CHAPTER FOUR

Thousands who do not hesitate to speak their minds vigorously about other social philosophies or political regimes stop short, panic-stricken, when it comes to speaking their minds on communism.

—EUGENE LYONS1

Honestly, I anticipated a smoother landing, a gentle glide path coming to rest in a deep cushion of seamlessly interlocking historical arguments. Instead, there it is, washed up like some great, beached sea creature requiring emergency resuscitation: American statecraft as an appendage of Soviet strategy. What does that mean?

I like to think the answer is readily manifest in the mountains of intelligence evidence that have come into view in the last twenty years like a heretofore undiscovered range. That’s because I’ve already been out and about in them, clambering through the documentation scholar-explorers have amassed on their travels into virgin archival territory on my own quest to explain permanent apathy over Communism’s crimes and Soviet dissolution, and reflex animus toward anti-Communism’s “crimes” of exposure. Such “crimes,” from anti-Communist investigations to anti-Communist military campaigns, would rate as gallant, good-guy pushback were it not for that permanent apathy.

We can quickly get our bearings, at least, from these same mountains of evidence, old and new: “old” meaning, for example, the scores of U.S. government officials ID’d as Soviet agents by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers sixty-plus years ago, and “new” meaning, for example, recent confirmation that those chance, voluntary, could-just-as-easily-never-have-happened revelations were correct. In fact, as Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev like to put it, Bentley and Chambers “only knew the half of it,” adding, “KGB sources of whom they were unaware honeycombed the federal government and its scientific laboratories.”2

That debate, at least, is over. That is, Washington, D.C., was, yes, a giant hive of Soviet intelligence activity. A massive Communist conspiracy did, in fact, exist. There was indeed a “Red plot against America,” orchestrated by the KGB and related Soviet branches and executed by an extensive network of American traitors. Cold Warriors, who, notes Robert Conquest, were supposedly “opposed to the Soviet system because of some irrational predisposition” (hence the tag “rabid” anti-Communist), were right all along.3

That last bit still tears it, probably. While this is the logical implication of these newest sets of facts haltingly working their way into national consciousness, it devastates what is still, despite those facts, the conventional wisdom and venerated mythology. The earth is flat. McCarthy was wrong. A legacy of denial remains.

At the same time, a new paradox has emerged. Many of the bunk-busting experts seem to regard the recently opened book on Soviet penetration activities (the very book these same experts themselves opened) as a simultaneously closed chapter. That is, the so-called golden age of Soviet espionage, 1933–45, which coincides exactly with FDR’s White House years, comes across as an era with a beginning and, more important, an end. It stands as a long national nightmare we were fortunate enough to wake up from and leave behind. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan is quoted summing up, elder-statesman-style, in The Haunted Wood (2000), Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s masterful account of this golden age, “by the onset of the Cold War, the Soviet attack in the area of espionage and subversion had been blunted and turned back.” That means “blunted and turned back” by 1946, the conventional starting point of the Cold War. Moynihan further wrote, “By the close of the 1940s, Communism was a defeated ideology in the United States, with its influence in steep and steady decline, and the KGB reduced to recruiting thieves as spies.” In other words, case closed, and what a relief: Now readers are free to relish all of these perfectly thrilling, true tales of deception in books such as The Haunted Wood as guilt-free entertainments from history’s vaults, solutions to forgotten riddles and nothing more.

Weinstein and Vassiliev concur with Moynihan’s sweeping release, offering as corroborating evidence their assessment that the 1945 defections of both Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, a former Soviet code clerk in Canada, destroyed the Soviet spy structure, ending most Soviet spying.4 Nine years later, even the subtitle of Spies by Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev drives the same point home: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. Operative word: “fall.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Soviet espionage activities were not checked by the revelations and investigatory efforts of a motley crew of anti-Communists on watch and in the spotlight, or coming in from the cold. Certainly, though, Moynihan’s claim that Communist “influence” was over and done with by 1950, as well as the expert conclusion that the KGB withdrew from the secret American battlefield altogether, conveys a sense of both ideological and operational victory that is unwarranted. Such misplaced, dare I say, “triumphalism” is belied by the ever-flickering flames of Communist sympathy on the Left, flames that would supercharge the Marx-inspired “Long March” through America’s institutions that characterize the postwar era,5 and that continue to shape (betray) our national character, our outlook as a people, to this day. It is a creaky kind of closure that leaves the question open as to the malevolent source and poisonous nature of this ongoing ideological assault.

Indeed, the authors of Spies make note of the loose ends. Calling Elizabeth Bentley’s defection to the FBI “the single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America,” they describe its profound impact. Not only did Bentley correctly identify scores of Soviet sources—M. Stanton Evans pegs the total at around 150 network members or collaborators6—she also had the effect of refocusing the FBI’s counterespionage efforts. Her timing was just right. It was on November 7, 1945, when she presented herself to the FBI—coincidentally or not, an anniversary of Lenin’s 1917 takeover of the Russian Revolution. Both World War II and the US-USSR wartime alliance had come to an end, and hundreds of agents previously working on German and Japanese counterespionage were free and, more important, politically unleashed to focus on Communist networks. The authors continue:

“Her revelations triggered a wholesale withdrawal of experienced KGB officers that left the agency’s American stations woefully unprepared for the opening years of the Cold War, led to the public exposure of links between the American Communist Party and Soviet intelligence that destroyed the former’s use as an espionage Fifth Column, and additionally tainted the Communist movement with treason, contributing to its political marginalization.”7

If so—and it’s worth remembering that the links between the American Communist Party and Moscow were open to question if not disbelieved in many quarters when Haynes and Klehr dragged the evidence out of Soviet archives in the 1990s—why doesn’t this great American woman have a statue somewhere? Her alma mater, Vassar, would do nicely for starters. Just as Yale pays monumental homage to its own renowned spy, Nathan Hale, Vassar should pay homage to Bentley. Why not? The answer, of course, is obvious: On the American college campus, hothouse of Marxist pedagogues and incubator of American elites, a spy against the colonial British monarchy merits celebration whereas a spy against the colonial Communist dictatorship is anathema. In that Marx-influenced outlook lies our greatest problem: the anti-anti-Communist stranglehold on the narrative. Thus, not only is Elizabeth Bentley reviled in the academy, but Bard College in upstate New York has set up the “Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies,” and Columbia University boasts the “Corliss Lamont Chair of Civil Liberties.” The University of Washington is home to the “Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies,” which showcases “a celebration of Communists in Washington [State] history as well as a condemnation of anyone who dared criticize communism.”8

Furthermore, say Haynes and Klehr, “FBI investigations and voluminous congressional testimony supported Bentley’s story. The documents in Vassiliev’s notebooks, as well as the KGB cables deciphered by the Venona project, demonstrate unequivocally that Bentley told the truth” (emphasis added).

Vindication, yes; justice, no.

“Yet the consensus of several generations of American historians (backed by many journalists and other opinion leaders) routinely mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed her as a fraud and mountebank.”9

They still do. Which takes us back to Square One, or, rather, Stumbling Block One: the mentality—make that the psychosis—of historians, journalists, and opinion makers impervious and hostile to facts. Pages and books and stacks of facts. They are also even more impervious and even more hostile to the logical, often ineluctable implications of these facts, which are devastating to the conventional wisdom and venerated mythology. In this impaired mindset I think we see the ultimate impact of Communist influence, Communist conspiracy. The complete subversion of logic is what it did to us. In this sundering of fact from implication lies the end of Enlightenment thinking, the seedbed of cultural decline, the rise of the godless but nonetheless cultishly religious Left, and the disintegration of a faltering, also damaged Right. Into this same breach between fact and implication, between implication and judgment, has rushed antilogical, contrafactual “political correctness” and also amoral cultural relativism.

To grapple further with this concept, it’s crucial to understand that this secret assault, this domestic front of the Cold War—which I suggest we backdate to 1933, the onset of both Soviet espionage’s “golden age” and the Sovietophile Roosevelt administration (which conferred diplomatic recognition on the Soviet Union that year)—was always about far more than eavesdropping and filching scientific formulas or battle plans. The “other” side of espionage—subversion, deception, disinformation, provocation, and influence—has an intangible impact compared to “spying,” but its effects can be every bit as significant if not much more so. Nonetheless, history consistently minimizes or overlooks them altogether, and not just in the entertainment-oriented Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where the entire history of espionage is almost exclusively depicted as the literal theft of secrets. Despite their centrality to the forward thrust of the USSR—or, come to think of it, probably because of their centrality to the forward thrust of the USSR—these stealth tactics have never entered our understanding of our historical experience. When it comes to what we know as a people, with lore to remember and stories to pass on, and, more urgently, when it comes to how we react and act as people, with occasions to rise to and crises to solve, we tend to draw a big, fat blank.

