The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Chapter 5. The Moscow Trials

  But it is not only the old Bolsheviks who are on trial [in Moscow]—we too, all of us, are in the prisoners’ dock. These are trials of the mind and of the human spirit. Their meanings encompass the age.

  —Philip Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” 19381

  THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF LEON TROTSKY

  A decisive event that simultaneously consolidated the anti-Stalinist left while setting the stage for its disintegration was the Moscow trials which began in 1936. These four trials were extraordinary for a number of reasons. First, the men and women who were placed in the prisoner’s dock and charged with treachery, sabotage, and espionage against the Soviet state included virtually all of the living leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Joseph Stalin, the behind-the-scenes organizer of the trials. Although he was in exile, charges were also brought against Stalin’s arch adversary, Leon Trotsky. Second, the accused, who were publicly tried in Moscow, abjectly confessed guilt to the charges against them and some even begged to be punished. Third, the trials were accompanied by a mass purge that affected all of Soviet society. In addition to those coerced into performing the show-trials, it is estimated that literally millions of workers, peasants, party members, intellectuals, military officers, and government officials were arrested and executed by administrative order.2

  While today the Moscow trials are regarded throughout the world as a horrendous frame-up, at the time many American intellectuals were confused about what they meant and failed to defend their victims. One cause of their confusion was the existence of a widespread sympathy for the Soviet Union in the middle and late 1930s.3 In this instance these intellectuals, none of whom thought of themselves as “Stalinists,” were moved more by feeling than by careful analysis. In the eyes of many liberals and radicals, Stalin, after 1935, had made a reasonable and practical turn in issuing his call for a “Popular Front” against the fascist powers. Only a few months before the first Moscow trials Hitler had begun to remilitarize the Rhineland. In France the Communists, liberals, and Socialists had formed a victorious electoral coalition led by Leon Blum. In Spain the Communists were fighting side by side with the Republicans against Franco’s fascists, and it seemed as if any open denunciation of the trials might disrupt the antifascist alliances. “It is always a temptation to believe the best about one’s allies,” Malcolm Cowley recalled years later in a memoir discussing his own refusal to condemn the trials, “or at least to conceal their crimes from oneself in order to maintain a precarious sincerity when one is forced, as a matter of policy, to deny in public the existence of those crimes.”4

  But even among those who were not inclined to actively block the disclosure of the truth for pragmatic political reasons, other obstacles contributed to their silence and perplexity. Some of the liberals sympathetic to Stalinist Russia had worked out complicated rationales that enabled them to tolerate undemocratic judicial procedures and other drastic measures in the Soviet Union, ones that they would find totally unacceptable in the United States. There were those who argued that authoritarian rule was in harmony with Russian culture and traditions; others believed that such methods were necessary if the illiterate peoples of the underdeveloped nations were to be dragged into the modern world. Lincoln Steffens, often cited as representative of this particular type of liberal known as the “fellow traveler,” wrote: “I am for them to the last drop, I am a patriot of Russia; the Future is there. . . . But I don’t want to live there.”5

  Trotsky excoriated the fellow-traveler mentality from a Marxist point of view. He asserted that the increase in friendship toward the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule reflected “the reconciliation of bourgeois liberalism with the bureaucracy which had strangled the October Revolution.” He further noted that “the more extensive the privileges of the new leading stratum [of the Soviets] became, and the more conservative it grew in defense of its privileges—the greater became the number of its friends among the bourgeois intellectuals and the liberals, snobs who keep up the vogue of the day. The inspirers of this state of mind became Walter Duranty [Moscow correspondent for the New York Times] and Louis Fischer [European correspondent for the Nation], downright sycophants of the Soviet oligarchy.”6

