English 400
Third Quarter Exam Reading
The Cold War
Contents
Brief Overview of the Cold War .................................................................................................. 3
Military ("Cold war," n.d.) ........................................................................................................................ 3
Cold War ............................................................................................................................................... 3
National Museum of American History ................................................................................................... 7
Origins of the Cold War ("Cold War history," 2000) ........................................................................... 7
Societal Effects in the United States .......................................................................................... 10
McCarthysm (Miller, 2006) .................................................................................................................... 10
"Blacklists and Other Economic Sanctions" (Shrecker, 1994) .............................................................. 11
War Time in Russia .................................................................................................................... 19
Stalin: Counting Stalin’s Victims 50 Years On (Balantyne, 2003) ................................................... 19
Anna Akhmatova ........................................................................................................................ 24
Biography of Anna Akhmatova ("Anna Biography," n.d.)....................................................... 24
“I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land” (World Literature, 2002, p. 1217) ................................. 26
The Weavers ................................................................................................................................ 26
Biography (The Weavers biography, n.d.) ......................................................................................... 26
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (Seeger, n.d.) ......................................................................... 28
References .................................................................................................................................... 30
Brief Overview of the Cold War
Military ("Cold war," n.d.)
Cold War
Dating the end of the Cold War requires dating its beginning, which requires defining what it
was about. By one reckoning, the Cold War began in the 1945-1948 timeframe, and ended in
1989, having been a dispute over the division of Europe. By another account, the Cold War
began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet
Union, having been a conflict between Bolshevism and Democracy.
The Cold War was the most important political and diplomatic issue of the later half of the 20th
Century. The main Cold War enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold
war got its name because both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly. In such a "hot
war," nuclear weapons might destroy everything. So, instead, they fought each other indirectly.
They played havoc with conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as
weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look
foolish.
The term “Cold War” was first used in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, senior advisor to Harry Truman,
the 33rd president of the United States, in reference to the frequently occurring and exacerbating
crises between the United States and the former Soviet Union, despite having fought side-by-side
against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
The Cold War grew out of longstanding conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States
that developed after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Communist Party under V.I.
Lenin considered itself the spearhead of an international movement that would replace the
existing political orders in the West, and indeed throughout the world.
The Cold War can be said to have begun in 1917, with the emergence in Russia of a
revolutionary Bolshevik regime devoted to spreading communism throughout the industrialized
world. For Vladimir Lenin, the leader of that revolution, such gains were imperative. As he
wrote in his August 1918 Open Letter to the American Workers, "We are now, as it were, in a
besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to
our relief."
Western governments generally understood communism to be an international movement whose
adherents forswore all national allegiance in favor of transnational communism, but in practice
received their orders from and were loyal to Moscow. In 1918, the United States joined briefly
and unenthusiastically in an unsuccessful Allied attempt to topple the revolutionary Soviet
regime. Suspicion and hostility thus characterized relations between the Soviets and the West
long before the Second World War made them reluctant allies in the struggle against Nazi
Germany.
The United States and Great Britain fought against the Bolsheviks, unsuccessfully, between 1918
and 1920. In 1918 American troops participated in the Allied intervention in Russia on behalf of
anti-Bolshevik forces. In the two decades thereafter, Soviet attitudes towards the West oscillated
wildly. American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union did not come until 1933. Even
then, suspicions persisted. During World War II, however, the two countries found themselves
allied and downplayed their differences to counter the Nazi threat.
The Cold War was a decades-long struggle for global supremacy that pitted the capitalist United
States against the communist Soviet Union. Although there are some disagreements as to when
the Cold War began, it is generally conceded that mid- to late-1945 marks the time when
relations between Moscow and Washington began deteriorating. This deterioration ignited the
early Cold War and set the stage for a dynamic struggle that often assumed mythological
overtones of good versus evil.
At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union stood firmly entrenched in Eastern Europe, intent
upon installing governments there that would pay allegiance to the Kremlin. It also sought to
expand its security zone even further into North Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Similarly, the United States established a security zone of its own that comprised Western
Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. From the long view
of history, it is clear that both sides were jockeying for a way to secure their futures from the
threat of another world war, but it was the threat that each side perceived from the other that
allowed for the development of mutual suspicion. It was this mutual suspicion, augmented by
profound distrust and misunderstanding that would ultimately fuel the entire conflict.
Over the years, leaders on both sides changed. Yet the Cold War continued. It was the major
force in world politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Historians disagree
about how long the Cold War lasted. A few believe it ended when the United States and the
Soviet Union improved relations during the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. Others
believe it ended when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, or when the Soviet Union
collapsed in late 1991.
For the first few years of the early Cold War (between 1945 and 1948), the conflict was more
political than military. Both sides squabbled with each other at the UN, sought closer relations
with nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing visions of a
postwar world. By 1950, however, certain factors had made the Cold War an increasingly
militarized struggle. The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman
Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak
of the Korean War, and the formulation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War's military dimension. U.S. foreign
policy reflected this transition when it adopted a position that sought to "contain" the Soviet
Union from further expansion. By and large, through a variety of incarnations, the containment
policy would remain the central strategic vision of U.S. foreign policy from 1952 until the
ultimate demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Successive American presidents and successive Soviet premiers tried to manage the Cold War in
different ways, and the history of their interactions reveals the delicate balance-of-power that
needed to be maintained between both superpowers. Dwight Eisenhower campaigned as a hardline Cold Warrior and spoke of "rolling back" the Soviet empire, but when given a chance to
dislodge Hungary from the Soviet sphere-of-influence in 1956, he declined. The death of Stalin
in 1953 prefaced a brief thaw in East-West relations, but Nikita Khrushchev also found it more
politically expedient to take a hard line with the United States than to speak of cooperation.
The United States and the Soviet Union were the only two superpowers following the Second
World War. The fact that, by the 1950s, each possessed nuclear weapons and the means of
delivering such weapons on their enemies, added a dangerous aspect to the Cold War. The Cold
War world was separated into three groups. The United States led the West. This group included
countries with democratic political systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This group included
countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did
not want to be tied to either the West or the East.
By 1960, both sides had invested huge amounts of money in nuclear weapons, both as an attempt
to maintain parity with each other's stockpiles, but also because the idea of deterring conflict
through "mutually assured destruction" had come to be regarded as vital to the national interest
of both. As nuclear weapons became more prolific, both nations sought to position missile
systems in ever closer proximity to each other's borders. One such attempt by the Soviet
government in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that the world has
ever come to a large-scale nuclear exchange between two countries.
It was also in the early 1960s that American containment policy shifted from heavy reliance on
nuclear weapons to more conventional notions of warfare in pursuit of a more "flexible
response" to the spread of communism. Although originally articulated by President Kennedy, it
was in 1965 that President Johnson showcased the idea of flexible response when he made the
initial decision to commit American combat troops to South Vietnam. American thinking had
come to regard Southeast Asia as vital to its national security, and President Johnson made clear
his intention to insure South Vietnam's territorial and political integrity "whatever the cost or
whatever the challenge."
The United States ultimately fought a bloody and costly war in Vietnam that poisoned U.S.
politics and wreaked havoc with its economy. The Nixon administration inherited the conflict in
1969, and although it tried to improve relations with the Soviets through detente – and even took
the unprecedented step of establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China – neither
development was able to bring about decisive change on the Vietnamese battlefield. The United
States abandoned the fight in 1973 under the guise of a peace agreement that left South Vietnam
emasculated and vulnerable.
