Assignment America: Stalinism is personal

NEW YORK, July 29 (UPI) -- We didn't have communists in Texas. We did talk about them a lot, though.

There was something comical about communists when I was growing up, and even their vaunted nuclear missiles didn't seem to be THAT real to an 8-year-old boy who reasoned that, if they couldn't grow wheat or raise livestock successfully, it was unlikely they could get the directional codes right on an ICBM.

Equally silly, though, were the commie-haters, red-baiters and John Birch Society pamphleteers -- of which we had an oversupply in Texas -- and they tended to be even more laughable because they were closer to home. The only thing more ludicrous than a communist was somebody like H.L. Hunt, the oilman, who spent his whole life trying to track communists down.

One of my favorite books was "Fear on Trial," the story of my fellow Texan John Henry Faulk's blacklisting and long legal battle to clear his name with the help of superstar attorney Louis Nizer. Faulk was a good-ole-boy morning radio personality in the style of Arthur Godfrey, but he'd been railroaded in the 1950s by the kind of old fogey who meddles in other people's affairs by imagining communist agents lurking at every bus stop.

Faulk was never a communist, but he WAS a liberal, and he'd attended a meeting in New York where some communists were seen, resulting in a big grocery-store magnate (in the H.L. Hunt mode) putting him on a blacklist. His CBS show was canceled and he never again worked in network radio or TV -- except toward the end of his life, when he was brought out of retirement to tell jokes on "Hee Haw."

That's why, when I was older, and I became a member of the Writers Guild of America West, I thought I understood what blacklisting was. You weren't anybody in the Writers Guild unless you'd been blacklisted. The blacklistees were huge celebrities, and they were always having charity dinners where they honored the Hollywood Ten -- or was it the Hollywood Nine? -- and made speeches about the evils of McCarthyism and how they'd had to use frontmen to get their screenplays produced. I always assumed that these guys were John Henry Faulk types who got run out of town by people like H.L. Hunt.

And then it slowly dawned on me: They really were ... communists! They didn't really say that at the charity dinners -- they never stood up and said "I was a proud communist and they persecuted me for that!" But, in fact, we now know from declassified KGB documents that the Writers Guild, the Animators

Guild, and several other Hollywood unions were reporting directly to Moscow as early as the 1930s.

I don't get it. I don't see how they could take orders from Stalin's functionaries in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, and I don't see how, decades later, they could honor one another as though they'd done something noble. Let's assume the very best -- that they were misguided idealists who truly believed in some kind of socialist utopia. All right then -- since they were some of the few communist intellectuals in the world who were NOT subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, shouldn't they have been using their freedom to save a few writers in Russia? Shouldn't there be something in the KGB file to identify them as a DISSIDENT communist cell?

But no, they were holding onto the party line, in one form or another, as late as the 1970s. Maybe they started calling it lower-case "communism," or maybe they switched to socialism, or maybe they became Trotskyites (to separate themselves from the atrocities of Stalin), or maybe they developed some convoluted theory that, if only Lenin had lived longer, communism would have worked. But whatever SLIGHT alterations they made in their position, they remained committed to a system that I'm now convinced was far worse than Naziism.

Whatever you can say about Hitler, Stalin's numbers are worse, and even his METHODS are worse -- the torture, the humiliation, the show trials, the forcing people to praise him right before they were shot, the use of exile as a form of slow death by exposure to the elements. The quickest way to be killed by Stalin was to do something nice for him. He killed you for KNOWING him.

All of these thoughts have been crystallized by an intriguing new book by Martin Amis called "Koba the Dread" (Talk Miramax, $24.95, 306 pages). "Koba" was Stalin's boyhood nickname, and Amis has immersed himself in the millions of pages written about "Iosif the Terrible" (Stalin admired Ivan the Terrible) in order to come to terms with the legacy of his father, the late novelist and poet Kingsley Amis, who was a communist for 15 years before renouncing it and becoming a conservative, in his older years. Martin Amis grew up surrounded by those same Writer's Guild-type intellectuals in England -- among them his friend Christopher Hitchens -- who remained apologists for some form of communism long after the system had been 100 percent exposed in Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago."

Amis asks some excellent questions. For example:

Why WAS communism considered so funny? His subtitle is "Laughter and the Twenty Million" -- the 20 million being the LOWEST possible number of people killed by communism. It doesn't include the widows and orphans of communism, those mangled, maimed or driven insane, or those who simply died early from exhaustion or starvation. Why DID we laugh at communism while treating the OTHER holocaust with such seriousness?

Amis doesn't really answer this question, but I think I have an idea. We regarded the German atrocities as genocide -- which they were -- but we regarded the Russian atrocities as suicide. In a sense, it seemed like crazy people in the same family killing one another.

Of course it wasn't that at all. It was a psychopath killing an entire nation that, paradoxically, adored him. In modern terms, it was a family where "intervention" was called for.

Which leads to another excellent question posed by Amis. After we saw what was really happening -- and there was evidence of Bolshevik terrorism as early as 1920 -- how was communism able to retain any intellectual cachet through all the following decades?

One fact will suffice to show how intellectually bankrupt these American and English communists were. During the collectivization of farms in the late 1920s and early 30s, the death toll from starvation among CHILDREN ALONE ... was four million. It was starvation as government policy.

And yet the various communist organizations that were born in the United States and England were mostly founded AFTER collectivization. Forget the Terror of 1937, the unholy pact with Hitler from 1939 to 1941, the execution of millions of Russian troops by order of their own generals (not to mention their use as human cannon fodder) in the Great Patriotic War, the concentration camps, the summary arrests and trials, the death upon death upon death until 1953, when Stalin finally died while planning a new purge -- of Jews.

Forget all that, forget Stalin entirely, and focus instead on Lenin. Many Western communists called themselves Leninists. And yet Lenin advocated terror and carried it out. Amis documents the brutal atrocities that are notable for being so matter-of-fact, almost mundane -- 40 people shot on Thursday, 27 tortured on Friday, the Cheka going door to door every night to roust out innocents were considered obstacles, or simply because the party wanted their property. The only thing Lenin didn't have, that Stalin did have, was time.

Now focus on Trotsky. The Trotskyites have always thought of themselves as the "cleanest" communists. And yet Trotsky endorsed terror as well. The idea of some sort of prelapsarian communist ideal that could be embraced apart from Stalin is pretty much dashed to shreds by Amis' deep reading of the available evidence.

There was never a time that communism wasn't based on violence -- and not just the revolutionary violence of throwing out the tsar. Violence was not just a weapon or a tool. It was a policy. It was sometimes used just to remind the people that it existed. Stalin killed people because he could.

Amis meanders a bit, and can be maddeningly self-indulgent about his personal reminiscences, but his marshalling of the damning evidence is fairly remarkable. It's an indictment of Stalin, of course, but who cares about that? Stalin is dead. What we should care about is that it's an indictment of those of us who treated communism as a joke. They needed our flesh-and-blood attention, but the best among us were occupied with theory. We convened philosophy classes in the foyer of a death house.

(John Bloom may be contacted at [email protected]).