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With the C.P.U.S.A. reconstituted, virtually every Communist who had hailed Browder for years as the symbol of an Americanized Communism then shunned him. He was even forced to find a new dentist and a different insurance agent.

Public displays of Soviet control over C.P.U.S.A. policies were hard to miss. After years of attacking Franklin D. Roosevelt for fascist policies and denouncing the New Deal as an elaborate plot to deceive the working class, the C.P.U.S.A. was stunned in 1935 when the Comintern, alarmed by the growing menace of Nazi Germany, abruptly changed course and called for a popular front against fascism. In place of the Cominterns previous policy of treating any alliance with socialists and liberals as anathema, Moscows U-turn involved demanding that its constituent parties reach out to all and sundry to stop fascism.

Running for president in 1936, Browder offered indirect support to Roosevelt. Two years later, Communists who had formerly regarded Roosevelt as a harbinger of American fascism hailed the president for his calls for a democratic alliance against Hitler.

The hosannas for antifascism ended suddenly in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The same Communists who had lauded Roosevelt now denounced him again, this time as a warmonger for such policies as Lend-Lease aid to Britain. The somersaults demanded by Moscow continued when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941: The C.P.U.S.A.s calls for peace were quickly replaced by demands that the United States do everything possible to aid the Allies.

Such major shifts in party line were only the most dramatic and public signs of fealty to the Kremlin. In 1938, at the height of the popular front policy, the C.P.U.S.A.s slogan Communism Is 20th-Century Americanism demonstrated its effort to prove its patriotism. But that same year, a C.P.U.S.A. representative in Moscow sent a secret letter warning that Comintern leaders thought the slogan ideologically incorrect and subversive. Without any discussion or debate, the party stopped using it.

While most of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who joined the C.P.U.S.A. over the years did so because they supported the policies or ideals the party promoted, a great majority quickly abandoned it after a policy reversal occasioned by a shift in Soviet foreign policy. Anyone who remained a Communist for more than a few years, though, had to be aware that the one constant was support for whatever policy the Soviet Union followed. Open criticism of the U.S.S.R. was grounds for expulsion. For all members of the C.P.U.S.A., the Soviet Union was the homeland of socialism, the first workers state, which had to be defended against the machinations of capitalism.

The C.P.U.S.A. dutifully spread the lies put out by Moscow. The party thus insisted that the show trials during Stalins purges had uncovered a vast capitalist plot against the Soviet leader. Party members dutifully repeated Soviet fabrications that Trotsky had been in the pay of the Nazis. Worst of all, many Communists applauded the execution of tens of thousands of Soviet comrades, denouncing those who were executed as bourgeois spies and provocateurs. When Finnish-Americans who had returned to Soviet Karelia in the late 1920s and early 30s to build socialism were purged, their American relatives were warned by party authorities to remain silent, and most did so.

Neither did the Communist movement limit its disinformation to Russian matters. In the 1960s, the K.G.B. secretly subsidized a left-wing publishing house in New York run by a former party member, Carl Marzani, that published the first book claiming that John F. Kennedys assassination had been arranged by a cabal of American right-wing businessmen and C.I.A. operatives.

It was not until 1956, when Khrushchev told Soviet Communists that Stalin had been a mass murderer, that American Communists were willing to believe what had been widely known for years. The persecutions of McCarthyism and the Cold War seriously depleted the ranks of the C.P.U.S.A., but it took the word of a Soviet Communist leader to destroy the faith in Communism that had sustained many Americans. By 1959, the C.P.U.S.A., which had once numbered nearly 100,000 members, was reduced to fewer than 3,000.

The C.P.U.S.A.s vulnerability had a great deal to do with its dependence on Moscow. For much of its existence, the party could not have functioned without Moscow gold. One of its first leaders, the journalist John Reed, was given more than a million rubles worth of czarist jewels and diamonds to smuggle into America to support the fledgling American movement. In the 1920s, Armand Hammer, the future head of Occidental Petroleum, used money derived from Soviet concessions to underwrite The Daily Worker and fund communist operations in Europe. Without Soviet money, the C.P.U.S.A. would not have been able to hire the hundreds of full-time organizers and support an array of front groups and publications that enabled it to outspend and out-organize its left-wing rivals.

Beginning in the late 50s and continuing into the late 80s, the K.G.B. delivered millions of dollars to the C.P.U.S.A. through two brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, both of whom were actually working for the F.B.I. as double agents. These subsidies, carefully monitored by the F.B.I., kept the C.P.U.S.A. alive as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. In return, the longtime party leader, Gus Hall, faithfully supported every Soviet foreign policy initiative, ranging from the U.S.S.R.s conduct during the Cuban missile crisis to the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the partys subsequent denunciations of Eurocommunism.

Several hundred American Communists carried their devotion to the Soviet Union even further, working, mostly without recompense, for Soviet intelligence agencies. Virtually all of the approximately 500 Americans who served as Soviet spies between the 30s and early 50s, including senior government officials like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, were either Communists or Communist sympathizers. The C.P.U.S.A. had a clandestine apparatus that cooperated with the K.G.B. and the Soviet intelligence directorate, vetting potential recruits and occasionally suggesting useful sources. Three successive party leaders Lovestone, Browder and Eugene Dennis knew and approved of this relationship.

That the leaders of an American political party always under attack for its Soviet connections would take the incredibly risky step of actually working with Soviet intelligence speaks volumes about the ultimate loyalties of the American Communist Party. Rank and file members might have had no idea of such behavior, but anyone who remained in the C.P.U.S.A. for more than a short spell had to be aware that criticism of the Soviet Union was not tolerated. Those who stayed in the C.P.U.S.A. through one of its many changes of line knew that fealty to the homeland of socialism took precedence over any other allegiance. The dream of those who believed in an Americanized Communism was killed by this lie.

Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor of politics and history at Emory University, is the author of numerous books about American Communism and Soviet espionage.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

Read more from the original source:
American Reds, Soviet Stooges - New York Times