by Paul Kengor
Dewey concluded this first report in The New Republic with a parting rush of enthusiasm: “The outstanding fact in Russia is a revolution, involving a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world.”14
Dewey was right about the scale and significance, but the tragic consequences stood in direct contrast to the Brave New World he envisioned.
The Safety of the Masses
Dewey's second article in his TNR series featured more of the same. In it he praised “the orderly and safe character of life in Russia,” an odd contention that, as he correctly noted, “would be met with incredulity by much more than half of the European as well as the American public.”15 Indeed.
Dewey had clearly digested the Communist Party dogma regarding the Bolsheviks’ annihilation of certain despised groups. He wrote: “In spite of secret police, inquisitions, arrests and deportations of Nepmen and Kulaks”— business-men, industrialists, and farmers—“exiling of party opponents, including divergent elements in the party, life for the masses goes on with regularity, safety and decorum.” There was no country in all of Europe, said the unflinching professor, in which “the external routine of life is more settled and secure.”16
Summing up his stroll through Leningrad, he again momentarily considered the possibility that he was being managed by Soviet handlers. He and his delegation had been free to “sight-see,” but only in a controlled or “favorable” environment. But, following his already-familiar pattern, he dismissed the likelihood of manipulation. The Soviet-directed tour of Leningrad may have been “carried on under most favorable auspices,” but, he insisted, he and his group had been free to “form our own ideas from what we saw and had contact with.”17
Dewey Discovers the “New World”
Each article in Dewey's series for The New Republic progressed to a new level of absurdity, as if the professor himself was following a kind of personal Hegelian dialectic. His third piece, aptly titled “A New World in the Making,” described his pilgrimage to Moscow. He was nearly reverential in his account of the capital city, much as the Lamonts had venerated Lenin's cold flesh. As he got physically closer to Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and M. Y. Latsis, to the headquarters of the Cheka and the Comintern, to the rumblings of Red Square and the Kremlin, to the dead body of Lenin, he detected “the heart of the energies that go pulsing throughout all of Russia.” He had the “feeling” that he “was coming into intimate contact, almost a vicarious share, in a creative labor, in a world in the making.” He and his fellow travelers “were now suddenly let into the operative process itself”—and it was invigorating. The philosopher took in the “deepening” “sense of energy and vigor released by the Revolution.”18
What he saw came “as a shock,” Dewey professed. What he recorded next no doubt would surprise his readers back home, especially those in the pews: the pragmatist hailed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to historical and cultural “conservation,” especially in regard to the “temples of the Orthodox Church and their art treasures.” This commitment was real, assured Dewey, and stood “contrary, again, to the popular myth.” Oh, sure, he conceded, “the anti-clerical and atheistic tendencies of the Bolshevist” were “true enough,” but “the churches and their contents that were of artistic worth are not only intact, but taken care of with scrupulous and even scientific zeal.”19
This statement displayed a bracing ignorance. It was so misguided that William Brickman, the uncritical editor of Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia, where this passage was included, was compelled to insert a gentle footnote: “Dr. Dewey, evidently, had no knowledge of the desecration of churches and synagogues.”20
Dewey also, evidently, had no knowledge of how many houses of worships had been shut down, forcibly stripped of relics and gems, and blown up, and how many priests and nuns had been carted off and locked up. Most offensive, Dewey hailed these “conservations” during his trips to Moscow and Leningrad, where the infamous Church Trials had taken place just a few years earlier (1921–22). In those show trials, priests and patriarchs had been forced to surrender to the state the Church's most sacred materials, much of which was melted down or turned into cash for Bolshevik coffers. The church officials were then imprisoned and often executed.21
Dewey's terrible mistakes and misinformation did not stop there. In the next line, he conceded that it was “true that many [of these churches] have been converted into museums.” On this, however, he added no clarifying information. What kind of museums? one might ask. Even the Lamonts had conceded that the Soviets turned churches into atheist museums. Here, too, Dewey's editor was forced to add some crucial missing detail: “One example was the conversion of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan … into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism.”22
Further justifying the Soviets’ anti-religious actions, Dewey then maintained that “to all appearances there are still enough [open churches] to meet the needs of would-be worshippers.”23 The Lamonts had said the same. Surely their Soviet handlers had fed them this line.
In truth, the Soviet authorities were in the process of shutting down the vast majority of the 657 churches that had been operating in Moscow on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to the Moscow Russian Orthodox Patriarchy, only 46 churches remained open by the 1970s, and those churches operated with little to no freedom, subject to the constant monitoring of KGB “church watchers” and other government authorities seated throughout church sanctuaries.24
Of course, according to the Soviets, the Russian “new man” had been unshackled from religion, freed from so-called superstitions and dogma. Naturally, then, the number of “would-be worshippers,” as Dewey put it, had decreased, meaning that many fewer churches were needed. To Dewey, who would later write that religion was the “opium of the peoples,” this logic must have made sense.
