Immersed In Red

by Mike Shotwell

  I was only six years old at the closing of the magazine, but Orville maintained a stack of the black-and-white, starkly presented issues, from which he would produce articles to educate me about various political topics. What I recall primarily were articles and poems penned by the black writers Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

  The writer/poet/civil rights pioneer, Langston Hughes, was born in 1902, and became heavily involved very early with the civil rights movement. Like many black writers and artists of his time, Hughes was drawn to the promise of communism as an alternative to a segregated America, and his poetry was frequently published in New Masses. He became infatuated with all things Soviet, traveling there in 1932 to make a movie about racism in the US. There he met another black, Robert Robinson, an engineer who had immigrated to Russia in 1930 to work in the Soviet auto industry.

  Desiring to leave the USSR and return to the States due to growing concerns for his safety, Robinson had requested permission several times to vacation in Ethiopia as a means of escape, but was regularly denied. Author of The Forsaken, Tim Tzouliadis, recounts Robinson’s appeal to Paul Robeson for help. What Robinson received was a letter of denial from Robeson’s wife, Eslanda, expressing their fear that if Robinson left the Soviet Union and subsequently expressed antiSoviet sentiments, it would reflect badly on the Robeson’s and put them in a dangerous situation. It had to be sobering for Hughes to learn that Robinson had been stripped of his passport and not allowed to leave. Here was a stark example of the true Russia.

  In his autobiography, Robinson described his dread fear of the Soviet KGB; he slept in his clothes nightly for fear he would hear a knock on his door at any moment. In 1974, after 44 years in Russia, including 27 years of attempts to leave, Robinson was finally granted permission to vacation in Uganda. He purchased a round-trip ticket so as to not arouse suspicion, but was then able to gain help to return to the United States, regain his passport, and live in the US for the remainder of his life.

  In 1937, Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for various communist African-American newspapers and was also involved in other communist-led organizations, such as the John Reed Club, an organization dominated by the Communist Party. Hughes signed a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin’s purges of the Old Bolsheviks, and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 in an attempt to keep the US from participating in WWII. This was during the Nazi-Russian non-aggression pact, and Hughes was following the Moscow party line.

  In the same year, Hughes presented a poem in Pasadena, Calif., under the auspices of the “International Union of Revolutionary Writers,” entitled Goodbye, Christ. It urged Jesus to get out of the way, that the Bible was dead, and was being replaced by “A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin…. Worker ME—.” Typical of Hughes at that period in his life, he glorified his communist/atheist ideology.

  In the early 1950s. Hughes was brought before the HCUAA. By that time, he had begun to distance himself from communism and was a cooperative witness. However, he did refrain from implicating others, with the claim that his beliefs were completely his own. He died in 1967.

  Richard Wright was born in 1908, and like Hughes, was drawn toward communism in the 30s. In 1932, he began attending meetings of the John Reed Club. He formally joined the Communist Party in late 1933 and as a revolutionary poet wrote numerous proletarian poems for New Masses and other left-wing periodicals. Wright moved to Paris in 1946, having left the Communist Party in 1942, and became a permanent American expatriate. Later, he wrote a book, Black Boy, chronicling his Communist Party involvement.

  American blacks in the 30s and 40s were striving for their day in the sun and their civil rights. Large segments of the general population also wished change. But in the 30s, the CPUSA, responding to the Comintern directives, saw an opening to promote societal division through the civil rights movement. They were very successful in their manipulations, and the remnants are still visible in present day American politics. Many black intellectuals like Paul Robeson, Hughes and Wright responded to the Soviet clarion call, moved by the Soviet constitution that forbade discrimination. However, blacks were not spared from Stalin’s periodic disfavor; they were grouped with fellow Westerners as foreigners warranting suspicion and expulsion. Once this was understood, it frequently led to disillusionment with communism and a subsequent distancing.