Although Nixon continued to negotiate with the Soviets and to court Maoist China, the Soviet
Union and the United States continued to subvert one another's interests around the globe in spite
of detente's high-minded rhetoric. Leonid Brezhnev had been installed as Soviet premier in 1964
as Khrushchev's replacement, and while he too desired friendlier relations with the United States
on certain issues (particularly agriculture), genuinely meaningful cooperation remained elusive.
By the end of the 1970s, however, the chance for an extended thaw had utterly vanished. Jimmy
Carter had been elected president in 1976, and although he was able to hammer out a second
arms limitation agreement with Brezhnev, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan significantly
soured U.S.-Soviet relations. Seeking to place a greater emphasis on human rights in his foreign
policy, Carter angrily denounced the incursion and began to adopt an increasingly hard line with
the Soviets. The following year, Americans overwhelmingly elected a president who spoke of
waging the Cold War with even greater intensity than had any of his predecessors, and Ronald
Reagan made good on his promises by dramatically increasing military budgets in the early
1980s.
Nonetheless, by 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had replaced Brezhnev in Moscow, and he quickly
perceived that drastic changes to the Soviet system were necessary if the USSR. was to survive
as a state. He instituted a series of liberal reforms known as perestroika, and he seemed
genuinely interested in more relations with the West, known as glasnost. Although President
Reagan continued to use bellicose language with respect to the Soviet Union (as when he labeled
it an "evil empire"), the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship was personally warm and the two
leaders were able to decrease tensions substantially by the time Reagan left the White House in
1989.
Despite improved East-West relations, however, Gorbachev's reforms were unable to prevent the
collapse of a system that had grown rigid and unworkable. By most measures, the Soviet
economy had failed to grow at all since the late 1970s and much of the country's populace had
grown weary of the aged Communist hierarchy. In 1989 the spontaneous destruction of the
Berlin Wall signaled the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and two years later the
Soviet government itself fell from power.
The DoD Cold War Recognition Certificate was approved for service during the "Cold War era"
from 02 September 1945 to 26 December 1991. By this account, after 45 years of protracted
conflict and constant tension, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is,
upon reflection, a rather tendentious reading of history, since it takes the central conflict of the
Cold War to have been the struggle between the two competing social systems, which could only
end with one or the other being consigned to the ash heap of history.
President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom award to former President Ronald Reagan at a
ceremony in the East Room on January 13, 1993. President Bush said that Reagan" ... helped
make ours not only a safer but far better world in which to live. And you yourself said it best. In
fact, you saw it coming. We recall your stirring words to the British Parliament. Here were the
words: ``the march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxist-Leninism on the ashheap
of history.'' Few people believe more in liberty's inevitable triumph than Ronald Reagan. None,
none was more a prophet in his time. Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military; not only that, he
restored its morale."
During the Cold War 325 Americans died as a result of hostile action; More than 200 airmen
were killed by Communist air defenses, and more than 40 American intelligence aircraft were
shot down, killing 64 Cryptologists and 40 crew members. Countless other Americans had their
lives disrupted through military service in support of the Cold War.
National Museum of American History
Origins of the Cold War ("Cold War history," 2000)
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union began to unravel even
before the end of World War II. When the war ended, the Red Army occupied much of Eastern
Europe. The evident weakness of Western Europe raised the specter of communism spreading
even further.
Although the Marshall Plan helped restore Western Europe, other events of the late 1940s kept
tension high: the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and Soviet blockade of West Berlin in
1948, the fall of China and the Soviet A-bomb in 1949. Soviet support for the North Korean
invasion of South Korea in 1950 confirmed the threat in Western eyes.
The establishment in 1949 of the Western alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization),
and the 1955 Warsaw Pact between the Soviet Union and its satellites solidified the two
opposing blocs that shaped the Cold War.
The Cold War touched many aspects of American social and cultural life, from the civil rights
movement to survivalism, from Hollywood to the universities. The nuclear threat—and the
Communist menace lurking behind it—brought the National Defense Education Act, the
interstate highway system, and growing mistrust of government by both liberals and
conservatives. In ways sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, the Cold War left its mark on
activities ranging from art and poetry to movies and comic books. Sports events became
particularly prominent venues for rivalry, beginning with the London Olympics in 1948 and
peaking every fourth year thereafter. Visiting artists, traveling exhibitions, and other cultural
exchanges, both formal and informal, sometimes helped ease Cold War tensions.
The Korean War began in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. The United
Nations (UN) Security Council resolved to defend South Korea and President Harry S. Truman
promptly committed U.S. ground, air, and naval forces. After narrowly avoiding defeat, the U.S.led UN army threw back the North Koreans and chased them north.
Late in November, the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army intervened in Korea, inflicting heavy
losses on UN forces near the border, then driving them out of North Korea. A stalemate ensued,
roughly along the border between the two Koreas. Peace talks began in July 1951 and two years
later finally produced an armistice.
For the United States, Korea confirmed the threat of Communist expansion. The armed forces
buildup occasioned by the crisis became permanent. Defense budgets, which had been declining
since 1945, now began long years of continuous growth.
The threat of nuclear annihilation restrained the armed forces of the United States and the Soviet
Union from directly confronting each other in battle. The closest call came in 1962, when the
Soviet Union secretly placed offensive missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, and provoked an
American naval quarantine that brought the two superpowers to the brink of war. For the most
part, the superpowers fought by subverting unfriendly regimes or covertly arming surrogate
forces. Both sides regularly provided military advisors to countries or factions they supported.
Even if the armed forces of the superpowers rarely confronted each other, they still saw plenty of
action. The Red Army suppressed dissent in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and
Czechoslovakia (1968). It also fought a border war with China (1969) and invaded Afghanistan
(1979). U.S. forces intervened in Korea (1950), Lebanon (1958, 1982), Vietnam (1961), the
Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1970), and Grenada (1983).
At other times the two countries sought common ground or mutual benefit, as when they signed
the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, shifting all nuclear weapons testing underground; or the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which restricted an entire class of nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each built a stockpile
of nuclear weapons. Soviet policy rested on the conviction that a nuclear war could
be fought and won. The United States adopted nuclear deterrence, the credible
threat of retaliation to forestall enemy attack.
To make its threat convincing, the United States during the 1950s developed and deployed
several types of delivery systems for attacking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. By the
1960s, three such systems emerged as the basis of strategic deterrence:
1. long-range manned aircraft carrying nuclear bombs
2. land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and
3. nuclear-powered submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles.
Each system became one independent leg of what was called the Strategic Triad. Any one of the
three alone was powerful enough to deter attack. Because no enemy could realistically hope to
destroy all three at the same time, the Triad seemed almost invulnerable.
Controversy has always surrounded nuclear technology, whether for peace or war, and nuclear
submarines were no exception. In the public arena, opposition derived from widespread fears of
all things nuclear, and questions about the morality of nuclear weapons. Perceived as part of the
nuclear arms race, ballistic missile submarine bases became the target of demonstrations at home
and abroad.
Within the military establishment, money was an issue. For instance, during the peak years of
Polaris spending, 1959 to 1964, the program consumed 8 to 14 percent of a Navy budget that
remained almost constant. Every other project suffered a 10 percent funding cut, because the
overall Navy budget did not increase. The result was significant opposition to Polaris among
those Navy officials who favored other approaches, especially since both nuclear propulsion and
ballistic missiles represented, at that time, novel technologies.
The wars in Vietnam lasted 30 years. They began when France tried to restore colonial rule after
World War II. Fear of losing Southeast Asia to the Communist-led independence movement
brought U.S. backing to the French effort during the 1950s. French defeat resulted in a divided
country, with the United States supporting the weak but pro-Western government of South
Vietnam.
