Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  4. Cited in Pipes, Communism: A History, 49. Pipes's source is A. G. Latyshev, Rassekrechennyi Lenin (Moscow: Mart, 1996), 40.

  5. Lenin, “The Activities of the Council of People's Commissars,” Report Delivered January 24 [11], 1918, at the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin's Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. 7, 280.

  6. The decree was published in “The Gazette of the Temporary Workers and Peasants Government,” No. 31, December 13, 1917, translated and published in “Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda,” Report and Hearing of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate (Washington, DC: GPO, 1919), vol. 3, 1185.

  7. Cited by Pipes, Communism: A History, 49. Pipes's source is V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works), 5th ed. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958–65), vol. 42, 1.

  8. Quoted by Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1932), 395. On Trotsky and global communism, see Woolley, Adherents of Permanent Revolution, 13, 35, and the works of Richard Pipes.

  9. This was commonplace throughout the Cold War, and will be seen especially in the Reagan chapter later in this book. For a telling denial, made by one of the biggest dupes in this book, see the interview with Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in Life magazine's famous March 1943 “special issue” on the USSR, which carried Stalin's face on the cover. In the article “The Soviets and the Post-War,” Davies was asked whether Russia was “determined to pursue the cause of world revolution”; he said flatly, “No.” Source: Joseph E. Davies, “The Soviets and the Post-War,” Life, March 29, 1943, 49.

  10. V. I. Lenin's “Letter to American Workers” was written August 20, 1918, and published in Pravda, August 22, 1918. The quotations here are taken from the translated version published in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), vol. 28, 62–75.

  11. Quoted by Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 395.

  12. In the original quote, the word “triumph” is “triumphs”—that is, “the Soviet government triumphs.” See Lenin, “Valuable Admissions by Pitirim Sorokin,” November 21, 1918, Lenin's Selected Works (1943 edition), vol. 8, 148–49.

  13. This is published in the English translated edition of The Capitalist World and the Communist International Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Third Communist International (Moscow: Publishing Office of the Third Communist International, 1920), 23. This is the “American edition” published by the United Communist Party of America.

  14. See Stalin's secret August 1939 speech to the Central Committee, where he urges that a continental war in Europe would be in the best interests of the Bolshevik-communist class struggle and world revolution. The text is published in Brian Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1999).

  15. I quote Stalin's speech at length later in Chapter 12. Among Lenin's missives, see Pipes, Communism: A History, 50–51, 93–94.

  16. Some translations of this quote finish with “is inevitable,” some with “will be inevitable,” some with “is unavoidable.” See, for instance, Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 395; and Lenin, “Report of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) at the Eighth Party Congress,” March 18, 1919, Lenin's Selected Works (1943 edition), vol. 8, 33.

  17. Lenin, “Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Nuclei Secretaries of the Moscow Organization of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” November 26, 1920, Lenin's Selected Works (1943 edition), vol. 8, 297.

  18. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 46, no. 1, October 1967, 22–52.

  19. George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947.

  20. These Lenin letters are quoted in Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West, 48, 54.

  21. See James Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April–December 1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 227.

  22. Quote cited by Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West, 45, who cites vol. 25, 187, of Marx's collected works.

  23. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 390. On Lenin, world revolution, and the Comintern, see also Volkogonov, Lenin, 387–407.

  24. Courtois and Panne in Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 271–75.

  25. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 28, 480.

  26. Ibid., 477.

  27. The Comintern had notable success in pursuing its goals. The grand total of national communist parties worldwide by the 1960s was ninety-two. This was noteworthy success for a violent system that scarcely worked. The earliest party was founded in Chile in 1912. By 1924, there were thirty-seven parties in the world. Among other sources, see Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 38–40, and Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 275–76.

  28. Discussion with Herb Romerstein, July 9, 2007.

  29. Richard Pipes, “The Cold War: CNN's Version,” in Arnold Beichman, ed., CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 45–46. These guidelines are consistent with the goals of Leninism, outlined in Lenin's 1920 work Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. See Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 3, 38–40.