  The National Guardian, later known as The Guardian, was a periodical I remember as another mainstay of Orville’s and my mother’s weekly reading requirements. It was a radical leftist independent weekly newspaper established in 1948 in New York City, originally published in close connection with the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace under the Progressive Party banner. Although independent of any political party, the National Guardian was initially close to the ideological orbit of the pro-Moscow Communist Party USA. However, in February, 1968, the newspaper’s editorial staff was reorganized. The paper shortened its name to The Guardian and gradually turned towards a pro-Chinese orientation and support of the Maoist New Communist Movement in the United States. It was last published in 1992.

  Individual writers committed to the cause became quite influential, especially in painting an unrealistic portrait of the Soviet Union, and having in some cases damaging effects. One of the most infamous of these was Walter Duranty. His written words carried great weight with not only the public, but also with the Roosevelt administration. He was the Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times from 1922-1936 and garnered the Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper in 1932 for a series of stories he authored on the Soviet Union.

  In the prologue of Sally J. Taylor’s book about Duranty, Stalin’s Apologist, she writes, “As Fascism rose in Europe, and Japanese Imperialism threatened the East, Western powers sank deeper into the quagmire of the Great Depression. Against this backdrop, Duranty touted the accomplishments of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, ushering in what would come to be called The Red Decade.” This elaborate and false assessment led westerners to believe that what was happening inside Russia “held the key to the future for the rest of the world.” This erroneous and malicious appraisal had calamitous repercussions.

  Duranty’s whitewashed, pro-Stalin reporting, coinciding as it did with the Ukrainian genocide, Stalin’s mass starvaton program during 1932–33, the show trials, and Stalin’s Great Terror, was unconscionable. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians and allied groups from former Soviet eastern bloc countries unsuccessfully appealed for the revocation of Duranty’s Pulitzer award. Years later, even the New York Times acknowledged his articles constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper,” but to their shame they refused to give up the award, with the feeble justification that giving back the prize would itself evoke the “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and history.”

  Nobody suggested purging or erasing Duranty. On the contrary, it is important that Duranty’s inexcusable legacy be kept alive as an example of a run-amok, self-absorbed writer and a sympathetic newspaper. (As for the role of the New York Times during the eleven years Duranty was the Moscow Bureau Chief, it strains credulity to believe that his articles were simply accepted at face value.)

  But it appears that Duranty had cohorts in his fictionalized reporting, as described by the late Dr. James Mace, American historian and expert on the Ukrainian famine:

  In the 1980s during the course of my own research on the Ukrainian Holodomor [famine] I came across a most interesting document in the US National Archives, a memorandum from one A. W. Kliefoth of the US Embassy in Berlin dated June 4, 1931. Duranty dropped in to renew his passport. Mr. Kliefoth thought it might be of possible interest to the State Department that this journalist, in whose reporting so much credence was placed, had told him that, ‘In agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities,’ his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own [emphasis added].

  I was wr
yly amused to find that in 2012, PJ Media and their partners, The New Criterion, began a yearly award contest entitled the “Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity,” specifically given “for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year.”

  Duranty’s writings, in the final analysis, were nothing more than Soviet communist propaganda thrust upon the American public in the guise of honest reporting. And appearing in a trusted publication gave further credence to Duranty. Probably the most deplorable consequence of Duranty’s enthusiastic fabrications about the great Soviet experiment was the loss of the thousands who emigrated as a result, seeking relief from the Depression and eager to participate in the proletarian/socialist struggle. These workers, many with their families in tow, had their passports revoked and, with the exception of a handful, were exterminated or lost in the Soviet labyrynth. Additionally, Duranty’s haughty rebukes of writers expressing differing opinions must have added to the plausibility of his words.

  In my own mind I liken Walter Duranty, the Pied Piper of pro-Soviet journalism, to Lansford Hastings, “the Pied Piper of Western US migration.” Hastings published a book in 1845 describing his famous shortcut across the Great Basin to California. This falsified information led to the disaster that was the Donner Party, who relied on the promising route only to perish in the Sierra Nevada in the disastrous winter of 1846–47. Mr. Hastings had never actually traversed the route he advertised.