Dewey went so far as to celebrate the confiscation of Russia's priceless religious icons and paintings as wonderful “restoration” projects done with meticulous care by the nation's academic establishment—“experts, antiquarians, scholars of history, chemists.”25 In reality, the Bolsheviks took these things and locked them up, removing them from sight. These images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, the angels and saints, were a threat to the transformation of human nature that the Bolsheviks sought via totalitarian Communism, and of which Christianity was a formidable foe. It would take nearly seventy years before the icons would again see the light of day.26
In no other matter was the intellectual John Dewey so remarkably ignorant as in the area of religion in Soviet Russia. Here, in particular, the esteemed professor played the role of supreme dupe. As Mikhail Gorbachev would acknowledge decades later, the Bolsheviks waged an all-out “war on religion.”27 Even after the Civil War had ended, noted Gorbachev, in a time of “peace,” they had “continued to tear down churches, arrest clergymen, and destroy them. This was no longer understandable or justifiable. Atheism took rather savage forms in our country at that time.”28
Gorbachev was describing precisely the time that John Dewey was in the Soviet Union.
Dewey finished his third New Republic article by proclaiming the Bolshevik Revolution “a great success.”29
The “Great Experiment”
In the fourth and fifth articles in the New Republic series, Dewey provided lengthy treatises on Soviet education. He perceived in Russia nothing short of an “educational transformation,” which he wholeheartedly endorsed—in fact, envied.
The leading progressive concluded, “The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.”30 In other words, he seems to have viewed Bolshevik Russia—a “society based upon the cooperative principle”—as the only sort of society where his kind of educational reform could be adequately implemented. This assessment ought to give
pause to Dewey's foes and admirers alike. It means following not only his progressive models for education but also his progressive notions for society; both education and society must be reshaped.
In his reports on Soviet education, Dewey frequently used the terms “democracy” and “democratic”—an odd choice of words to describe Stalin's state, but one in keeping with the Bolsheviks’ cynical use of language and Dewey's own often enigmatic, exasperating usage of the terms.31 He consistently hailed the Soviet collective over the individual, and glowingly reported that “the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other [Soviet] social agencies and interests.”32 He summed up: “I think the schools are a ‘dialectic’ factor in the evolution of Russian communism.”
Russian schools were the “ideological arm of the Revolution,” as he rightly put it. Dewey did not seem to sense the dangers with this. Quite the contrary— he appeared highly impressed with what he witnessed in Russian education. This should not come as a surprise, given his own views about how public schools must serve a socialization function, with the collective standing superior to the individual, and about how these schools must be devoid of a religious foundation. The real question is how much he learned from Russia's educators and how much he taught Russia's educators; the degree to which he was pupil or professor remains unclear.
Dewey was especially impressed with how the Bolshevik regime seemed so willing to pursue reform and “progress.” The father of experimentalism in American public education was thrilled with the “experimentation” thriving in Russian public education, which he saw as “flexible, vital, creative.” In fact, his final New Republic article was titled “The Great Experiment and the Future”—cleverly tying the phrase “Great Experiment,” which progressives usually applied to Soviet Communism generally, to Soviet education.
Moscow, Dewey reported, had “cleared the way” of impediments to pedagogical reform that the czars had allegedly put in place. As an example of such hurdles, he informed readers that the czars had blocked top Soviet educator Stanislav Shatskii from something as benign as introducing football to young people. The czarist authorities, Dewey reported, had concluded that instruction in football was actually thinly veiled training for the art of bomb-throwing. Dewey lampooned the thought, which was intended to illustrate the anti-Communist, Red-baiting paranoia of the “reactionary” Czar Nicholas II.33
Whether the football story is accurate is hard to say. No doubt, Dewey could have heard it only from his Bolshevik handlers.
One thing, however, is certain, and gets closer to the truth of the matter: as editor Brickman pointed out in a footnote, Shatskii was a committed Communist and rabble-rouser whom the czarist authorities had arrested not for teaching football but for “trying to plant socialism in the minds of little children.”34 That was another minor detail that Dewey did not share with readers of The New Republic.
To Dewey, all of that czarist closed-mindedness was in the past—dead with the ancien régime. Now, he hailed, it was a new day for Russia. The “reformers” were free, severed from the “conservative” past and joined with Stalin in running a better Russia. Shatskii himself now “found his advice and even his criticisms welcomed” by the open-minded, tolerant men who guided the new Russia.35
This bright new day would not last long. Several years after Dewey's dispatch for The New Republic, these open-minded, tolerant men would purge Stanislav Shatskii in the rampage of the Great Purge. In 1934 he became one of the first placed before the firing squad.
But that was later. In all, opined John Dewey, in what he treated as yet another pleasant surprise—sure to shock the sensibilities of unsophisticated American critics of Bolshevism—this new way of life, this dawn of a new day for Russian education, was extremely healthy for “the masses” (Dewey used this term often). The “masses” awoke to discover many “doors” opened to them “that were formerly shut and bolted.”