Assuming a more active role in 1961, the United States sent the first of 11,000 military advisors
to South Vietnam. When advice failed to stem the Communist tide, the United States in 1965
launched an air war against North Vietnam and committed ground troops to combat guerrilla
insurgency in the south. American strength peaked at 540,000 in 1969, then rapidly declined.
Growing numbers of Americans opposed the war on political or moral grounds, and public
protest mounted. The war was widely seen as futile by 1968, when peace talks opened in Paris.
The 1973 peace accord required the last U.S. forces to withdraw, leaving the war solely to the
Vietnamese. South Vietnam did not long survive, falling in 1975 to the invading regular North
Vietnamese Army.
Throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Union fought an increasingly frustrating war in Afghanistan.
At the same time, the Soviet economy faced the continuously escalating costs of the arms race.
Dissent at home grew while the stagnant economy faltered under the combined burden.
Attempted reforms at home left the Soviet Union unwilling to rebuff challenges to its control in
Eastern Europe. During 1989 and 1990, the Berlin Wall came down, borders opened, and free
elections ousted Communist regimes everywhere in eastern Europe. In late 1991 the Soviet
Union itself dissolved into its component republics. With stunning speed, the Iron Curtain was
lifted and the Cold War came to an end.
Societal Effects in the United States
McCarthysm (Miller, 2006)
Sen. Joseph McCarthy
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of
communism growing in Eastern Europe and China. Capitalizing on those concerns, a young
Senator named Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred “cardcarrying” communists had infiltrated the United States government. Though eventually his
accusations were proven to be untrue, and he was censured by the Senate for unbecoming
conduct, his zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century
American politics.
While the House Un-American Activities Committee had been formed in 1938 as an antiCommunist organ, McCarthy’s accusations heightened the political tensions of the times. Known
as McCarthyism, the paranoid hunt for infiltrators was notoriously difficult on writers and
entertainers, many of whom were labeled communist sympathizers and were unable to continue
working. Some had their passports taken away, while others were jailed for refusing to give the
names of other communists. The trials, which were well publicized, could often destroy a career
with a single unsubstantiated accusation. Among those well-known artists accused of communist
sympathies or called before the committee were Dashiell Hammett, Waldo Salt, Lillian Hellman,
Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein,
Charlie Chaplin and Group Theatre members Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and Stella Adler. In all,
three hundred and twenty artists were blacklisted, and for many of them this meant the end of
exceptional and promising careers.
During this time there were few in the press willing to stand up against McCarthy and the antiCommunist machine. Among those few were comedian Mort Sahl, and journalist Edward R.
Murrow, whose strong criticisms of McCarthy are often cited as playing an important role in his
eventual removal from power. By 1954, the fervor had died down and many actors and writers
were able to return to work. Though relatively short, these proceedings remain one of the most
shameful moments in modern U.S. history.
"Blacklists and Other Economic Sanctions" (Shrecker, 1994)
from: Ellen Schrecker, THE AGE OF MCCARTHYISM: A BRIEF HISTORY WITH
DOCUMENTS. (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
Even at the height of the McCarthyist furor in the early 1950s, the anti-Communist crusade was
relatively mild. Many prosecutions faltered on appeal and only a few foreign-born radicals were
actually deported. Only Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death; and of the roughly 150
people who went to prison, most were released within a year or two. Certainly compared to the
horrors of Stalin's Russia, McCarthyism was not a drastic form of political repression. But it was
an effective one.
The punishments were primarily economic. People lost their jobs. The official manifestations of
McCarthyism--the public hearings, FBI investigations, and criminal prosecutions--would not
have been as effective had they not been reinforced by the private sector. The political purges
were a two-stage process that relied on the imposition of economic sanctions to bolster the
political messages conveyed by public officials. The collaboration of private employers with
HUAC and the rest of the anti-Communist network was necessary both to legitimate the
network's activities and to punish the men and women identified as politically undesirable.
Without the participation of the private sector, McCarthyism would not have affected the rankand-file members of the Communist movement or so effectively stifled political dissent.
It is hard to come up with accurate statistics for the number of politically motivated dismissals
during the McCarthy period, for both the employers and the people they fired tried to conceal
what was happening--the former to protect themselves against charges of violating civil liberties,
the latter to obtain future jobs. Yale Law School professor Ralph Brown, who conducted the
most systematic survey of the economic damage of the McCarthy era, estimated that roughly ten
thousand people lost their jobs. Such a figure may be low, as even Brown admits, for it does not
include rejected applicants, people who resigned under duress, and the men and women who
were ostensibly dismissed for other reasons. Still, it does suggest the scope of the economic
sanctions.
The two-stage nature of McCarthyism, in which political undesirables were first identified by
one agency and then fired by another, increased its effectiveness. By diffusing the responsibility,
the separation of the two operations made it easier for the people who administered the economic
sanctions to rationalize what they were doing and deny that they were involved in the business of
McCarthyism. This was especially the case with the essentially moderate and liberal men (few
women here) who ran the nation's major corporations, newspapers, universities, and other
institutions that fired people for their politics. Many of these administrators sincerely deplored
McCarthy and HUAC and tried to conceal the extent to which their own activities bolstered the
witch-hunt.
Most of the time the first stage of identifying the alleged Communists was handled by an official
agency like an investigating committee or the FBI. In some areas, such as the entertainment
industry, private entrepreneurs entered the field. The bureau and the congressional committees
expected that the people they exposed would lose their jobs; and the evidence we have suggests
that about 80 percent of the unfriendly witnesses did. The investigators often greased the wheels
by warning their witnesses' employers or releasing lists of prospective witnesses to the local
press. Sometimes recalcitrant witnesses who kept their jobs were recalled for a second hearing.
The FBI was also involved in the unemployment business. Throughout the late 1950s, agents
routinely visited Junius Scales's employers to ensure that he could not keep a job. Naturally, the
bureau operated with greater stealth than the committees, for it was not supposed to release
material from its files to anyone outside the executive branch. But not only did the FBI leak
selected tidbits to sympathetic journalists and members of Congress, it also inaugurated a
systematic flow of information called the "Responsibilities Program." The program began in
1951 when a group of liberal governors, who were worried that they might be vulnerable to
right-wing charges of harboring Communists on their payrolls, asked the bureau to give them
information about state employees. Deniability was the program's hallmark; FBI agents usually
conveyed the requisite information to the governors or their representatives in oral reports or in
the form of what the bureau called "blind memoranda," typed on plain unwatermarked paper that
gave no evidence of its origins. During the four years of the program's existence, it transmitted
810 such reports, most of which resulted in the intended action.
It is important to realize that the dismissals were usually in response to outside pressures. Most
of the firings of the McCarthy era occurred after someone had refused to cooperate with an
investigating committee or was denied a security clearance. Major corporations like General
Electric and U.S. Steel announced that they would discharge any worker who took the Fifth
Amendment, and other employers made it equally clear that they would do the same. Some of
these employers may well have welcomed and even actually arranged for a HUAC hearing,
especially when it enabled them to fire left-wing union leaders. Left to their own devices,
however, most of the other employers would not have initiated political dismissals, though they
were usually willing to acquiesce in them once they were apprised of the identities of their
allegedly subversive employees.
Self-defense was the primary motivation. Even when not threatened with direct reprisals, the
leaders of the nation's major corporations, universities, and other private institutions seem to
have decided that good public relations demanded the dismissal of someone openly identified as
a Communist or even, in many cases, of people who were merely controversial. In retrospect, it
is clear that the fear of retaliation for retaining a Fifth Amendment witness or other political
undesirable was probably exaggerated. Those few institutions that kept such people in their
employ did not suffer in any noticeable way. Alumni did not withhold their donations;
moviegoers did not desert the theaters. But perception in this case was more important than
reality.
