REVIEWS
Wrong, Dennis & Radosh, Ronald & Fleisher, Henry C. & Jones, John Henry & Cohen, Mitchell
RUSSIA'S ROAD TO THE COLD WAR, by Vojtech Mastny. New York: Columbia University Press. 409 pp. $16.95. STALIN'S AMERICAN POLICY: FROM ENTENTE TO DETENTE TO COLD WAR, by William Taubman. New York:...
...Since the members really didn't care about foreign policy, says Levenstein, the union officers plugged the Communist viewpoint on that subject in their publications to mollify the CP, and to permit their own relative independence on allegedly more important matters...
...It is based on the extremely dubious theory that American union members—since they do not share much of the socialist philosophic tradition of their Canadian and European brothers and sisters—really do not care who leads their union so long as they are monetarily successful...
...Party meetings invariably included members who "were earning thousands a week...
...For those, ranging from the Bund to the left Zionists, who wished to synthesize nationalism and internationalism, internal conflicts were perhaps unavoidable...
...As darkness engulfed Europe in 1940, Walter Benjamin chastised social democracy for dogmatically portraying progress as humanity's unbounded, irresistible development, something that "automatically pursued a straight line or spiral course" toward perfection...
...At least, not until 1948...
...Should it be dated from the disputes over the implementation of the Yalta agreements, especially with reference to Poland...
...He makes full use of recently opened Western archives, the few significant and available Soviet records such as Khrushchev's oral reminiscences, and, most fully and originally, East European sources, especially the records of the Czech and Polish resistance movements and governments-inexile during the Second World War...
...The American CP produced people as different as Steve Nelson and Lester Cole...
...In Moscow at that time—the years after Hitler's seizure of power in Germany and the obliteration of the German Communist party—Stalin called for a change in international Communist tactics in order to concentrate on an international antifascist policy that might strengthen the defense of the Soviet Union...
...In the meantime, nothing he writes challenges the judgment reached by the historians of the blacklist years, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund...
...More recent events (as well as new information about the past) have cast into doubt virtually all of the revisionist claims except among a dwindling handful of radicals fixated on the '60s...
...The book also partly complements Taubman's in its detailed examination of American policy, drawing voluminously on new declassified materials released under the Freedom of Information Act...
...It was a period, he writes, when the Comintern and the Soviet party were trying to "service the needs of the growing national liberation movements in Asia and Africa...
...Cole organized producers, directors, and writers "between sets of tennis" and "drinks and shop talk...
...19.95...
...The term "cold war" has long referred to AmericanSoviet relations since the Second World War, but beyond that there has been little consistency in its usage, even on how to set it in type...
...Mastny is a Czech emigre, educated at Columbia...
...than other publications...
...Like Mastny—and, for that matter, Kennan at the time, despite his authorship of the containment policy—Taubman sees Stalin as a cautious, even fearful, essentially conservative world leader, "paranoid-defensive" rather than "paranoid-aggressive" in outlook, hardly the rational statesman 492 motivated by enlightened self-interest of revisionist writings...
...Such a conceptualization allowed for advocating the cultural autonomy of various nationalities within one border...
...It was the duplicity of the group that strengthened the conservatives' red-baiting and made it effective...
...These essays are not based on new research and do no more than reiterate his interpretation of 490 the United States as an inherently expansionist capitalist society pursuing a relentless drive for overseas markets...
...It superbly combines diplomatic history with interpretation of the motives and perceptions of political leaders and does not shrink from critical evaluation...
...Nelson's growing faith in democracy eventually led him to break with communism and to espouse what he now calls democratic socialism...
...Roosevelt and Churchill tended to regard Stalin as a reasonable man much like themselves underneath his gruff exterior...
...It says a lot about the party that the Nelsons all left and the party remained in the hands of the Coles...
...454 pp...
...The "utopian" Zionists, on the other hand, succeeded in building a Jewish state and in the process what is perhaps the most successful example of agrarian socialism, the kibbutz...
...Debates over the future of containment," Gaddis notes, "tend to be little more than reruns of those between George Kennan and Paul Nitze three decades ago...
...Maybe so...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...It was, no doubt, the multinational character of the Austro-Hungarian empire that helped impel such Austro-Marxists as Karl Renner and Otto Buer to interpret the national question in a manner differing from Marx, Engels, and Kautsky (who began his political career in the Austrian Social Democratic movement and reformulated his views of nationalism more than once...
...The Third Estate, which Abbe Sieyes claimed should be all in 1789, was not simply some 97 percent of the French population...
...NOT SO FOR LESTER COLE...
...In his rich and suggestive reading of Jewish history, Frankel, who teaches at the Hebrew University, both builds on the prodigious scholarship that has been forthcoming (particularly from Israel) in the past two decades on Jewish socialism and nationalism, and undermines numerous hitherto commonplace assumptions...
...As polar examples, they reveal the risks and limits of each: asymmetry threatens a terrifying escalation to allout, even nuclear, war whereas symmetrical response was tested and, to put it mildly, found wanting in Vietnam...
...Were nazism and the Holocaust simply warps on the continuum of that progress in which Marxists had placed so much faith, or do they imply something profoundly more frightening...
...THE zioNisTs—left or otherwise—were regarded by the Bundists as hopelessly engaged in a project both utopian and reactionary...
...The resulting military setback for the Chinese Red Army facilitated the rise of Wang Ming's main opponent, Mao Tse-tung, who had previously been ousted on instructions from Moscow...
...the fearful Freedom Rides...
...The "internal forces" Gaddis refers to are not the machinations of big capitalists but the problems of managing the economy mediated by the electoral competition of the major political parties...
