Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  It was several years before I would hear of the terrible insight that came to Lenin as he lay dying, and babbled from one side of his half-paralyzed mouth: “The machine has got out of control.”

  At the time, I knew only that the party and its purposes were greater than any man in it, greater than Lenin, greater than Comrade Trotsky, and certainly greater than Comrade Chambers.

  But, like a hot ash, the cable left on my mind a tiny, ineradicable char.

  XVIII

  Wages on the Daily Worker were so intermittent and so small that I began to look around to see if I could not make a little money in my spare time. My college friend, Clifton Fadiman, was then a reader at Simon and Schuster, the New York book publishers. He offered to let me try my hand at translating a little German book. It was about a deer named Bambi and was written by an Austrian, of whom I had never heard, named Felix Salten.

  I thought the story rather sentimental, but it brought back to me my boyhood days in the woods, when I was watching the flight and pursuit of creatures under the ponds or among the grass stems. I made the translation. Bambi was an instant success, and I suddenly found myself an established translator. But I did not have time for the generous offers that came to me from capitalist publishers. The Daily Worker kept me too busy. And the party, suddenly awakened to the fact that I could translate from several languages, put me to work.

  I was given a pamphlet by one of the French Communist leaders, Jacques Doriot. It was a report of his experiences in the Chinese revolution, which he had recently observed as member of a delegation from the Communist International. I was told that the translation must be done in a few days. So, after his work at the Daily Worker, the translator of Bambi hammered out the translation of Doriot—not for pay, of course. It was done in time. But it was never published. Even before I had completed it, Doriot had fallen from political grace. During World War II, he was chief of the fascist militia under the Vichy Government until he was killed by Allied strafing.

  XIX

  Some time in 1927 or 1928, an own-your-home impulse struck the Central Committee of the Communist Party. No doubt, several of its members on their illegal travels about Europe had been struck by the splendid headquarters and other real estate owned bv the prosperous and self-supporting German Communist Party, and wished at least the semblance of something like it.

  It was decided to buy an old building on the east side of Union Square. How the party paid for it I do not know. I heard whispers about the needle trades, “angels” and a mortgage from the Amalgamated Bank, which was controlled by the needle trades and which stood just across Union Square from the new Communist property. This holding was named the Workers Center.

  The ground floor was remodeled as a great cafeteria. Its walls were devoutly muraled by artists from the John Reed Club, a Communist-controlled cultural organization. The effect was a foretaste of the murals that, in W.P.A. days, were to astonish citizens on the walls of United States post offices; in fact, John Reed Club artists participated in both achievements. The murals depicted workers and peasants, usually with heads that looked as if they had been carelessly carved out of soap, and muscles bulging like the sinews of lions and bulls in Assyrian bas-reliefs.

  Under this ordeal of labor, a vast swarm of idlers chatted and wrangled most of the day and night. The cafeteria was soon known as the “zoo” and for its patrons Sender Garlin changed the term “rank and file” to read “the rank and vile.” The Daily Worker writers preferred a little Spanish restaurant around the comer, where they could get a platter of saffron rice for twenty cents and eat it among sedate and quietly talking Spanish workingmen, whose faces were sometimes solemn, sometimes vivacious, and who were so thin that they seemed to have no muscles at all.

  For the Daily Worker had moved into the Workers Center too. It occupied, if I remember rightly, the third or fourth floor. Above it were mysterious regions which I was to penetrate only on one mysterious occasion. On the lower floors were the pressroom, the business office and the offices of Uj Elöre, the Hungarian Communist weekly. The Daily Worker office occupied a whole floor. It was dominated by a vast copy table, designed and built under the personal direction of Robert Minor. It stood at the front of the office under the windows that overlooked the Square. At one side, was Editor Minor’s private office, which was usually empty, for Minor spent most of his time in the more tremendous political atmosphere of national headquarters, dropping down upon the Worker chiefly late at night. His appearances were as frantic as they were fleeting, for he was usually dashing to make the late train for Croton-on-Hudson, where then, as now, a number of Communists and sympathizers maintained summer dachas.6

  At the slot of the gigantic copy desk sat Harry Freeman. Like all the men who successively sat in that slot, he was in effect the editor of the Daily Worker. For Comrade Hatch, after doing as much as any man could to whip the recalcitrant Worker into shape, had whipped off to do the last thing so dry and unimaginative a man might be expected to do—write a novel.