Ideology shored up the dismissals. The cautious college presidents and studio heads who fired or
refused to hire political undesirables shared the anti-Communist consensus. They were patriotic
citizens who, however squeamish they may have been about the methods of McCarthy and the
other investigators, agreed that communism threatened the United States and that the crisis
engendered by the cold war necessitated measures that might violate the rights of individuals. By
invoking the icon of national security, they were able to give their otherwise embarrassing
actions a patina of patriotism. Equally pervasive was the belief that Communists deserved to be
fired. Because of their alleged duplicity, dogmatism, and disloyalty to their nation and
employers, Communists (and the definition was to be stretched to include ex-Communists, Fifth
Amendment Communists, and anybody who associated with Communists) were seen as no
longer qualified for their jobs. Since these disqualifications usually appeared only after the untilthen qualified individuals were identified by part of the anti-Communist network, these
rationalizations obviously involved considerable deception and self-deception.
There were few legal restraints. The Supreme Court's refusal to interfere with the firings of
public servants prefigured its attitude toward similar dismissals within other institutions. Again,
the Court, which initially acquiesced in the firing of unfriendly witnesses and other political
dissidents, began to change its position by the mid-19SOs. But the reversals were never complete
and they occurred after much of the damage had been done. In 1956, for example, the Court
invalidated the dismissal of a Brooklyn College literature professor who had taken the Fifth
Amendment, but since it admitted that there might be other reasons why he should be fired, he
never got his job back. A few people whose careers had been destroyed by the entertainment
industry blacklist tried to sue for damages, but federal judges did not even recognize the
existence of the blacklist until the mid-1960s.
No doubt because of the glamour of the entertainment industry, the anti-Communist firings and
subsequent blacklisting of men and women in show business are well known. The movies had
been a target of the anti-Communist network since the late 1930s. Investigating show business
was a sure way to attract publicity. There were plenty of potential witnesses, for the film industry
had a lively radical community with an active core of some three hundred Communists. In 1947,
the Hollywood Ten hearings precipitated the blacklist. At first it was not clear that employers
would punish unfriendly witnesses. But when the indictment of the Ten showed that the federal
government's law enforcement machinery was backing HUAC, the situation changed. At the end
of November, the heads of the major studios met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City
and released a statement announcing that they had fired the Ten and would not rehire them until
they recanted and cleared themselves with the committee.
Over the next few years many of the film industries more prominent leftists found it increasingly
harder to get work. By 1951 when HUAC returned to Hollywood to resume the hearings it had
begun four years before, the blacklist was in full operation. There was, of course, no official list
and the studios routinely denied that blacklisting occurred. Still, writers stopped getting calls for
work; actors were told they were "too good for the part."
The rise of television exacerbated the film industry's already serious financial slump and
reinforced the major studios' reluctance to offend any segment of their audience. Threats of
boycotts by the American Legion and other right-wing groups terrified the moviemakers and
their Wall Street backers. Imposing an anti-Communist blacklist seemed an obvious way to
avoid trouble at the box office for an industry that had, after all, long been subject to
considerable self-censorship with regard to sexual as well as political issues.
The blacklist spread to the broadcast industry as well. Here, the process became public in June
1950 with the publication of Red Channels, a 213-page compilation of the alleged Communist
affiliations of 151 actors, writers, musicians, and other radio and television entertainers. The
book, which appeared three days before the start of the Korean War, was published by American
Business Consultants, an outfit established in 1947 by a trio of former FBI agents who wanted to
make the public aware of the information about communism that the bureau had collected.
Initially funded by Alfred Kohlberg and the Catholic Church, the group became one of the antiCommunist network's main enterprises, offering its services in exposing and eliminating
Communists to corporations, foundations, and government agencies. Red Channels was a special
show business supplement to the exposes of individuals and organizations that appeared in the
group's regular newsletter, Counterattack.
The listings in Red Channels were compiled, so J. B. Matthews claimed, from his collection of
front group letterheads, congressional and California Un-American Activities Committee reports,
and old Daily Workers. They were not always accurate, but they were devastating. By 1951, the
television networks and their sponsors no longer hired anyone whose name was in the book, and
the prohibition soon spread to anyone who seemed controversial. A tiny group of true believers
enforced the blacklist by deluging networks, advertising agencies, and sponsors with letters and
phone calls whenever someone they disapproved of got hired. One of the blacklist's most ardent
enforcers was Laurence Johnson, a supermarket owner in Syracuse, New York, who threatened
to place signs in his stores warning customers not to buy the products of any company that
sponsored a program featuring one of "Stalin's little creatures." Although Johnson represented no
one but himself and his employees, some of the nation's largest corporations capitulated to his
demands.
Broadcasters scrambled to ensure that they did not hire the wrong kinds of talent and often
enlisted professional anti-Communists to check the backgrounds of prospective employees. One
of the authors of Red Channels charged five dollars a name; the ex-FBI agents of American
Business Consultants provided similar services, sometimes, it was said, after threatening further
exposures in Counterattack. CBS inaugurated a loyalty oath and, like the other networks and big
advertising agencies, put full-time "security officers" on its payroll. In Hollywood the studios
worked closely with the American Legion and the film industry's own anti-Communists and
informers. The criteria for the blacklists varied. People who were cleared by one network or
studio were banned by others. Even within a single network or agency, some shows hired
performers that other shows refused to touch. The blacklisters' targets extended far beyond the
Communist party and sometimes seemed to encompass almost every liberal in show business.
One producer found that a third of the performers he wanted to hire were turned down by his
superiors--including an eight-year-old girl.
It is not clear exactly why the entertainment industry's blacklist had such a broad reach.
Although most of the people affected by it had once been in or near the Communist party, the
blacklist also encompassed some genuine innocents, people who had merely signed letters
supporting the Ho of true believers enforced the blacklist by deluging networks, Hollywood
Ten's petition for a Supreme Court hearing or attended Popular Front gatherings during World
War II. No doubt the visibility of the industry played a role, as did the reluctance of studios and
networks to become involved in anything that seemed controversial. As one industry executive
explained, "We're a business that has to please the customers; that's the main thing we have to
do, keep people happy, and, to do that, we have to stay out of trouble." Finally, the professional
anti-Communists seem to have been more directly involved in administering the entertainment
industry blacklist than they were with the sanctions in other fields and could thus impose their
own more stringent ideological criteria.
It was possible to get removed from the blacklist. The clearance procedure was complicated,
secretive, and for many people morally repugnant. The people who initiated the blacklists, such
as the authors of Red Channels, charged a few hundred dollars to shepherd someone through the
process. A loose network of lawyers, gossip columnists, union leaders, and organizations like the
American Legion, Anti-Defamation League, and, it was rumored, the Catholic Church provided
similar services. Naming names was required, of course. Ex-Communists usually had to purge
themselves with HUAC and the FBI before they could work again. The better known among
them often had to publish articles in a mass-circulation magazine explaining how they had been
duped by the party and describing its evils. For Humphrey Bogart, whose main offense was his
public support for the Hollywood Ten, rehabilitation required an article in a fan magazine
confessing, "I'm no Communist," just an "American dope." It was also helpful to take some kind
of overtly anti-Communist actions such as opposing the antiblacklist factions within the talent
unions or circulating petitions against the admission of Communist China to the United Nations.
The film industry required more than three hundred people to clear themselves by writing letters,
which then had to be approved by James O'Neil, the former American Legion national
commander, and such anti-Communist professionals as J. B. Matthews and Benjamin Mandel.
Clearance was not routine. Even people who had no party ties had to write two or three drafts of
their letters until they showed the appropriate degree of contrition.
