Stalin- The Enduring Legacy

by Kerry Bolton

  The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was formally established in 1951 after several preliminary moves. The CCF had its origins in the above-mentioned American Committee for Cultural Freedom which had been organised in 1938 by Prof. Sydney Hook.[88], Hook, a leading socialist intellectual who became an outspoken proponent of US foreign policy against the USSR, and received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Reagan for his services, edited The New Leader, a socialist periodical, with his mentor, Prof. John Dewey, founder of American ‘progressive education’, and head of the Fabian-socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Both had instigated the so-called Dewey Commission set up in 1938 as an ‘impartial enquiry’ (sic) to repudiate the Moscow Trials against Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin et al.[89] In 1948 Hook’s new group, Americans for Intellectual Freedom came to the attention of the Office of Political Coordination, a newly formed branch of the CIA, directed by Cord Meyer.[90] Meyer, an internationalist, became a bitter opponent of the USSR when Stalin dashed the utopian dreams of internationalists to establish a ‘new world order’ after World War II.[91] Meyer was responsible for recruiting Leftists such as Gloria Steinem and psychedelic drugs guru Timothy Leary for the CIA.[92]

  The founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA states of the CCF’s founding:

  A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[93]

  The periodical Hook was editing, The New Leader, was a Marxist publication whose executive editor from 1937-1961 was a Russian emigrant, Sol Levitas, a Menshevik who had been mayor of Vladivostok[94] and who had worked with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin.[95] These Mensheviks and Bolsheviks became fanatically anti-Soviet,[96] with the triumph of Stalin over his political rivals. Saunders quotes Tom Braden of the CIA as stating that The New Leader was kept alive through subsidies that Braden gave to Levitas.[97] Partisan Review,[98] the Leftist magazine that had published Trotsky’s art manifesto, was saved from financial ruin by the Rockefeller and other Foundations and by the CIA.[99]

  The CCF was able to recruit some prominent Leftists, including David Rousset, editor of Franc-Tireus[100]; and Melvin J Lasky[101], who had edited The New Leader and was editing Der Monat, a US sponsored newspaper in Germany, and later the influential magazine Encounter;[102] and Franz Borkenau, a German academic who had been the official historian of the Comintern,[103] had fallen afoul of the Communist Party as a Trotskyist, and became one of the founding members of the CCF.[104]

  A socialist conference was called in Berlin in 1950 to extend the CCF into a global movement, organised by Lasky; Ruth Fischer, formerly a leader of the German Communist party who had been expelled from the party along with her faction on orders from Moscow; and the above named Franz Borkenau [105] Honorary chairmen included John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.[106] The CIA states of this conference:

  Agency files reveal the true origins of the Berlin conference. Besides setting the Congress in motion, the Berlin conference in 1950 helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left - the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.[107]

  To say that the CCF and fellow-travellers were ‘anti-communist’, as the CIA rationalises its support, is nonsense. While the CCF and other CIA and Foundation protégés included non-communist Leftists, such as liberals, social democrats and Menshevik veterans, it is wholly inaccurate to refer to this cultural subversion as ‘anti-Marxist’. The cultural offensive and the factor that united disparate elements was anti-Stalinist and such was the obsessive hatred of many Marxists, especially Trotskyites, against the USSR that they were willing to become conscious tools of the CIA and the Foundations of the wealthy. They saw Stalinism as a betrayal of Communism, to the extent of regarding US imperialism as a necessary means of fighting the Stalinists, and provided the ideological foundations for the Cold War and what continues to be mistakenly called ‘Right-wing’ and ‘conservative’.

  Stalin’s Response

  Around the same time that the Trotskyite-capitalist-CIA axis was planning a world cultural revolution apparently based on the Trotsky-Breton-Diego manifesto, the USSR began a cultural counter-offensive, building on Zhdanov’s 1948 speech outlining a definition of ‘Soviet culture’ and repudiating ‘leftism’ in the arts.

  In 1949 in the organ of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, F Chernov condemned the infiltration of cosmopolitanism in Soviet arts, sciences and history.[108] The article stands as a counter-manifesto not only to the Trotskyites and the ‘cultural cold war’ of the time, but also as an enduring and relevant repudiation of modernism and rootless cosmopolitanism as it continues to manifest in the present age of chaos. I would go so far as to suggest that the Chernov article, despite the occasional splattering of Marxist rhetoric, and some time-specific issues, provides a perceptive critique of the modern world in accord with Conservative thinking.