...Between the watershed year of 1881— when they were traumatized by vicious, widespread pogroms—and 1917, Russian Jews underwent a convulsive process that would ultimately sweep away the traditional world in which they lived...
...By the opening of the 20th century, Sitkoff concludes, "the Southern way had become the American way...
...Borochov—and Nachman Syrkin before him— presented what must be considered a much more radical critique of Jewish life than did the Bundists, whom Plekhanov once derided as "Zionists with seasickness...
...Both policy options were debated as early as the Truman administration...
...The rise of the New Left in the early 1960s brought the first revisionist histories, depicting the United States as the cold-war aggressor determined to use its postwar military superiority to promote the-expansion of capitalism and override the legitimate anxieties of the Soviet Union about the security of its borders...
...No doubt much remains to be told on the Soviet side of the story, but it is almost as improbable as in the case of Hitler that evidence supporting a radically revised and more favorable assessment of Stalin's mind and character will come to light...
...The book goes farther than this: it argues a thesis that in the period studied, Communist labor leaders were competent, successful, dedicated to their unions, effective and, as if to prove all this, engaged in constant covert struggles with the Communist party's political officials to keep the more atrocious Communist policies out of their unions...
...Marx and Engels add that with its penetration of world markets, the bourgeoisie was universalizing capitalist relations of production, and in consequence, "National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing daily more and more...
...In the eyes of Frankel's protagonists, to avoid such strains was to simplify and shun the true nature of the crisis Jews faced: just where and how were Jews to find their place in the new, rapidly changing world that was emerging...
...But Western leaders, often against the advice of Soviet specialists Kennan and Charles Bohlen, took Stalin's bluffs and threats too seriously after 1947, having previously failed to take them seriously enough...
...X" article until the present day...
...Given, for example, what happened to Jewry during World War II, reductionist class analysis simply cannot be sustained with integrity...
...If the West had taken a firmer line sooner than it did, Poland certainly, Czechoslovakia probably, and Hungary possibly might have escaped Soviet domination and there could have been a different solution to the problem of Germany...
...Levenstein sets forth his facts with such clarity and strength, one does not easily recognize that many of his "facts" are indeed in error...
...Throughout the book one is continually troubled by the fact that Communist union leaders all but escape personal criticism—even though some were incompetent, a few corrupt, and many placed Communist policy interests above the needs and viewpoints of their union members...
...Paul Nitze was chairman of the commission that drafted NSC-68 (to which Taubman also devotes a good deal of attention...
...Except for a few polemical responses solicited by the Nation, revisionist writers have ignored Robert James Maddox's The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, published in 1973, which documented in painful detail the careless and biased use of sources in the major works of revisionist historiography...
...Mastny accepts neither the existence of boundless Soviet ambitions rooted in Marxist ideology nor the inevitability of the loss of all of Eastern Europe because of the advance of the Red Army in 1945...
...The author gives a graphic account of some of the most dramatic incidents in American history: the start of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that began to break the back of segregation in public accommodations...
...Cole often writes to settle old political scores...
...As events moved toward a showdown, it was Goldberg who successfully advocated a "due process" method for the expulsion proceedings...
...Alas, his account reads like a Hollywood gossip column—some juicy tidbits thrown in, with little real substance...
...Having no land of their own, the Jews, and particularly Jewish workers, had "abnormal" conditions of production and must be resigned to hold marginal, vulnerable roles in the productive process...
...They were hardly part of his working-class milieu...
...The main target of the revisionists was less a record and interpretation of events produced by historians than the popular demonological view of the cold war as a struggle between a righteously aroused America and an evil Communist foe centered in Moscow but directing global forces bent on ultimate world domination and the extinction of freedom—what came to be called "the cold-war ideology" by its critics...
...291 pp...
...Still, by its military might, Israel guarantees that it is the costliest place in the world to raise a hand against a Jew...
...Mastny's account of Czech-Soviet relations is particularly detailed, with Eduard Benês emerging as a well-meaning statesman who far exceeded even Roosevelt and Churchill at their most naive in his illusions about Stalin and the Soviet Union, "fully substantiat[ing] charges by his wartime critics that Czechoslovakia was in effect offering itself as an instrument of Russian expansionism...
...Gaddis characterizes the two rival strategies that have dominated American policy since the onset of the cold war as "asymmetrical" and "symmetrical...
...In reality, a much more complex, multifaceted exchange of influences occurred, extending across borders and oceans...
...The student antiwar movement may have had only a transitory effect on American foreign policy, but many of its followers went on to pursue academic careers and eventually to win tenure...
...Despite the Communists' accomplishments, such as their antifascist and union activities, as Ceplair and Englund write in The Inquisition in Hollywood, the Hollywood Reds "could not escape some association with the actions, errors, and crimes of international communism...
...But that does not explain why the Hollywood Reds also hid their views in the 1940s, at the height of their wartime coalition with FDR liberals...
...William Taubman (following Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Yet their experience and what they learned from it diverge considerably...
...Perhaps some day he will sneak a glance at AntonovOvseyenko or at an accepted dissident, such as Roy 499 Medvedev...
...So much has been written on this topic that one hoped Cole's remembrances would shed some new light on those dark years...
...Petersburg...
...Cole writes that when he was vice-president of the Guild in 1942, admitting to party membership "would harm my effectiveness," since conservative opponents of the union were arguing it was controlled by Reds...
...The rival view, envisaging global resistance to Communist expansion and permanent commitment to an arms race, was most fully presented in NSC-68, a report commissioned in 1950 by President Truman after Mao's victory in China and the Russian explosion of their first atomic bomb...
...PROPHECY AND POLITICS: SOCIALISM, NATIONALISM, AND THE RUSSIAN JEWS, 1862-1917, by Jonathan Frankel...
