Some ex-Communists are so stricken by the evil they have freed themselves from that they inform exultantly against it. No consideration, however humane, no tie however tender, checks them. They understand, as few others do, the immensity of the danger, and experience soon teaches them the gulf fixed between the reality they must warn against and the ability of the world to grasp their warnings. Fear makes them strident. They are like breathless men who have outrun the lava flow of a volcano and must shout down the smiles of the villagers at its base who, regardless of their own peril, remember complacently that those who now try to warn them once offered their faith and their lives to the murderous mountain.
By temperament, I cannot share such exultation or stridency, though I understand both. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary. Each time, relief lies only in the certainty that, when enough has died in a man, at last the man himself dies, as light fails.
Sometimes, by informing, the ex-Communist can claim immunity of one kind or another for acts committed before his change of heart or sides. He is right to claim it, for if he is to be effective, his first task is to preserve himself. Sometimes, he can even enjoy such immunity, if he is able to feel what is happening to him in the simplest terms, impersonally, as an experience of history and of war in which he at last has found his bearings and which he is helping to wage. By the rules of war, common sense and self-interest, the world can scarcely lose by allowing him his immunity. It does well, provided by acts he makes amends, to help him to forget his past, if only because in the crisis of the 20th century, not all the mistakes were committed by the ex-Communists.
I never asked for immunity. Nor did anyone at any time ever offer me immunity, even by a hint or a whisper. What immunity can the world offer a man against his thoughts?
And so I went to see Adolf Berle.
III
The meeting was arranged by Isaac Don Levine. Levine is the former editor of Plain Talk, one of the few magazines in the country that tried to tell some of the truth about the Amerasia Case while it was still happening. For years, he has carried on against Communism a kind of private war which is also a public service. He is a skillful professional journalist and a notable “ghost.” It was Levine who led Jan Valtin out of the editorial night and he was working with General Krivitsky on I Was in Stalin’s Secret Service when, sometime in 1938, I met both men.
I had gone to Levine in the first place with the idea of writing two or three pieces about the underground, notably the case of Robinson-Rubens. Nothing came of the project, about which, in any case, I was only half-hearted. But something much more important developed.
From the first, Levine had urged me to take my story to the proper authorities. I had said no. I was extremely wary of Levine. I knew little or nothing about him, and the ex-Communist is an outlaw, not only a fugitive from the Communist Party, but the natural prey of anyone who can turn his plight to his own purpose or profit. Levine gave me no cause for concern but I wished to be careful. When he proposed that he arrange a meeting at which I might tell my story directly to President Roosevelt, I was reassured. It seemed to me that in a matter so grave, touching the security of the country at top levels of the Government, the President was the man who should first hear the facts and decide where to go from there. I told Levine that, if he would arrange the meeting, I would co-operate.
Two factors chiefly moved me to agree. One was the force of history. The other was General Walter Krivitsky, who for me was to be fateful.
IV
History was moving torrentially. Seldom have such tensions been packed into one year as into the year 1939. For while I was struggling to begin life anew at the age of thirty-eight, in a world that I had given up as hopeless at the age of twenty-four, the historic crisis that had made me reject it reached a new crest.
The Spanish Civil War had ended. That is to say, the opening campaign of World War II had ended. The great interventionists in Spain—Fascism (in its German and Italian forms) and Fascism (in its Soviet guise)—were free to maneuver for new positions in other fields. Spain had disclosed the pattern of the war to come. Whatever the free nations meant to fight for, whatever the millions meant to die for, in reality, World War II, like the Spanish Civil War, would be fought to decide which of the great fascist systems—the Axis or Communism—was to survive and control Europe. In the end, the superiority of the Communist system was indicated by the fact that it was able to use the free nations to carry out its purposes, as indispensable allies in war, whose vital interests could easily be defeated in peace.
Godesberg was followed by Munich; the partition of Czechoslovakia by its occupation. My wife and I were among the invisible millions who haunted their radios in those days. We heard Jan Masaryk’s voice break as be pled against the extinction of his country. Until the end, we heard, borne on the air waves across the ocean, the Vltava. Smetana’s music, that describes the flowing of the Vltava River through Bohemia on its way to the sea. The motive forces of history conspire unknowably. Whoever, in that distracted studio in those distracted hours, kept playing that song, could not possibly have known that it would reach the ears of a defeated ex-Communist and his wife in Baltimore, or the impact it would have upon them.
As that childishly simple, descriptive music came over the air—a little peasant theme, repeated over and over like the hopeless crying of a child from whom everything has been taken—my wife wept. She wept for the Czech children and for all children. She wept for the night that was descending upon mankind. I had been a Communist in large part to keep that night from falling. I had failed. The force that I had hoped might save was abetting the disaster. That fact I had already learned, or was soon to learn, from Walter Krivitsky. The knowledge made certain that what, as a Communist, I had tried and failed to do, I would now try to do as an ex-Communist, by other means, but, in fact, from much the same motives.