Why such benevolence from the Bolsheviks? Because the present government, he maintained, “is as interested in giving [Russians] access to sources of happiness”—sans, one must surmise, freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, and property—as the czarist government “was [interested] to keep them in misery.” “This fact,” explained the professor, “and not the espionage and police restrictions, however excessive the latter may be, explains the stability of the present government.”36
As this statement indicates, it cannot be argued that Dewey was unaware of the brutality of the Soviet state. He frequently acknowledged Moscow's strong-arm tactics, only to dismiss or rationalized them. Here it was the Soviets’ “excessive” “espionage and police restrictions,” which, he asserted without providing any evidence, had nothing to do with the “stability” of the Bolshevik regime. Earlier it had been his odd statement that “in spite of secret police, inquisitions, arrests and deportations of Nepmen and Kulaks, exiling of party opponents, including divergent elements in the party, life for the masses goes on with regularity, safety and decorum.” That is quite an “in spite of.”
Did Dewey's students read any of this? Probably so, given the ideological closeness between Columbia and TNR. Upon reading such ruminations, a freshman in Dewey's philosophy course at Columbia might figure that the Bolsheviks were held together though some sort of elected parliamentary coalition, rather than a brutal dictatorship. The freshman would be warmed, pleasantly surprised, by the Bolsheviks’ educational experimentation.
For Dewey, education was a bulwark of Bolshevik benevolence. He felt so positive because of “the marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practices under the fostering care of the Bolshevist government—and I am speaking of what I have seen and not just been told about.”37
“A Crime Against Humanity”
The views that Dewey expressed about his Soviet tour were so flattering—and so gruesomely misguided—that even his daughter, Jane, conceded they were “very sympathetic in tone with the USSR.”38 He made his sympathies abundantly clear in his final article for The New Republic series, in which he offered a recommendation to the U.S. government: full diplomatic recognition of Bolshevik Russia.
Diplomatic recognition had, of course, been Stalin's primary international political objective for years. It was the Soviets’ prime motivation for hosting such visits by Western intellectuals. In other words, Dewey did exactly what Stalin wanted. That he concluded the series by pushing this objective illustrates the extent to which the Bolsheviks had duped the father of modern American public education.
“Political recognition of Russia on the part of the United States,” Dewey wrote, was “at least a necessary antecedent step” in “bringing about the kind of relations that are in the interest of both countries and of the world.” Dewey candidly admitted that his trip had brought him to that conclusion: “I went to Russia with no conviction on that subject.… I came away with the feeling that the maintenance of barriers that prevent intercourse, knowledge and understanding is close to a crime against humanity.”
That admission bears repeating: Dewey conceded that he had gone to Russia without an opinion on the matter of recognition, but he returned with the conviction that the United States should extend recognition—indeed, that to fail to do so would be “close to a crime against humanity.” His Soviet handlers had convinced him. He took the bait—hook, line, and sinker.
Dewey went so far as to charge that Britain's withdrawal of recognition of Russia “had done more than any other one thing to stimulate the extremists and fanatics of the Bolshevist faith, and to encourage militarism and hatred of bourgeois nations.”39
This was an amazing charge. If only Britain and other Western nations granted Russia the recognition for which the Soviets and their progressive friends pleaded, Dewey was saying, then nonextremists and nonfanatics—like General Secretary Stalin—could be aided in their struggles against the militants. In short, we in the West were encouragin
g extremism among the Communists—within an otherwise idyllic USSR. Communist militancy was at least in part our fault.
The pragmatist's argument was hauntingly similar to that made decades later by members of the political Left after September 11, 2001, when endeavoring to explain why militant, extremist Muslims hated the West. Mistrust was not the fault of the violent extremists—whether jihadist Muslims or despotic Bolsheviks—but somehow of the West, because of its very mistrust of the extremists in the first place.
In all, Joseph Stalin and his henchmen could not have been more satisfied with John Dewey's pleas in The New Republic. From the first Dewey dispatch to the last, the professor did what the Soviets hoped, and then some. For Dewey to close with a push for diplomatic recognition was ideal, from the Soviet perspective.
John Dewey had been a dupe, and so had the editors at The New Republic, which provided him a mighty platform—six separate issues—from which to issue this pro-Soviet propaganda. The Soviets should have considered awarding some kind of commendation to Dewey and the editors of The New Republic. The only remaining question on hopeful Soviet minds was just how many additional dupes Dewey and TNR could drum up in the United States through this high-profile series of articles.
Legwork for Stalin
Fortunately, America, unlike Russia, was a real democracy— to borrow a favorite word that dominated Dr. Dewey's musings. That is to say, Americans enjoyed a genuinely free and diverse press, with real freedom of thought. As such, little time was wasted in throwing cold water on Dewey's burning enthusiasm for Stalin's state. Soon the conservative press in the United States, especially the Hearst newspapers—which the American Left derided as “reactionary” and hysterically anti-Communist—was labeling Dewey a “Bolshevik” and a “Red.”40