...All of this places Levenstein in a difficult position to understand or explain the expulsion of the Communist-dominated unionists...
...working as a Comintern courier in China and Germany, and, during the war years, organizing laborers and seamen in California...
...The Jews did not require either their own territory or independent political institutions, but rather national cultural autonomy in the diaspora, with the Yiddish language as its vehicle and edifice...
...But Gaddis notes three later changes paralleling the shift from Kennan's 1947 view to NSC-68, each accompanying a change in the party controlling the White House: from NSC-68 to Eisenhower's "New Look" with its uneven combination of prudent moderation and frightening emphasis on nuclear weapons, next to the expanded commitments of Kennedy and Johnson, and then to the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente...
...Sitkoff notes that while black Americans have achieved significant gains...
...The emergence of a "union of all civilized humanity" with "one language and one nationality" would ensue, "just as the peoples in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean were united in Hellenism after Alexander the Great, and the peoples of the western area later merged into the Roman nationality...
...The ever more accommodating Western attitude toward a possible division of the continent into spheres of influence abetted Stalin's quest for power and influence...
...the workers did care...
...Gi I he working men have no country, " reads a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto...
...Nelson's life in the party, paradoxically, led him to an appreciation of America's democratic system...
...The Bund's notion of Jewish self-determination under socialism was, in the final analysis, cultural, not political...
...What makes Nelson's reflections valuable is his ability to look back on his political life, and to make tough judgments...
...But although Nelson left the party in 1957, it was not until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that he suffered his own Kronstadt...
...Sitkoff also writes about the defeat of the move501 ment in Albany, Georgia...
...Nevertheless, he characterizes a good deal of criticism of the Communist union leaders as "red-baiting"—all but suggesting that while scholars have the right to call a spade a spade, it's demagoguery when an anti-Communist union official does the same thing...
...The Carter administration interrupted this pattern by continuing detente...
...In other words, the orientation of the Bund, and its use of Yiddish as the medium for mass-organizing of Jewish workers (as opposed to the earlier tactic of teaching Russian to select circles of workers), represented a shift to a more specifically Jewish national outlook from internationalist or Russian ones...
...Most "orthodox" Marxists, in the wake of Marx's and Engels's pronouncements, embraced a universalism that rejected national aspirations as ends in themselves...
...While the main locus of his book is Russia, its primary contribution lies in its synthesis of the events on three continents...
...The radicalism of the left Zionists consisted in their assertion that a revolution in the society in which Jews were living would not solve their problem, and that political, not just cultural, self-determination was necessary...
...They were wrong, Nelson admits, to reject Browder's efforts "to stimulate a deeper study of American history and political realities...
...In pondering the thoughts and actions of the statesmen of the time, one cannot help noticing how small and simple their world was in comparison with ours...
...The opening chapter, "Up From Slavery" (recalling the title of Booker T. Washington's autobiography), is an incisive account of the secondclass status forced upon black Americans "by force, intimidation...
...The endeavor to create a Jewish state in distant Palestine could only detract from the struggle in Russia, where the real future of the Jews would remain...
...He arrived in the United States as a Croatian immigrant in 1920, and almost immediately found himself at work in a North Philadelphia slaughterhouse...
...No wonder Steve Nelson could never "shake my awe at meeting some of these people...
...This may be true in some cases at some time—the experience of the Teamsters comes to mind—but it was certainly not the case in most of the CIO unions...
...In the chapter "The Dream Deferred" (entitled after a poem by Langston Hughes), Sitkoff describes the "long hot summers" of the middle 1960s, when numerous riots in several cities shocked and seared the consciousness of the nation...
...On the contrary, the universal and the particular—and hence the international and the national—must be considered not as opposites but as fundamentally, and dialectically, interrelated...
...GADDIS'S Strategies of Containment is a sequel to his 1972 prize-winning book, picking up with events after 1947 and tracing American diplomatic and strategic policy toward the Communist world through the Carter administration...
...Cole does try to address himself to the one issue that critics of the Hollywood Communists have always raised—why didn't they admit to their Communist beliefs and membership...
...His memoir offers us a fascinating account of his years in the CP—organizing miners in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal fields...
...Not a single revisionist has taken advantage of the 1974 Freedom of Information Act, which has made a prodigious quantity of new material from official sources available to scholars...
...The traditionalist view of the cold war tended to assume that Stalin cherished nearly unlimited expansionist goals, sometimes simply inferring a drive for world domination from scholastic perusal of Lenin's writings...
...Today we might add that defining the questions is still easier than solving them...
...Acheson himself, in addition to his unquestioned intelligence, behaved with courage and dignity under intense pressure...
...In the end, then," he writes, "the Communists were destroyed for reasons that had little to do with their merits as trade unionists...
...In retrospect, many of them were extraordinarily prescient about the future shape of world affairs, but they were rooted in a conservative realism and "elitism," utterly alien to the Marxist and economic determinist leanings of the revisionists...
...Later, Truman assumed too readily that Soviet deception and anti-American propaganda signified warlike intentions rather than the more limited aim of "expanded power and influence without war...
...He chastises the late Lawson for seeming "to hold fast" to Browderism, which Cole defines simply as "social democratic collaboration with capitalism...
...I would unhesitatingly recommend Taubman's book as the best, short but comprehensive study of the cold war as a political conflict at the level of summit policy-making and diplomacy...
...At the same time, Taubman writes in a breezy, often colloquial style that makes his book eminently readable yet avoids the dreadful journalistic addiction to "colorful" illustration and portentous overdramatization that infects so much American writing on public affairs, even that of scholars...