The show business people who couldn't or wouldn't clear themselves soon became unemployable
and ostracized. Some left the country---if they could get passports. Others used subterfuges.
Blacklisted writers worked under pseudonyms or hired "fronts" who were willing to pass off the
blacklistees' scripts as their own. It was not a lucrative business. The aliases and fronts could not
command the fees that the more established blacklisted writers had once earned. Producers knew
what was going on and unscrupulous ones took advantage of it. The more principled ones began
to chip away at the ban and hire some blacklisted writers. In 1956, the embarrassed silence that
accompanied the failure of screenwriter "Richard Rich" (Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood
Ten) to claim his Academy Award began the process. By the mid-1960s, some of the blacklisted
screenwriters were back in Hollywood.
Actors, of course, could not use fronts. Even the most talented of them had a tough time on the
blacklist. Broadway, with its smaller clientele, did let them perform, but work in the legitimate
theater was sporadic and much less remunerative than in movies or TV. Ultimately, many of the
blacklisted actors had to abandon their careers and take whatever jobs they could find. More than
one blacklistee ended up waiting tables. The blacklist took a personal toll as well. Broken health
and broken marriages, even suicides, were not unknown. When the blacklist lifted in the 1960s,
its former victims were never able to fully resuscitate their careers. They had simply lost too
much time.
The entertainment industry's blacklist was the most visible of the economic sanctions of the
McCarthy era, but it was hardly unique. Most of the politically motivated dismissals affected
Communists and ex-Communists and tended to be concentrated in industries where Communistled unions had been active or in sectors of society that harbored the middle-class intellectuals
and professionals who had gravitated to the party during the Popular Front. Steelworkers,
teachers, sailors, lawyers, social workers, electricians, journalists, and assembly line workers
were all subject to the same kinds of political dismissals and prolonged unemployment as show
business people. And the experience was just as devastating.
Considerable irony invests the McCarthy era dismissals within the academic community, for the
nation's colleges and universities allegedly subscribed to the doctrines of academic freedom and
to the notion that professors should not be punished for their political activities outside of class.
But academia was not immune to McCarthyism, and by the late 1940s most of the nation's
academic leaders believed that professors who were members of the Communist party had
surrendered their intellectual independence and so were unqualified to teach. Significantly, no
university administrators acted on these convictions unless pressured to do so by a state or
congressional investigation or other outside agency. Until HUAC came to town or the FBI slid a
"blind memorandum" across the college president's desk, there were no questions about the
academic competence of the alleged subversives. At no point were any of them charged with
recruiting their students or teaching the party line. Most of them were former Communists who,
though hostile to the committees, were not especially active at the time.
The first important academic freedom case of the cold war arose in July 1948 at the University of
Washington, where the state legislature's UnAmerican Activities Committee forced the issue by
questioning a handful of faculty members. Six defied the committee and the administration filed
charges against them. The faculty committee that dealt with the case in the fall recommended the
retention of all but one, a professor who refused to answer any of its questions about his politics.
The regents fired two others as well, since they had admitted to being members of the
Communist party and were therefore, so the university's president explained, "incompetent,
intellectually dishonest, and derelict in their duty to find and teach the truth." The rest of the
academy agreed: Communists could not be college teachers. The academic community backed
up its words with action or, rather, inaction; none of the dismissed professors was able to find a
teaching job.
Within a few years the ban in academia extended to Fifth Amendment Communists. Concerned
about the unfavorable publicity that unfriendly witnesses would draw to their institutions, the
nation's academic leaders urged faculty members to cooperate with HUAC and the other
committees. Because of the tradition of academic freedom, university administrators clothed
their responses to McCarthyism in elaborate rationalizations about the academic profession's
commitment to "complete candor and perfect integrity." The most authoritative such statement
was released by the presidents of the nation's thirty-seven leading universities in the spring of
1953, just as the main congressional committees were about to investigate higher education. It
stressed the professors' duty "to speak out"--that is, name names--and warned that "invocation of
the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a
teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for
membership in its society." The message was clear. College teachers subpoenaed by a
congressional committee knew that if they took the Fifth Amendment or otherwise refused to
testify they might lose their jobs.
The main academic purges occurred from 1952 to 1954 when the congressional committees had
run out of more glamorous targets and turned to the nation's colleges and universities. Dismissals
were not automatic; an academic hearing usually followed the congressional one. Though the
faculty committees that mounted the investigations did not normally demand that their
colleagues name names, they did expect them to cooperate and discuss their past political
activities. People who refused, who felt that such questions were as illegitimate as HUAC's, were
invariably fired. So were most of the others, especially at schools where conservative or
politically insecure administrators and trustees refused to accept the favorable recommendations
of faculty committees. In a few cases, if a professor had tenure, taught at a relatively less
vulnerable private university, and cooperated fully with the institution's investigation, he or she
could retain his or her job. But these were exceptional cases and they often masked the less
publicized dismissals of junior professors, who were invariably let go when their contracts
expired. By the time the McCarthyist furor subsided, close to a hundred academics had lost their
jobs for refusing to cooperate with anti-Communist investigators. Several hundred more were
probably eased out under the FBI's Responsibilities Program and similar measures.
Once fired, the politically tainted professors could rarely find other academic jobs. Like the
Hollywood blacklistees, they were confronted with an unacknowledged but thoroughly effective
embargo. Some emigrated, some switched fields, and some went to teach in small southern
Negro colleges that were so desperate for qualified faculty members they asked no questions.
The university blacklist began to subside by the early 1960s. Most of the banned professors
returned to the academic world, but their careers had suffered in the interim.
Hundreds of elementary and high school teachers also lost their jobs, sometimes after an
appearance before HUAC and sometimes as the result of a local loyalty probe. Social workers
were similarly affected, especially in the welfare agencies of cities like New York and
Philadelphia where they had formed unions and agitated on behalf of their clients. Again, a
combination of outside investigations and loyalty programs cost these people their jobs.
Journalists were another group of middle-class professionals who were fired when they defied
congressional committees. There were only a handful of such people, their dismissals an
embarrassment in an industry that presumably required so much freedom itself. The New York
Times justified its firing of a copyreader in the foreign news department as a matter of national
security; had he worked on the sports desk, the Times explained, he could have kept his job.
Industrial workers also faced dismissals and blacklists, especially if they were active in the locals
of left-wing unions. Again, outside pressures precipitated the firings. Although alleged
Communists were sometimes dropped outright (especially if found leafleting or circulating
petitions outside plant gates), most of the time they lost their jobs as a result of a congressional
investigation or the denial of a security clearance. Companies with defense contracts were under
pressure to remove recalcitrant witnesses and other political undesirables from their payrolls; in
several instances the government threatened to withdraw a contract if an offending worker was
not fired. The most massive wave of dismissals occurred in the maritime industry, where the
imposition of a port security program after the outbreak of the Korean War screened about
fifteen hundred sailors and longshoremen off their jobs. Nor were employers and federal
authorities the only agencies to impose sanctions within a factory. Unfriendly witnesses were
sometimes subjected to "run-outs" organized by co-workers who beat them up and physically
forced them off their jobs.
Occasionally the fired workers were reinstated. Successful litigation forced major revisions in
the port security program, for example. In other instances, if--and this was an increasingly big if-their unions were willing to back up their grievances, some people got their jobs back. In the
late 1940s, arbitrators hearing these cases were sometimes willing to restore the jobs of people
who clearly could not endanger the national security. But after the outbreak of the Korean War,
neither their unions nor the arbitrators would support such people's claims. In addition, workers
who were fired for political reasons were often deprived of unemployment benefits.
Economic sanctions affected independent professionals and businesspeople in different ways.