Let’s examine that blank more closely. One simple, concrete measure of the success of Soviet subversion in America is the near-total absence of movies that dramatize arguably the primary historical drama of the last century: the struggle—military, guerrilla, spiritual, artistic, personal—against spreading Communist totalitarianism. It wasn’t until The Lives of Others came out in 2006 that we even saw the first serious cinematic treatment of Communist dictatorship in Europe—and that was made by a young German writer-director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was born in 1973. His youth was an indictment of one, two, three generations’ failure to withstand, let alone overcome, the influence of the Other Side on the most essential modes of thinking and expression.

In Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley plumbs the movie vaults to rattle around these gaping holes in celluloid memory. Thousands of Germans alone risked their lives to break out from behind the barbarically inhuman Berlin Wall and find freedom in the West, he writes, but only a single Hollywood offering (Night Crossing from Disney, 1982) ever dramatized this inhuman scenario. Similarly, the screen goes dark on perilous escapes closer to home—from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a Marxist regime that executed political rivals, imprisoned poets, and persecuted homosexuals. For serious depictions of the Soviet Union as a giant jail, there is Never Let Me Go (1953), starring Clark Gable and Gene Tierney, about an American journalist fighting the Soviet state for a visa for his Russian wife, but what else? While screen heroes inspired by Marxist sensibilities or Nazi villainy still abound, who can name one anti-Communist good guy from the movies? Meanwhile, Billingsley writes, “not a single Hollywood film has ever shown Communists committing atrocities.” Given the toll—an estimated one hundred million dead of Communism in the twentieth century according to The Black Book of Communism—that’s a mind-boggling omission. So far, I’ve only found one exception: Knight Without Armor, a gem of a 1937 movie starring Robert Donat as a British agent and Marlene Dietrich as a Russian aristocrat. In a raw scene of terror, Red Army forces mow down White Russian prisoners. Instead, when it came to the Terror Famine in the Ukraine or the Moscow show trials, Hollywood spewed out pro-Soviet propaganda with North Star (1943) and Mission to Moscow (1943).

Nicknamed “Submission to Moscow,” this latter movie was a landmark achievement in made-in-the-USA Soviet propaganda, and with good reason. It was based on the 1941 bestselling book of the same title by U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies, and Davies was a Soviet apologist’s Soviet apologist. For example, Davies was quick to reassure Washington in 1938 that when it came to the Moscow show trials, public travesties (enabled by future Nuremberg dignitaries) in which Stalin liquidated his political rivals on false charges, there was “proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.”10 Far from losing his career over such base propaganda, Davies remained a senior adviser on Soviet affairs to FDR and, later, to Harry Truman. Davies was not only a liar, however; he was also an ignoramus on such affairs, as he himself admitted to the State Department’s Elbridge Dubrow, who dutifully and officially recorded Davies’s comments in early 1943. What amounts to an extraordinary personal confession is worth quoting at length:

Mr. Davies in a very frank frame of mind stated he had been “very lucky” in the attitude he had deliberately adopted regarding the Soviet Union. He added that predicting international events and trends was really a matter of speculation and that he had been lucky in his speculation on the Soviet Union …

Remember, this is the go-to guy on Things Soviet.

In expanding this theme to some length Mr. Davies explained that because of his lucky predictions regarding the Soviet Union and particularly the prowess of the Red Army he had gained the reputation of being an expert on the Soviet Union. He stated that while he had endeavored to the best of his ability to learn all he could about that country during his comparatively short stay there [as ambassador!] he realized fully he did not have a complete and basic knowledge of the country.

Notice, however, that this didn’t stop him from dispensing advice.

He stated that because of this fact he felt that at the present time, particularly in connection with his statement of last Sunday regarding the trustworthiness of Stalin, he was “whistling by the graveyard” since he realized that in making such a prediction he was going contrary to the facts of the past but felt it was necessary to make such a statement in order to try to prepare the ground for a basic understanding [emphasis added].11

If wishing wouldn’t make it so, maybe a statement “going contrary to the facts” would.

So runs the thinking process of an influential American official in the midst of creating a lie with enormous implications—Stalin is trustworthy—and what do we discover? He’s operating on desperation, chicanery, and delusion. By chance, we have seen how a leading Soviet “expert” of the day abandoned the solid ground of facts for the perilous, looking-glass world of what-might-be-if, where even good intentions become a perverted basis for evil actions. We see it here in 1943, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union; we see similar thinking processes nearly seventy years later vis-à-vis Iraq and Afghanistan, where what-might-be-if strategies running contrary to Islamic realities have disastrously prevailed.12

I am not suggesting Davies’s intentions were good, however. He knew too much about the facts he saw fit to dismiss, and indeed appears to have been garishly compensated to dismiss them. How? Drop in on Hillwood, the Washington, D.C., estate of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post (Toasties), sometime and see. Open to the public, the Georgian-style mansion houses the largest collection of Russian decorative art outside Russia—Fabergé boxes and eggs, religious icons, tiaras, samovars, paintings, tea sets, Cossack daggers, jewelry, and stacks and stacks of gilded porcelain dishes. Much of it was picked up—no, shoveled up—by Post and Davies during their marriage in what Davies himself described as an “orgy” of buying that coincided with his tenure as Soviet ambassador from 1936 to 1938.13

Didn’t that coincide with the Moscow show trials?

You betchum. There’s a connection, too, as Robert C. Williams notes in his book Russian Art and American Money: “The wave of terror of 1937 had flooded the art market with items that could compromise their owners as being bourgeois, religious, or worse. The desperate were divesting themselves of incriminating evidence; the Davies were among the foreign beneficiaries.”14

The Davieses were well aware of the “desperate” and their “divestments.” On March 22, 1937, Joseph wrote a letter to his daughter describing the “interesting” state-run “commission shops.” They resemble “our antique shops,” he wrote, and “sell all manner of things brought in by their owners, including those taken over by the government from the ‘purged’ high officials.” (emphasis added). This disclosure is edited out of this letter as it appeared four years later in Davies’s book Mission to Moscow, Williams notes15—one more act of denial to make the world go around. Life, dinner parties—blood purges, rummaging through the art of the “purged”—went on.

Example: Davies wrote in his journal on March 13, 1938, that ho, hum, Bukharin was sentenced to death today, and that he and Marjorie had gone to the commission shop and “picked up a few odds and ends.” Two days later, Williams notes, Marjorie received for her fiftieth birthday, among other trinkets, a Fabergé topaz box set with gold and diamonds, an eighteenth-century gold perfume bottle, a malachite and lapis lazuli cigarette box, a silver samovar, and “a large painting of some happy collective farm workers”—nice socialist-realist ballast.16 Tim Tzouliadis IDs this painting as Peasant Holiday in the Ukraine in The Forsaken, his unforgettable 2008 account of American citizens abandoned in the Gulag by the U.S. government. The painting, Tzouliadis writes, “a cultural negation of a famine that killed five million” on view at Hillwood in the dining room, is “waiting for someone with sufficient grace to take it down.” When I checked in 2012, it was in storage.17

Marjorie, by the way, knew the score, too. Thirty years later, she told an interviewer she used to hear vans pulling up in the middle of the Moscow night, followed by women and children screaming as the NKVD made arrests and carted off loved ones. Marjorie also said she was regularly awakened by the sound of gunfire. “I know perfectly well they are executing a lot of people,” she told her husband the ambassador. “Oh no,” he replied. “I think it’s blasting in the new part of the subway.”18

I’ve wandered through Hillwood’s public rooms. The docents will tell you that this largest collection of Russian decorative art outside of Russia came together during those years Marjorie spent in Moscow trolling the commission shops. Davies, who was Husband No. 3 out of four, gets scant mention. It’s almost as though he has been purged from her biography. Speaking of purges—which the docents do not—Williams writes that during this period of Moscow show trials and blood purges, “the commission shops had about them the scent of death.”19 With that in mind, a visit to the collection becomes an unnerving experience. Display case upon display case of dishes—luminously colored porcelain, gold-leafed and often with royal crests—still give off the whiff of terror and doom Williams mentioned. It is too easy to imagine the great houses that were emptied of these luxuries, their owners murdered by the regime that helped the Davieses acquire them by the gross at a bargain price. Judging by the merely impressed faces of museum visitors, the treasures have become no more than an art lover’s pleasure, sundered from their bloody political provenance. This, too, has become just more “facts” to ignore, as Davies discussed back in 1943, to “prepare the ground for a basic understanding.”