...But Kennan has also been described as the "first revisionist," for as early as 1949 he was criticizing what he saw as the excessive militarization of the containment policy he had articulated as well as its unwise extension to parts of the world outside Europe and the Far East where postwar boundaries had been fixed by treaty or agreement...
...Nelson also stresses that the party structure of "democratic centralism," which allowed a small cadre to be effective, "also made us more vulnerable to Stalinism...
...Stalin saw them projectively, assuming that they controlled their nations as totally as he did his and that they used democratic rhetoric just as cynically and manipulatively...
...A classless society and national sovereignty," argued Syrkin in 1898, "are the only means of completely solving the Jewish problem...
...However dark the moment seems, a new day will surely dawn...
...Blacks rioted, he observes, ". . to enter the mainstream of . . . society, to be treated like outsiders no longer...
...For a younger generation, the volume presents a recapitulation of an exciting yet troubled period in the history of the American trade-union movement...
...New York, Cambridge, and London: Cambridge University Press...
...With the hindsight of 130 years, it is difficult not to recognize nationalism as one of the specters that are perennially haunting Marxism...
...Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press...
...Opposition to the war in Vietnam gave enormous resonance to coldwar revisionism as protesters against the war broadened their target to include American foreign policy as a whole...
...Levenstein suggests that the evidence presented by the CIO at the various expulsion hearings concerning partyline stories and editorials on foreign policy in union publications was really a cheap shot...
...Indeed, Kennan and Nitze are still central figures in the contemporary debate over arms control and nuclear policy...
...The working men have no country," wrote Marx...
...the courageous black students who challenged Jim Crow at Southern lunch counters...
...Trumbo joined the party, Cole explains, only "to be with his friends...
...Steve Nelson is that rarity American Marxists are always looking for—an authentic working-class radical...
...Equally if not more troubling is the philosophic foundation of Levenstein's study...
...Long before his present support for nuclear disarmament, for over 30 years in fact, Kennan has been a "dove" rather than a "hawk" with respect to most cold-war confrontations...
...Dulles's doctrine of "massive retaliation" on the one hand, and the Kennedy administration's commitment to "flexible response" on the other represent the extreme, "ideal-typical" versions of each strategy...
...VOJTECH MASTNY'S Russia's Road to the Cold War is a pioneering effort to overcome these limitations and is likely to remain for a very long time— perhaps until the millennium when Soviet archives are opened—the major study of Soviet diplomacy from the German invasion of 1941 to the end of the Second World War in August 1945...
...This could only be altered by a thoroughgoing revolution in Jewish life...
...But, unfortunately, not when it comes to reevaluating critical foreign policy issues...
...After 1881 a new banner was unfurled, and on it was proclaimed "Self-Emancipation...
...WILLIAM TAUBMAN is a specialist in Soviet foreign policy now teaching at Amherst...
...Nor is there agreement as to exactly when it all began...
...Anyone who thinks that America never had political prisoners would do well to read Nelson's account of his Pittsburgh years, and of the treatment he received after being convicted of "sedition" for his open Communist views...
...And Cole, it seems, still does not even realize that crimes were committed in Russia during the Stalin years...
...Strategies of Containment (despite its uninspiring title) is engagingly literate...
...Today one often encounters the claim that revisionism has become a near orthodoxy on the campus, even among professional historians...
...Other momentous decisions whose consequences we are still living with were made in Truman's second term, some of them after Democratic losses in the 1950 off-year elections and the firing of General MacArthur in the spring of 1951, which made Truman's last 18 months in the White House almost as embattled as the years before his 1948 election victory...
...29.95...
...the vacillation of the Kennedy administration...
...The program eventually articulated by the Bund was markedly similar to that later put forth by Bauer...
...Containment, he concludes, "has for all its contradictions, mutations, and irrationalities, been a surprisingly successful strategy: historians looking back on the post-World War II era are likely to rate it as one of the more stable and orderly of modern times, and to give the architects of containment no little credit...
...BEFORE THE VIOLENCE OF 1881, Jewish politics qua Jewish politics was, in Frankel's terms, "purely auxiliary...
...at work in the Fisher body plant in Detroit, where he was among the first to organize an auto workers' union...
...Cole does not seem to realize that if he was sincerely serving writers in the Guild—as evidence suggests he was—then openness about his political views would have undermined the argument that he had a hidden, private revolutionary agenda...
...He sees the postrevisionists, including himself, as superseding both the revisonists and the "traditionalist" historians who preceded them...
...the rivalry between the various black American organizations, such as the Committee for Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the role of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam...
...Mastny agrees with Gaddis's conclusion in The United States and The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972) that Stalin's dictatorial powers gave him greater freedom than the Western leaders had to avoid the eventual hostile confrontation...
...It reads almost like intellectual history rather than a straightforward record of events, for Gaddis's primary concern is with rival strategic conceptions underlying American policy that have alternated in cyclical succession from the time of Kennan's long telegram and later "Mr...
...We follow the rise of Jewish political parties with socialist and national programs, such as the Jewish Labor Bund, the left Zionist Poale Zion ("Workers of Zion"), and the territorialists (who sought political and territorial self-determination for the Jews but not necessarily in Palestine...
...The documentation meets the highest scholarly standards...
...A gigantic white backlash was unleashed when President Nixon pursued his "Southern strategy," Sitkoff asserts...
...the internal disputes that shook the Students' Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC...
...Taubman's major conclusion is: "While some conflict was inevitable given East-West differences (in political and economic systems, in interests and ideologies), misperception aggravated and intensified the tension—misperception that often took the form of each side's projecting onto the other a warped image of itself...
...In the end, the Bund's role in Jewish history was as tragic as it was heroic...
...Frankel demonstrates persuasively that this was not the case, that the Bund's decisions in theoretical matters were largely made from the top down and that numerous "political contingencies," including the success of Yiddish socialism elsewhere and the rising impact of Zionism, were important...