Being self-employed, they did not have to worry about being fired, but they had to endure other
injuries. In some occupations, licensing requirements enabled the states to impose political tests,
usually by making applicants take some kind of loyalty oath. Unfriendly witnesses could lose
their licenses or, if they did work for a state or local government have their contracts canceled.
Lawyers were particularly affected, especially those who defended people in anti-Communist
proceedings. Whatever their own political beliefs, such lawyers were perceived as sharing those
of their clients. Of course, some attorneys were or had been Communists. Like other middleclass professionals, many lawyers had been attracted to the party during the 1930s and 1940s.
Many of them belonged to the cohort of talented liberal and left-wing attorneys who had staffed
the New Deal agencies or worked with the CIO. By the late 1940s most them had left the
government and the mainstream unions and were trying to establish themselves in private
practice. The few members of the legal profession willing to handle the cases of Communists
suffered economically. Their other clients, fearful of being stigmatized by attorneys who were
publicly identified with the national enemy, went elsewhere. The political dissidents, deportees,
and left-led unions that provided the core of their business were usually too forced major
revisions in the port security program, for example. Insolvent to pay much, if anything.
Worse than the loss of clients and income was the possibility that defending the party might land
them in jail or get them disbarred. The lawyers who represented the Dennis defendants were not
the only attorneys to be charged with contempt of court as the result of their efforts during a
Communist trial. Nor were they the only lawyers threatened with disbarment because of their
politics. As the testimony of a Bay Area attorney reveals, the problems such lawyers faced made
it particularly difficult for the protagonists in anti-Communist proceedings to find legal
representation, especially if they did not want a known left-winger. Some of the defendants in
the second round of Smith Act trials were rejected by more than two hundred attorneys.
Unlike the academic world and film industry, which were under outside pressure, the legal
profession undertook to oust its tainted members on its own. The initiatives came from
conservative attorneys associated with the anti-Communist network. The American Bar
Association (ABA) set up a Special Committee on Communist Tactics, Strategy, and Objectives
to ensure that alleged subversives did not penetrate the legal profession. The association also
adopted resolutions against allowing Communists and, later, Fifth Amendment witnesses to
practice law. These resolutions, coming as they did from the organized voice of a highly
respected profession, carried considerable weight. To implement them, national and local bar
associations worked closely with HUAC, the FBI, and the rest of the anti-Communist network to
screen applicants and begin disbarment proceedings against the more radical members. Few
succeeded.
Important members of the legal establishment (and not just the targeted attorneys) opposed
these ousters. After all, lawyers did have a traditional commitment to and understanding of civil
liberties, as well as a professional responsibility to represent all types of clients. By the mid1950s some eminent lawyers were concerned about protecting the public's right to counsel and
refused to countenance political disbarments. Even more important, in a few instances local bar
associations and attorneys from major law firms in cities like Philadelphia, Denver, and
Cleveland had begun to take on Communist cases. Such gestures, coming from leading members
of the bar, contributed to the lessening of the McCarthyist furor--even if they did not necessarily
win their clients' acquittal.
War Time in Russia
Stalin: Counting Stalin’s Victims 50 Years On (Balantyne, 2003)
March 5 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest mass-murderers
of all time - the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Probably as many Soviet people were killed
during his reign of terror as perished during World War II at the hands of the Nazis. Yet many
today still fail to grasp the magnitude of his crimes against humanity. Many Russians in fact look
back nostalgically to the Stalin era.
In March this year, 53 per cent of Russians polled by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of
Public Opinion, viewed Stalin's role in history as "absolutely positive" or "more positive than
negative". In the West, the BBC has recently created an uproar with its television drama,
Cambridge Spies, about traitors Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt,
who, during the 1930s and '40s, used their privileged positions in the British establishment to
betray secrets to Moscow. The series - currently screening on ABC television - depicts the young
men's devotion to Soviet Communism as an idealistic and understandable response to the plight
of the unemployed and the rise of Fascism in Europe before the war.
Downplayed in all this, however, is the fact that, even in the 1930s, there was ample evidence
available of Stalin's repressive policies. Fellow-travellers who turned a blind eye to the reality of
Soviet Communism were not misguided idealists, but were as morally culpable as Nazi
sympathisers who whitewashed Hitler. If certain Russians and BBC producers, in this
anniversary year of Stalin's death, are so forgetful of a major and tragic chapter of European
history, it is perhaps a fitting time to set the record straight and recapitulate the human cost of
Stalin's terror. Certainly, his millions of innocent victims deserve no less.
Collectivisation
One of the most bloodthirsty phases of Stalin's career began in the late 1920s after he had
successfully isolated his political rivals and emerged as undisputed master of the Soviet Union.
He used coercion and terror to mobilise the working population to fulfill his grandiose five-year
plans for industrialising the economically backward USSR.
Irish playwright and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, wrote approvingly of Stalin's
methods: "Every Russian knows that if he will not make his life a paying enterprise for his
country ... an agent of the OGPU [Soviet secret police] will take him by the shoulder and will
conduct him to the cellar of this famous department and he will simply stop living."
Stalin pursued an especially uncompromising policy towards the Soviet peasantry. He aimed at
nothing less than depriving peasants of their land, herding them into state-run collective farms,
and empowering the state to seize all their agricultural produce. Standing in the way of this
wholesale expropriation, however, were millions of peasant smallholders called kulaks. Stalin's
drastic solution was to call for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class". The reign of terror which
descended on the Soviet countryside was, in the words of the great Polish scholar of Marxism,
Leszek Kolakowski, "Probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state
against its own citizens".
Special OGPU military units, armed with tanks and machine-guns, surrounded villages and fired
indiscriminately into crowds of peasants. Mass arrests and executions followed. Millions who
escaped death in this way were rounded up, bundled into cattle trucks and deported to the
notorious Gulag slave labour camps in Siberia or the Arctic where many perished.
In collectivising agriculture, Stalin met particular fierce resistance from Ukrainians, whose large
population and sense of nationhood, he feared, could also prove a threat to Moscow's rule.
During 1932-33 Stalin used unprecedented means to bring Ukraine to heel. He had all of
Ukraine's grain confiscated and her borders sealed so that no person could leave and no food
could enter the country. In what amounted to the first deliberately man-made famine in history,
Stalin turned Ukraine - once the great breadbasket of Europe - into a vast wasteland. Millions
died.
The writer Arthur Koestler was visiting Ukraine at the time. He described seeing from his train
starving children who "looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles ... the stations were lined with
begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage windows
horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, stick-like limbs and swollen, pointed bellies."
Years later, when discussing farm collectivisation with Winston Churchill in Moscow in August
1942, Stalin coolly admitted that the four-year ordeal of carrying through this policy had cost
more Soviet lives and been more stressful to him than the first year of Hitler's onslaught against
the USSR.
Kirov's murder and the purges
After the collectivisation-terror, Stalin sought to eliminate from the upper echelons of Soviet
society anybody who could conceivably pose a threat to his rule. In late 1934 he clandestinely
arranged to have his main potential rival, Sergei Kirov - the popular secretary of the Leningrad
Communist Party - assassinated. To conceal his own culpability, Stalin had the assassins
themselves killed and then blamed others for the Kirov murder. He cleverly turned the resulting
political turmoil to his advantage by unleashing a political witch-hunt directed against
Communist Party members who had been prominent during the time of his predecessor, Lenin.
Mass arrests followed. Once mighty revolutionaries were broken by months of interrogation,
torture and threats to their families. When they were ready to confess to concocted criminal
charges, they were brought before especially convened show-trials in Moscow. There, in front of
astonished foreign journalists and observers, they made self-abasing confessions that they had
been lifelong traitors and agents of foreign powers.