What of the Davies statement, the one that prompted his personal confession to Dubrow, the foreign service officer who then placed it in the official State Department record? A few days earlier, on January 30, 1943, Davies had been quoted in The New York Times as having “deplored the ‘damned poor judgment’ of those who expressed fears at the time that if Russia’s army went through to Berlin, Premier Josef Stalin would dictate the terms of the peace and communize Europe.”

Such talk, Davies declared, was “bunk.”20

Really?

Such talk was clairvoyant, but what did it matter to those on a “mission” to and from Moscow? Both the Davies book and movie, conceived of as a means of persuading a reluctant U.S. public to support Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, were, as historian Todd Bennett writes, “conscious instruments” of White House foreign policy.21

Or was that conscious instruments of Soviet foreign policy?

“The only task of literature was that of fulfilling the social directions of Stalin,” said a Soviet poet quoted by Nicholas S. Timasheff in The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia,22 by way of explaining the role of the Soviet artist in the school of Socialist Realism. This was a role the Hollywood Ten, Twenty, Thirty, Hundred—proud “Stalinists”—took equally seriously. Which is another reason why we have no cinematic offerings on Patton’s Washington-thwarted push to liberate Prague in 1945, the 1944–47 forced repatriation to Soviet custody (and often death) of two million Soviet-claimed nationals who thought they’d escaped to freedom in the West, the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet military … Both the epic drama of Prague Spring (1968) and the Soviet-backed crackdown on Poland’s Solidarity movement (1981) seem to be backdrops for just one film apiece: the former in a fleeting sequence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the latter in To Kill a Priest, which, as Billingsley points out, “failed to detail the politics involved.”23

These aren’t “American” stories, you say?

What about the “lost” heroics of CIA agents the world over? Rambo aside, what about the truly lost Americans, thousands of American POWs from every American war involving the USSR, beginning with World War I, whom the U.S. government unconscionably and reprehensibly left behind, often to languish as medical guinea pigs in Soviet hell?24 Or the American citizens, unemployed Depression pilgrims and, worse, their American children, whom the U.S. government allowed to live out their time on earth as prisoners of the Gulag Archipelago?25 Stateside, what about the flatfoots, the G-men, who shadowed honest-to-goodness Communist conspirators? We have The House on 92nd Street, an interesting 1945 movie with FBI heroes trailing a Nazi spy ring operating on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but no movie features FBI heroes trailing myriad Communist spy rings operating in New York and Washington. What about the spies who came in from the cold, the ones forced into a life of unjust ignominy, and the ones who committed “suicide”? Or the congressional investigators who took intensive White House heat (à la Rep. Martin Dies) and press vilification to expose what they knew, despite the wall of liberal static, was treason? What about Joe McCarthy, who loved his country, tried to defend the Constitution, and, as the evidence, increasingly collected and sorted, tells us, was right every time?

These are American dramas, all right, but they all went down the memory hole, discarded as tainted goods unfit for public consumption, let alone dramatic treatment and thus a place in cultural memory. At this point, I must interject a personal note—so deeply personal I almost forgot to include it, not from shyness exactly, but due to its internalized place in my psyche. My father, Elliot West, a novelist and Hollywood writer, was a veteran of World War II. He cast his first vote for FDR somewhere in northern Europe in 1944 and his second vote for Henry Wallace in New York City in 1948. He later signed a petition against the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 and refused to sign a CBS loyalty oath around that same time (my mother doesn’t remember exactly when). No later than 1960, however, he had become unreservedly and outspokenly anti-Communist. Indeed, some of my earliest memories are of loud voices rising up the stairs from the living room, where a dinner party had become a heated argument over the Vietnam War, “youth” protests, rock ’n’ roll, Watergate, racial quotas—the greatest political hits of a tumultuous time.

In 1969, he sold a story to Houghton Mifflin to write a novel about a Berkeley professor and Spanish Civil War veteran who had had an Orwell-like epiphany on the evils of the Communist Left, which the professor saw reconstituted around him in the Vietnam antiwar movement. Within a week of signing the deal, some large number of Houghton Mifflin editors, presumably sympathetic if not linked to this same movement, threatened to resign en masse if this one book with a viewpoint they did not share stayed on the Houghton Mifflin list. To make a short story shorter, my dad wrote a completely different book that year—and never got back to that Berkeley novel. Later, in 1978–79, despite high-profile agency representation, he got nowhere faster with another anti-Communist novel, this one set amid what he called The Third Front—the Communist infiltration of Europe during World War II—and the forced “repatriation” of 2 million Soviet-claimed nationals, most of them to death and imprisonment in the USSR. The IBM Selectric–typed manuscript, two-thirds complete, sits in a box behind my desk—the perfect metaphor for all of the anti-Communist stories that remain unincorporated into our lore. Such masses of evidence have accumulated in odd, unsorted piles outside and separate from the narratives we “know.” I don’t think it is inapt here to quote Solzhenitsyn, who, considering the muzzled state of Russians still in the shadow of the Gulag, wrote, “And if we do not show that loathsomeness [of the state] in its entirety, then we at once have a lie. For this reason I consider that literature did not exist in our country in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Because without the full truth it is not literature” (emphasis in original).26

*   *   *

We Americans didn’t show “that loathsomeness” in its entirety, either, and, as I’ve noted before and remain struck by, we weren’t operating under threat of the Gulag. How did our process of literary selection, which certainly wasn’t always natural, take shape? Billingsley points, for example, to the efforts of one John Weber, a Marxist labor organizer whose party work in Hollywood included organizing the Screen Story Analysts Guild, a Communist-dominated group that read—i.e., vetted or nixed—movie scripts. Just for good measure, the vice president of the guild was another Communist Party member, Lillian Bergquist, who also served as the chief script analyst for the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), the Hollywood branch of the Communist-dominated Office of War Information (OWI).27

Incredibly, disastrously, Weber went on to head the literary department at the William Morris Agency, then the preeminent talent agency in town, another choke point from which to monitor the flow of work and workers (writers). Such control was a point of strategy, but it was also a point of pride, prompting the odd indiscreet revelation—and thank goodness. One prize gaffe came from Oscar-winning screenwriter and Communist Dalton Trumbo, later a poster boy for Hollywood martyrdom during what we think of as the Hollywood Blacklist days, the period in the 1950s during which studios and producers officially “blacklisted” Hollywood Communists conspiring with Moscow to overthrow the U.S. government.

But … isn’t that treason?

Trumbo’s statement, made in 1946 in The Worker (petted Hollywood screenwriters are “workers,” too!), brags about a de facto anti-Communist blacklist that effectively prevented stories told from the anti-Communist perspective from getting to the silver screen. There might be a dearth of “progressive” movies on-screen, Trumbo admits, “but neither has Hollywood produced anything so untrue or reactionary as The Yogi and the Commissar, Out of the Night, Report on the Russians, There Shall Be No Night, or Adventures of a Young Man.” He goes on to tick off a few more significant anti-Communist manifestos, gloating over their never-to-be-exploited commercial value. “Nor does Hollywood’s forthcoming schedule include such tempting items as James T. Farrell’s Bernard Clare, Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, or the so-called biography of Stalin by Leon Trotsky.”28

Clearly, there existed a Hollywood blacklist before there existed the Hollywood Blacklist. Trumbo’s statement breaks down to a basic message: Even if “progressive” (read: Stalinist) movies are tough to put over, take heart, comrade; every “untrue,” “reactionary,” “Trotskyist” hot property that comes along and gets rejected is a victory for Mother Russia. Some of those titles, it’s important to note, preceded the U.S. wartime alliance with the USSR (1941–45), coming along during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–41). This is something to keep in mind the next time tears are ordered up for a Hollywood Blacklist pity party. The fact is, Dalton Trumbo, martyr of the 1950s “Red Scare,” hero to the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement, was himself “a blacklister before he was himself blacklisted.”29

Further, the Communist Party maintained an index of proscribed works Party members were not “allowed” to read. In I Chose Freedom, Victor Kravchenko describes the inner life of “totalitarian subjects abroad” who “remained the terrorized subjects of a police-state” and, as such, had to contend with censorship and other restrictions even while stationed in America. Any indiscretion—reading a Russian-language publication deemed “counterrevolutionary” was the worst offense, but almost any American newspaper was suspect (exceptions: The Daily Worker, PM, The Nation, and The New Republic)—could mean political suicide or even worse.30

Even more shockingly, similar restrictions were supposed to apply to American Communists—even tanned and lotus-eating Hollywood types. Ex-Communist Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk relates in his 1996 memoir Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten, the following exchange he had with producer Adrian Scott near the beginning of their fruitful collaboration that produced such films as Cornered, Crossfire, and Murder, My Sweet. There they were, two young princes of Hollywood, strolling across the RKO lot one day, when Dmytryk mentioned he’d been reading an interesting book.

