Politics (journal) - Counteracting The Soviet Myth

Counteracting The Soviet Myth

With the grim consolidation of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the ensnaring of a large part of the younger generation on the left by the Henry Wallace movement and what he felt to be common notions within of either a moral equivalence between Russia and the west, or an outright tipping of the moral scales in favor of the Soviet side, Macdonald, while still claiming adherence to the anarchist and pacifist labels, and upon re-immersion in the vast literature on recent Communist history, devoted a large opening section of the Winter 1948 number of Politics to the attempt to counteract the Soviet myth, among whose articles he included an extensive reading list of standard works chronicling forced labor in the Soviet Union, the Moscow trials, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, dating back to the early critiques of the Bolshevik experiment in its infancy published by the anarchist Emma Goldman and the eminent English philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the sphere of foreign and military policy in the developing Cold War, though the range of perspectives Macdonald published naturally did not include pro-Soviet or fellow-traveling writers, he did publish those advocating that the United States take the first, unilateral step toward an eventual mutual disarmament, in the belief the Soviets, assured of the good faith of their ostensibly stronger adversary, would be moved to follow suit. Within the same symposium, Macdonald included a detailed response from the Deweyite pragmatist philosopher and militantly anti-Soviet social democrat, Sidney Hook,

"Messrs. Daniel and Squires are naive. The political kernel of their proposal is their hope that if the United States destroys its atomic bombs and plants, Stalin will be ashamed of himself and abandon his dictatorship ... I am not in favor of a preventive war because I am as confident as one can be in human affairs that so long as Stalin fears he will be blasted off the face of the earth once he strikes against the West, he will wait. We can see to it that he is never free of that fear. Even less than the romantic Hitler has he the demonic desire to bring the world down on him in a universal ruin."

in whose orbit Macdonald would travel in the next decade which saw him serve for a year as Associate Editor of the London-based monthly Encounter, founded in 1953 by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose own founding in Paris in 1950, with Hook among its leading intellectual lights, he prophesied at the end of the same essay:

"I speak in the first person only for purposes of expository emphasis. Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses—yes, even among the soldiers—of Stalin's own empire, that all of his problems for a long time to come will be internal. I can find the people. . . ."