...12.95...
...STRATEGIES OF CONTAINMENT: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF POSTWAR AMERICAN NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY, by John Lewis Gaddis...
...IN JONATHAN FRANKEL'S masterly and meticulous new study, Prophecy and Politics, the question of the universal and the particular is posed in terms of the crisis faced by one people, the Jews, as they entered the 20th century, principally in Eastern Europe...
...His memoir reads like a document meant to prove Murray Kempton's acerbic comment that the Hollywood Communists functioned in a world that had "very little of a reality at all...
...That intervention forced him to admit what he had long denied: "Stalinism was more than the mentality of one maniac...
...An entire new canon of scholarly works on the cold war from its origins up to the present has been produced in the last decade to which the three books here under review make a major contribution...
...Despite the end of Jim Crow, the black struggle did not result in racial equality...
...Some writers regard the conflict as having lasted until the Nixon-Kissinger détente of the early '70s, only to break out anew with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 or the rhetorical belligerence of the Reagan administration in the past two years...
...We cannot take from them what they have not got...
...That upanddown, in-and-out relationship of the leaders of the CIO and those union leaders who were either Communist party members or generally undeviating followers has long fascinated journalists who covered the events in the years 1935-50, as well as labor historians, political scientists, and sociologists...
...Change, it was believed, could only come about through a process of liberalization that might one day emerge from St...
...New York: Hill and Wang...
...This becomes an excuse to condemn another apostate member of the Hollywood Ten— the late Dalton Trumbo, whom Cole can never forgive for his famous "only victims" statement...
...With the hindsight of the last 130 years and with the dark shadow of the Holocaust still present, this much is sure: the Jews did not...
...Lester Cole and Steve Nelson were two American Communists whose active years in the party coincided —the years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the early cold war...
...To immigrants like Nelson, the Communist party became a vehicle for Americanization...
...432 pp...
...The revisionist school may be moribund, but it is not altogether clear exactly whom or what its members were supposed to be revising...
...the emergence of Martin Luther King...
...If revisionism produced a highly ideological reading of the cold war, one that despite its independent origins bore at times a resemblance to official Soviet views, it nevertheless began as a counterideology that became persuasive to many after the American involvement in Southeast Asia...
...He reviews the turning point of Dr...
...Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press...
...Not that the postrevisionists take as their point of departure the claims of the revisionists and then proceed to reject them: for the most part they simply ignore and bypass them, obviously finding no credibility in the fetishism of economic interests that dominates revisionist writings and aware of Maddox's expose of their shoddy scholarship (which had been remarked upon earlier by Henry Pachter in the pages of Dissent...
...So much for Nelson's major contributions to what he refers to simplistically and falsely as helping the Comintern play a "positive role" in seeking to "overturn the system of imperialism...
...18.95...
...and the counter terror of both the official and private racist opposition...
...Looking back at the party's purge of wartime leader Earl Browder—a step demanded by the Soviet Union as the cold war grew hot—Nelson comments that he and others might have used the occasion to move their party "toward greater internal democracy, a reorientation toward American realities, and independence vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...
...Borochov attempted a Marxist analysis of nationalism, according to which Marx's notion of relations of production would be supplemented by geographic, anthropological, and historical "conditions of production" that defined the emergence of nations...
...The Communists, in fact, were "destroyed" because, as elected officers of trade unions in a democratic society, their membership in a party controlled by a foreign dictator had everything to do with "their merits as trade unionists...
...His book covers much more briefly the same ground as Mastny's and carries the record forward to Stalin's death in 1953 with a short concluding chapter on events up to the present and the recurring pattern he finds in them—the book's last sentence is "Stalin's American policy lives...
...Although the political estrangement between the CIO leadership and the bloc of Communist union leaders had been growing in the postwar years—a reflection of the decay of the wartime Soviet-American alliance—the appointment of Goldberg to the CIO's most important staff post reflected a sharp new emphasis in CIO policy...
...a phrase coined by Leo Pinsker, an Odessa intellectual who was transformed by the fateful events of that year from integrationist into proto-Zionist...
...When capitalized, "the Cold War" usually means the period of maximum hostility between the superpowers nearly 30 years ago and the events leading up to it...
...THE STRUGGLE FOR BLACK EQUALITY, 1954-1980, by Harvard Sitkoff...
...497 STEVE NELSON, AMERICAN RADICAL, by Steve Nel son, James R. Barret, and Rob Ruck...
...One should not . . . simplify the question," Ber Borochov once remarked during a debate over Zionist goals, "instead of solving it...
...Yet Stalin was not entirely a diabolus ex machina: "In the last analysis," Mastny concludes, "his hands were tied by the Soviet system which had bred him and which he felt compelled to perpetuate by his execrable methods...
...The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam," King charged, and soon thereafter he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee...
...Palo Alto: Ramparts Press...
...Kennan's original formulation of containment was asymmetrical: as he has ceaselessly insisted ever since, he did not regard containment as primarily a military posture and he advocated it only for a few areas of the world vital to American interests...
...LEVENSTEIN HAS NO ILLUSIONS about the effect of Soviet control over Communist parties in the years his study covers...
...q of Congress, something they have succeeded in doing only once since then, in 1952, the year of Eisenhower's first landslide, and that by the margin of a single seat in the Senate...
...The author then turns his focus on Eastern Europe with a detailed examination of the impact of 1881 and 1905 on the intelligentsia and its role in the events of those years...
...The multinational character of the Czarist empire, however, did not lead Lenin to similar views: when the Bolshevik leader espoused the self-determination of a nation, it was never as an end in itself, but always a matter of tactics...