“What book,” asked Scott.

“Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,” I replied.

Adrian stopped short, and, as I turned to face him, he spoke in a subdued voice. “Good God!” he said. “Don’t ever mention that to anyone in the group!”

“Why not?” I was honestly puzzled.

“It’s on the list!” he breathed, looking a little embarrassed. “Koestler is corrupt—a liar. He is an ex-communist, and no member of the Party is allowed to read him.”31

Dmytryk was flabbergasted. Not only had he been unaware of such a “list,” he hadn’t known Scott was a Party member. (That this was a revelation demonstrates the effectiveness of “cells” in maintaining Party secrecy.) Allowed by whom? Dmytryk wanted to ask, but he writes that he didn’t say anything. In the end, of course, no movie fan was “allowed” to see Koestler’s gripping indictment of Communism on the silver screen, either—or any other anti-Communist story like it.

The backstory of Out of the Night, another title on Trumbo’s blacklist, is similarly revealing. Although it is a forgotten book today, Princeton literature professor John V. Fleming includes this memoir of Communist and Nazi intrigue and adventure by the pseudonymous Jan Valtin, whose real name was Richard Krebs, among the four “anti-communist manifestos” that shaped the Cold War.32 Appearing in January 1941, Out of the Night was a publishing sensation, teased in two successive issues of Life magazine, featured by the Book of the Month Club, and chosen as a Reader’s Digest book selection. It would be a bestselling book of 1941. It would also be one of the last trade book exposés of Communist crime published until 1945, an information vacuum that neatly coincided with our wartime alliance with Stalin.

In 1942, Bennett Cerf, the storied chief of Random House, would actually propose that the American publishing industry withdraw from sale all books critical of the Soviet Union.33 While this frankly totalitarian proposal to pull pre-“politically incorrect” books from the shelves did not go into effect, it highlights both the receptivity to Soviet propaganda and the hostility to the anti-Communist critique that were prevalent in literary circles. Indeed, in December 1941, publishing titan Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers, pulled back already distributed review copies of Leon Trotsky’s critical biography of Stalin (so contemptuously dismissed by Oscar-winning Commie flack Trumbo).

The story of the publication of the Trotsky book was an epic in itself. As the editor’s note to the edition finally released in 1945 rather sanguinely notes, “Like most authors, Trotsky was more optimistic than accurate about the expected date of completion, and his case was aggravated not only by the excessive optimism of the revolutionist and military leader but by continual harassments and attempts on his life” (emphasis added).

On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was still at work on his Stalin biography when an assassin sent by Stalin plunged an ice pick into his head, splattering his manuscript with his own blood. Some parts of the book were utterly destroyed in the ensuing struggle. Still, Harper assembled, edited, and published a finished book by December 12, 1941, when—historical significance, epic effort, blood, and murder aside—the publisher decided to consign it all to the memory hole. Stalin murdered Trotsky? Cass Canfield murdered Trotsky’s Stalin, But with finesse. In his note calling back the Trotsky book from public view, flagged by George Orwell in a letter to his English publisher (shortly before Orwell began writing 1984), Canfield rather elegantly wrote to prospective reviewers, “We hope you will co-operate with us in the matter of avoiding any comment whatever regarding the biography and its postponement.”34

Any comment whatever. The Trotsky recall took place just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. Harper also withdrew My Year in the USSR by New York Times correspondent G. E. R. Gedye, while Doubleday, Doran canceled the spring publication of One Who Survived, the reminiscences of ex-Soviet diplomat and military officer Alexander Barmine. These publishing recalls were reported in the March–April 1942 edition of Partisan Review, which, decrying the wartime pressures being exerted on political speech, also announced the creation of a new department, “Dangerous Thoughts,” to “give publicity to the more significant instances of suppression of free thought from month to month.”35

Did these appalling acts of censorship serve the “greater good”—namely, the wartime alliance with USSR to defeat Hitler? That’s the consensus, but I reject it. Why? The effect, intended by all too many, was to harness the evil of Hitler to deny the evil of Stalin. In the end, it was a big, fat load of this “greater good” argument that strengthened and perpetuated a greater evil—the USSR, the true victor of World War II due in large part to the successful campaign in the West to whitewash Communist crime and to coddle Communist criminals.

This wasn’t just an American whitewash. Across the pond, Churchill’s 1932 book Great Contemporaries, a collection of biographical essays, was crudely bowdlerized in a 1941 reprint that cut out—purged—two opponents of Stalin, Trotsky and Boris Savinkov. It further censored an acerbic critique of George Bernard Shaw’s notorious 1931 visit to the Communist regime in Moscow in which no Soviet lie was too big to swallow. This brings to mind the famous story of how in 1953, following the trial and execution of Lavrenty Beria, former NKVD chief, editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia sent out a notice to subscribers urging them to cut out the Beria entry “with a small knife or razor blade” and replace it with an essay on the Bering Sea, which the editors thoughtfully provided. So how can we deride the Soviets as heavy-handed censors without also deriding ourselves?36

Returning to Out of the Night, from the Hollywood perspective, it had it all—“adventure, danger, suspense, violence, tear-jerking romance, steamy sex,” writes Fleming, besides being “an eventually patriotic and morally uplifting true story for our times.” In terms of anti-Communist appeal it had everything, too: a vast criminal conspiracy directed by Moscow; Party orthodoxy rigidly enforced from within by internal spies and purges; parallels between Stalin’s regime and Hitler’s regime, which were (and remain) the biggest no-no of all. In Trumbo’s Hollywood, this book was DOA—“untouchable,” Fleming writes, and even before Nazi Germany attacked Communist Russia on June 22, 1941.

Three days later, on June 25, noted Hollywood producer and director Albert Lewin wrote a letter describing what Fleming would later call the “informal censorship” that suppressed anti-Communist works in Hollywood: “Although ‘Out of the Night’ would not be an easy book to make into a picture, I thought it would surely have sold long before this because of the enormous popularity of the book. I have made some inquiries and have been told that there was considerable interest among some producers, but that Washington indicated its disapproval out of a desire not to offend Russia” (emphasis added).

No word, alas, on how “Washington indicated its disapproval,” or who did the indicating. Lewin’s letter continues, “Evidently the attack on Russia will make it still more unlikely that anyone would want to market an anti-Communist picture now.”37

Due to the German attack on the USSR, Lewin predicted it would be “still more unlikely” that Out of the Night would ever have any Hollywood takers. This suggests the Washington campaign against the book had begun earlier, during the period of Soviet-Nazi alliance as codified in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Somebody, as Trumbo implied, didn’t want anti-Communist stories made into movies no matter what. So they weren’t.

