Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“DOUBLE LIVES – Stalin, Willi Munzenburg
and the Seduction of the Intellectuals” by Stephen Koch (first published in 1994; later updated and
revised; also published with the subtitle “Spies and Writers in the Secret
Soviet War of Ideas Against the West”)
It
can be chastening to read a book which pulls apart methodically the delusions
of an earlier age. It can be especially chastening if some of those delusions
are still with us.
I
first read Stephen Koch’s Double Lives
a decade ago, and dipped into it again ahead of writing this notice. Stephen
Koch is an American academic, critic and novelist attached to Columbia
University. He has written books about Andy Warhol and other art icons. He has
angered the admirers of Ernest Hemingway by writing a book (The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos,
and the Murder of Jose Robles) showing how complicit Hemingway was in
Stalinist terror during the Spanish Civil War. Most controversially, he has
written Double Lives.
Why should this
book be controversial? Because it punctures many of the enduring myths of the
1930s.
A widespread
myth says that, even if Soviet Communism was flawed, it provided a
counter-balance to Fascism and Nazism. The myth says that the Popular Front of
the mid-1930s, in which Communists and democratic parties of the Left joined
forces for a few years, offered the real possibility of a push-back against
Hitler. But, says the myth, such solidarity was scuttled when the duplicitous
foreign ministries of Britain and France did a deal with Hitler at Munich in
1938. This left the Soviet Union without allies in a threatened war with
Hitler. While the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 may be regretted, the myth says it
was an understandable reaction to the Soviet Union’s desertion by the West, also
known as the West’s abandonment of “collective security”.
Add to this the
contemporaneous Spanish Civil War, with Communist-organised International
Brigades fighting against Franco, and the myth comes up with a relatively
benign view of the Soviet Union as something on the side of the forces of
light.
Stephen Koch
will have none of this and, with a wealth of solid research and detailed
interviews to support him, sets out to show how easily Western liberal
intellectuals were lured into this totally unrealistic reading of events.
Koch’s main
purpose is to expose the duplicity of the Soviet Union, its secret services and
its sympathisers in the years leading up to the Second World War. It is his
main contention that from 1933 onwards, it was always Stalin’s intention
to do a deal with Hitler. The “Non-Aggression Pact” (i.e. alliance) of 1939 was
simply the culmination of years of practical, covert cooperation between the
two regimes. It was not something resorted to after the British and French
sell-out of Munich in 1938. Stalin’s aim was always to divert Hitler’s
attention west. Hitler’s aim was to
pacify Stalin for as long as it took him to subdue Western Europe. In playing
this game, both Stalin and Hitler were aware that much of their
mutually-hostile rhetoric was for display and public consumption only. Their
secret services exchanged information (and prisoners) well before the open
alliance of 1939-41. Stalin saw his main opponents, and the main people to be
destroyed, as any non-Communist opponents of Fascism, such as Social Democrats
and Labour Parties.
Koch says this
mutually beneficial deal between the dictators was struck at the time of the
Reichstag Fire trials of 1933. Three Communists (including the Bulgarian
Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov, who later ran the Comintern) were put on trial by
the Nazi regime but, thanks to the secret Nazi-Soviet deals already being
struck, they were acquitted and flown to Moscow. Communist propaganda
denounced the Nazi regime, but especially denounced “irresponsible” SA brownshirts
and usually held back from criticising Hitler himself. Stalin was quite happy
to have Hitler roll up and persecute the German Communist Party, which had the
unhealthy habit of showing independence of Stalin. Hitler’s murder of Rohm and
the brownshirt leadership was approved by Stalin, and was the direct model for
Stalin’s terror directed against the “Old” Bolsheviks in the wake of the murder
of Kirov.
Koch argues that
the “Popular Front” strategy adopted by Stalin after 1935 was exactly what Dimitrov,
said it was – a Trojan Horse designed to destroy any legitimate anti-Nazi
activities by non-Communists. It was also an excellent cover for the most
intense stages of Stalin’s Terror that were going on at the very time the
Popular Front was operative. By having Communists so overtly opposing Hitler
and Nazism, left and liberal intellectuals in the West would be deluded into
seeing Communism as the noble opponent of tyranny, and would therefore be less
inclined to investigate or criticise Stalin’s Terror. The received wisdom
became “Any attack on Stalin must be an
endorsement of Hitler” and we reach the stage where anybody opposing the
Soviet regime was labelled “objectively fascist”.
