The angry answer at the dinner table meant that two facts were known: I was an American; I had broken with the Communist Party. Alger, who was sitting at the head of the table, to my right, tried to dispel the awkwardness. He said something to this effect: “It is a pity that you broke. I am told that you were about to be given a very important post. Perhaps if you went to the party and made your peace, it could still be arranged.” I thought: “Alger has been told to say that to me.” The “important post” was perhaps Bykov’s old project of the sleeper apparatus now doing service as bait. I smiled and said that I did not think I would go to the party.
I began a long recital of the political mistakes and crimes of the Communist Party: the Soviet Government’s deliberate murder by mass starvation of millions of peasants in the Ukraine and the Kuban; the deliberate betrayal of the German working class to Hitler by the Communist Party’s refusal to co-operate with the Social Democrats against the Nazis; the ugly fact that the German Communist Party had voted in the Reichstag with the Nazis against the Social Democrats; the deliberate betrayal of the Spanish Republican Government, which the Soviet Government was only pretending to aid while the Communists massacred their political enemies in the Spanish prisons. This gigantic ulcer of corruption and deceit had burst, I said, in the great Russian purge when Stalin had consolidated his power by massacring thousands of the best men and minds in the Communist Party on lying charges.
I may have spoken for five or ten minutes. I spoke in political terms because no others would have made the slightest impression on my host. I spoke with feeling, and sometimes with slow anger as the monstrous picture built up. Sometimes Alger said a few objecting words, soberly and a little sorrowfully. Then I begged him to break with the Communist Party.
Suddenly, there was another angry flare-up: “What you have been saying is just mental masturbation.”
I was shocked by the rawness of the anger revealed and deeply hurt. We drifted from the dining room into the living room, most unhappy people. Again, I asked Alger if he would break with the Communist Party. He shook his head without answering. There was nothing more to say. I asked for my hat and coat. Alger walked to the door with me. He opened the door and I stepped out. As Alger stood with his hand on the half-open door, he suddenly asked: “What kind of a Christmas will you have?” I said: “Rather bleak, I expect.” He turned and said something into the room: “Isn’t there... ?” I did not catch the rest. I heard Priscilla move. Alger went into the room after her. When he came back, he handed me a small cylindrical package, three or four inches long, wrapped in Christmas paper. “For Puggie,” he said. Puggie is my daughter’s nickname. That Alger should have thought of the child after the conversation we had just had touched me in a way that I can only describe by saying: I felt hushed.
We looked at each other steadily for a moment, believing that we were seeing each other for the last time and knowing that between us lay, meaningless to most of mankind but final for us, a molten torrent—the revolution and the Communist Party. When we turned to walk in different directions from that torrent, it would be as men whom history left no choice but to be enemies.
As we hesitated, tears came into Alger Hiss’s eyes—the only time I ever saw him so moved. He has denied this publicly and derisively. He does himself an injustice—by the tone rather than by the denial, which has its practical purpose in the pattern of his whole denial. He should not regret those few tears, for as long as men are human, and remember our story, they will plead for his humanity.
XV
What lonely rides men take. That night ride from Washington back to Baltimore was one of the loneliest I shall ever make. It is not good to lose good friends for less than human reasons.
In the house on St. Paul Street, I opened the Hisses’ gift to my daughter. I do not know why I opened it instead of keeping it and putting it under the Christmas tree—probably some precautionary sense. The package contained a little wooden rolling pin such as could be bought at the dime store for a nickel. The Hisses had loved my daughter, played with her, cared for her. If the gift had been intended as an insult, I should have smiled regretfully and reflected on the ways of men. It was because it had been given in spontaneous kindness, the last thought at the final parting, that it seemed to me to betray completely the mind of the giver and what I had become to it; and through me, it struck at the child.
“This,” I thought, “is the gift that you think fit for the child of a renegade from the Communist Party. The father is irredeemable, but the child must not be wholly included in the father’s guilt—not wholly. So you condescend to conscience and send her a five-cent toy.”
I am not saying that I was necessarily right in my feeling or that I drew the right inferences. I have, in fact, since come to think that I was deeply wrong. I am reporting what I felt as an instance of the curiously taut emotions almost inseparable from the turmoil of such a break with the past as mine. I took the little rolling pin and its wrappings down to the cellar and threw it in the furnace. It was years before I could bring myself to tell my wife about it.
XVI
When I told Alger Hiss that our Christmas would probably be bleak, it was the children, of course, that I was thinking of. It was a Christmas bleak for the children that troubled me. But Christmas, 1938, was not bleak.
My mother came to spend the holidays with us and with her the spirit of Christmas entered the house. Our friends, everybody who knew about us, and by then such people were more numerous, seemed to have had the children in mind too. Presents for them began to arrive by mail. On Christmas Eve, we heaped them under the tree, which glittered with the ornaments of my childhood Christmases, fragile birds, spikes, horns, bunches of grapes, now practically unobtainable because the only people who really know how to blow them, the Germans, have been blown by the century into chaos. My mother had kept boxes of those delicate toys through all the years when they had lost their meaning for me. She had given them back to my children.