...it was a force at whose head stood the French bourgeoisie...
...It is remarkable," Mastny remarks of the earliest impasses over the shape of the postwar world, "how much these events . . . already have the unmistakable air of another era...
...Having worked for him as a research assistant in 1951-52 during his first venture into scholarship before his brief ambassadorship to the Soviet Union, I came to know his views on a wide range of subjects...
...Gaddis's first book is now the standard history of the origins of the cold war, and Mastny's study excellently complements it by viewing the same events over part of the same period from the standpoint of the other, less accessible antagonist, the Soviet Union...
...The due process procedure resulted—contrary to the Communists' boastful claims that they would have the decisions overturned in the courts—in one or two federal court decisions that quickly wiped out the expellees' claims for reversal...
...Others write in lowercase of "the cold war," treating it as a more or less permanent condition in the absence of either general disarmament or the unambiguous world hegemony of one of the antagonists, though subject to shifts of locale and changes of mood...
...Or only from congressional approval of the Truman Doctrine in early 1947...
...These lapses from accuracy range from the misspelling of names to a mistaken attribution of CIO affiliation to unions that never had it—including Ronald Reagan's Screen Actors Guild...
...The harsh, and often unanticipated, realities of the successful struggle for national independence—particularly as it concerns the Arab question—will be an ongoing dilemma for the next generation of Israelis...
...Those very tensions are the true source of the richness of the history that Jonathan Frankel's book captures...
...But Cole seems to want that mantle for himself...
...COMMUNISM, ANTICOMMUNISM, AND THE CIO, by Harvey A. Levenstein...
...Self-emancipation, the effort to take their fate into their own hands, meant for the Jews a reentry as an active subject on the stage of world history...
...Bauer's classic, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907), sought a nonterritorial definition of the nation as a "totality of men bound together through a common destiny into a community of character...
...King's career when the eloquent advocate of nonviolence denounced the war in Vietnam: "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home...
...Gaddis suggests that asymmetrical response appeals to fiscal conservatives and symmetrical response to Keynesian liberals, thus establishing a linkage between domestic and foreign policies...
...Truman was perceived almost universally as little more than a caretaker president to whom the job had fallen by accident, especially after the 1946 congressional elections when the Republicans won control of both houses To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...259 pp...
...Asymmetrical containment stands for a selective response to threat, limiting military resources and concentrating them against the major adversary as opposed to dispersing them in order to counter peripheral and "incremental" challenges...
...Nelson eventually rose to the leadership level and ended his active years in the drearier role of a full-time CP functionary...
...Frankel provides chapters on the ideas, roles, and dilemmas of various theorists of Jewish socialist nationalism (Nachman Syrkin, Chaim Zhitlovsky, Ber Borochov), and closes with an examination of Jewish socialist politics (largely spear-headed by Russian Jews) in pre-World War I Palestine and in America through the close of the Great War...
...describes this body of work as "postrevisionist," including under that label an earlier book by Gaddis, Mastny's study (published in 1979) to which Taubman's own book is in some ways a sequel, and books by Daniel Yergin on American policy toward the Soviet Union in the immediate postwar period and by Robert Dallek on Roosevelt's foreign policy...
...The book concludes with an excellent annotated bibliography...
...Gaddis thinks containment will continue, "given recent Soviet behavior," but ends on an unsatisfying if tantalizing note of doubt as to whether there might not be alternatives to the "unimaginative cycle" to which he has called attention...
...Few efforts were made to explore the detailed record and evolution of Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, given the inaccessibility of Soviet documentary sources and the absence even of memoirs...
...In the United States these two powerful trends came into a continuing and usually uneasy relationship within the Congress of Industrial Organizations and a number of its union affiliates...
...He answers that during the witch-hunt years such admission would have legitimized the HUAC headhunters' quest, since to admit one was a Communist during "conditions of whipped-up hatred" meant that one would then reap "the whirlwind of a savage, hysteriadriven mob...
...Taubman names George Kennan in his early essays on American diplomacy and American-Soviet relations as well as W W. Rostow as "orthodox or traditionalist" historians of the origins of the cold war (or "Cold War," as he has it...
...But it is difficult to understand the omission of any mention of Arthur J. Goldberg, who became general counsel of the CIO and the Steelworkers after Lee Pressman's departure in the spring of 1948...
...It continued to a lesser degree under President Ford who "appealed to the same backlash emotions as had his predecessor...
...Kennan was, of course, himself a major policy-maker in the early Truman administration and his role as chief architect of the turn toward resistance to Soviet pressures and demands emerges even more saliently than before in the accounts of Taubman and Gaddis...
...Yet 1947 and 1948 were the years of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the breaking of the Berlin blockade, and the beginning of the negotiations that resulted in the NATO alliance...
...448 pp...
...Taken to its logical consequence, this ultimately negates the idea of cultural pluralism...
...To the Labor Zionists, who consolidated in Russia in 1906 under Ber Borochov's leadership, the Jewish problem was first and foremost a political problem and could not be resolved in Russia, or anywhere else in the diaspora...
...Symmetrical containment strives to respond in kind to the nature of the threat at the time when and the place where it emerges...
...Thus Nelson took instructions from Wang Ming to the Chinese Communists, who were facing a major assault from Chiang Kai-shek's forces against the Communist government in Kiangsi province, where some 5 million people were trapped...
...No later president, not Johnson in 1968, nor Ford in 1976, nor Carter in 1980—all of whom were given a respectable chance of winning reelection—has appeared as vulnerable as Truman in the last two years of his first, unelected term in office...
...Far from bogging down in massive detail, the book is beautifully organized...
...Cole's political activity eventually led to being blacklisted, after serving time in prison with the original Hollywood Ten...
...502...