  Still another factor that disoriented liberal intellectuals was their fear of confronting a truth that was likely to be profoundly disturbing. James T. Farrell recalled in a memoir of the Moscow trials that “if the official verdict of the trials were true . . . the co-workers of Lenin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution must be considered as one of the worst gangs of scoundrels in history; if the trials were a frame-up, then the leaders of Soviet Russia were perpetrating one of the most monstrous frame-ups in all history. An outstanding and humane American, known for his anti-Communism and utter honesty, wrote to me, stating that while he saw the justice of this question, he hated to face it.”7

  It was not long after the demise of the NPLD that many of the same individuals who had been active in the organization came together again through the establishment of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. The administrative personnel of the committee was largely, although not exclusively, comprised of Trotskyists (represented by George Novack, Felix Morrow, Pearl Kluger, and Martin Abern) and the same group of intellectuals around Herbert Solow who had broken with the American Trotskyists over the latter’s abandonment of the NPLD. Each current operated autonomously inside the Trotsky Defense Committee, with each maintaining its own ideas, although the two groups were largely compatible in this endeavor. In October 1936 the Trotskyists, who by that time had collectively joined the Socialist Party, sent James Burnham, Max Shachtman, and George Novack to confer with Socialist Party leaders Devere Allen and Norman Thomas at the party’s national committee meeting in Philadelphia to gain their support for the Trotsky Defense Committee. In the meantime, Solow and the others were working with Sidney Hook, who would eventually serve as the link to John Dewey’s involvement in the special Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials.8

  Nevertheless, suspicions remained despite the collaboration. The Trotskyist members did not function as individuals; rather, they represented the views of their political current. Perhaps an element of intrigue marked Solow’s group as well, which tended to act as an informal caucus, but this did not prevent Solow from becoming a firm supporter of the committee. When Trotsky, in Mexico, sent a letter to New York in early 1937 to urge the rapid establishment of the Commission of Inquiry, Solow obtained $5,000 from Margaret De Silver to support the effort. In a running debate by mail with Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Tom Mooney, and others, Solow argued on behalf of the project, even reaching the breaking point with his old college friend Clifton Fadiman, who refused to cooperate with Solow in certain related matters.9

  Solow deserves much of the credit for the success of the American Committee, which was an especially significant achievement in light of the difficulty that similar projects encountered in other countries. On 1 March 1937 Solow received a letter from Pierre Naville, the French intellectual who was then a Trotskyist leader, reporting on the struggles that were going on in the French committee, a weak body that had attracted little collaboration from intellectuals other than André Breton, Victor Serge, and, clandestinely, André Gide. Naville proposed that the American Committee designate itself as the central international coordinating body.10

  The centerpiece of the Trotsky Defense Committee’s activities was undoubtedly the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. For eight days in Coyoacan, Mexico, Trotsky gave testimony to and was interrogated by an investigating committee of prominent intellectuals led by John Dewey. Dewey’s enthusiasm for the event was expressed in a letter he later sent Max Eastman: “You were right about one thing—if it wasn’t exactly a ‘good time,’ it was the most interesting single intellectual experience of my life.”11 Dewey was seventy-eight years
old at the time. The commission’s hearings presented the only significant opportunity that Trotsky had to defend himself in the court of world opinion against Stalin’s accusations of sabotage and espionage. The Commission of Inquiry had an aura of high drama that a socially conscious poet, playwright, or novelist might invent, or about which an imaginative historian might dream. “It is a shame that you are not here to attend the hearings,” wrote James T. Farrell, an observer, in a letter to a friend on the penultimate day of the proceedings. “It is a spectacle to see, a spectacle rare in history. Imagine Robespierre or Cromwell under such circumstances. Well, this is more, because neither Cromwell nor Robespierre had the intellectual breadth that Trotsky has.”12

  The formation of the commission itself was an act of determination in the face of apathy and even aggressive hostility on the part of a sizable component of the New York intellectual milieu in which it was initiated. Indeed, just a few days after his return from Mexico, Dewey delivered an address at New York City’s Mecca Temple in which he issued a strong indictment of the “systematic and organized effort made to prevent the investigation which is now successfully taking place.”13