“To a very significant degree, the Popular
Front was a propaganda front for the Great Terror. Stalin’s campaign
annihilating any vestige of independent political thought inside Soviet Russia
coincides precisely with the campaign proclaiming democratic pluralism and
openness in the West… The Front and the Purge were prepared simultaneously. The
heyday of both was 1936 and especially 1937. By the spring of 1938, with the
Moscow murders mainly complete, Stalin began to wash his hands of the
propaganda operation. By the summer of 1939 he killed it dead.” (Part One,
Chapter 5)
The “Popular
Front” also coincided with the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, Communist activity
methodically destroyed the non-Communist Left in the Spanish Republic by terror
and murder. Hitler and Mussolini extended credit to Franco and their right-wing
Spanish allies, but Stalin extended no credit whatsoever to his Spanish allies,
even though his advisors told him that the Spanish Republic was being
dangerously weakened by the political purges and was becoming less capable of
fighting Franco. Essentially, this was because Stalin was not interested in a
Spanish Republican victory, and certainly not in one in which Social Democrats
or any of the non-Communist left had a say. When and if Franco was defeated,
Stalin wanted a purely Communist Spain as a bargaining chip, which might again
divert Hitler’s attention west and away from the Soviet Union. In Eastern
Europe, the Popular Front served only to weed out and destroy non-Communists
(such as a socialists who fought Dollfuss in Vienna) and prepare the way for
the Stalinist states that followed the Second World War.
While these are
Koch’s essential themes, he is just as concerned to show how Western liberals
and intellectuals were seduced either into joining the Communist Party, or into
sympathising with and advancing its aims while imagining that they held
independent views. Koch is particularly good on what would now be called “spin”
– the way apparently non-Communist front organizations and publications (even
ones that occasionally offered mild criticism of the Soviet Union) could be
relied on to popularise and publicise the Stalinist line in essential matters.
In England, France and America, much “radical chic” of this sort reigned at the
time of the Popular Front.
A sort of
narrative holding this book together concerns the career of the German
Communist Willi Munzenberg, companion of Lenin and covert propagandist for the
Comintern from the early 1920s to the time when Stalin abandoned the “Popular
Front” strategy. Munzenberg’s day was really over by the time of the Spanish
Civil War. He died in France in 1940, fleeing from Nazi invasion. There is an
outside possibility that he committed suicide, but it is more likely that he was
murdered by Stalin’s agents, for in his last year Munzenberg broke with the
Party-line and began publishing in the West lists of German Communists who had
been destroyed by Stalin’s Terror.
Koch sees
Munzenberg as the man who perfected the idea of the “cultural congress” as a
vehicle for Soviet propaganda; and the technique of building public outrage at
perceived injustices in western democracies as a diversionary tactic so that
Western liberals and opinion makers would be less inquisitive about Soviet
methods and motives.
Says Koch: “His goal was to create for the
right-thinking, non-political West the dominating political prejudice of the
era: the belief that any opinion that happened to serve the foreign policy of
the Soviet Union was derived from the most essential elements of human decency.
He wanted to instil the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to
criticise or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted
and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a
forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by
an uplifting refinement of sensibility.” (Part One, Chapter One)
Munzenberg was a
master at creating “front” organizations and publications – he had a hand in
the creation of the Left Book Club (based on the German Communist Universum
Bucherei), Claud Cockburn’s political gossip sheet The Week in London, ”P.M.” magazine in the USA and Ce Soir in France. Koch adds “… certainly most of the people who poured
their idealism into the Munzenberg fronts… had no idea that their consciences
were being orchestrated by operatives of Stalin’s government.” (Part One,
Chapter One)
Munzenberg cut
his teeth in organizing outrage at the trial in America of the anarchists Sacco
and Vanzetti in 1927, who (as later revelations showed) were probably guilty as
charged. There was, of course, a very devious purpose behind this organised
outrage. In the 1921 famine in Russia, the overwhelming majority of effective
relief had been provided by Hoover’s American Relief Administration and a
Western European fund organised by Fridthof Nansen. Very little had come from
the Communist Party or its overseas branches. America stood high in general
Russian esteem because of this. Says Koch “For
the world proletariat of 1925, the leading counter-myth to the myth of revolution
was the idea of America.” It was therefore necessary to organise an
event, which would present the United States as a land of injustice. The
particular hypocrisy of Munzenberg’s campaign was, however, that Sacco and
Vanzetti were anarchists, not Communists, and in the Soviet Union anarchists
were routinely imprisoned or executed.