...The conclusion is, inescapably, that the varieties of human oppression must each be grasped and gfappled with in their specificities, as well as within the larger totality of socioeconomic understanding that Marxism has done so much to provide...
...From Kennan's "long telegram" in early 1946 and Churchill's Fulton, Missouri, speech a few weeks later...
...He reconstructs virtually on a week-to-week basis the development of Soviet postwar aspirations and the deliberations at the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, insisting throughout that "Stalin's goals should be considered as evolving rather than as a design firmly fixed and single-mindedly pursued" and that his "actual objectives" can be "reliably distinguished from lip service to the messianic tenets of the doctrine that is the minimal attribute of any Communist aspiring to good standing...
...There is a historical stereotype that depicts Russia as the sole fount of Jewish socialism, the source from which its key characteristics flowed in other lands as well...
...This stark vision, exploited by such demagogic politicians as Joseph McCarthy for narrow domestic political aims, began to lose plausibility after the death of Stalin, the end of the Korean War, and the affirmation of "peaceful coexistence" by Stalin's successors...
...What Nelson does not tell his readers is that it was precisely Stalin's policy that had led to this near disaster, and that the advice he carried from Moscow, as Fernando Claudin writes in The Communist Movement, marked "a last attempt by the Comintern to re-establish its control and authority over the Chinese section," an attempt that "almost resulted in a catastrophe even worse than that of 1927...
...Indeed, there is a rigorous logic to this vision: if classes are the sole true category for understanding social reality and if, consequently, the only real struggle is that of the classes, then nationalism and national contentions obfuscate what is really at stake...
...How Levenstein could 500 have all but ignored this series of events is difficult to understand...
...Goldberg argued with those in the CIO's top levels who wished, in the heated temper of the times, to "just throw the bastards out...
...686 pp...
...He had to pretend to be a good left-wing liberal, since "open identification would provide more ammunition for the enemy propaganda...
...Nelson also acknowledges that American Communists contributed to their own isolation in the cold-war era by refusing even to consider that it "took two sides to heat up the cold war...
...It mobilized Jewish workers to defend themselves as no group had before, but its faith in a Jewish socialist future in Eastern Europe proved to be chimerical...
...Nonetheless, inasmuch as both sought national and socialist solutions to the Jewish question, the Bund and the left Zionists found themselves attacked from all sides and, of course, by each other...
...Americans—both black and white—need more books like Harvard Sitkoff's moving account of the fierce "struggle for black equality" that consumed the nation from the late '50s until the recent past...
...There were fierce debates and decisive actions by the rank and file in many unions...
...HOLLYWOOD RED: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LESTER COLE...
...The decline in support of the CP among unionists who had been in its orbit during the war could not be solely attributed to a right-wing offensive...
...Covering the entire crucial period in American-Soviet relations from 1941 to 1953, it includes a concise but probing summary of what has changed and what has remained constant in the subsequent 30 years...
...493 The difference between the two policies has always been one of emphasis rather than implementation...
...Nelson tells us that he served abroad—including China—as a Comintern courier between 1931 and 1933...
...It tried to balance not only universalist and 496 particularist aspirations but also the real divisions within Bundist ranks on the question of the organization's national emphasis...
...Cole argues that during the World War II period people joined the CP "not so much out of deep intellectual and humanist motivation [as he did himself, he implies] but on the basis of personal friendship...
...364 pp...
...Does technological progress imply the same for human relations...
...Yet there have been no significant additions to the corpus of revisionist scholarship since the early 1970s, apart from a few essays by William Appleman Williams, the acknowledged dean of the school...
...in the autumn of 1935 President John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, recognizing that the political climate had created a unique opportunity for the unionization of the mass-production industries— and despairing of persuading the AFL craft unions to relinquish their jurisdictional claims over the skilled workers in those industries—called together the committee of union leaders that became the CIO...
...With the rise of Menahem Begin and the ongoing disarray of the Israeli labor movement (a disarray whose origins long precede the actual electoral victory of the Israeli right), the socialist and universal components of the socialist Zionist synthesis have, however, become more and more eclipsed...
...Only in a Jewish state could the Jewish proletariat, on its own grounds and taking part in all levels of the productive process, play a role in the struggle for international socialism...
...Disagreements over chronology have often reflected deeper ideological differences and partisanship...
...Furthermore, inasmuch as Marx, Engels, and Lenin defined the state as a form of class rule— with the anticipated proletarian state withering away at the advent of the classless society—the birth of nation-states implied the creation of types of class rule, with nationalism as a new opiate for the masses...
...For those who lived through these events, Levenstein's book refreshes old memories...
...The cold war and containment, to be sure, originated in response to Soviet postwar expansion, but since 1947 "to a remarkable degree, containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States...
...He begins with two precursors, Moses Hess, the German Jewish Communist and sometime companion of Marx and Engels, whose Rome and Jerusalem (1862) called for the creation of a socialist Jewish state in Palestine, and Aron Liberman, an exile from Vilna who in the 1870s, in London, founded the first avowedly Jewish socialist organization, the Hebrew Socialist Union...
...49.50...
...John Howard Lawson is most often remembered as the dean of the Hollywood Reds—the tough Marxist theoretician who got the other CP members in the film colony to toe the line...
...Taubman's title suggests misleadingly that his main subject is Stalin's foreign policy, but he actually discusses almost as fully American responses to Soviet initiatives and changes of line...
...Frankel strives to understand the reactions of the Jewish intelligentsia to these events, especially as it entailed thinkers and movements seeking a reconciliation between nationalist and internationalist claims...
...they] did not result in equality because of the lack of a thorough economic transformation in the status of Afro-Americans...