  Farrell was a member of the Executive Committee of the Trotsky Defense Committee, the organization formed to secure asylum for Trotsky and enable him to have a hearing. Accordingly, he participated in the selection of the members of the Dewey commission. He later recalled that the committee simply chose “people who we assumed had some integrity and reputation.”14 An ability to stand up against the predominant opinion among the left intelligentsia turned out to be the decisive quality required to conquer the forces that began to exert pressures designed to sabotage the inquiry. This pressure manifested itself most forcibly through the periphery of the Communist Party, which of course heralded the verdict reached in the Moscow trials, but it was also reflected in the organs of liberal opinion, the New Republic and the Nation. An “Open Letter to American Liberals” was issued that attacked the work of the commission. Among its eighty-eight signers were Heywood Broun, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser, Lillian Hellman, Rockwell Kent, Max Lerner, Robert Morss Lovett, Robert S. Lynd, Carey McWilliams, Dorothy Parker, Henry Roth, Paul Sweezy, Lillian Wald, Max Weber, and Nathanael West.15

  But when Dewey agreed to head the commission and to travel to Mexico to interview Trotsky, who was not permitted to enter the United States, the commission had found a chairman who personified to the highest degree the requisite integrity. “Scarcely anyone knows the intensity and variety of pressures he had to withstand,” wrote Sidney Hook at the time of Dewey’s death, “not least of all from the members of his immediate family, some of whom feared he might be killed in the excitable political milieu of Mexico City . . . . The simple truth of the matter is that Dewey made up his mind irrevocably [to go] only after he became aware of the efforts and far-flung stratagems of the Communist Party to prevent him from going.”16

  THE HEARINGS IN MEXICO

  In New York City on Friday, 2 April 1937, Dewey, Farrell, and a small party of commissioners and staff boarded the Sunshine Special en route to Mexico City via St. Louis. Meanwhile, technical staff provided by the Trotsky Defense Committee had arrived at the home of the renowned Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his companion Frida Kahlo, where the investigative proceedings were to take place. Solow was the central organizer of all the American citizens present; he assisted with the legal and technical arrangements as well as serving as chief contact with the office of the Trotsky Defense Committee in New York. Because he had broken with the American Trotskyist organization over the “French Turn,” Solow and Trotsky apparently spent a good part of the time before the hearings in heated debate. On 2 April he reported to Margaret De Silver, “The old man [Trotsky] continues in character. I have had two violent fights with him and expect another tomorrow. At the same time he breaks his heart about one professor John Martin who was banged up in an auto accident on his way to visit the old man. The two of them had never met, but the old man takes responsibility for the accident to one who was about to visit him, and he asks five times a day for the guy’s health. And he works on and on, turning out grand stuff. He is incredible.”17

  Also present were John McDonald, who helped with the physical preparation of materials, and his wife, Dorothy Eisner, who did several paintings during the hearings. They stayed for a time at the residence of Mrs. Robert Latham George, the mother of Adelaide Walker. Charles Walker took charge of relations with the press. In addition to the technical staff, the arrival of the commissioners from the United States was awaited by a number of Trotsky’s political followers, who constituted his personal staff or who had some other function during the forthcoming hearings. The personal staff included a three-man secretariat: a Czech Trotskyist named Jan Frankel, who was shortly to become the first husband of novelist Eleanor Clark; Jean van Heijenoort, later professor of philosophy at Brandeis University; and Bernard Wolfe, a former Yale student.

  Wolfe was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 28 August 1915.18 His father, Robert Wolfe, was a Russian Jewish immigrant who attempted a career as a violinist and director of synagogue choir groups but eventually became a factory foreman. His mother, Ida Gordon, was from a wealthy Jewish family in Poland but had rebelled to join a Tolstoy study circle. At the age of fourteen she went to work in a sweatshop to earn money to come to the United States, joining her sister in New Haven. In the 1920s, Wolfe’s parents prospered; there was a socialist atmosphere in the home and a sympathy for workers’ struggles. But during the 1930s Robert Wolfe’s plant moved to another city, and he fell into a deep depression that eventually required institutionalization. Ida Wolfe struggled to survive in poverty by running a small neighborhood store. Their sons, Albert and Bernard, were deeply impressed by these tragic events and turned to radical politics. Bernard also began reading Freud.

