Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the “Iron Curtain”)

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.”—Sir Winston Churchill, Address At Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., March 5, 1946

Look beyond that first sentence in the above quote, the one that the 20th-century’s greatest phrasemaker turned into a Cold War soundbite. With good friend President Harry Truman in the audience, watching as Winston Churchill accepted an honorary degree from Westminster, the former British Prime Minister—the man who had led his country in its hour of greatest peril—was now, after a dutiful acknowledgement of the massive contribution of Joseph Stalin in the Grand Alliance, somberly outlining the Soviet leader’s recent catalogue of electoral crime.

The 65th anniversary of the Iron Curtain speech comes the same week that the media reported on the death of Judith Coplon Socolov, a Justice Department analyst who lived nearly 60 years after convictions in two espionage trials. (An appellate court judge tossed out the convictions because of FBI agents’ perjury concerning wiretapping Socolov and their failure to obtain search warrants, and, in 1967, the government decided not to pursue the case any longer. However, the judge affirmed that Ms. Socolov was guilty, a judgment confirmed by the 1995 disclosure of the VENONA decrypts of intercepted cables concerning Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and other spies that the government could not disclose at the trials.)

Over 30 years ago, Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism showed how for a group of Old Leftists of the 1930s through Nikita Khruschev‘s 1956 “secret speech“ outlining the terror of Stalin, Soviet-style Marxism became a golden ideology. In Judith Socolov's case, however, “romance” took on a double meaning, as becomes clear in the lede of Sam Roberts’ New York Times obit:

“Judith Socolov, who as a diminutive Barnard graduate named Judith Coplon was convicted of espionage more than 60 years ago after embracing a utopian vision of communism and falling in love with a Soviet agent, died Saturday in Manhattan.”

Oh, what she did for love....

A little later, the article quotes Ms. Socolov’s daughter Emily on whether her mother was guilty: “Was she a spy? I think it’s another question that I ask: Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?”

The obit does not describe the younger Ms. Socolov’s current profession, but it sounds as if she is either currently a politician or should seriously consider becoming one. After all, she appears to have absorbed one of the key rules that any budding politico learns in an encounter with the media: When faced with a question you don’t like, make believe it’s another question and answer that one.

There were unquestionably victims of anti-Communism hysteria in the United States, but Ms. Socolov was certainly not one of them. Her defense at her two trials—that she was meeting a Soviet intelligence officer because she was working on a book for which she was culling the most intimate of secrets during pillow talk—was simply not credible, since she could not produce any manuscript or even outline.

And so, Judith Socolov’s remaining defense—the one her daughter raises now like a fallen flag—is that American Communism was the best force for a brave new world of labor and civil rights.
All too many academic historians have allowed that argument to go unchallenged. It should be demolished on several points:

1) American Communists were engaged in willful ignorance about what was occurring behind the Iron Curtain. The Moscow “show trials” of the late 1930s were demonstrated to be miscarriages of justice by a panel that included American philosopher and educator John Dewey, hardly a conservative. As if that weren‘t enough to make them wonder what was going on, American Communists who traveled to the U.S.S.R. repeatedly faced the dilemma of how to account for the sudden, unexplained disappearance of friends in Stalin’s labor paradise.

2) American Communists called for enhanced electoral rights at home and their destruction abroad. What a contradiction: while the great cause of African-American voting rights would be upheld by the party faithful in the U.S., anyone who attempted to exercise the franchise in a way that deviated from the party line would be crushed in Eastern Europe.

3) American Communists faced more than a simple choice between country-club Republican capitalism and Democratic Party racism. The New Deal demonstrated that there was a small-d democratic alternative that safeguarded the rights of labor. Moreover, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had, by 1948, moved decisively toward embracing civil rights. (It should also be stated that the GOP had not yet embraced the “southern strategy” to which it would turn in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign.)

4) The rights championed by Communists did not extend to religious liberty. When I attended parochial school as a child, many classmates had parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and Cuba in the wake of Communist takeovers. Yet Catholics were hardly the only religious victims of Communism: Stalin’s effort to install atheism suppressed people of many religious faiths, including Jews, who had to endure the closure of synagogues as he consolidated his hold on power in the 1930s.

5) The legal rights possessed by American Communists simply did not exist in the Soviet Eden they supported. Ms. Socolov was able to live out the remainder of her life in freedom because a judge, despite certainty of her guilt, believed that her right to a fair trial had been fatally undermined by prosecutorial misconduct. No such safeguards existed in the Soviet Union, where people were summarily executed.

Defenders of American Communists are not content to say that the old Leftists lived out the remainder of their lives doing good (in Ms. Socolov’s case, raising a family, earning a master’s degree in education, and tutoring women in prison in creative writing). They also insist that these were idealists who did not know the truth about the dictator they defended.

But how could these Old Leftists not know at least some of what was occurring? For anyone who picked up a newspaper and read even Churchill's recital of electoral abuses in Eastern Europe--especially for many college-educated devotees of this new political gospel such as Ms. Socolov (a Barnard College graduate) who tried to make contact with people in the Soviet Union--how could they not know that something was awry? To claim otherwise would be adopting what has been termed “the Sergeant Schultz defense” (named, of course, for the hapless Hogan’s Heroes German soldier): “I know nothing.”

In a number of lands freed from the yoke of dictatorships, truth commissions have been established that have determined the extent of past political crimes. The lack of critical thinking in academe and journalism about the cost of the crimes of Ms. Socolov and other Soviet spies makes one long for such a body (or, at least, something like the Dewey-headed commission on the show trials) here in the U.S. There is a cost for accepting uncritically the claims of these Old Leftists, best expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."