  In contrast, Duranty resided in Moscow in his position as bureau chief, and was well aware of what life was like there; yet he chose to paint a very different picture for his readers back home. As a result, the pain and suffering he caused touched far more people, over an extended period of time, than Hastings ever did.

  The press is a powerful tool, and Walter Duranty’s glowing reports created a positive, deep-seated mindset about the Soviet Union in the psyches of many Americans that remained entrenched for the remainder of their lives and even into the next generations. Orville was one of those persons. Duranty’s name, and others like Nat and Janet Ross, were held up to me as people who had lived, written and studied in Russia and knew the truth about the great worker’s paradise, as opposed to the whining, right-wing detractors who churned out anticommunist propaganda from the comfort of their desks.

  George Seldes was an American writer whose career spanned from1909 into the 1980s. He assumed the title of a “free thinker,” was heavily opinionated on most topics, and was a lifelong self-described atheist. He was an investigative journalist working on many newspapers and publications and was revered by generations of fellow writers. Orville was very familiar with Seldes’ publication, In Fact magazine, which was extremely influential in its day (1940-50). He used to refer to Seldes as an upstanding person who was run out of business by red-baiters.

  According to John Earl Haines, the author and former researcher at the Library of Congress, “Seldes was actually a long-term secret member of the Communist Party, according to notes of KGB archival files made by Vassiliev in 1993-96.” An NKVD intercept in 1940 identified “George Seldes” as a “longtime fellow countryman” (member of the party), however, he denied his membership before the McCarthy Senate hearings.

  Seldes’ publication partner was “Bruce Minton,” which was a cover name for Richard Bransten, a Soviet agent with the code name “Informator.” Bransten’s wife was another Soviet agent, Louise Bransten, who was a combination secret member of the Communist Party, and also the mistress of NKVD San Francisco station chief, Grigory Kheifets.

  When allegations of communist involvement came out against Bransten (“Minton”), Seldes made the absurd claim that he was not aware of Bransten’s involvement with the Soviets. But the charade goes on today. The Wikipedia biography on Seldes makes no mention of his or his partner’s communist connection. Seldes was given an award in 1980 by the Association for Education in Journalism for professional excellence, and also received the George Polk Award for his life’s work in 1981. Either these journalistic organizations were naively unaware or unconcerned with Seldes’ troubling and duplicitous background.

  George Seldes presented himself to the reading public as a tough but fair, independent journalist; one who had valuable, inside-track information, and was delivering the truth. When not covering political topics, Seldes practiced some admirable journalism, such as being an early reporter on the dangers of smoking, and covering various business issues. But his work in regard to US foreign policy as it related to communist countries must be viewed through the lens of his own communist ideology, which he carefully masked from the public. Seldes died at the age of 104 in 1995.

  Isidor “Izzy” Stone’s writing career as an investigative journalist spanned the years 1909 to 1989, and he contributed to many publications. Stone was decidedly pro-Soviet in his world view, was associated with the communist “Popular Front,” and had formerly been a contributor to the Soviet-aligned Nation and the New Republic. As a consequence of his pro-communist writing, he was fired from his then-current job at the New York Post.

  Orville stated in his interviews that when he was working with the National Youth Administration, he often met Stone, who was then writing for the Nation. Their meeting place was at the home of Helen Fuller, who later became the editor of the New Republic.

  In 1940, Stone moved to George Seldes’ magazine, PM, and became a stalwart of the paper’s pro-communist faction. KGB documents, published in the mid-90s, have now shown that Stone was a paid Soviet spy who had been originally recruited by the NKVD in 1936 and been given the code name “Blin” for “pancake.” He was also shown to be a talent spotter, and courier relaying information to other agents. He remained a Soviet spy until 1939, at which point he withdrew due to bitterness over the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939-1941, but his sympathies for the Soviets were quickly renewed when war broke out.