  In 1931 Bernard entered Yale University as a premedical student at the age of sixteen. At about the same time, Albert, an unskilled worker, came under the influence of a high school friend, Morris Gandleman, whose father had been a founder of the Communist Party in Connecticut and was later expelled as a Trotskyist. Bernard soon began seeing the Gandlemans as well. He rapidly became convinced of the correctness of Trotsky’s outlook and threw himself into political work at the same time that he pursued an honors course in psychology in preparation for a career in psychiatry. In the Trotskyist movement Bernard assumed the name “Ben Hardee,” and Albert became “Al Hardee.”

  An activist in the antiwar and unemployed movements, Wolfe found himself isolated at Yale because the other New Haven Trotskyists were all workers and off campus, and the Communist youth group was the dominant force among the students. When he attended a convention of the National Student League at Vassar, Wolfe attempted to speak from the floor but was beaten up and thrown out by the Communists. Finally, he broke out of isolation at Yale when he gained the sympathy of Arthur Mizener, a young radical professor who later became famous for his biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise (1951). Mizener was an enthusiast of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and, under Wolfe’s influence, he contributed to the New International.

  After receiving his B.A. degree in June 1935, Wolfe briefly attended Yale graduate school but abandoned his plans to become a psychiatrist. For a while he directed the College of Women Trade Unionists at Bryn Mawr. In the fall of 1936 he moved to New York to assist with literary work for the Trotskyist movement. There he met Felix Morrow, one of the Trotskyists assigned to organize the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, which secured asylum for Trotsky in Mexico and attempted to permit him a hearing to refute the fraudulent charges leveled against him in the Moscow purge trials. Morrow explained that Trotsky’s secretarial staff in Coyoacan was weak in the English language and that Wolfe’s knowledge of French would be of great value as a common language among the secretariat if he could raise the money to join the Trotsky household. Wolfe immediately contacted Mizener who helped hi
m obtain the necessary funds.

  Wolfe stayed in Mexico from January until August 1937. Returning to New Haven and then New York in the fall, he continued to write for the Trotskyist press for another ten months until he began to drift off into Greenwich Village bohemia. By 1939, both he and Albert were out of the Trotskyist movement, and Anäis Nin and Henry Miller got him a job producing a dozen pornographic novels at a dollar a page. In 1972 he published an autobiography, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer, describing this phase of his life. In the mid-1940s he coauthored a minor classic, Really the Blues (1946) with Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, the biography of a Jewish jazz musician who adopted the music, language, and many of the attitudes of Afro-Americans. Following psychoanalysis in 1950 with Dr. Edmund Bergler, proponent of the concept of “psychic masochism,” Wolfe published a series of psychological novels that culminated in The Great Prince Died (1959; reissued in 1975 under the title Trotsky Dead). The thesis of the novel is that Trotsky, called Victor Rostov, had unconsciously assisted in his own assassination because of guilt over his role in the 1921 suppression of the uprising at Kronstadt naval base. Wolfe subsequently moved to Hollywood where he continued to write novels and screenplays until his death in 1985.

  Two additional Trotskyists arrived on the Sunshine Special to join Wolfe and the others in Coyoacan: Pearl Kluger, who assumed a secretarial role, and George Novack, the secretary of the Trotsky Defense Committee. Finally, there were two more Trotskyists who came in from Chicago: Albert Glotzer, a founding member of the Communist League of America, who served as verbatim reporter for the proceedings, and labor lawyer Albert Goldman, who was Trotsky’s attorney during the interrogation.