  Chernov began by referring to articles appearing in Pravda and Kultura i Zhizn (‘Culture and Life’), which ‘unmasked an unpatriotic group of theatre critics, of rootless cosmopolitans, who came out against Soviet patriotism, against the great cultural achievements of the Russian people and of other peoples in our country’. Chernov described this coterie as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and ‘propagandists for decadent bourgeois culture’, while they were ‘defaming Soviet culture’. The culture of the ‘West’ is described as ‘emaciated and decayed’, a description with which any Conservative critic of Western modernism, such as the poets T S Eliot and W B Yeats or the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler, would concur. The ‘Soviet culture’ referred to by Chernov is the classic ‘great culture of the Russian people’, and is therefore of a folkish-national character and there is nothing Marxist about it. By 1949 the highest Soviet authority – Stalin - whose views Chernov must have been conveying, had perceived that the USSR was the target of broad-ranging cultural subversion:

  Harmful and corrupting petty ideas of bourgeois cosmopolitanism were also carried over into the realms of Soviet literature, Soviet film, graphic arts, in the area of philosophy, history, economic and juridical law and so forth.[109]

  It seems that these ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were stupid – or arrogant and conceited – enough to believe that they were in a State that was still pursuing Marxian ideas, despite the repudiation of all the main tenets of the original Bolshevik regime of Trotsky and Lenin. One, comrade Subotsky had, as presumably a good Marxist, sought to undermine the concept of nationality, and repudiate the idea of the heroic ethos that had become an essential ingredient of Soviet life and doctrine, especially since the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (World War II). Hence Chernov wrote damningly of this ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ whose views on culture seem suspiciously Trotskyite:

  The rootless-cosmopolitan Subotsky tried with all his might to exterminate all nationality from Soviet literature. Foaming at the mouth this cosmopolitan propagandist hurls epithets towards those Soviet writers, who want ‘on the outside, in language, in details of character a positive hero to express his belonging to this or that nationality’.[110]

  The USSR had become a nationalist state founded on the Russian cultural heritage, nationality and traditions; advocating nationalism and folk-culture antithetical to the internationalism and materialism of classical Marxist ideology.

&
nbsp; Chernov continued: ‘These cosmopolitan goals of Subotsky are directed against Soviet patriotism and against Party policy, which always has attached great significance to the national qualities and national traditions of peoples’.

  Chernov next described an ‘antipatriotic group’ promoting ‘national nihilism’ in theatre criticism, this concept being, ‘a manifestation of the antipatriotic ideology of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, disrespect for the national pride and the national dignity of peoples’.

  Chernov directed his attention to individuals of a ‘national nihilist’ tendency in the sciences and philosophy, citing one Kedrov, who had sought to develop a ‘world philosophy’ devoid of ‘national distinctions and features’:

  Here, Kedrov’s cosmopolitan orientation is obvious, advocating a scornful attitude toward the character of nations, towards their distinctive qualities, making up the contribution of nations to world culture. Denying the role of national aspect and national distinctive features in the development of science and philosophy, Kedrov spoke out for ‘solidarity’ with reactionary representatives of so-called stateless and classless ‘universal’ science. Meanwhile, the slogan ‘united world science’ is profitable only to our class enemies.[111]

  Chernov was repudiating any notion of universalism, even in areas of science that are still generally perceived as ‘universal’, as belonging to everybody and nobody, such universalism being seen as a tool of the enemies of the USSR. Chernov cogently warned that ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the name of ‘international solidarity’ has as its goal the ‘spiritual disarmament’ of the Soviet – i.e., Great Russian – people:

  The forms in which bourgeois-cosmopolitan petty ideas are dragged into the area of ideology are multifarious: from concealment of better products of socialist culture to direct denigration of it; from denial of the world-historical significance of Great Russian culture and elimination of respect for its traditions to the frank propagation of servility before decadent bourgeois culture; from the spreading of national nihilism and negation of the significance of the question of priority in science to the slogan about "international solidarity" with bourgeois science and so forth and so on. But the essence of all these forms is this antipatriotism, this propaganda of bourgeois-cosmopolitan ideology setting its goal of spiritual disarmament of the Soviet people in the face of aggressive bourgeois ideology, the revival of remnants of capitalism in peoples’ consciousness.[112]

  Chernov identified ‘rootless cosmopolitism’ as part of a specific foreign agenda, which was certainly formalised that year – 1949 – with the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

  In the calculation of our foreign enemies they should divert Soviet literature and culture and Soviet science from the service of the Socialist cause. They try to infect Soviet literature, science, and art with all kinds of putrid influences, to weaken in such a way these powerful linchpins of the political training of the people, the education of the Soviet people in the spirit of active service to the socialist fatherland, to communist construction.[113]

  Despite the necessary allusions to ‘communism’, the context of the article is overtly one of Great Russian nationalism that has repudiated all notions of ‘international solidarity’ and ‘universalism’ as corrosive to the ‘spiritual’ health of the people, nation, state and culture, regardless of the rhetoric used.