It was my son’s first Christmas—the first in which he was old enough to take a conscious part. He padded downstairs early on Christmas morning and stopped short before the tree. But it was not the tree that had stopped him. His grandmother had given him a gaily painted wagon filled with big, bright-colored wooden blocks. It stood unwrapped under the tree. He simply stared at it. We smiled encouragement to him. “For me?” he asked incredulous.
For, in the presence of such benefaction, the act of belief was too much for him.
In a sense, different, but perhaps not so much different, it was my first Christmas too. For the first time in our lives, I tried to tell my children the Christmas story. I tried to tell it in such a way that each of its elements, the sheep, the hills, the sky, Bethlehem, would remind them of something they knew that would be real to them. I told them that on Christmas Eve sheep were being pastured on bare hills, like the hills in the poorer parts of Maryland. Men were watching them, poor men, the kind of men who tend sheep. As they listened to the sound of the sheep moving and tried to follow them in the dark, they became aware of an unusually bright star, burning in the sky in the direction of Bethlehem, a village beyond the hills. There was a sudden brightness and they heard voices saying: “Glory to God in the highest. On earth peace. Good will to men.” Years later, men still felt that moment so strongly that they had caught it in the song which my daughter was just learning:Noel! Noel!
Noel! Noel!
Christ is born in Bethlehem.
Bethlehem, I told them, is our hearts.
XVII
I have described how I broke with the Communist Party. I have not told why I broke with Communism. It would have been all but meaningless to try to describe a crisis of the mind and spirit before I had given some idea of the organization and atmosphere in which that crisis occurred.
In 1935 or 1936, I chanced to read in the press a little item of some nine or ten lines, perhaps less. The story said that Dmitri Schmidt, a general in the Red Army, had been sentenced a
nd shot in Russia. I have forgotten whether it said “for treason.” I had never heard of Dmitri Schmidt before. I still do not know anything more about him. He is a ghost who appeared to my mind a few hours after his death, evoked by a few lines of type.
I do not know why I read and reread this brief obituary or why there came over me a foreboding, an absolute conviction: Something terrible is happening. I felt this so strongly that I mentioned the item to J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party. He did not answer me at once. Then he said fiercely: “A comrade who has just come back from Moscow is going around saying that there is a terror going on there and that they are arresting and shooting everybody. He should be taken care of.” This was Peters’ way of saying that I should shut up. Then I knew that my foreboding was right.
The little item about Dmitri Schmidt meant, of course, that the Great Purge had reached the Red Army. Like a single, absurd revolver shot far off on the sidelines, it announced the opening of an immense and bloody engagement. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had begun to condition itself for the final revolutionary struggle with the rest of the world by cutting out of its own body all that could weaken or hamper it in that conflict. It was literally sweating blood.
More nonsense, if possible, has been written about the Purge than about any of the great events of our age. It has been described as a drama of the Russian mind and soul which a non-Russian can hope to understand only by reading the novels of Feodor Dostoyevsky. It has been cited (for example, in Mission to Moscow) as an act of high patriotism whereby the wise Stalin rid his country of those traitors who were trying to negotiate an agreement with the Nazis. The fact that Stalin and his group shortly thereafter negotiated such an agreement with the Nazis is tactfully overlooked. The great public trials, by which the Purge was dramatized in the person of former high Communists, who sometimes abjectly, sometimes with apparent delight, confessed to the most fantastic lies, had just the effect they were intended to have abroad. They distracted attention from the main purpose of the Purge, while the wise men of the West wrote with brilliant inconclusiveness on “Why They Confess.” (They confess, of course, because, if a man’s family is completely at the mercy of his captors, and if he is systematically tortured by experts, he will, unless he is exceptionally strong or already more than half-dead, confess to almost anything. If he does not confess, he will not be tried publicly; he will be shot secretly.)
The Great Purge was in the most literal sense a massacre. It was like one of those Western jack-rabbit hunts in which a whole countryside forms a vast circle that finally closes in on its victims and clubs them to death. The purgees, like the rabbits, had no possible chance to escape; they were trapped, arrested, shot or sent to one of those Russian slave-labor camps on which the Nazis modeled their concentration camps, substituting the gas oven for death by enforced starvation, hard labor and undoctored disease.
