Treason of the Clerks

National Review, Sept 15, 2003 by Michael Knox Beran

In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (Encounter, 300 pp., $25.95)

Nearly a decade ago John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, having gathered much valuable material in the archives of the defunct USSR, published The Secret World of American Communism. That book exposed as sentimental whimsy the notion that the American Communist party was a "courageous and idealistic band of rebels" who made useful contributions to the republic; it was instead, Haynes and Klehr showed, a group of flunkies slavishly obedient to Josef Stalin's commands. Four years later, in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, the two scholars used newly available documents from the Venona Project -- a top-secret American code-breaking operation -- to demonstrate the real damage done by the Communist spy rings of the 1930s and 1940s.

In their new book, Haynes and Klehr turn from writing history to writing about it. They catalog the activities of a corps of zealots in the academy who have refused to accept the archival revelations of the last decade. Far from being baffled and disheartened by the evidence that accumulated so rapidly in the 1990s, these scholars are doing their best both to extenuate the sins of the American Communists and to make light of the Soviet purposes they furthered in this country.

Haynes and Klehr trace the origins of this revisionist revolution to the 1960s and 1970s, when a number of historians attempted, they write, to "'normalize' the Stalinist regime by minimizing the number of victims of the Terror and the Gulag." After portions of the old Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, the revisionist claims became unsustainable; but, far from blanching at newly documented horrors, many scholars continued to whitewash Lenin and Stalin. Lenin, according to Theodore Von Laue, a revisionist scholar at Clark University, was a "Russian Patriot." Stalin, he maintains, was a "remarkably humble" man in light of his tremendous "human achievement." Another revisionist, Robert W. Thurston of Miami University in Ohio, argues that "extensive fear did not exist" in Stalin's Russia. Stalin himself was "more human" than he has generally been portrayed, and so, too, was his governing philosophy. According to revisionists Leslie Adler and Thomas Paterson, Soviet Communism embodied a "humanistic ideology" that unfortunately never quite worked out.

In the revisionist reading, Stalin's American helpers have been even more unfairly traduced than their master in the Kremlin. Rejecting heaps of evidence uncovered in U.S. and Soviet archives, the revisionists seek to revive the myth of a kinder, gentler American Communism; their scholarship is devoted to putting a benign face on the NKVD agent next door. Some of the revisionists continue to insist on the truth of hoary legends about the innocence of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Those revisionists who do concede the reality of the spies' crimes continue to regard them as sympathetic figures, guilty of something less than treason: They were advocates of "international cooperation" who engaged in an occasional "unauthorized technological transfer" or two, or they sought to advance a deeply "personal [and] utopian vision of world peace." At all events they weren't as bad as the American officials who persecuted them. Paul Buhle of Brown University describes a principal figure in the revisionists' demonology, President Truman, as "America's Stalin." No argument that might possibly cast the American Communists in a favorable light is so absurd but some revisionist driveller has put it forward.

Haynes and Klehr are astonished at how reluctant the revisionists have been to exchange the hapless work of defending American Communism for the more constructive task of trying to understand how they themselves could have come to be so wrong in their historical analysis. As a group the revisionists seem never to have cultivated even the most rudimentary arts of introspection; it seems never to have occurred to most of them that perhaps -- just perhaps -- they are the victims of their own delusive idealism, the fantastic egotism that a certain kind of intellectual piety breeds.

And yet occasionally the authors of In Denial discover, in the dim annals of revisionist scholarship, a flash of tragic insight. Gerda Lerner, a one-time Communist party activist who in 1981 was elected president of the Organization of American Historians, had the candor to confess, "I wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical faculties when it came to that subject, and instead accepted what I wanted to hear on faith." Lerner conceded that she "fell uncritically for lies I should have been able to penetrate and perceive as such. Like all true believers, I believed as I did because I needed to believe: in a utopian vision of the future, in the possibility of human perfectibility, in idealism and heroism, and I still need that belief, even if the particular vision I embraced has turned to ashes."