  When Harry Freeman took over the copy desk, I took over his old job as foreign-news writer, and Honig took over my old job as worker-correspondence editor.

  XX

  Harry Freeman did not sit at the copy desk very long. His journalistic talents could have made him a career anywhere. Those, together with certain other qualifications, were about to carry him into a post that any Communist newsman might covet. He also used his social talents, quietly and effectively.

  Harry, his wife, and his brother Joseph Freeman shared a fairly sumptuous apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. I sometimes found myself wondering how they could afford it, but I supposed that Joe’s salary as an employe of Tass (the official Soviet news service) paid the rent. The apartment had been sublet from Eugene Lyons, a former Tass man himself; at that time a United Press correspondent in Russia, and a Soviet sympathizer. (In 1937, his fierce indictment of the Soviet Government and Communism in Assignment in Utopia was one of the books that influenced my break with Communism. )

  I was one of several Daily Worker people who sometimes spent pleasant evenings at the Freemans’. Among the others were Sender Garlin and Abe Magill, a solemn young Philadelphian, known, for his humorless ponderosity, as the “rabbi Magill,” and more recently as one of the party’s profounder theoretical minds. There was also Sol Auerbach, better known by his party name of James Allen. Auerbachsucceeded me as foreign-news writer at the Daily Worker. Later, he became the chief editor for International Publishers, the official Communist book-publishing house, whose manager, Alexander Trachtenberg, was a member of the party’s Central Control Commission.

  At the Freemans’, too, I met Nadya Pavlov and her husband who was employed by Amtorg, the Russian American Trading Corporation. The Pavlovs were Russian Communists, and frantic Trotskyists (before Trotsky’s downfall). Nadya, a bright, alert, belligerent Bolshevik, who wore her black hair in the official bob, used to insist, especially in her cups, that I was not a Communist, but a peasant—“simply a Russian peasant.” At the time, that used to annoy me. But perhaps she was more right than either of us knew, and, curiously, she was not the only Russian who would make the same observation.

  The centerpiece of the Henry Street evenings was Kenneth Durant and his wife. Durant was a bony, dark, saturnine scion of a well-to-do Philadelphia family. He combined a razor-shap intelligence with executive inaccessibility (at that time, he was the head of Tass in the United States). I remember him best for the acrobatic contortions with which he would wrap himself around the Freemans’ big billiard table, the icy precision of his shots and the equally icy ( and flagrant ) rudeness with which he would turn away from billiards to crush his ebullient wife with a few terse, depressing words.

  His wife was a big, plump girl in her thirties. The short skirts of the period and a somewhat babyish expression made her look like a grown woman who, by a characteristic lapse of judgment, had got herself up as a tot for a fancy-dress ball. She used to suffer her husband�
��s jolting rudeness with skin-crawling meekness. I used to pity her, but perhaps that was not necessary. During the Great Purge, it was feared for a while that she had been liquidated by the Russian secret police. But she had merely dipped out of sight in the course of a private itinerary that had taken her from England, through Scandinavia into Finland.

  One day Harry Freeman informed me, in strictest secrecy, that he was leaving the Daily Worker and going to assist Kenneth Durant at Tass. Later, I used to visit him at the Tass office. Sometimes he returned the call at the Daily Worker. His old loyalties were strong, and, though Tass employes were strictly forbidden to engage in American Communist activities, Harry would now and again knock out a foreign-news story for the Worker. Those were my last glimpses of him. I do not recall seeing Harry Freeman after 1929.