This great massacre, probably the greatest in history, was deliberately planned and executed. In the interest of the Revolution (and, as always in politics, this higher interest can also be translated into terms of personal interest without at all challenging its sincerity), the group of Communists headed by Stalin decided that the historical situation through which the world and the Communist Party was passing, justified them in killing off those Communists who opposed their indispensable strategy and tactics. Those killed have been estimated from several hundred thousand to several million men and women. The process took about three years, 1935 through 1938. Its immediate purpose was to give the Stalinists absolute control of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, then of the Red Army, then of the secret police (C.P.U.). This seizure of power in the party and the state, which the Stalinists carried out with the same careful craft that the Communists had used in seizing power in Russia, took place in three well-marked waves and several subsidiary waves. In the first wave, aimed at consolidating their power in the party, the government and the army, the Stalinists used the secret police to massacre their opponents in the party and the general staff. In the second wave, the Stalinists turned on the secret police and replaced the head of the G.P.U. (Yagoda) with his second in command (Yezhov). Yezhov then liquidated Yagoda and his friends (on charges of murder). In the third wave, the Stalinists killed Yezhov, who had been their tool in killing Yagoda, and secured absolute control of the secret police. This act, which was the crest of the Purge. gave them complete control of the party and the government.
The principle is the old Oriental one whereby a great king commanded a group of slaves to dig and construct a treasure vault. When the treasure was moved in, the king commanded a second group of slaves to massacre the first group, so that the secret of the vault and its location died with them. To make doubly sure, he then commanded a third group of slaves to massacre the second group, so that even the knowledge that the second group had massacred the first group was buried with them. Colonel Bykov never had the slightest doubt as to what was happening in the Purge. As each new list of executed men was published, he would quote Lenin to me gleefully: “Loochye menshe, no loochye—Better less, but better.”
Since the Purge, millions of men, women and children in the world have died violently. The 20th century has put out of its mind, because it can no longer cope with the enormity of the statistic, the millions it has exterminated in its first fifty years. Even among those millions the number killed in the Purge makes a formidable figure. But, on a Communist, not only the numbers, but the revolutionary stature of the purgees, had a shattering impact. To the Western world, those strange names—Rykov, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Rakovsky, Krylenko, Latsis, Tukhachevsky, Muralov, Smirnov, Karakhan, Mrachkovsky—were merely tongue twisters. To a Communist, they were the men who had made one of the great transformations in human history—the Russian Revolution. The charge, on which they were one and all destroyed, the charge that they had betrayed their handiwork, was incredible. They were the Communist Party. If the charge was true, then every other Communist had given his life for a fraud. If the charge was false, then every other Communist was giving his life for a fraud. This was a torturing thought. No Communist could escape it.
The Purge struck me in a personal way too. Like every Communist in the world, I felt its backlash, for the Purge also swept through the Soviet secret apparatuses. I underwent long hours of grilling by Colonel Bykov in which he tried, without the flamboyance, but with much of the insinuating skill of Lloyd Paul Stryker, the defense lawyer in the first Hiss trial, to prove that I had been guilty of Communist heresies in the past, that I was secretly a Trotskyist, that I was not loyal to Comrade Stalin. I emerged unharmed from those interrogations, in part because I was guiltless, but more importantly, because Colonel Bykov had begun to regard me as indispensable to his underground career, so that toward the end of his grillings he would sometimes squeeze my arm in his demonstrative Russian way and repeat a line from a popular song that had caught his fancy: “Bei mir bist du achön.”
Actually, Bykov’s cynicism was harder to bear than his grillings. He was much too acute to suppose that I was sound about the Purge, and he took a special delight in letting me know it. Sometimes, after the purgees had been sentenced to be shot, there would be no official announcement of their execution, as if to emphasize playfully that this official silence was part of the silence of death. “Where is Bukharin?” Bykov asked me slyly some weeks after the Communist Party’s leading theoretician had been sentenced to death for high treason, while his death had not been announced. “Dead,” I answered rudely. “You are right,” said Bykov in a cooing voice, “you are right. You can be absolutely sure that our Bukharin is dead.”
The human horror of the Purge was too close for me to grasp clearly its historical meaning. I could not have said then, what I knew shortly afterwards, that, as Communists, Stalin and the Stalinists were absolutely justified in making the Purge. From the Communist viewpoint, Stalin could have taken no other course, so long as he believe
d he was right. The Purge, like the Communist-Nazi pact later on, was the true measure of Stalin as a revolutionary statesman. That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not evil, it was the sad consequence of evil. It was Communism that was evil, and the more truly a man acted in its spirit and interest, the more certainly he perpetuated evil.
But, at the time, I saw the Purge as the expression of a crisis within the group—the Communist Party—which I served in the belief that it alone could solve the crisis of the modem world. The Purge caused me to re-examine the meaning of Communism and the nature of the world’s crisis.
I had always known, of course, that there were books critical of Communism and of the Soviet Union. There were surprisingly few of them (publishers did not publish them because readers did not read them). But they did exist. I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them. I was then entirely in agreement with the European Communist who said recently, about the same subject: “A man does not sip a bottle of cyanide just to find out what it tastes like.” I was a man of average intelligence who had read much of what is great in human thought. But even if I had read such books, I should not have believed them. I should probably have put them down without finishing them. I would have known that, in the war between capitalism and Communism, books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded. I should have considered them as more or less artfully contrived propaganda.
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