  The Venona decrypts during WWII showed Stone mentioning to his Soviet handler that he “would not be averse to having a supplementary income.” The Soviets insisted that if that should happen, Stone would “have to do his part and really produce.” Subsequent intercepts proved that Stone was secretly paid by the NKVD for contributing articles on subjects required by Moscow. As covered in Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa’s book, Disinformation, Stone demonized US policies, belittled the FBI, maligned Pope Pius XII, blamed the Catholics for Nazi persecution of the Jews, attacked McCarthyism, and opposed the war in Vietnam, all following the Soviet orthodoxy.

  After World War II, Stone welcomed Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and only voiced “tepid criticism of Stalin’s brutalities.” At the death of Stalin, he voiced disapproval with Eisenhower’s “merely official” condolences, stating they were “small-minded and unworthy of a great power.” “A magnanimous salute was called for on such an occasion.” One of his sympathetic biographers referred to Stone as “an apologist for the hammer-and-sickle.”

  In 1953, at the urging of George Seldes, Stone founded a weekly periodical, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which continued until 1971. It became very influential in liberal circles, and Stone became an icon of the leftist world.

  Stone finally professed in 1988, “I was a fellow traveler.” The following year, when communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Stone still could see no conflict between communism and America’s “ideals of freedom.” He stated, “In a way, I was half-Jeffersonian and half a Marxist. I never saw a contradiction between the two, and I still don’t.” Once again, with stupefying repetition, we hear the CPUSA mantra that American communists were the true twentieth-century patriots … that they were the inheritors of Jeffersonian democracy. What a grotesque distortion of American history. At a minimum, Stone was a paid Soviet agent from 1936–39, cooperated with the Soviets in the 40s, detached himself in 1956, and then, according to the ex-KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, “resumed relations” in 1966, “on Moscow’s instructions.”

  To my mother and Orville, Izzy Stone was an icon, a shelter in the storm. He was the voice of
reason and his unending pro-Soviet articles were presented to me as justification for the Soviet sphere of influence, the mistakes of US foreign policy, the benefits of the new Soviet society, and many other subjects.

  In his long journalistic career, Stone, like Seldes, did write about some positive issues, the fight for civil rights, as an example. But also like Seldes, the majority of his work in the political realm can now be viewed for what it was … leftist propaganda.

  Walter Lippmann: In just about any political discussion I had with Orville, a day or two later he would invariably give me an article to support his line of reasoning written by Lippmann or Stone, or something from The Nation, The National Guardian or the Daily Worker. It had the effect of a preacher answering questions with Bible quotations.

  But Lippmann was special. His column in The New York Herald Tribune, from 1931 to 1967, entitled “Today and Tomorrow,” was a widely sindicated mainstay in two hundred publications. He was, without question, the most influential journalist of his time. Some term him “The father of modern journalism.” To Orville and my mother, particularly during the 40s through the 60s, he was no less than a god, writing eloquently, and mostly against US foreign policies.

  Lippmann was a prominent socialist from his youth who, after attending Harvard, “took his socialism with him into his journalism, joining the Socialist Party and the Socialist Press Club.” After Roosevelt’s election in 1932, he told Roosevelt, “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” Lippmann’s socialist sympathies toward the Soviet Union remained intact, even with the acceptance of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In a letter written to Edward C. Carter, Lippmann urged, “cooperation with the European revolutionaries and the Soviet Union in their attempt to build a socialist Europe as a nucleus for a world socialist order, with the obvious corollary of the establishment of socialism in this country.” Carter was on the board of directors of the Communist-front organization, the American-Russian Institute, and General Secretary of the Institute of Pacific Relations, both of which were exposed by the bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee as organizations to further communist objectives. FBI files indicate that Carter admitted he was a “fellow traveler;” among the many honors he received, was the “Order of the Red Banner of Labour (USSR).”