The net effect of these pro-Soviet machinations? In plain Brooklynese, we wuz robbed. As a culture, we were stripped of defining events and people, markers and guides that should have been familiar signposts along the nation’s path, not historical specialties waiting to be discovered (or not) via academic research. These books, these stories, all of these people, were ideological casualties of the Communist conspiracy, and their losses reflect our own. These omissions contribute to the funhouse-mirror reflection of our distorted worldview. We struggle to make sense of an artificially incomprehensible void, unenlightened by the repetition of empty buzz words (“McCarthyism”) and the appearance of 2-D villains (“Red-baiters”). Truly, this is “the black hole of antiknowledge,” where the twentieth-century struggle against Communism—against the “Red menace,” the “Communist peril”—is sucked in and swallowed up. Recent research may validate the use of such terminology as “menace” and “peril,” but it is “Have you left no sense of decency?” that echoes on in our collective consciousness, even if it makes no sense at all—and never did.38

Welcome to the culture of omission, with gaps, blanks, and disconnects throughout. Such holes tend to go unnoticed, but sometimes they trip us up, and perplexingly so. At the end of The Sword and the Shield (1999), a landmark compendium of files copied from KGB archives, Cambridge don and doyen of intelligence historians Christopher Andrew and ex-KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin note the fact, apparently puzzling to them, that most historians ignore intelligence history, including Venona and other such archives. This has meant, they continue quite logically, that the standard studies of the Cold War, biographies of Stalin, and histories of the Soviet Union in general have overlooked the central role played by the operations and achievements of the intelligence and security organs of the Soviet state, chief among them the KGB. Listing some historical works notable for such omissions, the authors further note, “In many studies of Soviet foreign policy, the KGB is barely mentioned.”39

This fact is not only astonishing, it is nonsensical—“physics without mathematics, if you will,” as KGB historian John J. Dziak wrote, describing exactly the same phenomenon a decade earlier in Chekisty: A History of the KGB.40 Andrew and Mitrokhin go on, almost ingenuously, to take a stab at analysis: “Though such aberrations by leading historians are due partly to the overclassification of intelligence archives…, they derive at root from what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’—the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing view of the world. For many twentieth-century historians, political scientists and international relations specialists, secret intelligence has been just such a concept” (emphasis added).41

It’s impossible to say whether Andrew and Mitrokhin realize what a damning indictment of “twentieth-century historians” they have just issued, despite the ameliorating tag of empathy: the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts … It’s as if to say, there these twentieth-century historians were, poor babies, busily fitting the facts into their “existing view of the world,” when, all of a sudden, KGB history reared its view-changing head. What else could they do? Like a Hollywood producer turning down Out of the Night in deference, direct or indirect, to the local Hollywood and White House commissars, or like an Allied prosecutor at Nuremberg editing his indictment to protect Stalin’s legal and moral vulnerabilities, historians have scotched evidence that would displease these same masters—and would also undermine their own “existing view of the world.” Andrew and Mitrokhin sum up this existing worldview this way: It is “the common assumption of a basic symmetry between the role of intelligence in East and West.”42

This “common assumption” requires either taking a chain saw to the record or wearing a blindfold permanently. So what if we miss the KGB effect on Soviet foreign policy? Undermining that “common assumption” of “basic symmetry” would mean shattering the mirror imagery between the U.S. and the USSR in general, and we mustn’t have that. End of mirror imagery, good-bye nuanced palette of le Carréllian grays with which such historians have painstakingly painted a murky age of moral and other equivalences between the Free World and totalitarianism. End of nuanced palette, good-bye age of moral and other equivalences. Maybe even good-bye moral relativism, too.

So what if, as Andrew and Mitrokhin point out, “the Cheka and its successors”—GPU, OGPU, NKVD, KGB (today FSB)—“were central to the functioning of the Soviet system in ways that intelligence communities never were to the government of Western states”? So what if, as the authors write, they “were central to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy as well as to the running of the one-party state”?43

One-party state?

Heavens, get that one-party state out of my existing view of the world. It’s wrecking my common assumption of basic symmetry.

Soldiering on, Andrew and Mitrokhin seem fairly hip to the problem, but then soft-soap its cause: “The failure by many Western historians to identify the KGB as a major arm of Soviet foreign policy is due partly to the fact that many Soviet policy aims did not fit Western concepts of international relations.”44

That’s some failure. That’s some way to dress up the cause of that failure, too. “Western concepts of international relations” is a nice way of describing the alternate reality created by Soviet “agitprop”—agitation and propaganda—which, to varying degrees, is precisely what was devastated by the evidence Andrew and Mitrokhin amassed in their own book. It is such evidence that so discombobulated the intellectual elite’s “existing view of the world,” from Hollywood studios to New York publishing houses to faculty lounges, with precious few exceptions.

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror—twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

How could that be? Without understanding the extent of Communist penetration into the decision-and-opinion-making echelons of the West—and, as important, into the decision-and-opinion-making minds of the West—the question is baffling, a mystery without clues, a historical brick wall. From our vantage point, blanks and all, it is almost impossible to comprehend how it could have been that our relatives and forebears, apparently sentient, apparently decent Americans, could have looked on in neutral silence as the Soviet state, year after year, starved and brutalized and enslaved millions of its own people to death—news of which did indeed spread throughout the West despite Soviet censorship and prevarication, although it remained outside consensus.47 Dalton Trumbo, as we’ve seen, took pride in the silence on the Hollywood front. He’s hailed as a martyr of idealism. Historians, as we’ve seen, looked the other way, strenuously, to protect their precious “basic symmetry.” They remain figures of respect and authority. How—and when—did these and other inversions of logic and morality, common sense and common decency, begin to take place?

Two extraordinary and very different works by journalist Eugene Lyons take us a little closer to the answer. One is The Red Decade (1941), “an informal account of Bolshevism in our country,” as he described it, and the other is Assignment in Utopia (1937), his memoir of his personal odyssey from committed fellow traveler of Communism and dedicated apologist of the Soviet experiment to outspoken and remorseful anti-Communist. Where The Red Decade surveys the Communist penetration of the opinion-and-decision-making echelons of the West, Assignment in Utopia examines its effect on the Western opinion-and-decision-making mind—Lyons’s own—and how the ideology, once internalized, acts on conscience, reason, and also the survival instinct. His experience is singularly instructive.

Through Lyons’s reflections we see from the inside looking out what we usually try to understand from the outside looking in. As a general memoir of disenchantment with Communism, Lyons’s book is by no means unique; there is a rich literature on the subject.48 However, as a working journalist, a gentleman of the press (“mainstream media” came much later), Lyons, who served as United Press Agency’s Moscow correspondent between 1928 and 1934, offers an uncommon perspective on ghastly, seminal events, and how and why they were reported to the outside world, or not.

As Lyons’s fervor for the Soviet experiment waned, his insights into the Communist state’s use of terror—and American willingness to excuse such terror—grew and sharpened until they became personally unbearable. Not the typical reaction, alas. In tracing the fissures of doubt that would slowly develop into crevasses large enough to swallow up his Communist loyalties, Lyons adds to our understanding of how the culture of omission we have inherited evolved, and how its creators actually operated.

Lyons perfectly sums up the internal workings of what we know now as “media bias,” at that time a largely new phenomenon in terms of both ideological impetus and global impact:

In the first year or so of my Russian sojourn [1928], my imported convictions were a sieve that sifted events for me; reporting was no more than a physical job of finding and transmitting “desirable” information; I needed only a little dexterity in wishing away or explaining away the rejected materials.

Kind of like one of Andrew and Mitrokhin’s see-no-KGB historians.

Later, when doubts obtruded themselves and my instincts were more and more hurt, the sifting became more and more a mental effort, paid for in self-reproach.49

Such “self-reproach” turned out to be the undeniable thorn of conscience, but it could just as easily have been the ever-gratifying tickle of masochistic torment. Had things gone differently, he writes, had he not, specifically, returned to Russia after a 1931 sojourn in the States for his final, ultimately therapeutic dose of Communist reality, he might have “evolved a new, if badly scarred and patched enthusiasm.” Later, he would think that by returning for ultimate disillusionment he had “escaped something vaguely shameful,” and that had he not returned to Russia for the second half of his Moscow tour, “I might have ended by contributing high-minded lies to the New Masses and slept happily ever after.”50

Still, self-extrication was a long process. Lyons writes of self-censoring pressures that sound like a set of adolescent anxieties: “the anxiety to ‘belong’ in the dominant social circles in Bolshevik Moscow, the fear of being rejected by the only circles that mattered to me at home.” These “played their roles in keeping me ‘friendly,’” he writes, along with more concrete, professional concerns.51 Only “friendly” correspondents could remain in Russia. The slightest deviation from the Party line could draw a meaningful official warning, for example, in a sudden inaccessibility of Soviet officials, or a delay in obtaining travel visas. Indeed, the totalitarian culture of censorship that Westerners—press, diplomats, businessmen, industrialists—came all too quickly to accommodate was probably the key source of lasting and corrosive moral compromise. Which reminds us of the crucial role free speech plays in a moral society.

