John Earl Haynes

The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism

This article reviews the huge Cold War-era and post-Cold War literature on American Communism and anti-Communism in the United States. These issues have long been the subject of heated scholarly debate. The recent opening of archives in Russia and other former Communist countries and the release of translated Venona documents in the United States have shed new light on key aspects of the American Communist Party that were previously unknown or undocumented. The new evidence has underscored the Soviet Unions tight control of the party and the crucial role that American Communists played in Soviet espionage. The release of all this documentation has been an unwelcome development for scholars who have long been sympathetic to the Communist movement.

Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933-1943

Drawing on secret and therefore candid coded telegraphs exchanged between Communist Party leaders around the world and their overseers at the Communist International (Comintern) headquarters in Moscow, this book uncovers key aspects of the history of the Comintern and its significant role in the Stalinist ruling system during the years 1933 to 1943. New information on aspects of the Peoples Front in France, civil wars in Spain and China, World War II, and the extent of the Cominterns cooperation with Soviet intelligence is brought to light through these archival records, never examined before.

Frissions of Familiarity

John McIlroy and Alan Campbell’s ‘‘A Peripheral Vision’’ brings home the parochialism too prevalent in the historical study of American Communism. I do not excuse myself from this criticism. I and other traditionalists have long emphasized that the American Communist movement was part of an international movement and that understanding the Communist International and Moscow were essential to understanding the history of the Communist Party, USA. That said, while some historians of the American movement have paid attention to Comintern and Soviet history, only a few (and I am not among those commendable few) have undertaken a serious review of the literature of the history of Communist movements in other countries. In many cases we can plead the paucity of foreign language skills among otherwise well-trained American historians. But in the case of the British Communist movement, even that weak defense is not available. And to our embarrassment (certainly to my embarrassment), it is clear from ‘‘A Peripheral Vision’’ that British scholars have read far more American Communist history than we have read CPGB history. Given my lack of familiarity with the literature of British Communist history, it was, then, with considerable astonishment that I read ‘‘A Peripheral Vision’’ and realized how ‘‘familiar’’ much of it seemed. There were, of course, many details and persons with whom I was unfamiliar. Once one gets past Pollitt, Dutt, and Klugmann, my knowledge of British Communists runs out quickly: Arthur Horner, J. T. Murphy, and J. R. Campbell were unknown or nearly so to me. But even so, the main contours of the history of the CPGB were remarkably parallel to those the CPUSA: the Bolshevization/Stalinization of the party in the midto late 1920s, the self-destructive foolishness of the Third Period, the militant anti-fascism and ersatz nativism of the Popular Front in the midand late 1930s, the not-very-artful pirouette over the Nazi–Soviet Pact in the fall of 1939, and the embarrassingly eager embrace of war in June 1941. Nothing seemed strange, unexpected, or ‘‘different’’ in any significant way. This frission of familiarity, moreover, was a double one. If the parallels between the history of the CPGB and the CPUSA seemed remarkable, the parallels between the historiography of British and American Communism

The CPUSA reports to the comintern: 1941

From the early 1920s until 1939, communications between the American Communist party and Communist International (Comintern) leaders in Moscow had been frequent and ample. Tens of thousands of pages of texts (letters, memoranda, cables, magazines, and newspapers) passed to and from Moscow and the CPUSA. The Comintern also dispatched plenipotentiary representatives who supervised the leadership of the American party as well as specialized agents who dealt with specific ethnic groups or specific organizational tasks or technical requirements. For its part, the American party sent a stream of American Communists to Moscow: official party ‘‘representatives’’ to the Comintern, ‘‘referents’’ who served apprenticeships with sections of the Comintern and as in-house sources of information on America, cadre attending long-term educational and shortterm training sessions at the elite International Lenin School and the lessprestigious Communist University of Toilers of the East, and delegations of party activists attending Comintern-related conferences. In the 1930s numerous high-level CPUSA officials also personally traveled to Moscow to deliver lengthy written reports, testify, and be subjected to detailed examination by the Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat.

Harry Hopkins and Soviet Espionage

One of the intriguing unidentified cover names in the Venona decryptions released in the mid-1990s was ‘19’, a Soviet source senior enough to report taking part in a conversation with President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Vice-President Wallace at the 1943 Trident conference. While some historians thought the evidence too ambiguous to identify the real name behind ‘19’, others built a case that it was presidential adviser Harry Hopkins. Alexander Vassilievs notebooks, made public in 2009, resolved the issue by firmly identifying ‘19’ as State Department official Laurence Duggan. There remain, however, writers who refuse to accept the evidence that ‘19’ was Duggan and insist that Hopkins was a Soviet agent on the basis of insubstantial evidence.

Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage

Abstract A careful review of the depiction of Soviet atomic espionage provided in Pavel Sudoplatovs Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets by Jerrold and Leona Schecter demonstrates how faulty memories, Soviet intelligence agency disinformation, sloppy citations, misplaced trust in documents provided by unidentified sources under unexplained circumstances, and egregious lapses in logic and judgment can lead to conclusions unsupported by evidence. The accounts of Soviet atomic espionage in both books are neither reliable nor credible. In particular, the assertions that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard consciously cooperated with and assisted Soviet atomic intelligence are without credibility.

“The Elephant in the Living Room”: Theodore Draper and the Historiography of American Communism

Many historians who have published on the history of the American Communist movement disagreed with or criticized Theodore Draper. Michael Brown, author of a new book on the historiography of communism, dismissed the Draper’s writings as ‘‘predicated on a profound philosophical malaise,’’ declared them to be ‘‘implausible as history’’ and ‘‘outside of social science,’’ and insulted them as only ‘‘an extraordinary overtly tendentious type of satire.’’ Other preferred to forget Draper. But he cannot be ignored. The first substantial body of scholarly work on the CPUSA was the Communism in American Life series that appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Out of the 10 books in the series only three or four are much consulted today, and Draper wrote two of them. There are two reasons for the endurance of Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia. While ideologically obsessed critics such as Michael Brown would not agree, most historians recognize that Draper’s two volumes were characterized by exemplary scholarship. One of the most difficult tasks faced by the authors of the

Early Cold War Spies: The Soble-Soblen Case: Last of the Early Cold War Spy Trials

T he spy trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s fo cused on the theft of sensitive government information. Top secret documents, atomic espionage, and military technology had been stolen. The accused had held important government positions with knowledge of internal U.S. policy deliberations or had access to highly sensitive technological and military secrets, and the public was transfixed by the trials and their aftermath. The spy cases of the latter half of the 1950s drew less attention. The defendants had little to do with stealing significant government secrets, although that was not for lack of trying and in part reflected successful American counterespionage. Instead, the spies in the last cases had chiefly participated in the Soviet Unions clandestine campaign to suppress or discredit exiled Russian dissidents and other ideological enemies of the USSR. In many cases their actions were not strictly illegal under American law of that day but several of those involved had the blood of dissident Russians on their hands. And like the Rosenberg case, the Soble-Soblen spy trials featured siblings turning on each other. Jack Soble, Robert Soblen, and their confederates were tried for espionage against the United States, but the history of their apparatus goes back to Europe and Joseph Stalins rivalry with Leon Trotsky. A brilliant writer and Marxist theoretician, Trotsky became one of the Bolshevik heroes of the Russian Revolution by organizing the Red Army into an efficiently merciless military force and leading it to victory in the Russian Civil War.

Early Cold War Spies: Introduction: Early Cold War Spy Cases

A t the height of the early cold war, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, newspaper headlines repeatedly trumpeted the exposure of yet another nest of Communist spies or saboteurs who had infiltrated American laboratories or labor unions or government agencies. Many Americans worried that a Communist “fifth column,” more loyal to the Soviet Union than to the United States, had burrowed into their institutions and had to be exposed and removed. The issue of Soviet espionage became a U.S. obsession, and domestic security dominated public discourse. Legislative committees vied with one another to expose Communists. The executive branch labored to root out disloyal government employees. The courts wrestled with the balance between constitutional rights and societal self-protection. The trade-union movement expelled from its ranks those unions with hidden Communist leadership. Liberalism, the dominant political movement of the era, fought an internal civil war over whether Communists were legitimate participants in the New Deal coalition, a struggle that ended with the triumph of anti-Communist liberalism and the assignment of Communists and their allies to the fringes of politics. There was a widespread consensus that Soviet espionage was a serious problem, American Communists assisted the Soviets, and some high officials had betrayed the United States. But in the 1960s this consensus disintegrated. The use of anticommunism for partisan purposes by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s produced a backlash of incredulity about the extent of the domestic Communist problem.

Early Cold War Spies: Contents

1. Introduction: early Cold War spy cases 2. The precursors 3. Elizabeth Bentley: the case of the blond spy queen 4. The Alger Hiss - Whittaker Chambers case 5. The atomic espionage cases 6. Judith Coplon: the spy who got away with it 7. The Soble-Soblen case: last of the early Cold War spy trials 8. Conclusion: the decline of the ideological spy.