  30. See Pipes, Communism: A History, 93.

  31. Ibid., 94–95.

  32. This was point fourteen among the Comintern's twenty-one requirements of admission. See Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents, (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 1, 166–72; and “The Communist Party of the United States of America: What It Is, How It Works,” Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 84th Congress, 2nd Session, April 23, 1956 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1956), 1–2.

  33. See Pipes, Communism: A History, 95.

  34. See Degras, The Communist International, 1919–1943, vol. 1, 166–72.

  35. The full quotes from this program are published by Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 38–40.

  36. Among them, Richard Pipes told me this without hesitation when I asked him to pick a start date for the Cold War. Source: Interview with Richard Pipes, September 9, 2002. From the outset, write Courtois and Panne in The Black Book of Communism, Lenin regarded the Comintern as one of several instruments for international subversion. The world's many communist parties, Courtois and Panne note, “rapidly became more and more subordinate, before surrendering completely to the Comintern.” This subordination was “both political and organizational,” as the Comintern came to “make all major decisions for these parties and ultimately decided all questions of policy.” At Moscow's instigation, the Comintern installed an armed group within each Communist Party to prepare for revolution and civil war against the reigning powers. Regardless, then, of where communism next appeared, Moscow was always the source. “Soviet Russia was the first communist regime,” Courtois writes. “The Leninist and Stalinist U.S.S.R. was the cradle of all modern communism.” The Soviet leadership took great pride in this fact. And the Bolsheviks’ confidence that communism would expand from the Russian Civil War to Europe and the world would serve as the justification for Soviet terror for decades to come. See Courtois and Panne in Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 271–75, 727, and 742.

  37. See Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents, vol. 1, 166–72; and O. Piatnitsky, The Twenty One Conditions of Admission Into the Communist International (New York: Workers Library Publishers, February 1934), 29–31.

  38. On August 8, 1920, the Comintern sent a dispatch ordering that all Communist parties in America were “immediately obliged to amalgamate and form one party.” This was decided, said the Comintern, “on the basis of the decisions of the 2nd World Congress of Communist International.” The Comintern also issued a deadline: “This union should be finally compl
eted in 2 months, i.e. not later than October 1920.” See Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 1, Delo 17, Fond 515. Harvey Klehr, in his opening to the Library of Congress reference book Files of the Communist Party of the United States of America in the Comintern Archives, an internal source used for researchers, describes the longer series of mergers and name changes that occurred in the 1920s. The Communist Labor Party and a faction of the Communist Party of America merged in 1920 to form the United Communist Party. Later, the Communist Party of America and the United Communist Party merged under the name of the former. In 1921 this group changed its name to the Workers Party of America, which changed again in 1925 to Workers (Communist) Party of America. The name was changed once more in 1929 to Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

  39. A typical example was William Schneiderman, who in the 1930s was an agent of the NKVD, code-named “Nat” (Venona transcripts), with an alias of “Sherman,” and was later made head of the Communist Party of California, where he would come into contact with individuals as significant as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at the Manhattan Project. Information provided by Herb Romerstein. The best source for this is Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 258–68.

  40. See Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: Viking, 1960), 162.

  41. Printed in “The Communist Party of the United States of America: What It Is, How It Works,” 2.

  42. In the 1920s, CPUSA leaders were surprisingly open about publishing Moscow's instructions to them, which remain via the many pamphlets from the period. By 1947, U.S. government officials began to collect the pamphlets as evidence of Moscow's control, some of which they gathered from defectors but others of which were handily available as published party documents. E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 16, 2007. Romerstein discusses these in his Venona Secrets and also his KGB Against the Main Enemy. This, too, is an obvious fact that could be demonstrated ad nauseam, and, for those interested, should be pursued in other sources, such as former Communist Party member Ben Gitlow's 1940 book, I Confess: The Truth About American Communism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), which demonstrates unequivocally Moscow's control of the American party during its first ten years.

  43. Any scholar interested in examining the ironclad relationship between the Comintern and CPUSA should consult these reels. Among the reels not referenced in this book, but likewise containing very rich material, are reels 2, 3, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 36, 37, 68, 70, 72, 101, 200, 201, 202, 230, 243, 247, and 287. The material in these reels is not discussed here simply because there is a limit to how much of the material can be incorporated into this book.

  44. This document does not contain a date, though it clearly was produced in the summer of 1919. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 1.