At the end of such a trial, the Soviet chief state prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski would cry: "I
demand that mad dogs be shot - every one of them!", before the defendants were taken away to
their deaths. Stalin's Purges spread to every level of Soviet society. Citizens were encouraged to
denounce neighbours and workmates as spies or saboteurs. Regional police chiefs frantically
vied with each other to fulfill or over-fulfill their arrest quotas of alleged "enemies of the people"
- or else faced being shot themselves.
Population losses
The Kremlin went to great lengths to cover up the magnitude of Soviet population losses
resulting from Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s. It suppressed the results of the 1937 census
because, according to an official statement, it contained "grave mistakes owing to the activities
of enemies of the people". The real reason, of course, was that the census would have revealed a
massive population deficit. So rather than disclose the truth, the Soviet government had the entire
census board staff shot as spies. A "revised" census was published in 1939 - this time, with
grossly inflated population figures. But even this revealed that roughly 10 per cent of the Soviet
population was statistically missing, i.e., some 15 million victims of Stalin's reign of terror.
World War II
Terrible though the sufferings of the 1930s were, they have tended to be eclipsed in popular
perception by the ordeal the Soviet Union suffered after the German invasion in 1941. As the
Western democracies owed their very survival to the enormous sacrifices sustained by the Soviet
population in resisting the German onslaught, any criticism of Stalin since the war has tended to
be muted.
But if the Soviet people eventually defeated Hitler, it was small thanks to Stalin who failed to
prepare his country's defences adequately. During 1939-41, of course, Stalin was Hitler's ally and
helped sustain the Nazi war machine by shipping vast quantities of Soviet grain, oil and other
strategic materials to the Third Reich.
In addition, Stalin encouraged the Communist parties in the West to sabotage the Allied war
effort. In the East, Stalin collaborated with Hitler in dismembering Poland, then invaded the
Baltic States and attacked Finland.
When Hitler turned on his erstwhile Soviet ally, launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22,
1941, the USSR was woefully unprepared. The Soviet military leadership had been severely
incapacitated by the Purges. In 1937, Stalin had sentenced to death thousands of experienced
military officers, including the Supreme Commander of the Red Army, Marshal Mikhail
Tukhachevsky.
During its life and death struggle with Hitlerism, the Soviet Union might have benefited from
the help of the Polish army, but during the spring of 1940 Stalin had treacherously ordered the
murder of 15,000 Polish army officers at Katyn Forest near Smolensk and other killing sites (a
crime which he later blamed on the Germans).
As for Soviet civilians, Stalin's rural terror of the 1930s had sown the seeds of fierce hatred
among Soviet peasants towards Communist rule. When the Germans invaded, many peasants
prematurely hailed them as liberators, thus leading to a rapid collapse of Soviet resistance.
Hitler, of course, had no intention of winning the hearts and minds of eastern Slavs. Nazi racial
doctrine held them to be untermensch (subhuman). The Nazis treated their despised subject
populations as fit only for enslavement or extermination. The Soviet people, whatever their
misgivings about their own country's régime, turned against their new oppressors and began
waging partisan warfare.
Stalin's secret war
Estimates of Soviet casualties during the so-called Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 have varied
according to political fashion. In 1947, the Soviets liked to boast that their victory had been won
with "the least possible losses", and usually gave a figure of only seven million war dead. But,
during the late 1950s, the Soviet leadership saw that a higher figure might be advantageous for
propaganda purposes. The now familiar figure of "20 million Russian war dead" did not actually
emerge until the 1960s, during Khrushchev's time. In fact, the true number of Soviet people
killed during the war years may well have been in excess of 20 million, but they were certainly
not all Russian, and not all were killed as a result of the Nazi invasion.
Throughout the war the terrible death toll among the Gulag slave labour camp population
continued unabated. Roy Medvedev, a famous independent Russian historian and MarxistLeninist, has compared Gulag inmate numbers and deaths with actual troop casualties during the
first phase of the war: "The average number of prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1941-1942 was
approximately equal to the number of soldiers on active duty in the army. At that time the loss of
people [in labour camps and at the front] was also approximately equal."
Nick Eberstadt of the Harvard Centre for Population Studies has observed: "The USSR fought a
two-front campaign in World War II. The first was against the invaders; the second was against
its own citizenry." Stalin waged this second war because he feared the animosity of his own
people - so much so, in fact, that he was prepared to divert desperately-needed troops from the
war front to deal with suspected enemies on the home front.
Stalin was particularly apprehensive that many non-Russian nationalities of the USSR might
harbour pro-German sympathies, so he interrupted his war effort to unleash a campaign of ethnic
cleansing against suspected populations. Between 1941 and 1944, while Hitler was busy
transporting Jews to the death-camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, Stalin uprooted
1,600,000 people from among the Crimean Tartars, Volga Germans and several Caucasian
republics, including Chechnya. He deported in cattle-trucks the entire populations of these small
nations to eastern Siberia and the Sino-Soviet frontier. During the first 18 months, approximately
one-third of them perished.
Other citizens who received no mercy were Soviet prisoners who survived internment by the
Germans. During the war the Wehrmacht had captured about five million Soviet prisoners, of
whom about 80 per cent died in captivity. The million or so survivors subsequently repatriated to
the USSR, instead of being welcomed back at the war's end, were declared traitors to the
socialist motherland. On arrival, thousands were shot outright, whilst practically all the
remainder were banished to slave labour camps where many more perished. As Professor
Norman Davies has said: "It is a nice question whether these men, who had defied Hitler only to
be killed by their own side, can properly be counted among the victims of the struggle against
Fascism."
For many people in the former USSR, war did not end in 1945. Partisan warfare continued for
some years after the war as people of Ukraine and the Baltic States resisted attempts by the
Soviet Red Army and secret police to re-impose Communist tyranny on their nations.
Non-Russian casualties
After the so-called Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, Soviet propaganda glorified specifically
"Russian" sacrifices, but belittled the terrible human and material losses sustained by the nonRussian nations of the former USSR, notably Belarus and Ukraine.
Yet even Soviet sources confirmed in 1987 that, although wartime military losses were mainly
Russian, the civilian losses were overwhelmingly non-Russian. The Wehrmacht never occupied
any substantial region of Russia for very long, but it overran and devastated Belarus and, above
all, Ukraine whose wartime losses amounted to 5-6 million dead. (The Independent, December
29, 1987).
American foreign correspondent Edgar Snow who visited the USSR in 1945 said that the
"whole titanic struggle, which some are apt to dismiss as 'the Russian glory', has in all truth and
in many costly ways been first of all a Ukrainian war ... No single European country has suffered
deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmlands and its humanity." (Saturday Evening Post,
January 27, 1945). Yet, as Norman Davies has commented: "Thanks to persistent wartime
prejudices, many British and Americans still harbor the illusion that most Ukrainians spent the
war either as auxiliaries in the concentration camps or in the Waffen-SS Galizien [but] the
Waffen-SS recruited three times as many Dutchmen as Ukrainians." (New York Review of Books,
June 9, 1994).
Of Soviet population losses during the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War, at most two-thirds were
victims of Hitler's invasion; the rest were victims of Stalin's secret war against his own people.
Stalin's régime, then, whether in peace or war, was as deadly an enemy to the Soviet population
as any external invader.
Russian author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn - himself
an inmate of Stalin's Gulag for many years - has regretted the fact that Stalin's record of
slaughter and terror has never captured the public imagination in the way that Nazi atrocities
have. "[Hitler's] murder camps have made him famous," says Solzhenitsyn, "whereas no one has
any interest in ours at all."
