AMERICAN COMMUNISTS FOLLOWED SOVIET PARTY LINE SAYS EMORY PROFESSOR IN NEW BOOK BASED ON SOVIET ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
A new book, The Soviet World of American Communism, further confirms the fact that the American Communist Party was a tool of the Soviet Union says co-author and Emory University political scientist Harvey Klehr. The claims are based on Klehr's research in the archives of the Communist International in Moscow.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Klehr became the first Western scholar to visit the newly opened archives of the Communist International in Moscow the following year. In the section containing documents about the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), Klehr found what he believes is confirmation of his long-held views about the relationship between the CPUSA and the Soviets.
Results of his early archival research were published in The Secret World of American Communism (1995, Yale University Press)------Klehr's second book based on his research, The Soviet World of American Communism, is co-authored by John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress and Kiril Anderson of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, and also is published by Yale University Press.
"The overall argument I've been making for the last 15 or 20 years, that the American Communist Party had never been an independent entity, was right on the mark," Klehr says. Other scholars have argued that the CPUSA was "an independent, democratic, American institution," says Klehr. "And I think the evidence is overwhelming that no way was that the case."
American Communists showed "reflexive loyalty" to Moscow, Klehr says, as the CPUSA followed the Soviet Union's zigzag from one party line to the next. During the "Popular Front" period in the mid-1930s, American Communists formed a successful coalition with unions, New Deal liberals and the Roosevelt administration that brought the party into the mainstream for the first time. When the Soviets initially allied with Nazi Germany in 1939, the CPUSA immediately abandoned the coalition.
The Cold War may be history, but the debate over communism's influence in the United States is far from settled, Klehr believes. "The fight over the nature of American communism is, in a way, a fight about the nature of American culture today," says Klehr, who specializes in American radical movements and serves as the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory.
For instance, last fall marked the 50th anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist. "There were huge events in Hollywood, big mea culpas," Klehr says. "The Screenwriters Guild had this big thing where they apologized formally to the surviving blacklistees." The blacklist was created at a time when even suspicion of communist ties was enough to prevent someone from getting work.
The reaction to communism can still be felt in another prominent sector of American society, according to Klehr. "Some argue that the reason the labor movement is so weak now was that it purged communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For a lot of people, the anticommunist movement in the United States was a defining moment in our culture."
Paranoia was a primary component of the communist movement. And while conspiracy theories seem to have more proponents on the right these days, Klehr argues that the mindset is not limited to extremists. "I think in a way people are prone to see conspiracies everywhere they look," he says. "Modern American society is filled with conspiracies------just go see an Oliver Stone movie. Psychologically, it's comforting in a way. It confirms that you have very powerful enemies; that's one reason why you're not winning."
The post-war anticommunist backlash------personified by Sen. Joseph McCarthy------is famous for its paranoia and hysteria. Klehr and Haynes have finished a book about the Venona encryptions, cables the KGB sent from the United States to Moscow during World War II. Soviet espionage in America was extensive, Klehr says, bringing new insight to interpreting the McCarthy era.
"Was this, as the dominant interpretation would hold it, a period of paranoia and a period in which America lost its soul? Or were there very real dangers and threats that we responded to, sometimes rationally, sometimes irrationally?
"What kind of country were we and are we?" Klehr continues. "The communism issue raises those questions."
Klehr is a resident of Decatur, Ga. (30030).
RSS