  That traditional folk culture was the foundation of so-called ‘Soviet culture’ was explained by Chernov in referring to an episode in which the Central Committee of the party had condemned an opera, ‘The Great Friendship’, despite its focus on the traditional music and dances of the Caucasian folk. Stalin in particular was outraged at Muradeli for attempting ‘improvements’, Muradeli having composed one of the ‘traditional tunes’ himself.[114] According to Chernov the Central Committee resolution of 1948 had, ‘subjected to a scathing denunciation the direction of some composers who had neglected the great musical legacy of the brilliant Russian composers’. The ‘great Russian musical legacy’ is specifically not that of dialectical materialism, or any other such Marxist notion, but clearly that of traditional folk culture, and no ‘improvisations’, adaptations or new interpretations were going to be acceptable. What becomes clear is that the aim of ‘Soviet culture’ was to create ‘socialist realism’ in the arts uncompromisingly founded on a bedrock of traditional folk culture. As indicated by Trotsky’s art manifesto, Marxists along with liberals and globalists in the West saw something disturbingly similar between Soviet ‘socialist realism’ and ‘Fascist’ art.[115]

  Chernov was predicting what would be a major and long-lasting offensive against the Soviet, at the same time (1949) that Sidney Hook, et al, in league with the CIA, Rockefeller and other such interests, were planning to launch a world cultural revolution founded on what Stalinism was condemning as ‘rootless’ or ‘bourgeois’ cosmopolitanism’. Chernov warned of what is today called the ‘cultural cold war’, stating that this would be part of the ‘ideological weapon’ for the encirclement of the USSR:

  The most poisonous ideological weapon of the hostile capitalist encirclement is bourgeois cosmopolitanism. Consisting in part of cringing before foreign things and servility before bourgeois culture, rootless-cosmopolitanism produces special dangers, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological banner of militant international reaction, the ideal weapon in its hands for the struggle against socialism and democracy. Therefore the struggle with the ideology of cosmopolitanism, its total and definitive unmasking and overcoming acquires in the present time particular acuity and urgency.[116]

  Chernov explained cosmopolitanism in terms that are thoroughly conservative and traditionalist:

  Cosmopolitanism is the negation of patriotism, its opposite. It advocates absolute apathy towards the fate of the Motherland. Cosmopolitanism denies the existence of any moral or civil obligations of people to their nation and Motherland.[117]

  At the foundation of this ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ is the rule of money; the worship of Mammon, and Chernov’s description is again prescient as to the present nature of international capitalism or what is today called ‘globalisation’:

  The bourgeoisie preaches the principle that money does not have a homeland, and that, wherever one can ‘make money’, wherever one may ‘have a profitable business’, there is his homeland. Here is the villainy that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is called on to conceal, to disguise, ‘to ennoble’ the antipatriotic ideology of the rootless bourgeois-businessman, the huckster and the travelling salesman.

  As of necessity, Chernov resorts to citing Marx in stating that ‘bourgeois patriotism...degenerated into a complete sham after its financial, commercial, and industrial activity acquired a cosmopolitanist character’. Yet the Stalinist critique and cultural manifesto of Chernov is as much a repudiation of the Marxian as the plutocratic-capitalist attitudes towards nation and nationality. Marx had seen this internationalisation of capital as part of the dialectical process that would lead to the internationalisation of the proletariat, paving the way to world socialism. Marx was for that reason – dialectically – a supporter of Free Trade:

  National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster…[118]

  Of Free Trade Marx wrote:

  Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade. [119]

  Contrary to Marx’s dialectics, Stalinist Russia held that nationalism and patriotism are the basis upon which their socialism must be constructed. It
might be rationalised that this was itself a dialectical process for the eventual establishment of the world communist society in which all nations would disappear including the Russian. Yet the exhortation of the Stalinists for loyalty to the ‘Socialist Motherland’ was based on a nationalism which was stridently folkish and made the ‘Great Russians’ a unique nationality, not because they were citizens of the first ‘Socialist state’ or any other such nebulous ideological formulae, but due to what Chernov described in un-Marxian terms as their innate and superior characteristics.

  Chernov cogently stated precisely the agenda of the ‘cultural cold warriors’ that was about to emerge from the USA: ‘In the era of imperialism the ideology of cosmopolitanism is a weapon in the struggle of imperialist plunderers seeking world domination’.[120] And so it remains, as will be outlined in the concluding paragraphs.

  If any doubt remained as to what Chernov meant by nationalism as the bulwark against international capital, and that Stalinism was an explicit repudiation of Marxist notions of internationalism despite Chernov’s necessary ideological allusions to Lenin, Chernov makes it plain that it is precisely the type of nationalism condemned by Marx that was nonetheless the foundation of the Soviet State of the Great Russians:

  National sovereignty, the struggle of oppressed nations for their liberation, the patriotic feelings of freedom-loving peoples and above all the mighty patriotism of the Soviet people - these still serve as a serious obstacle for predatory imperialistic aspirations, they prevent the imperialists’ accomplishing their plans of establishing world-wide domination. Seeking to crush the peoples’ will for resistance, the imperialist bourgeoisie and their agents in the camp of Right-wing socialists preach that national sovereignty purportedly became obsolete and a thing past its time, they proclaim the fiction of the very notion of nation and state independence.[121]