Stalinism, unfortunately, is not completely dead and buried if today it can still win a
sizeable following among Russians and a sympathetic portrayal by British television producers.
In this special anniversary year, people in the East and West might do well to reflect on history
and particularly on the warning words of the poet Yevtushenko to Soviet leaders 50 years ago
on the death of Stalin.
Anna Akhmatova
Biography of Anna Akhmatova ("Anna Biography," n.d.)
Akhmatova began writing verse at the age of 11 and at
21 became a member of the Acmeist group of poets,
whose leader, Nikolay Gumilyov, she married in 1910 but
divorced in 1918. The Acmeists, through their periodical
Apollon rejected the esoteric vagueness and affectations
of Symbolism and sought to replace them with "beautiful
clarity," compactness, simplicity, and perfection of form-all qualities in which Akhmatova excelled from the
outset.
Her first collections, Vecher (1912; "Evening") and
Chyotki (1914; "Rosary"), especially the latter, brought her fame. While
exemplifying the best kind of personal or even confessional poetry.
Akhmatova's principal motif is love, mainly frustrated and tragic love,
expressed with an intensely feminine accent and inflection entirely her
own.
Later in her life she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic, and
religious motifs but without sacrifice of personal intensity or artistic
conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were
particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya staya (1917; "The
White Flock"), Podorozhnik (1921; "Plantain"), and Anno Domini MCMXXI
(1922). This amplification of her range, however, did not prevent official
Soviet critics from proclaiming her "bourgeois and aristocratic,"
condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God,
and characterizing her as half nun and half harlot.
In 1921 her former husband, Gumilyov was executed on charges of
participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev affair), this
further complicated her position. She entered a period of almost complete
poetic silence in 1923 and literary ostracism, publishing no further
volumes until 1940. In that year several of her poems were published in
the literary monthly Zvezda ("The Star"), and a volume of selections from
her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig ("From Six Books").
A few months later, however, it was abruptly withdrawn from sale and
libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following the German invasion,
Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the
women of Leningrad [St. Petersburg].
Evacuated to Tashkent soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized
soldiers and published a number of war-inspired lyrics; a small volume of
selected lyrics appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she
returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local
magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were
made for publication of a large edition of her works.
In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party for her "eroticism, mysticism, and
political indifference." Her poetry was castigated as "alien to the Soviet
people," and she was again described as a "harlot-nun," this time by none
other than Andrey Zhdanov, Politburo member and the director of Stalin's
program of cultural restriction. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet
Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was
destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.
Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet
communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly
magazine Ogonyok ("The Little Light") under the title Iz tsikla "Slava miru"
("From the Cycle 'Glory to Peace' "). This uncharacteristic capitulation to
the Soviet dictator--in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: "Where
Stalin is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth"--was
motivated by Akhmatova's desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom
of her son, Lev Gumilyov, who had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to
Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted
from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far
different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem
("Requiem"), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by
Akhmatova's grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in
1937. This masterpiece--a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet
peoples during Stalin's terror--was published in Moscow in 1989.
Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of other
poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and
various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote sensitive personal
memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo Modigliani,
and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelstam.
In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry
prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral
degree from Oxford University. Her journeys to Sicily and England to
receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since
1912. Akhmatova's works were widely translated, and her international
stature continued to grow after her death. A two-volume edition of
Akhmatova's collected works was published in Moscow in 1986, and The
Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes, appeared in
1990.
“I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land” (World Literature, 2002, p. 1217)
I am not one of those who left the land
To the mercy of its enemies.
Their flattery leave me cold,
My songs are not for them to praise.
But I pity the exile’s lot.
Like a felon, like a man half-dead,
Dark is your path, wanderer;
Wormwood infects your foreign bread.
But here, in the murk of conflagration,
Where scarcely a friend is left to know
We, the survivors, do not flinch
From anything, not from a single blow.
Surely the reckoning will be made
After the passing of this cloud.
We are the people without tears,
Straighter than you…more proud…
Anna Akhmatova
The Weavers
Biography (The Weavers biography, n.d.)
The Weavers were an immensely popular and influential folk music quartet from Greenwich
Village, New York, United States.
The Weavers group was formed in 1947 by Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Pete
Seeger. A fifth member, Erik Darling, sometimes sat in with the group when Seeger was
unavailable. The name came from an 1892 drama of the same name by Gerhart Hauptmann.
After a period of finding themselves unable to find much, if any paid work, they finally achieved
a performance slot at the jazz club the Village Vanguard. This led to their discovery by arranger
Gordon Jenkins and their signing with Decca Records. The group had a big hit in 1949 with
Leadbelly's Goodnight Irene, backed with the 1941 Israeli folk song Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.
The Weavers sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, folk, gospel
music, children's songs, labor songs and ballads from the US, selling millions of records at the
height of their popularity. They inspired the commercial "folk boom" that followed them in the
1950s and 1960s, including such acts as The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.
The Weavers avoided the more controversial songs in their repertoire, as well as avoiding
performing at controversial venues and events, and the leftwing press derided them as having
sold out their beliefs in exchange for popular success. Despite their caution, they were placed
under FBI surveillance and blacklisted by the US government during the McCarthy era. The
Weavers were targeted because of their history of singing protest songs and folk songs favoring
labor unions as well as for the leftist political beliefs of the individuals in the group. Anticommunists protested at their performances and harassed promoters. The Weavers were an easy
target because of their fame and popularity on the radio and with the record-buying public. Soon
after their being targeted by the authorities, the group's popularity diminished rapidly, and their
record contract was terminated.
Pete Seeger continued his solo career after the group disbanded in 1952. In 1955, the group
reunited to play a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, a venue whose management was unaware of
the controversy surrounding the group. The concert was a huge success, a recording of which
was issued by Vanguard Records and led to their signing to that record label (by the late 1950s,
folk music was becoming popular and anti-communism was fading). Seeger left the group to
return to his solo career, and the Weavers continued without him. After Eric Darling left the
group, he was replaced by Frank Hamilton and then, briefly, the very young Bernie Krause.
Of the other Weavers, Lee Hays died in 1981, while 85-year-old Pete Seeger does not travel
much these days. Ronnie Gilbert has had a solo career as well. Additional reunion concerts were
staged in 1964 and 1980. A documentary film about the history of the group, the reunion concert,
and the events leading up to it called The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time! was released in 1982.
The group was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001.
In February 2006 The Weavers received the Lifetime Achievement Award given out annually at
the Grammy awards show. Represented by members Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, they
struck a chord with the crowd as their struggles with political witch hunts during the 1950s were
recounted. "If you can exist, and stay the course -- not a course of blind obstinacy and faulty
conception -- but one of decency and good sense, you can outlast your enemies with your honor
and integrity intact," said Hellerman.
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (Seeger, n.d.)
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Pete Seeger, 1961
References
Balantyne, J. (2003, June 28). Cover story: Counting Stalin’s victims 50 years on. News Weekly.
Retrieved from http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2003jun28_cover.html
Biography of Anna Akhmatova. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.poemhunter.com/annaakhmatova/biography/
Cold War. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/cold_war.htm
Miller, A. (2006). McCarthysm. Retrieved from
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/arthur-miller/mccarthyism/484/
Seeger, P. (1961). Where have all the flowers gone. Retrieved from
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/flowers-gone.shtml
Shrecker, E. (1994). Blacklists and other economic sanctions. In The age of McCarthyism: A brief
history with documents (p. ). Retrieved from
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html
Submarine and Cold War history. (2000). Retrieved from
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/index.html
The Language of Literature: World Literature. (5th ed.). (2002). United States: McDougal Littell.
The Weavers Biography. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.activemusician.com/The-WeaversBiography--t8i2992