Munzenberg’s
lieutenant in Soviet propaganda was Otto Katz, who outlived Munzenberg only to
die in the last round of Stalinist purges in the 1950s. It was Katz who rallied
the support of the Hollywood left for his “Anti-Nazi League” which suddenly
changed its name to the “League for Democratic Action” and began propagandising
against a war with Hitler as soon as the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. Indeed
Katz’s apparatus now began denouncing France and Britain as warmongering states
which should have reached a wise compact with Hitler the way Stalin had. This
was too much for the novelist Thomas Mann who, with his brother Heinrich, had
previously been co-opted into many of Katz’s “anti-fascist” activities. Seeing
how duplicitous the Katz apparatus now was, Mann burst out “No Nazi – or Stalinist – agent in this
country could have sown such evil propaganda against the democracies and the
life-and-death struggle they are waging against the German regime as you do.”
(Part Two, Chapter 9)
There are some
grimly funny – or at least ironical - stories here. One concerns the Russian
General Walter Krivitsky, who defected to the USA early in 1939 and immediately
made public the fact that Hitler and Stalin were about to do a deal. Propaganda
and front organizations went into overdrive, denouncing him as a fraud. Over
400 Hollywood liberals and showbiz radicals signed a public letter of protest
(Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Clifford Odets, Sinclair Lewis etc. etc.)
at Krivitsky’s “lies”. It ran as a paid advertisement in bold type on the back
pages of many newspapers. The trouble was, it appeared on the very same day
that the front pages of the same newspapers were announcing, with astonishment,
the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This is a classic case of bad timing!
(Part Two, Chapter 8)
And yet, dear
reader, coming to the end of my summary of this worthwhile book, isn’t at least
part of your mind saying that Double
Lives must be the work of a right-wing writer who hasn’t understood the
nobility of the anti-fascist movement?
The stereotype
of an American book written against Communism is that it must be some sort of
unreconstructed Cold War tract. Old lefties have become adept at saying that,
yes, Stalinism was an evil but it was somehow detachable from the noble ideals
of Communism. Anyone who says otherwise must be a crude McCarthyist. And, of
course, evocation of the right-wing demagoguery of the McCarthy era is a very
good way of making the old Hard Left look good. There is also the obvious fact
that many of the diplomatic manoeuvres of the British and French governments in
the 1930s really were dodgy, and the Munich agreement is nothing to be proud
of. Like Stalin, the French and British governments were seeking to divert
Hitler away from their patch. However, unlike Stalin, they never went into
alliance with Hitler, collaborated with his terror system or helped him out
with war materiel when he launched his first attacks.
If you have any
misgivings about Koch’s book, I simply point to the wealth of verifiable
research on which it is based and especially the interviews Koch undertook with
key informants and witnesses. (One of his main interviewees was Willi
Munzenberg’s widow, Babette Gross, a very old lady who had long since abandoned
her Stalinism and developed into a devout anti-Communist.)
But how is this
relevant to us?
Simple. The
gross forms that modern capitalism can take, the widening of the wealth gap and
the rise of right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump could be fertile ground for
the myth that a decisive, non-democratic Left alternative is possible. I see
this in many of the simplistic slogans that flood Facebook and other social
media. We are urged to “Smash Capitalism”, but few coherent alternatives are
proposed. A replay of the Left Delusion of the 1930s is perfectly feasible. For
this reason, careful study of a book like Double
Lives is an important political act for our own age.
Writing poetry
in particular, I find childhood still exerts a powerful pull. In my first
collection The Little Enemy (2011), I
included the following poem in honour of early teenage explorations of the
nearby estuary’s attractive mud. I was flattered when a year later the
craft-artist Ingrid Anderson chose to turn my images into two matching screen
prints, incorporating a plan of the estuary with a crab motif. 
