CPUSA were Finns from the Upper Midwest. (Gus Hall, the hardliner who led the Party from 1959 until 2000, was a Minnesotan of Finnish background.) By the 1930s, some Jews emerged into CP leadership positions, but they did not dominate. Only once, in 1927-’29, did a Jew (Jay Lovestone) actually head the Communist Party.
Still, from the late ’20s to the late ’40s, Jews provided a disproportionate share of its members, about “one-third to 40%,” out of a total of 90,000. According to his research confirming the “Venona Intercepts,” 360 American Communists were spies, of whom 156 were identified as Jews, while perhaps 100 to 150 Soviet agents remain unknown. Among his other observations, Klehr noted that Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project producing the atomic bomb, had once been a Communist but was never recruited as a spy.
Remarking that “history is full of ironies,” Klehr observed that Senator Joseph McCarthy “never stooped to anti-Semitism,” even employing a Jew (Roy Cohn) as his chief aide. But he also mentioned that John L. Rankin, a Dixiecrat Congressman from Mississippi, a leading anti-Communist crusader on the House Un-American Activities Committee, was known as an anti-Semite.
Klehr’s colleague, John Earl Haynes, moderated the closing panel, a set of case studies on specific individuals. Click for Part 2….