V
I met Krivitsky with extreme reluctance. Long after my break with the Communist Party, I could not think of Communists or Communism without revulsion. I did not wish to meet even ex-Communists. Toward Russians, especially, I felt an organic antipathy.
But one night, when I was at Levine’s apartment in New York, Krivitsky telephoned that he was coming over. There presently walked into the room a tidy little man about five feet six with a somewhat lined gray face out of which peered pale blue eyes. They were professionally distrustful eyes, but oddly appealing and wistful, like a child whom life has forced to find out about the world, but who has never made his peace with it. By way of handshake, Krivitsky touched my hand. Then he sat down at the far end of the couch on which I also was sitting. His feet barely reached the floor. I turned to look at him. He did not look at me. He stared straight ahead. Then he asked in German (the only language that we ever spoke): “Ist die Sowjetregierung eine faschistische Regierung?—Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?”
Communists dearly love to begin a conversation with a key question the answer to which will also answer everything else of importance about the answerer. I recognized that this was one of those questions. On the political side, I had broken with the Communist Party in large part because I had become convinced that the Soviet Government was fascist. Yet when I had to give that answer out loud, instead of in the unspoken quiet of my own mind, all the emotions that had ever bound me to Communism rose in a final spasm to stop my mouth. I sat silent for some moments. Then I said: “Ja, die Sowjehegierung ist eine faschistische Regierung —the Soviet Government is a fascist government.” Later on that night, Krivitsky told me that if I had answered yes at once, he would have distrusted me. Because I hesitated, and he felt the force of my struggle, he was convinced that I was sincere.
When I answered slowly, and a little somberly, as later on I sometimes answered questions during the Hiss Case, Krivitsky turned for the first time and looked at me directly. “Da hast recht,” he said, “und Kronsta
dt war der Wendepunkt—You are right, and Kronstadt was the turning point.”
I knew what he meant. But who else for a thousand miles around could know what we were talking about? Here and there, some fugitive in a dingy room would know. But, as Krivitsky and I looked each other over, it seemed to me that we were like two survivors from another age of the earth, like two dated dinosaurs, the last relics of the revolutionary world that had vanished in the Purge. Even in that vanished world, we had been a special breed —the underground activists. There were not many of our kind left alive who still spoke the language that had also gone down in the submergence. I said, yes, Kronstadt had been the turning point.
Kronstadt is a naval base a few miles west of Leningrad in the Gulf of Finland. From Kronstadt during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet had steamed their cruisers to aid the Communists in capturing Petrograd. Their aid had been decisive. They were the sons of peasants. They embodied the primitive revolutionary upheaval of the Russian people. They were the symbol of its instinctive surge for freedom. And they were the first Communists to realize their mistake and the first to try to correct it. When they saw that Communism meant terror and tyranny, they called for the overthrow of the Communist Government and for a time imperiled it. They were bloodily destroyed or sent into Siberian slavery by Communist troops led in person by the Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky, and by Marshal Tukhachevsky, one of whom was later assassinated, the other executed, by the regime they then saved.
Krivitsky meant that by the decision to destroy the Kronstadt sailors, and by its cold-blooded action in doing so, Communism had made the choice that changed it from benevolent socialism to malignant fascism. Today, I could not answer, yes, to Krivitsky’s challenge. The fascist character of Communism was inherent in it from the beginning. Kronstadt changed the fate of millions of Russians. It changed nothing about Communism. It merely disclosed its character.
Krivitsky and I began to talk quickly as if we were racing time. Levine first dozed in his chair, and then, around midnight, went to bed. About three o‘clock in the morning, he came down in his bathrobe, found us still talking and went back to bed. Day dawned. Krivitsky and I went out to a cafeteria near the comer of 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. We were still talking there at eleven o’clock that morning. We parted because we could no longer keep our eyes open.
We talked about Krivitsky’s break with Communism and his flight with his wife and small son from Amsterdam to Paris. We talked about the attempts of the G.P.U. to trap or kill him in Europe and the fact that he had not been in the United States a week before the Russian secret police set a watch over his apartment. We talked about the murder of Ignatz Reiss, the Soviet agent whose break from the Communist Party in Switzerland had precipitated Krivitsky’s. They had been friends. The G.P.U. had demanded that Krivitsky take advantage of his friendship to trap or kill Reiss.
That night, too, I learned the name of Boris Bykov and that Herman’s real name had been Valentine Markin, and why he had been murdered and by whom.
