by Christopher Hitchens
The Nation, 24 August 1998
In Victor Navasky's friendly review of Ellen Schrecker's Many Are The Crimes, the most recent of her efforts to recast the history of the American Communist Party in a more indulgent light ["Dialectical McCarthyism(s)," July 20], there appears the following passage:
"In a fascinating aside, Schrecker reports that in October 1939 Trotsky accepted an invitation to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He postponed his appearance only because of the State Department's refusal to give him a visa. He was about to give a deposition to a member of the HUAC staff when he was assassinated."
And on July 29, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, historian Timothy Naftali revisited George Orwell's now-famous "list" of people he considered to be compromised by moral or intellectual softness on Stalin. Despite his odd assertion that Orwell's thumbnail sketches were "anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual," Naftali commended their honesty and courage and suggested that they should cause us to re-examine the naming of names by later HUAC witnesses like Elia Kazan. Navasky and aNaftali have both clouded the record.
In September 1939 Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, respectively secretary and national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States, appeared voluntarily as witnesses before HUAC and its then-chairman, Congressman Martin Dies of Texas. (Another member of the committee was Congressman Jerry Voohis of California, later to be a darling of "progressive and peace-loving forces" for his losing electoral tussle with Richard Nixon.) Browder and Foster, and a number of lesser CPUSA functionaries, used their time before the commmittee to denounce Trotsky and his followers as agents of the Gestapo and to call for their forcible suppression. As a result, on October 12, 1939, Trotsky was sent a cable in Mexico City by J.B. Matthews, the committee's chief investigator and himself a former supporter of the Socialist Party. The cable read, in part:
"The Committee desires to have a complete record on the history of Stalinism and invites you to answer questions which can be submitted to you in advance if you so desire. your name has been mentioned frequently by such witnesses as Browder and Foster. This Committee will accord you opportunity to answer their charges."
Trotsky was fresh from a triumphant appearance before the independent Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials, chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey, in the course of which he had helped expose those trials as a monstrous frame-up. He proposed at once to accept the invitation -- the Dies Committee had not used subpoena power on earlier witnesses -- and informed his American co-thinkers in the Socialist Workers Party of his decision. The party's political committee approved the move, over the strenuous opposition of James Burnham, who was always keen to be the purest and most dogmatic comrade. This opposition allowed Trotsky the opportunity to clarify his intentions:
"The Committee can be considered from two points of view: (a) as a parliamentary investigating committee, (b) as a kind of 'tribunal.' Will Comrade [Burnham] say that we should boycott parliamentarianism or that we should boycott the bourgeois courts?"
In a later essay on the same topic, Trotsky argued on principle against the suppression of either Stalinist or fascist groups, and lampooned the ridiculous idea that any activity or conception could be "un-American." But on the day after that essay was written, Dies withdrew his invitation to testify. (The State Department, even with Alger Hiss in its senior echelon, had nothing to do with the cancellation.) Trotsky commented that since he had explained, through his lawyer, Albert Goldman, "that my political aims of course had nothing in common with the reactionary political aims of Mr. Dies," the withdrawal was "a sordid procedure." Denying that he intended to make a written deposition, he said, "If Mr. Dies wishes my opinion in written form only, he can read my books." When he was assassinated, he was working on another document about the GPU's exploitation of the Comintern.
The case of Orwell has also been widely distorted. Having seen many of his friends murdered in Spain by agents of the Comintern, he confined himself to comments, usually both pithy and cryptic, about well-known public figures like Henry Wallace, J.B. Priestly and Stephen Spender. All the observations mirror precisely what he was saying openly (when he could get published) about the contemporary "fellow travelers." Having originated the "list" as a literary pastime with his friend Richard Rees, Orwell was asked for it, while undergoing his last illness, by a woman, Celia Kirwan, with whom he had been in love and to whom he once proposed marriage. She herself was an independent leftist, but worked for something named the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office and was sister-in-law of Orwell's friend Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon fictionalized the trial of Nikolai Bukharin. This is as different as could be from trying to save one's own hide by ratting on former comrades to a lawless Inquisition.
Within a few months of the Dies affair, the GPU proved Trotsky's direst prognostications correct by arranging his murder. The CPUSA, having hailed this bold move by the master-tactician in the Kremlin, went on to support the prosecution of the Socialist Workers Party under the Smith Act. The Hitler-Stalin pact, predicted by Trotsky alone after the Munich agreement, was broken, as he had also predicted, only by Hitler. James Burnham became a renegade and a McCarthyite, and his power-worshiping turncoat books received their first and most searching critique from George Orwell. These are among the elements in intellectual history that have been airbrushed by cold war mentalities on the soft left and the revisionist right. We still have no cultural understanding of the premature anti-Stalinists.
(With thanks to Martha Bridegam - AA)