  Sender Garlin took over Freeman’s old post at the copy desk.

  XXI

  Like Freeman, Garlin was an able newsman. But he was not a good editor. In his fussiness or excitement over detail, the main editorial threads snarled in his hands. No editor but Hatch had ever made the mail trains to the West. Garlin succeeded in missing them by wider margins than most. The linotypers, who could make or break the edition in the last hour before the deadline, disliked him and deliberately sabotaged his work. His inspired mimicry of everyone made the older comrades fear (with reason) that he also mimicked them behind their backs. They disliked him too.

  Once, he was ill for a few days, and chiefly because there was no one else to slide into the copy-desk slot, I was slid in. I had never paid much attention to the copy-desk routines. To everyone’s surprise, but chiefly to mine, it all went off quietly. A sense of time, order and personal relations, I found, was chiefly required. The staff co-operated eagerly. I belonged to neither faction in the party. Both despised my neutrality, but there was an advantage in having an impartial umpire at the desk (Freeman and Garlin had been Lovestoneites). The linotypers co-operated too. They were Americans, who hated Communism and all its works. But we shared that obsession, common to all Americans, for getting a specific job done. I took to editing the paper in the closing hours from the linotype room, walking around among the men (where, by union rules, I had no business to be), splitting up copy so that they could set it faster, urging them on until we were caught up unconsciously in one purpose, and, for the first time since Hatch, the paper began to make the mail trains.

  By the time Garlin came back, the staff had made known to Minor that they no longer wanted him at the copy desk. His indispensability as a newsman was urged. He bowed obediently to discipline and made only random cabals against me.

  Sometimes the rush for the mail trains was defeated by a factor that I could not control. The Daily Worker still suffered almost weekly financial crises. When the linotypers had been unpaid for a week they refused to set copy. They would simply sit at their machines, smoking cigarettes and sneering at Communists until their wages appeared. Where they appeared from was always a mystery to me. But, at one point, I became aware that part of the mystery was a bookkeeping transaction with the Hungarian Communist weekly, Uj Elöre. Sometimes, during these crises, I met and spoke with a short, dark, friendly Hungarian named J. Peters who was connected with the business office of Uj Elöre. Sometimes, he ventured a kind word about my industry and, especially, my public relations with the linotypers.

  The future head of the underground section of the American Communist Party was not the only underground shadow that touched me in the print shop. Though I did not then suspect it, I was also in touch with the Soviet underground. The assistant foreman of the shop was a Communist Party member. His name was Sam Shoyet. His brother-in-law also worked in the print shop, quietly setting up ads and easing them gently into the frames. He was a slight, stooped young man in his late teens or early twenties. He wore very thick-lensed glasses and his face was as white as a mushroom. His name was Harry Tamer.

  Sam Shoyet was the party’s secret eye in the print shop. He warned me when trouble was blowing up among the linotypers and what the temper of the night’s morale was. So far as he dared, he helped me with the speed up. But the men did not like him. Sometimes, in a pinch, he sat down at a machine and set a few lines of type himself. We became friendly.

  He was a strange-looking man, with a Kalmuck’s broad cheekbones and slightly slant, squint eyes. He told me that he had been born in Russia. Later, he bad worked at his trade in Paris and in Tokyo. I remember thinking: “But how could he set Japanese type?” It was one of those pointless little discrepancies that lodge in the mind because something is not quite right about them. They are not thought about, but neither are they quite forgotten.

  Several years later, when I was myself underground, I was to meet another of Sam Shoyet’s brothers-in-law—one of Harry Tamer’s older brothers. I met him in his apartment in Brooklyn, which was one of the secret headquarters of the Soviet underground. Joshua Tamer, though I did not then know it, was an employe of one of the big steel companies. One day United States security officers appeared at the steel company’s offices in New Jersey. Tamer was at lunch. The officers informed the company that Tamer was suspected as a Russian agent. “That is impossible,” they were told. “Tamer is a quiet man who has worked here for years.” But “the quiet man” promptly fled to the Soviet Union, where he has remained ever since.