But nothing else that we said was so important for the world, or for the course of action that it enjoined upon us both in our different ways, as what Krivitsky had to tell me about the designs of Soviet foreign policy. For it was then that I first learned that, for more than a year, Stalin had been desperately seeking to negotiate an alliance with Hitler. Attempts to negotiate the pact had been made throughout the period when Communism (through its agency, the Popular Front) was posing to the masses of mankind as the only inflexible enemy of fascism. As, in response to my first incredulity, Krivitsky developed the political logic that necessitated the alliance, I knew at once, as only an ex-Communist would, that he was speaking the truth. The alliance was, in fact, a political inevitability. I wondered only what blind spot had kept me from foreseeing it. For, by means of the pact, Communism could pit one sector of the West against the other, and use both to destroy what was left of the non-Communist world. As Communist strategy, the pact was thoroughly justified, and the Communist Party was right in denouncing all those who opposed it as Communism’s enemies. From any human point of view, the pact was evil.
We passed naturally to the problem of the ex-Communist and what he could do against that evil. Krivitsky did not then, or at any later time, tell me what he himself had done or would do. It was from others that I learned the details of his co-operation with the British Government.
But Krivitsky said one or two things that were to take root in my mind and deeply to influence my conduct, for they seemed to correspond to the reality of my position. “Konkret angegriffen,” he said at one point, “gibt es keine frühere Kommunisten. Es gibt nur Revolutionäre und Gegen-Revolutionäre.—Looked at concretely, there are no ex-Communists. There are only revolutionists and counterrevolutionists.” He meant that, in the 20th century, all politics, national and international, is the politics of revolution—that, in sum, the forces of history in our time can be grasped only as the interaction of revolution and counterrevolution. He meant that, in so far as a man ventures to think or act politically, or even if he tries not to think or act at all, history will, nevertheless, define what he is in the terms of those two mighty opposites. He is a revolutionist or he is a counterrevolutionist. In action there is no middle ground. Nor did Krivitsky suppose, as we discussed then (and later) in specific detail, that the revolution of our time is exclusively Communist, or that the counterrevolutionist is merely a conservative, resisting it out of habit and prejudice. He believed, as I believe, that fascism (whatever softening name the age of euphemism chooses to call it by) is inherent in every collectivist form, and that it can be fought only by the force of an intelligence, a faith, a courage, a self-sacrifice, which must equal the revolutionary spirit that, in coping with, it must in many ways come to resemble. No one knows so well as the ex-Communist the character of the conflict, and of the enemy, or shares so deeply the same power of faith and willingness to stake his life on his beliefs. For no other has seen so deeply into the total nature of the evil with which Communism threatens mankind. Counterrevolution and conservatism have little in common. In the struggle against Communism the conservative is all but helpless. For that struggle cannot be fought, much less won, or even understood, except in terms of total sacrifice. And the conservative is suspicious of sacrifice; he wishes first to conserve, above all what he is and what he has. You cannot fight against revolutions so.
In his own way, Krivitsky was saying what Ignazio Silone meant when he said to Palmiro Togliatti (echoing the words of the Internationale) : “The final conflict will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists.”26
In that all night conversation, Krivitsky also said: “In our time, informing is a duty.” He added, like a sad afterthought: “Man kommt nicht leicht von Stalin los—one does not come away from Stalin easily.”
I knew that, if the opportunity offered, I would inform.
VI
Unexpectedly, Levine provided the opportunity. Between the time that he proposed to arrange a conversation with the President, and the time I next saw Levine, some months had elapsed. I had gone to work for Time magazine. I was much too busy trying to learn my job to think of Levine, the President or anything else.
Then, on the morning of September 2, 1939, a few days after the Nazi-Communist Pact was signed, and the German armor had rushed on Warsaw, Isaac Don Levine appeared at my office at Time. He explained that he had been unable to arrange to see the President. But he had arranged a substitute meeting with Adolf Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security. It was for eight o’clock that night. Would I go?
I hesitated. I did not like the way in which I was presented with an accomplished fact. But—“looked at concretely, there are no ex-Communists; there are only revolutionists and counterrevolutionists”; “in our time, informing is a duty.” In fact, I was grateful to Levine for presenting me with a decision to which I had only to assent, but which involved an act so hateful that I should ha
ve hesitated to take the initiative myself.
I said that I would meet Levine in Washington that night.
VII
The plane was late. Levine was waiting for me nervously in front of the Hay-Adams House. No doubt, he thought that I might have changed my mind, leaving him with nothing to take to Adolf Berle but embarrassing explanations.
Berle was living in Secretary of War Stimson’s house. It stood on Woodley Road near Connecticut Avenue. It stood deep in shaded grounds, somewhat junglelike at night. For some reason the cab driver let us out at the entrance to the drive and, as we straggled up to the house, I realized that we were only four or five blocks from the apartment on 28th Street where I had first talked to Alger Hiss. With a wince, I thought of his remark when I told him that I had taken a job in the Government: “I suppose that you’ll turn up next in the State Department.”
The Berles were having cocktails. It was my first glimpse of that somewhat beetlelike man with the mild, intelligent eyes (at Harvard his phenomenal memory had made him a child prodigy). He asked the inevitable question: If I were responsible for the funny words in Time. I said no. Then he asked, with a touch of crossness, if I were responsible for Time’s rough handling of him. I was not aware that Time had handled him roughly.
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