When the Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s documented expose of Stalin’s Purge Trials, was published in 1968, the response from the Kremlin was predictable. Conquest, who died last week, was denounced as peddling fascist propaganda by Leonid Brezhnev, the hardline replacement for the thaw-attempting Nikita Khruschev when the latter was toppled in 1964. But in private, the truthfulness of Conquest’s account was validated by the KGB, who consulted it to see what their predecessors had been up to.
Spain Betrayed—This Time by a Novel
“Hemingway the artist is with us again,” exulted Edmund Wilson, America’s then-most influential man of letters, in 1940. He was referring to the writer’s Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, now 75 years old. What Hemingway had “returned” from, Wilson argued, was a knee-jerk Stalinism, imbibed from his time spent as a correspondent in the 1936-1939 conflict. In Wilson’s eyes, Hemingway had surrendered his artistic integrity by writing agitprop in To Have and Have Not (1937) and The Fifth Column (1938). In the 1937 novel, Hemingway seemed to eschew individualism by having his character make the dying declaration that “a man alone ain’t got no fuckin’…
The Other Witness
When I was a graduate student in history at a university in New York, the epicenter of what remains of the Old Left, I got into an argument with a professor over the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, which at that point was 60 years old. What was billed as a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany, long thought to be bitter foes, was in reality a military partnership. Under it, each dictator grabbed territory; this commenced before the ink dried on the agreement, with their joint invasion of Poland that kick-started the Second World War. In our debate, my position was that the…
Flipping Hollywood’s Blacklist Narrative
Once on a British talk show in the early 1970s, anticommunist actor John Wayne startled the host by acknowledging that there was indeed a Hollywood blacklist. Wayne's follow-up, however, made the host's jaw drop even farther; the blacklist, he stated, wasn't wielded by industry anticommunists against Communist Party members, but by the reverse. It was for this reason, Wayne stated, that he enlisted in the anticommunist fight in order to defend conservative screenwriters and get them back on the payroll. Wayne, regarded by the Old and New Left, as a fascist, was in actuality more of a rebel against the establishment…