S. J. Taylor, in her frank biography of New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, the most notorious Soviet apologist in the Moscow press corps, reveals an early example of this phenomenon. In mid-1932, she writes, after British business interests sent a Canadian agricultural expert named Andrew Cairns to study the effects of forced collectivization on Soviet agriculture, the results of the study—“a record,” British ambassador Sir Esmond Ovey wrote at the time, “of over-staffing, overplanning and complete incompetence at the centre; of human misery, starvation, death and disease among the peasantry … Workers are left to die in order that the Five Year Plan shall at least succeed on paper”—was suppressed by this same British ambassador. Taylor writes, “In a somewhat puzzling statement, Ovey wrote, ‘The pity of it is that this account cannot be broadcast to the world at large as an antidote to Soviet propaganda in general.’”

Why ever not? Weren’t these facts exactly what the world desperately needed as an antidote to poisonous Soviet propaganda? Wasn’t this report exactly what the peasants, already dying of starvation by the tens of thousands, were owed? Taylor duly explains the apparent reason the publication of Cairns’s report was “postponed” (à la Trotsky’s Stalin bio censored by Cass Canfield). The British Foreign Office wanted to send Cairns back to Russia the following spring—presumably to write another report that would be similarly “postponed”—“but because of the controversial nature of Cairns’s first report they feared he would be refused a return visa if it were published.”52 In the end, Cairns did not return; the report languished unpublished. Western complicity in the Terror Famine, the Stalinist assault on the peasantry that killed an estimated six million people between 1930 and 1933, may be seen as having been, from the start, a matter of business as usual.

Where true believers such as Eugene Lyons were concerned, however, self-censorship wasn’t only a matter of narrow tactical calculation. He writes of “the bugaboos of loyalty and consistency, the need to safeguard my faith; a frantic desire to save my investment of hope and enthusiasm in the Russian revolution”53—motivations that more than anything else speak to an unbecoming human weakness for self-validation, an ego-driven cause all too many find irresistible even as they end up clinging to fraud like an anchor of self-esteem. A man’s faith in Communism must be justified simply because it is his faith. It is his “investment,” as Lyons put it, that must be protected along with his “consistency.” How could I have been so dumb is the neon-flashing subtext to be blacked out by heavy overlays of falsehood or “carefully sifted” truth. Thus Lyons safeguarded his faith, and he succeeded, publicly, for some years after doubts had set in.

On returning home to the U.S. in 1931, Lyons was something of a celebrity for having scored the first, two-hour, sit-down interview with the elusive Stalin himself (much to Timesman Duranty’s consternation). “It was,” Lyons writes, describing the 1930s equivalent of 24/7 media coverage, “front-paged throughout the world, quoted, editorialized, put on the radio by the ‘March of Time’ as one of the ranking ‘scoops’ in recent newspaper history.” It was also, he confesses, “a magnificent opportunity frittered away.” Amid the flood of congratulatory telegrams from around the world, Lyons confesses to having been “far from exultant.”

I thought of all the searching questions which I might have asked but had been too idiotic and too timid and too grateful to ask and I was overwhelmed with a conviction of failure. I had failed to confront Stalin with the problems which were by this time weighing on my own conscience—the use of terror as a technique of government, the suppression and punishment of heretical opinion within the ranks of devoted communists, the persecution of scientists and scholars, the distortion of history to fit the new politics, systematic forced labor, the virtual enslavement of workers and peasants in the name of the socialism which was to emancipate them.54

From this extraordinary mea culpa comes a sense of the grotesque mismatch that pit vain and weak mortals against the inhuman, supernatural evil of Stalin, starkly and terrifyingly apparent in 1931 even as the majority of his twenty million victims still lived. But maybe that’s giving the journalist a sentimental pass. I confess to liking Lyons from his work, and admiring his post facto honesty that drove him to reveal himself in such a brilliantly unflattering light. Such revelation helps us learn how these omissions, these collusions, these twistings of the truth come about.

“In my purely professional thrill of a Stalin interview, I had been content to remain politely on the lacquered statistical surface of the Soviet scene.”55

All the way home across Europe and the Atlantic in 1931—the land and sea odyssey back to the safe haven of the Statue of Liberty, New York City—Lyons “wrestled with the problem of how much of what I had seen and what I had thought I should tell,” a problem that reveals his internalization of the totalitarian taboo. Such candor is refreshing if also disturbing. As a vital source of public information, Lyons was torn by a dilemma that was in fact no private matter, particularly once United Press dispatched its star correspondent on a public lecture tour (having plugged his recent series summing up his three years in Russia in foot-high letters on delivery trucks: THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA). It was here that Lyons succumbed to emotional currents he felt emanating from his Depression-era audiences. “I had intended to paint a more realistic picture,” he writes of a lecture stop in Youngstown. “But the simple believing people, their eyes pleading for reassurance,… could not be denied.”56 And remember, Lyons had already concluded (and declared privately) that the USSR was a terror-state.

It all seemed far away from Youngstown and the other twenty cities in the throes of economic crisis that Lyons toured in the northeast, so far away that, he writes, “your mind imposed its own favorite designs upon the Soviet contradictions, choosing, discarding, arranging, hastily repairing the damage wrought by three years of immersion.” He continues, “Whatever your American lectures may have done to the listeners, they almost convinced the lecturer. By compromising with your experiences you nearly sneaked back into the comfortable groove of uncritical faith … [The] dead are dead and the maimed are dying, and what if another million dung-colored Russians are driven into the marshes and forests and deserts, if the great idea marches forward.”57

Chilling words. After all, “What if?” here means “So what?” Anything to keep the “great idea” moving forward—particularly if it were only millions of “dung-colored Russians” standing in the way. It’s hard not to hear a shocking echo: The dead are dead and the maimed are dying and what if another million dung-colored Jews are driven into the ovens just a few years later, if the great idea marches forward …

But that’s different.

Is it?

The difference I see is that the Nazi totalitarian “great idea” was always inseparable from its toll, but the Soviet totalitarian “great idea” was always separated and protected from its toll. We never ask why one Holocaust matters when multiple holocausts do not, why one “great idea” of totalitarianism was only totalitarian and the other was only great. We condemn the German population of a police state for looking the other way from and doing nothing about Jewish annihilation under way in Nazi concentration camps; we never think to question ourselves living large in a free world and looking the other way from and saying nothing about ethnic, political, class, and religious annihilation under way in Soviet concentration camps. This split vision derives from the triumph of Communism’s unceasing world revolution against “traditional” morality, objective morality, a morality of fixed standards by which men navigate, or at least perceive the shoals of evil and treacherous behaviors. Such morality tells us there is no separating the idea from its toll. This is the lesson we have erased from our slate.

In Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1934 novel Winter in Moscow, a bitter send-up of the expat community in Moscow and its indifference to what Robert Conquest would later document as the Terror Famine that killed millions in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, one character observes starving peasants begging for bread. To Muggeridge, who had arrived in Moscow in 1932 “effervescing with Soviet sympathies” that would rapidly go flat (within just a few months, as fellow journalist William Henry Chamberlin observed58), “the idea,” which others used to justify or ignore the famine, meant nothing, as his character in the novel makes clear: “Whatever else I may do or think in the future, he thought, I must never pretend that I haven’t seen this. Ideas will come and go, but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something I have seen and understood.”59

On his real-life return to the USSR, Eugene Lyons would see and eventually understand. He writes of finding the familiar old mind games, the sifting techniques, no longer effective on his return. “With every week after my return I came to feel more ashamed of my mealy-mouthed caution while at home,” he writes. “Deep under those excuses I had made for myself, I now was forced to admit, had been the subconscious desire to remain persona grata with the masters, retain my job. I was protecting my status as a ‘friendly’ correspondent. And at that I had just about crawled under the line.”60

There Lyons was to stay at least long enough to participate in a seminal event in Soviet crime and Western turpitude: what Robert Conquest would much later identify as the very first successful implementation of the “Big Lie”—the concerted assault on truth to form world opinion, in this original case, to deny the regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine. It was a Faustian turning point.

Conquest writes:

On the face of it, this [deception] might appear to have been an impossible undertaking. A great number of true accounts reached Western Europe and America, some of them from impeccable Western eyewitnesses …

But Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly calls the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be readily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand, and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive falsehood on the other, were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively instructed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.

Flat denial plus a corpus of positive falsehood: Sounds like another black hole of antiknowledge, another corroding attack on the basis of the Enlightenment itself. Conquest describes this concerted effort to deceive the world about the truth of the state-engineered famine, Stalin’s brutal war on the peasantry, as “the first major instance of the exercise of this technique of influencing world opinion.”61

This instance, then, was a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century, a moment in which history itself, always subject to lies and colorations, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian innovation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, weaponized, by KGB-directed armies of dezinformatsiya agents.

