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Historical falsification and its consequences

By David Walsh

Book review:
Socialism, historical truth and the crisis of political thought in the United States
by David North, Labor Publications, 1996, 46pp., $3.50

This new pamphlet from Labor Publications, Socialism, historical truth and the crisis of political thought in the United States, originated as a response to a book review published last March in the New York Times. In his comment on Dmitri Volkogonov's biography of Leon Trotsky, veteran Cold War ideologue Richard Pipes made the assertion that "Trotsky and Lev Sedov, his son, frequently said and wrote that Stalin's regime had to be overthrown and Stalin himself assassinated."

This wasn't the only falsehood in Pipes's review, but there are lies and there are lies. The claim, which originated with Stalin and the GPU, that Trotsky and his cothinkers had entered into a plot to murder the Soviet leadership provided the pretext in the 1930s for the staging of the Moscow show trials and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of socialist workers and intellectuals in the Soviet Union.

Pipes's repetition of the Stalinist slander elicited a strong reaction from the Socialist Equality Party. David North, the party's national secretary, wrote a letter to the Times, which that publication chose not to publish, refuting Pipes's claims. An open letter to the newspaper circulated by the SEP at the Socialist Scholars Conference challenging the Pipes review was signed by more than 100 participants. On April 23, North delivered a lecture--which forms the basis of this pamphlet--to a large and receptive audience of students and faculty at Michigan State University on the significance of Pipes's falsifications and the historical questions raised by them.

The new pamphlet also includes the revealing exchange of letters between North and Pipes. Any objective reader cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary weakness of Pipes's arguments, which perhaps explains his reluctance to reply to North's first letter.

Pipes's comments have elicited a few responses in the radical press, but only the SEP has treated his falsifications with the seriousness which they deserve. The party has been engaged for the past several years--along with the entire International Committee of the Fourth International--in a battle against the new school of historical falsification, which has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Taking advantage of the generally low level of knowledge concerning the past, a whole body of historians have produced works claiming to show that the Stalinist tyranny emerged organically from the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Pipes, the adviser on Soviet and East European affairs in the Reagan administration, is a principal representative of this new school.

In his lecture and his letter to the New York Times, North poses the following question: how can one account for the fact that the arguments of a leading right-wing ideologue such as Pipes borrow their essential content from the arsenal of Stalinism?

North points to the commonality of interests between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the anticommunist Sovietologists. It served the purposes of both to present the Stalin regime as the legitimate embodiment of the traditions of the October Revolution. This furnished the Soviet leaders with political authority and credibility. It provided the Cold Warriors an opportunity to discredit left-wing opposition to capitalism.

That a widespread socialist resistance to the Stalinist bureaucracy existed in the USSR is an embarrassing historical fact which Pipes and his ilk strive to conceal. Hence the extreme hostility of Pipes to Trotsky and his sympathy for the lies concocted by the Stalinists in the 1930s.

Unexplored territory

The refutation of Pipes, salutary though it may be, is not the only, nor perhaps the most important, contribution this new work has to offer. The response to Pipes serves to open up the question of the Moscow Trials and their impact on political life in the US. It is the investigation of this largely unexplored territory that is groundbreaking.

After examining the facts of the Moscow show trials, North arrives at his central thesis: that the flirtation by a considerable section of the American intelligentsia with Stalinism--and, in particular, its support for the show trials of 1936-38--represented a critical chapter in US political development.

The author explains that the Depression confronted the American liberal intelligentsia with the obvious failure of capitalism. The USSR grew increasingly attractive to certain literary and academic types after the adoption by the Stalinist Communist International of the "popular front" policy in 1935. Now the Communist parties were to ally themselves with "progressive" bourgeois parties, on the basis of a supposed common front against fascism.

The admiration for the Soviet state felt by the American intellectuals, courted (and, if necessary, bribed) by the Stalinist apparatus, as North writes, "did not at all signify an endorsement of revolutionary change within the United States.... Rather, many liberal intellectuals were inclined to view an alliance with the USSR as a means of strengthening their own limited agenda for social reform in the United States, as well as keeping fascism at bay in Europe."