...And Stalin was not only the absolute ruler of Russia, but, as both Mastny and Taubman stress, he virtually monopolized the formulation of Soviet foreign policy, often keeping his closest associates in the dark about his real objectives...
...IT DOES NOT SEEM likely that there will be any sharp reversal of the judgment reached by these recent historians about the origins of the cold war, barring some tremendous Soviet archival revelation...
...Although he rejects as completely as Gaddis and Mastny the revisionist view that the cold war resulted from American challenges to the security of a war-shattered, defense-minded Soviet Union, he also moves away from traditionalist assumptions in underscoring and criticizing Washington's misperceptions and overreactions to Moscow...
...statute," and custom, with the collusion of the Supreme Court of the late 19th century...
...Taubman's major theme is the drama of the interplay between Stalin's false image of Western leaders and their mistaken conceptions of him...
...Hence, despite Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms of him on this score, the two revolutionaries ultimately shared a common vision...
...The conservative columnist George Will certainly exaggerated in charging recently that the Democratic party in the early 1970s embraced the revisionist version of the cold war, but this version became widely accepted in the universities, especially those where student activism was greatest...
...The "revisionist" historians of the 1960s challenged the then-prevailing official and scholarly view that American policy toward the Soviet Union had originated in a defensive response to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and threats to the independence of non-Communist nations bordering on the enlarged Soviet empire...
...At the same time, the initial efforts of the Reagan administra491 tion to revive the old bipolar cold-war dogmas of the '50s have failed to win much favor even with the general public, let alone among intellectuals and professional historians...
...it was a product of an essentially undemocratic system...
...Two of the revisionists, Gar Alperowitz and Gabriel Kolko, have evidently turned away from the study of international relations to other areas...
...New York: W. W. Norton...
...Levenstein has also omitted many significant facts—understandable, perhaps, in order to keep his study within manageable limits...
...True enough, yet Gaddis's study of American policy since 1947 impresses one with the durability of containment and the exploration, as early as 1950, of nearly all the policy options that are still being 494 debated today...
...Professor Harvey A. Levenstein of the History Department of McMaster University at Hamilton, Ontario, has delved deeply into the history of the Communists in the CIO, looking with particular care at a few of the unions in which the Communist bloc was most successful, and following the tangled events that led, at the CIO's 1949 convention, to the expulsion of about a dozen unions from the CIO on grounds—whether expressly stated or not —that they were Communist-dominated...
...Cole does not tell us that he too certainly must have held fast to Browderism when Browder was in command...
...Goldberg— later to become secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, and ambassador to the United Nations— quickly became the confidant and friend of Philip Murray, the CIO president...
...On the other hand, Philip Murray scarcely rates the characterization of "duplicitous," and Walter Reuther was certainly no more, and probably a good deal less, opportunistic than most of his antagonists...
...He recounts with humor how projecting the Soviet Union as a model for socialism "just didn't cut with 498 a lot of men in the shop," and how he sought to rebuff top CP staffers, those with "fewer day-today connections in the factories," who always insisted that their auto-shop paper carry more news about the U.S.S.R...
...Today it would take an extraordinary blindness —or obtuseness—to look back at the events of the last 100 years, ranging from Bergen-Belsen to the anticolonial nationalist struggles of the Third World, and attribute them all to a peculiar cunning 495 of class reason...
...Walter Laqueur recently observed that the revisionist picture of the cold war was like a film of a boxing match that focused on only one of the contestants, showing him jabbing, counterpunching and feinting as if he were shadowboxing against himself...
...Difficult questions must emerge from reflection on Benjamin's criticism and on the events of the years immediately after he penned it...
...For example, traditional historiography of the Bund, that once powerful socialist (anti-Zionist) organization founded in 1897 in Vilna, sees its diaspora nationalist ideology developing, in Frankel's phrase, "inexorably as a superstructure reflecting the realities of the mass base...
...Cole was one of the founders of the Screen Writers' Guild...
...Gaddis quotes, for instance, Conrad's famous description from Heart of Darkness of a battleship firing into the African jungle to illustrate the futility of a particular American naval tactic in Vietnam...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...that system was the true cause of the Cold War...
...volunteering to fight in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War...
...For all his sensitivity to domestic politics, even Gaddis, in common with nearly all other historians of the cold war, seems to me to give insufficient weight to the political weakness of the Truman administration during the period when the foundations of what is still the basis of American foreign policy were being laid...
...25.00...
...yet, in his own words, he and other Hollywood Reds often "worked and lived entirely differently from party members in the working class...
...Eric Foner, Consulting Editor...
...Here he transcends the old oversimplified contrast between external threat and internal imperatives that dominated the traditionalist-revisionist debate...
...The Bund was suppressed by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and its last mass base in Poland was destroyed by Hitler...
...He also writes explicitly about American Communist party control over its members in the elected leadership and on the staffs of various CIO unions...
...Karl Kautsky, in 1908, epitomized this tendency when he argued in Nationalitdt und Internationalitdt that with the education of the masses under socialism, the "universal languages" would become linguae francae, and "ultimately" the tongues of the smaller nations would disappear...
...Dean Acheson did not exaggerate when he gave his memoirs the title "present at the creation," nor, at least in my estimation, when he called Truman "the captain with the mighty heart" in dedicating the volume to him...
...Another, David Horowitz, who was a radical journalist rather than an academic, has changed his view of the American-Soviet conflict and now condemns the left's long-standing "blind spot toward the Soviet Union...
...In fact, Yiddish-speaking labor movements achieved success in New York and London (and also emerged in Moldavia, Galicia, and Congress Poland) before they did in the Czarist empire, and their literature was smuggled into Russia where its influence was substantial...
...The struggle to complete the unfinished business of American democracy will endure until its fulfillment...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