What do I mean by “armies”? Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of intelligence in Communist Romania, told me, “During the Cold War, more people in the Soviet bloc worked for the dezinformatsiya machine than for the Soviet army and defense industry put together. The bloc’s intelligence community alone had over one million officers (the KGB had over 700,000) and several million informants around the world. All were involved in deceiving the West—and their own country—or in supporting the effort.”62

That came later. It had to start somewhere, though, and so it did. By 1936, after civil war broke out in Spain, George Orwell could sense a sea change in the writing of history, of news, of information, of the handling of what he called “neutral fact,” which heretofore all sides had accepted. “What is peculiar to our age,” he wrote, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.” Or even that it should be, I would add. For example, he wrote, in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on World War I, not even twenty years past, “a respectable amount of material is drawn from German sources.” This reflected a common understanding—assumption—that “the facts” existed and were ascertainable. As Orwell personally witnessed in Spain, this notion that there existed “a considerable body of fact that would have been agreed to by almost everyone” had disappeared. “I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History ended in 1936,’ at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism generally, but more specifically of the Spanish Civil War.” He continued, “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed … I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”

Then he hits it precisely: “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’” (emphasis added).63 Ideology over all.

That had to start somewhere, too. The confession-minded Eugene Lyons seems to know where. In fact, he was present at the creation. Chapter 15 in Lyons’s book Assignment in Utopia is called “The Press Corps Conceals a Famine.” It lays out the basics about what he called in 1937 “the whole shabby episode of our failure to report honestly the gruesome Russian famine of 1932–1933.” This group failure is best but by no means exclusively characterized by the eye-rolling bunk Pulitzer Prize–winning Walter Duranty would cable home as news to The New York Times, which was in fact Soviet-sanctioned propaganda designed to justify a brutal and unprecedented war to destroy millions of peasants. To familiarize ourselves with Duranty’s techinque, here from March 1, 1933, is how he rationalized the forced, violent uprooting of one million peasant families to all but certain death in penal colonies in the north:

The Russian masses may and do grumble about shortages and other difficulties, but there is no sign they are horrified, alarmed or even disapproving at the sight of “removals” of recalcitrant peasants …

They accept the Bolshevist explanation that “class enemies” must be defeated and made powerless, and, as far as this writer can see, they accept it readily as a natural and indeed excellent thing.64

Thus, Westerners, free men as defined by the Magna Carta, the Rights of Man, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the American Way (even though Duranty himself was English), capitulated to the totalitarian machine. They listened to and amplified the agitprop of the “Bolsheviki” and the nomenklatura (priviledged bureaucracy). When it came time to face the Terror Famine, they preferred to construct their own, pre-Orwell memory hole to rid themselves of the truth.

It is an extraordinarily wide press conspiracy that Lyons goes on to describe, all of it designed to undermine the veracity of one man, one outlier, a lone truth teller who came, who saw, who reported—and, most important, made headlines. This singular person was twenty-seven-year-old Gareth Jones, a brilliant, Russian-speaking, Welsh journalist who had served as David Lloyd George’s secretary, and whose initial, attention-grabbing statements to the press on reaching Germany, after extensively debriefing his journalistic colleagues in Moscow and completing a secret trek through the starving areas of the USSR, brought the famine into the light. Exposure. His sensational report was carried in many newspapers including The New York Evening Post, The London Evening Standard, and The Manchester Guardian, where another, ultimately more enduringly famous truth teller, Malcolm Muggeridge, had just published several mainly overlooked articles about the state-organized mass starvation in progress.65

“Everywhere was the cry, There is no bread. We are dying,” Jones told the world, which drove frantic editors back home to send a flurry of cables asking their Moscow correspondents why they couldn’t hear that same cry. “But the inquiries coincided with preparations under way for the trial of the British engineers,” Lyons explains, referring to the now-forgotten Metro-Vickers show trial that would see six British engineers convicted of espionage and ejected from the country. This, according to Lyons, became the correspondents’ overriding concern because there was a “compelling professional necessity,” he writes, to remain on “friendly” terms with the censors, at least for the duration of the trial.

A paper-thin excuse, it would seem, but the cover-up organized to discredit Gareth Jones was airtight. Lyons writes, “Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.”66

Like a scene out of Comrade X—a classic romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr set amid the Moscow press corps (which, believe it or not, packs grim elements of truth about the Soviet regime, no doubt to Dalton Trumbo’s consternation)—the real-life correspondents gathered in one reporter’s Moscow hotel room one evening in the spring of 1933. There, chief censor Comrade Umansky, “the soul of graciousness,” Lyons writes ironically, joined them. Due to the upcoming British engineers’ trial, incredibly, Umansky had leverage over the correspondents’ famine coverage, or so the men believed—or so they wanted to believe. Indeed, in Lyons’s eyes, “it would have been professional suicide to make an issue of the famine at this particular point.” So, he writes, through “much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take … a formula of denial” was worked out among them.

“We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that dismissed Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski [hors d’oeuvres], Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.”67

A more morally sordid scene is hard to imagine. As for that “formula of denial” the correspondents worked out, Duranty would take the lead, as usual, and write a first-person smackdown of Jones in his next-day report—headline: RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING—dismissing the Welshman’s “big scare story” in The New York Evening Post as hasty, wrong-headed, anti-Soviet thinking. Duranty admitted there was a lack of bread in the villages but put this fact down to mismanagement, inexperience, even “conspiracy.” He also inserted his chilling, trademark line: “But—to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Indeed, Duranty went on to compare the Soviets’ indifference to “casualties” in their “drive toward Socialization” with that of generals who might order a costly battlefield attack. Of course, he overlooked the potentially extenuating circumstance that generals are typically driving an enemy from the homeland, while the Soviet regime was fighting its people on their farms. Classic bottom line in prevarication: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”68

Got that? No deaths from starvation, but widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. To understand this episode is to understand the extent to which Orwell’s “Newspeak” had its birth in the pages of the free press as much as in the totalitarian censor’s office.

Naturally, Gareth Jones objected to Duranty’s personal attack on his credibility and published a strong response in which he underscored both the veracity and the variety of his sources and evidence. In so doing, Jones also noted his discussions with “between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations” whose testimony supported his own. Jones continued:

But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent.

Journalists, on the other hand, are allowed to write, but the censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give “famine” the polite name of “food shortage,” and “starving to death” is softened down to read as “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” Consuls are not so reticent in private conversation.69

That’s no saving grace in my book. These consuls Jones refers to were not only as intimidated by Soviet censorship as the journalists were, they were equally as culpable in aiding and abetting this first, crucially significant Big Lie. Looking back over more than three-quarters of a century of Big Lies to follow, this initial instance, this first time, demands a level of scrutiny and reflection it doesn’t ordinarily receive, not having been widely recognized as the Original Sin that would ultimately corrupt us all. It was as if society suddenly became incapable of making the most elementary if also vital connections between facts and conclusions, logic and judgment, ideas and implications, and truth and morality.

More than three decades later, in 1968, when Robert Conquest came along with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the colossal horror of the Soviet regime, first regarding the Moscow show trials, and then, in 1985, with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, there was no need to meet in a hotel room with a Soviet censor and work out a conspiracy of denial and drink to it with vodka. Nor was there consciousness of such a need. The legacy of denial had become so powerful in the interim as to have become imperceptible and stunningly effective. “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children,” Conquest wrote, but class was incapable of learning.70

“People accepted his facts, but they didn’t accept his conclusions,” British writer Neal Ascherson said to the British newspaper The Guardian in 2003, perfectly crystallizing the intelligentsia’s permanent reaction to Conquest.71 This facts-sans-implications formulation is key. It sounds so reasonable. Come, come, dear boy; no one is rejecting your facts, just your conclusions. There may indeed be extreme “food shortages,” but widespread mortality is due to diseases associated with “malnutrition,” not famine. Facts, yes. Conclusions, no. However, such facts are conclusions because they are crimes. Soviet exterminationism is Soviet exterminationism (emphasis on Soviet), just as Nazi genocide is Nazi genocide (emphasis on Nazi). Reject the conclusion and the facts, the crimes, become meaningless. Indeed, such facts demand judgment, just as such crimes demand a verdict. As Conquest put it:

