HISTORICAL ESSAY
9. WESTERN COMMUNISTS AND SOVIET LIFE
We think of the Soviet Union as a society closed to direct observation, let alone participation, by Westerners. The metaphor of the iron curtain, first used by Churchill, expresses that closure. Western journalists and diplomats found themselves isolated by official restrictions on their movement, secret police surveillance, and above all Soviet people's fear of unauthorized contact with them. Western tourists were shepherded round the usual sites and left knowing as little about the country's real life as when they arrived.
All this is true. Yet the iron curtain always had holes, especially for certain categories of Westerner. Exchange students were in a somewhat more favorable position; many of them learned much about Soviet life. Even under Stalin, before student exchanges were dreamt of, there were Western engineers recruited to assist in the industrialization drive, and they too learned a great deal. (1) And even tourists could learn something if they had relatives to visit, as quite a few of us did.
But one type of Westerner was particularly well placed to break through the iron curtain. Some even managed to become part of Soviet society. These were the Western communists (party and non-party). Some, like Peggy Dennis and her husband Gene, were chosen to go to Moscow to represent their parties at the Comintern (Communist International). (2) Others, like Margaret Wettlin, entered the USSR as tourists but managed to stay on by somehow wangling a job, often as a teacher or translator, and/or by marrying a Soviet citizen. (3) Yet others came as political refugees, like the Spanish communists after Franco's victory in the civil war.
And let's not forget the ex-spies, such as Britain's Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. Rumor may have it that Philby never managed to adapt to Soviet life and went to seed as a loner, but Maclean did much better. He became a respected specialist on Britain at IMEMO, (4) and in this capacity contributed to the more sophisticated Soviet understanding of the outside world that culminated in Gorbachev's "new thinking."
In Britain the new field of Soviet Studies benefited enormously from the privileged access of communist scholars to Soviet reality. (5) Take Jacob Miller, editor of the leading journal Soviet Studies from its launch in 1949 until his retirement in 1978. (6) Miller was a member of the British Communist Party from his student days, and with the help of recommendation through party channels he was able to spend a year and a half in Moscow in 1936-37. There he researched the Soviet planning system at the Economic Research Institute of Gosplan, interviewed senior Gosplan officials, and lived at the students' hostel of the All-Union Planning Academy in the company of industrial and agricultural managers from the provinces. (7) Like many others, Miller later distanced himself from communist politics, leaving the CP about 1960, and devoted his energies solely to Soviet Studies. But how could he have had such close contact with Soviet life at the height of Stalinism had he never been a communist?
Some people may feel that interaction between Western communists and the USSR hardly counted as genuine East-West contact because communists, even if they happened to live in the West, were not part of the West in terms of their mentality and loyalties. They were "them" not "us." Yes, there was an ambiguity in their position as Western communists, and this enabled them to participate in both societies. But read the memoirs of Peggy Dennis and Margaret Wettlin (and there were many others like them) and you will see that their outlook was formed mainly if not wholly under the influence of American concerns and American social conditions. For example, Wettlin's alienation from American capitalism grew out of reflections occasioned by the shattering childhood experience of her family's bankruptcy and eviction from their home in 1924 (pp. 32-33). Such people were and remained Americans and can be understood only as Americans.
For example. Reading Peggy Dennis' account of her life in Moscow in the early 1930s I found myself getting annoyed at her lack of curiosity about what was happening at the time to ordinary Soviet people. Thus she goes to work at the Profintern (the Red International of Labor Unions), where her job is to follow developments in the Western labor movement on the basis of Western publications. Yet she never thinks of inquiring into conditions of labor in the USSR or comparing them with conditions in the West.
But I think this is simply because she does not care very much about Russia for its own sake. For her and other American communists, Moscow is above all a source of assistance for the hard struggle back home, a compensatory dream, in case of need a place of refuge. The primary focus is always on America. To analyze her attitudes toward the Soviet Union without reference to this factor is like peering through the wrong end of a telescope. Only later, when she returns to the USA and has to leave her son Tim behind and he grows up as a Soviet citizen, does she acquire a double focus. With it comes a more sophisticated and critical understanding of Soviet reality, finally triggering her departure from the CPUSA, now under the stifling leadership of the narrow-minded Gus Hall.
It is commonplace to condemn Western communists for such willful "blindness." From an ideal pan-human viewpoint it is no doubt reprehensible. But the primary orientation to one's own country that lies at the root of the blindness is one still shared by most people. Did most Soviet dissidents really care about Western countries for their own sake? For them too "over there" was no more than a source of assistance, a dream, possibly a place of refuge.
Margaret Wettlin's immersion in Soviet life was much deeper than Peggy Dennis'. In particular, she was for many years an informer for the secret police. Someone should tell Solzhenitsyn about this book, for he complains that there is a dearth of autobiographical accounts by informers. She responds to the Chekists' invitation out of a naïve desire to do what she can for the cause, and she hopes she can use her position to help people. Perhaps too she enjoys the sense of power, of being privy to a hidden and powerful world. She is finally shocked into realization of what she is doing when she reports the confided discontents of an acquaintance and recommends steps to improve the latter's situation, but instead the malcontent is arrested and sent off to the camps.
A few years after the death of her husband, the stage director Andrei Yefremov, Margaret's brother Dan persuades her to come home. And so after an absence of half a century she returns to America. She tells us about her second marriage; she seems glad to be back. I wanted her to tell me what changes and non-changes she noticed in American life. After all, the Rip van Winkle is a rare bird. How did she now view the ideals of her youth? Alas, nothing doing. Fifty Russian winters have done their work: she is no longer a political person.
NOTES
(1) At least one Western engineer wrote a book about his experiences in the USSR. I'm afraid I can't locate the reference. No doubt some reader will remind me.
(2) Peggy Dennis. The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925-1975 (Berkeley CA: Creative Arts Book Co. and Westport CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977).
(3) Margaret Wettlin. Fifty Russian Winters: An American Woman's Life in the Soviet Union (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994).
(4) The Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, one of the most important foreign policy think-tanks.
(5) This is not, of course, to claim that the active role played by communists in the rise of Soviet Studies in Britain had wholly positive consequences.
(6) Except for three years during this period. My information about Miller comes from the obituary in Europe-Asia Studies (successor to Soviet Studies), Vol. 53 No. 5, July 2001, pp. 669-673.
(7) Miller described the experience in his article "Soviet Planners in 1936-37" in Jane Degras and Alec Nove, eds., Soviet Planning: Essays in Honour of Naum Jasny (Oxford, 1964).
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