The corollary of their support for the newly "respectable" Soviet Union was an instinctive hostility to Trotsky and the genuine Marxists--in the process of being annihilated by Stalin--as a troublemaking and disruptive element. North cites a particularly revealing passage from Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic and a typical Stalinist "fellow-traveler," to this effect.

In defense of the Moscow Trials, in April 1937, Cowley wrote: "It has seemed to me for several years that hatred of Stalin is his [Trotsky's] deciding principle, and this slogan of 'the permanent revolution' is likely to destroy the revolution permanently, by attacking and weakening socialism in the one country where it now exists."

North comments: "This essay was a sorry demonstration of all that was, even at that time, corrupt and rotten in modern American liberalism. It evaluated even the greatest historical and moral issues on the basis of its own narrow social interests and petty individual concerns."

The Moscow Trials were, for the liberal intelligentsia, the historical moment of truth. By and large, it was found grievously wanting. One current demonstrated its concern for historical truth and principles.

Its greatest representative was the philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), who agreed to head up an independent investigation into the Stalinist charges that Trotsky had entered into a conspiracy for the purpose of overthrowing the Soviet government.

Dewey's willingness to take on the politically explosive Moscow Trials did not merely express his commitment to truth. "Dewey spoke for a strain of American liberal thought that believed deeply in social progress and did not presume the identity of democracy and market economics. It believed that a democracy without social equality was a hollow shell, and therefore identified itself with a biting critique of capitalism." There is, needless to say, no equivalent figure today.

Rapid change in mood

It was not long after the Moscow Trials that the pro-Stalinist liberals began to sing a different tune. Confronted with the obvious fraudulence of the Moscow proceedings and the ceaseless repression carried out by the Stalin regime, many of the former "friends of the Soviet Union" placed a minus sign where they had previously placed a plus. Plagued by a bad conscience, they suddenly came to the conclusion that Leninist Jacobinism had been immoral all along and any social change brought about by violent revolution was inevitably doomed to failure. In the postwar period the former fellow travelers in large numbers stumbled over one another in their rapid movement to the right, discovering or rediscovering the virtues of capitalist democracy.

Why did this intellectual mood swing take place with such relative ease? Why did anticommunism find such support within this milieu? In addressing these complex questions, North begins by pointing to the privileged position of American imperialism and the environment of postwar prosperity. He quickly notes, however, that these material factors cannot alone explain the phenomenon and that certain political and ideological facts of life have to be taken into account. One of these factors undoubtedly was the pernicious character of American Stalinism and the justifiable hatred it had earned for its duplicity and cynicism.

At this point North returns to the central theme of his lecture: the disastrous consequences of the false identification of Stalinism and Marxism. Both in its pro-Stalinist and outright anticommunist phases, "the liberal intelligentsia was essentially uncritical of the Stalinist bureaucracy's presentation of itself as the protagonist of Marxist policies."

North bluntly states that the source of the paralysis of contemporary social thought is to be found in the persistence of this untenable position. Society is racked by immense crisis, and yet no progressive mass movement of opposition has emerged. Almost no one is enamored of the existing order, but few as yet see an alternative. This is the price humanity is paying for the crimes of Stalinism and the confusion it has created about the nature of socialism.

One of the greatest values of the pamphlet is the variety of avenues of historical exploration it opens up. The section entitled "Why liberalism moved to the right" raises a host of questions, which could not possibly be answered in the course of a single lecture. For example: what accounts for the particularly crude character of American Stalinism? To what extent was the rightward shift of American liberalism the particular expression of an international phenomenon? How did this process work itself out in the evolution, for example, of such publications as the New Republic (which entered the camp of open support for American imperialism) and the Nation (which remained an apologist for Stalinism)?

Much current political analysis, even that which passes for oppositional or radical, deals in abstractions--for example, "liberalism," "conservatism," "populism"--which go largely untreated. The considerable strength of this new work is that it attempts to trace concretely the existing social atmosphere to definite political events and relationships. It is often the things right in front of our faces that are the most difficult to see. Marxism ought to provide the weapons for submitting the most elementary and enduring ideological assumptions to criticism. Here is one instance in which it has done that.

See:
Socialism, Historical Truth and the Crisis of Political Thought in the United States
A lecture by David North