The historian, registering the facts beyond doubt, and in their context, cannot but also judge. Die Weltgeschischte ist das Weltgericht—World History is the World’s Court of Judgment: Schiller’s dictum may seem too grandiose today. Yet the establishment of the facts certainly includes the establishment of responsibility.72

The Left tried to drive a wedge between the facts as Conquest marshaled them and the conclusions as he drew them, making efforts to taint both due to his evident “dislike” of purges, terror, and death camps—or, as Eugene Lyons might have put it ironically, his middle-class liberal “hang-overs of prejudice” against dictatorship, mass slaughter, and the crushing of the human spirit. Conquest writes:

It was believed that a “Cold Warrior” became opposed to the Soviet system because of some irrational predisposition … The idea seems to be that if one can show that opposition to the Soviet threat was in part based on dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions—that is, “emotions”—then the opposition cannot have been objective. But, of course, the Soviet system was indeed disliked, even detested, because of its record and intentions.73

What Conquest’s detractors dismissed as “emotions”—namely, “dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions” (including twenty million killed by Stalin)—was in fact a historian’s verdict of responsibility regarding such crimes. Visceral feelings aside, it is a judgment based on evidence, logic, and moral analysis. These are the same underpinnings of any rational investigation into Nazi “actualities and intentions” and subsequent finding of their detestable nature. No one would pause over the following slight reworking of a Conquest line quoted above: “The main lesson seems to be that the Nazi ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children”—but insert “Communist ideology” into the sentence and boy, look out.

“No one could deal with this,” he writes of his Great Terror research, “or other themes I wrote of later, unless judgmental as well as inquisitive; and those who denied the negative characteristics of Soviet Communism were deficient in judgment and in curiosity—gaps in the teeth and blinkers on the eyes.”74

To be able to “deal with” the evil of Communist extermination history, then, as Conquest writes, is to be judgmental as well as inquisitive. This suggests a continuum between such fruits of curiosity and academic labor—the repugnant facts of Communist extermination history—and our judgment of them. The gap-toothed and blinkered ones, however, set out to interrupt this continuum, to sunder these facts from their conclusions, to explode the whole logical exercise that begins in facts and ends in conclusions into senseless fragments—to decontextualize it (and everything else while they’re at it). Yes, the Nazi system killed six million people (fact), and yes, the Nazi system was evil (conclusion); and yes, the Soviet system killed twenty million people (fact), but how dare that “cowboy” Ronald Reagan call the Soviet Union the “evil empire”?

Like postmodernism itself, this massive inconsistency on Nazism and Communism doesn’t make a shred of sense. If making sense were the goal, the phrase “evil empire” would have been a trite truism, a hoary cliché long before Ronald Reagan uttered the words, which, like the most potent incantation, drove tribes of intelligentsia the Western world over into fits of mass hysteria and rage—against evil Reagan, not the empire. If the words today no longer conjure the same teeth-gnashing indictment of Old West simplicity they once did, they still manage to strike a spark or two of faux outrage. Also, the quotation marks of irony have yet to fall away.

I went back to the original Reagan speech recently, realizing I’d never heard or read any more of it than that signature phrase. Reagan was addressing evangelical Christians at a time when the so-called nuclear freeze, which we now know to have been a colossal Soviet influence operation,75 was under debate in Congress and Reagan was proposing to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe. Two weeks later, he would announce his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which, even as it became the obsession that would drive the final Soviet dictators to exhaust the Communist system in their futile efforts to compete, was endlessly caricatured in Western media as a “cowboy’s” comic-book ray gun of choice straight from Star Wars—no doubt a Soviet-encouraged moniker.

The speech is surprisingly mild. I was surprised to learn that by the time Reagan gets around to mentioning the “evil empire,” he was not inveighing against the USSR directly but rather against the creed of moral equivalence, at the time the very definition of intellectual chic. It’s hard to convey the intensity of the drumbeat for moral equivalence in those days. It was background noise and op-ed commentary, the premise of debate (“Resolved: There is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union,” Oxford Union debate, February 23, 1984) and the endings of movies (Three Days of the Condor [1975], Apocalypse Now [1979], Reds [1981]). The era Reagan was trying to end was one of entrenched belief in “ambiguities” between capitalism and Communism, between liberty and tyranny. It was too much for one man to do, even Ronald Reagan.

“We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke,” East German agent Fiedler remarks to British agent Leamas in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, le Carré’s stunningly successful 1963 novel that instituted the le Carré brand. This joke was an old story by the 1980s, the conventional wisdom, the Establishment point of view. It still is. By 2008, le Carré was confiding to The Sunday Times of London, over fragrant, amber-colored glasses of Calvados, as the waves crashed at the foot of the cliffs below the author’s Cornwall home, that he had himself been tempted to defect to the Soviet Union.76

“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border … it seems such a small step to jump … and, you know, find out the rest” [ellipses in original].

The rest about the twenty million killed? Heavens, no. The Times explains:

This is maybe less surprising than at first it seemed: we are in true le Carré territory, nuanced and complex, where the spying is sometimes an end in itself and where there is rarely an easy, Manichaean split between the good guys and the bad guys. Defecting was a temptation the writer resisted, to our good fortune [emphasis added].

To each our own. What is remarkable here is less the “news” about le Carré than the ease with which the reporter absorbs this point of moral cretinhood, conveying the author’s view as a beguilingly piquant eccentricity even as it skirts the charnel houses the man found himself fascinated and not repelled by. Such enthusiasm would not have greeted a thriller writer who expressed a temptation to “jump … and, you know, find out the rest” about, say, the Third Reich.

If an unhealthy attraction to the Soviet Union was still respectable as recently as 2008, imagine how outrageous the phrase “evil empire” sounded twenty-five years earlier. This is what Reagan actually said:

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.77

Reagan’s exhortation to face “the facts of history” was a broad challenge, his reference to “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. The cataclysmic histories of Ukraine, Finland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Korea, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Angola, and on and on were not the shining raiment becoming an empire of peace. Reagan was challenging us to acknowledge the implications of this fact, to fight the paralysis of “moral equivalence,” and see not two bullies in a playground, as the East-West struggle was repetitiously framed, but one aggressor seeking to impose a totalitarian system over as much of the world as possible. Good and Evil. Reagan may have had to struggle to explain this to the West, but the Soviets, as Robert Conquest reminds us, looking back from the vantage point of 2005, were never unclear, morally or otherwise, about their intentions:

The Soviet Union, right up to the eve of its collapse, was committed to the concept of an unappeasable conflict with the Western world and to the doctrine that this could only be resolved by what Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko described, as officially as one can imagine (in his 1975 book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union) as world revolution: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.”78

As Conquest added, “one could hardly be franker.”

Ah, Gromyko. In the outraged uproar in the West over Reagan’s “evil empire” speech in the spring of 1983, the Soviet foreign minister called an unusually extended press conference to offer his response. As reported by The New York Times’s Serge Schmemann, the resulting story ran under the eye-catching headline GROMYKO NEWS CONFERENCE: A “VIRTUOSO PERFORMANCE.”79 The quotation in the headline comes from the reporter himself, who wrote that unnamed “Western experts agreed that his [Gromyko’s] performance was virtuoso.” You can almost see the Times reporter nudging a colleague in the room and saying, “Hey, wasn’t that a virtuoso performance?,” getting a nod back, then duly noting the “expert” consensus.

Gromyko’s performance was virtuoso, all right, exceeding all boundaries of veracity, all measure of reality. “Mr. Gromyko poked the air with his forefingers as he condemned Mr. Reagan’s statements on the Soviet Union,” a separate Times news story reported. “‘If it were possible to start compiling charts of the amount of evil in the two systems,’ he said, ‘I want to assure you that the height of the curve for the United States would be hundreds of times higher than ours’” (emphasis added).80

No report I’ve seen indicates that the correspondents received this comment with anything other than rapt attention, quiet professionalism, and serious consideration. As that world-class whopper took shape, rose, and broke over the room, it’s easy to imagine the scratch of pens on steno pads, the spinning tape recorders, the furrowed brows, the nodding heads. I can also imagine the murdered millions, for whose deaths the Soviet Union was never tried, and who did not rise, could not rise, from mass graves beneath the permafrost to condemn this new lie. Maybe that’s because there really is no such thing as ghosts. Or maybe it’s because the gravitational force of the zombie-millions who never act or think to condemn the Soviet Union, Communism, and their agents, prevented them. Their apathy, their silence was just too much. It truly was a virtuoso performance.

Weren’t they all.