  Later I was to meet another brother of Harry and Joshua Tamer’s. He was an employe at a waterworks system in northern New Jersey. Still later, J. Peters was to introduce me to a Soviet agent, who under the pseudonyms of Robinson and Rubens, was the center of a celebrated international mystery. (He was also the subject of one of the little memos in Alger Hiss’s acknowledged handwriting which figured in the Hiss trials.)

  After that, I thought that I knew why Sam Shoyet, of the Daily Worker print shop, had been in Tokyo. I no longer supposed that he had been setting Japanese type.

  The underground was not only peering at me through the slant eyes of Comrade Shoyet. It was even closer to me in the person of John Sherman, whom I could see, as I glanced from the copy desk down the lines of writers, holding his bald head in a stern pose, which, the comrades said, he thought made him look like Lenin. A situation was developing in the party, whereby, in unforeseeable ways, the future would soon close in on both of us; on Sherman first, and, through him, on me.

  XXII

  Stalin was about to take another step in his gradual conquest of absolute power. By a guileful alliance with the right wing of the Russian Communist Party, he had destroyed Trotsky. Now he felt strong enough to dispense with his allies. He set out to destroy the right opposition in the person of Nikolai Bukharin, who at that time seemed the most powerful figure in Russia.

  The political destruction of Bukharin took about a year, beginning, roughly, with the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928. It was a somewhat complicated task, for the temper of Stalin’s mind requires a strategy of multiple deceptions, which confuse his victims with the illusion of power, and soften them up with the illusion of hope, only to plunge them deeper into despair when the illusion fades, the trap is sprung, and the victims grasp with horror, as they hurtle into space, that the levers of control were always in Comrade Stalin’s hands.

  Even the American phase of this struggle took place on a plane beyond my sight (for, contrary to a widespread notion, I was always a comparatively obscure member of the Communist Party). But, as acting editor of the Daily Worker, I could not fail to be touched by some of its frenzies; and in the person of Robert Minor, who, during the climax of the fight, was acting secretary of the Communist Party, I was able to observe some of its more awkward antics. For, unlike the destruction of Trotsky, which merely ruffled American Communist circles, the destruction of Bukharin affected the American Communist Party down to the smallest cell.

  That repercussion was due to the factional situation within the American Communist Party and a shrewd error on the part of the Lovestoneite leaders who supposed that Bukharin, and n
ot Stalin, was going to be the winner of the Russian party conflict.

  Over the years, the Lovestoneites had won their own fight in the United States. Their power in the American Communist Party was all but complete. They had cajoled or coerced a majority vote in all the units of the party. They controlled most, if not all, of the party organizations and the press. The Fosterites had shrunk to a sullen, intractable, greatly outnumbered minority. For the first time in its history, the Lovestoneites seemed on the point of enforcing unity on the distracted party. It had been done by the methods of any political machine, by corruption and by pressure. But, for a moment, many Communists were inclined to welcome the blessings of forced harmony..

  For the first and only time, I attended a Lovestone caucus meeting. I was not a very sympathetic observer. Of all that was said and done, I remember only .two things. I remember the long bulk of Robert Minor, informally sprawled on the floor before the speakers’ tables at the front of the meeting—the image of relaxed assurance and victory. And I remember the short, arrogant figure of John Pepper, who, as Joseph Pogany, had been the commissar for war in the Hungarian Soviet Government, and who was now the official representative of the Communist International to the American Communist Party, and Lovestone’s “gray eminence.”7

  A stumpy figure, Pepper strutted down the center aisle of the meeting, staring haughtily to the right and left, but seeing no one —a small man swollen with pride of place and power. The spectacle was unforgettable, for Pepper was actually strutting toward a downfall that would strip him, at a snap of Stalin’s fingers, of all those powers that meant life to him. It would lead him at last, through torments that can only be guessed at, to an execution cellar and a revolver bullet in the base of his brain.