Hilton Kramer's new book, and much else, can clear up the residual hypocrisies about a genuine threat.
What is Stalinism? Now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union a fast-fading memory, the question may seem academic. But once upon a not-so-distant time, Americans who believed devoutly that Joseph Stalin was a great and good leader wielded real power in this country's cultural life -- enough that they could make life difficult for those who dared to point out that their hero happened to be the world's most wanted mass murderer. What is more, the spiritual descendants of such folk continue to this very day to unwittingly do the bidding of a monster who died a half-century ago, but whose malign spirit lingers on.
Consider, for example, this year's Academy Awards ceremony, at which Elia Kazan was presented with the Irving Thalberg Award for lifetime achievement in film.
By all rights, the director of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront" should long since have been a shoo-in. But for years, Kazan was blocked from consideration for the award because he chose to testify before a congressional committee about his youthful involvement with the American Communist Party, and in so doing to identify other party members.
Given the fact that the Communist Party was officially committed to the overthrow of the U.S. government, and that many of its members doubled as Soviet spies, you'd think Kazan had done his fellow Americans a service. But because he "named names," his own name has long been mud among aging Hollywood liberals devoted to the principle that there can be no forgiveness for those ex-Communists who, disillusioned with the Soviet Union, decided that it was their duty to try to stop it from having its evil way with the West. As a Wall Street Journal headline writer concisely put it last month, "He told the truth -- they lied for communism. And he's the bad guy?"
Even more revealing, though, is the fact that an equally staunch band of young celebrity leftists organized an anti-Kazan protest on Oscar night, subsequently receiving sympathetic coverage from still younger TV and print reporters seemingly unaware of the fact that Soviet communism was not just another form of government, no better or worse than Western democracy, but the single most bloodthirsty entity in the history of the world.
This peculiar phenomenon -- call it neo-Stalinism -- is among the most troubling features of American intellectual life today. Just as Stalin's henchmen used to airbrush the images of murdered colleagues out of the photos in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, so do neo-Stalinists seek to conceal the skeletons in the closets of those Americans who played the Soviet game.
Ignorance is their secret weapon. Chances are you didn't know, for example, that Aaron Copland, America's greatest composer, was also a red-hot Stalinist who played a key role in the infamous "Waldorf Peace Conference" of 1949, at which American Communists and their sympathizers feted a delegation of top Soviets with shameless enthusiasm. And even if you did know it, you probably read about it in a book that encouraged you to dismiss Copland's Communist connections as a mere youthful peccadillo. (He was 48 years old at the time of the Waldorf Conference.)
Far more serious is the persistent willingness of neo-Stalinists to ignore the inconvenient facts about the so-called "Red Scare" of the '40s and '50s, when the now-notorious House Un-American Activities Committee was at the height of its influence. Did HUAC make mistakes? You bet. But as Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev explain in "The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era" (Random House, 402 pages, $30), the files of the KGB reveal that virtually every well-known "victim" of the Red Scare was in fact a Soviet intelligence agent or source. Richard Nixon was right: Alger Hiss really did steal top-secret State Department documents, and Julius Rosenberg really did pass atomic-bomb blueprints to his KGB handlers.
Those four words -- "Richard Nixon was right" -- lie at the heart of neo-Stalinism. Latter-day apologists for Soviet communism may have a slicker line of patter, but they still believe, just like their predecessors, that there are no enemies on the left and no honest men on the right. If Nixon said it, then it has to be wrong, even if it was sworn to by 50 eyewitnesses and backed up with irrefutable documentation. Hence the steadfast unwillingness of aging leftists to admit that Hiss was a Soviet spy, and the equally steadfast unwillingness of their grandchildren to admit that it matters.
Anyone seeking to understand exactly why it matters should read Hilton Kramer's "The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War" (Ivan R. Dee, 363 pages, $27.50). Kramer, editor of the New Criterion and one of America's most distinguished art critics and a former senior culture editor of the New York Times, is also a staunch anti-Stalinist who has devoted much time and thought to exploring the devastating effects that Stalinism and neo-Stalinism have had on American intellectual life.
"American intellectuals," Kramer writes, "representing the political conscience of the Western democracies, found themselves challenged by a widespread and well-organized campaign to falsify the political record and the political goals of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes for the purpose of advancing the interests of those regimes. In the ways in which our intellectuals responded, or failed to respond, to these historic challenges, much of the political history -- and, alas, the moral history -- of American intellectual life since the '30s was written. ... Future generations will -- if we are lucky, anyway -- marvel that it was not the Western defenders of communist tyranny who suffered so conspicuously from censure and opprobrium in the Cold War period, but those who took up the anti-Communist cause."
Kramer is particularly scathing on the subject of Hollywood radicals who were "blacklisted" for their Communist ties, and are now treated as sacred cows in fawning articles written by journalists ignorant of the beliefs for which they were blacklisted.
"The actualities of the Communist movement in America," he writes, "have disappeared from all discussion of the blacklist. ... there [is] no acknowledgment of what it meant to be under Communist Party discipline in the 1930s and 1940s, and no reference, either, to the political terror and the horrors of the Gulag that Hollywood money and influence helped to support during the worst years of Stalin's murderous reign. That it might be considered an even blacker hour in Hollywood's history when so many of its well-heeled talents threw their support to the enemies of American democracy -- the enemies, indeed, of the very freedoms that enabled Hollywood itself to prosper -- [is] also nowhere acknowledged."
Nobody wants to return to the days of Joe McCarthy, the idiot anti-Communist who did so much damage to his own side that you start to wonder whether he might actually have been in the pay of the Soviets. (They paid off plenty of other people, including a New York congressman and some well-placed journalists.)
Nor is anyone seriously suggesting that you should stop listening to "Billy the Kid," or torch your videocassette of "The Maltese Falcon," just because Copland and Dashiell Hammett were Communists. But you shouldn't pretend that they weren't Communists, either, much less that it was no big deal.
It is the responsibility of all morally serious Americans to face up to the truth about our country's past, no matter how ugly it may be -- and the truth is that a great many prominent Americans who should have known better gave aid and comfort to the foulest murderer who ever lived. We owe it to Stalin's victims never to allow that ugly fact to be forgotten.
Terry Teachout, author of The Sun's "Instant Culture" series, is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time magazine. He also writes about the arts for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review and other publications. The editor of "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy," he is currently at work on "H. L. Mencken: A Life."
Pub Date: 04/18/99