  45. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 1.

  46. On quote, see Safire, “On Language: Useful Idiots of the West.”

  47. Herb Romerstein states that “only a handful” of comrades were present in Chicago “in these activities” relating to the American Communist Party's entrance into the Comintern. Source: E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, November 26, 2009.

  48. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 9.

  49. Corliss and Margaret Lamont, Russia Day by Day: A Travel Diary (New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1933), 121–22.

  50. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 9.

  51. “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publication (and Appendices), revised and published December 1, 1961, to supersede Guide published on January 2, 1957 (including Index),” prepared and released by the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, House Document No. 398 (Washington, DC: GPO), 198.

  52. Fraina laid this out at great length in the August 23, 1919, edition of Revolutionary Age, reprinted in its entirety in: “Organized Communism in the United States,” Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 85th Congress, 2nd Session, August 19, 1953 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1958), 25–29. In this same report, see pages 4, 10, 29, and 141 for more on Fraina.

  53. See subhead “Communist Party, USA, as a Puppet,” in “The Communist Party of the United States of America: What It Is, How It Works,” 64.

  54. E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 16, 2007.

  55. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 1, Delo 17, Fond 515.

  56. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 16.

  57. The document is not dated, but clearly would have been written in May 1920. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 1, Delo 17, Fond 515.

  58. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 1, Delo 25, Fond 515.

  59. The speculation on churches is mine. As for the sources on the funding, there are several. The Library of Congress went public with documentation on the funding in Revelations from the Russian Archives: A Report from the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993), 29. Other sources on the funding include two articles by John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr, “’Moscow Gold,’ Confirmed at Last?” Labor History, vol. 33, no. 2, Spring 1992, 279–93, and vol. 33, no. 4, Fall 1992, 576–78. Haynes and Klehr actually published receipts signed by Gus Hall, head of CPUSA. See also Harvey Klehr, John E. Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 24, and Harvey Klehr, John E. Haynes, and Kirill Mikhailovich Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 150.

  Congress has also heard testimony on this. In July 1982, FBI official Ed O'Malley testified on Soviet active measures before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The relevant testimony appears on pages 202–3 of the bound transcript of the hearings that day, July 14, 1982, second session, 97th Congress. O'Malley testified that the KGB itself clandestinely transferred funds to CPUSA on behalf of the CPSU. He noted that CPUSA was one of the most loyal, pro-Soviet branches in the world.

  The most intriguing source documenting the funding from 1958 to 1980, told through a remarkable story, is revealed in John Barron, Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996), xv, 339–40. This is the biography of Morris Childs, who is discussed later in this book, along with more details on the funding of CPUSA by the USSR. Herb Romerstein has also reported on the funding in a number of publications.

  60. Among others, see Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1998), 58.

  61. “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (and Appendices), revised and published December 1, 1961, to supersede Guide published on January 2, 1957 (including Index),” 180.

  62. On Childs, see Barron, Operation Solo. On Freeman, see Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 57.

  63. Krafsur and Burns served in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and show up often in the Comintern Archives and Venona transcripts. Heiman, whose father had been a Soviet intelligence agent, worked for the Soviet embassy and TASS, and became a spy against the U.S. government. Source: E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 9, 2007; Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 411, 429; and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 344.

  64. Interestingly, the remainder of the quote (usually not noted) reads: “That is my belief. But I don't want to live there.” Among others, see the discussion in Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 64.

 
; 65. E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 16, 2007, and June 23, 2007.

  66. E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 16, 2007.

  67. This quote is generally considered reliable. The quote was recorded by Yuri Annenkov from Lenin's own papers, which Annenkov gathered at the Lenin Institute. It has been published in Eduard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 209, among several other sources.

  68. Among Lenin's deaf-mutes, including those he is apparently referring to in this quote, were the Western capitalists, of whom he is also reputed to have said (in another disputed Lenin quote) that he and his Bolsheviks would sell the capitalists the rope to hang themselves.

  69. Lenin said this in a December 6, 1920, speech to the Moscow Organization of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (RCPB), a transcript of which is published in Lenin, Collected Works, 449.

  70. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin Signet Classics, 1998), 67.