An Open Letter to Howard Fast

...You must know in your heart that our country at its worst is free compared with any totalitarian country at its best...

...So Stone does rise and blurt out the truth he has so belatedly discovered: "This is not a good society...

...You enjoy an advantage over those others: You are articulate...

...Fast, that cry from the heart is a cry for help...

...There is little if anything in the Khrushchev indictment of the regime that has not long been common knowledge among free men...

...But you are too intelligent not to see through this deception...

...that you "will not fail again" to exercise your critical judgment on things Soviet, and specifically you make this public pledge: "Never again will I accept the "clever rationale' which appears to make sense but under scrutiny does not...

...In the final analysis McCarthy, even if he were as wicked as you think, is one Senator among 96 and has to contend with a free press and a largely hostile public opinion...

...You need only close your inner eyes tight, drink it down boldly, and be at peace again, at least outwardly...

...He was the first president, and is still a director, of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism...

...Again, you are too sensible to believe that preposterous equation...

...I knew there were prisons...

...I know that most of them were drawn into the movement by their heartstrings--by an outraged sense of justice and a naive faith in social patent medicines--and that not all of them have been irretrievably corrupted...

...Is an occasional miscarriage of justice the same as the total absence of justice...

...I am writing you, also, because I do not regard all Communists as scoundrels...

...He fully condoned Stalinist frameups when used against "enemies" like Bukharin or Zinoviev...

...Unlike writers of the USSR, you still have that blessed option...

...You sensed, I suspect, that you were voicing their distress as well as your own...

...You will find your travail described in Whittaker Chambers's Witness, which traces his soul-searing journey to the point when he could say--when he had to say--"This is evil, absolute evil...

...for pledge of civil rights, for the sacred right of habeas corpus, of public appeal to higher courts, of final judgment by one's peers...

...Much as you love "socialism"--or what you personally think this cover-word means--you proclaim that certain fundamental human values are more important...

...Here Eugene Lyons, who a generation ago was similarly shocked by Stalin's Russia, addresses an open letter to Mr...

...The fact that so many former Communists have fully recovered their moral sanity tells the story...

...In any free country, after similar revelations, a whole new set of men would have been swept into power as earnest of real change...

...But how, by the test of such values, can you persist in loving and defending the Kremlin nightmare...

...There are numberless books, memoirs, studies--by foreign observers, by scholars, by runaway Soviet officials, by former inmates of slave-camps...

...How can you ignore it...

...What he saw and sensed made him suffer, even as the revelations about the Stalin period make you suffer...

...The worst you can charge is that capitalist courts sometimes have "mishandled and perverted" such rights...

...Then you swear by "all that is holy" (though what is holy to a Stalinist...

...At one point you write: "It is some comfort to say that I did not know the facts in the Khrushchev report...

...Some people have dismissed your statement as chicanery--a piece of tongue-in-cheek "self-criticism" prescribed by the Party itself for this difficult moment...

...But he tells them: "I feel like a swimmer who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst...

...and therefore an implied approval of...

...They crawled back into the fetid womb of the Party for surcease from the pain of thinking and the dread of acting...

...His friends urged him, in the name of expediency, to remain silent...

...But your Soviet handful consisted of Stalin, his associates and executioners, exercising absolute and arbitrary power over 200 million people...

...Your sigh of relief at the end of the essay --"And with this said, I feel better-- better than I have felt for a long time"--makes this clear enough...

...That is why I have decided to address you, and through you thousands of others in the Communist orbit, whether Party members or not, who have been deeply shaken by the Kremlin's admissions of a quarter of a century of degenerate crimes and cruelties...

...Can you continue to justify a Stalin in terms of a McCarthy and live with your conscience...

...Few phenomena in history have been as extensively reported as the Soviet regime...

...You are not the first Communist and will not be the last to face the tormenting inner struggle in which you are now engaged...

...I know how achingly empty life seems at first when your long-cherished certainties turn to dust, when your dream turns into a nightmare, when you discover that those whom you denounced as slanderers were telling the ugly truth after all...

...A few have tried to atone for their connivance with evil by becoming active anti-Communists, as dedicated to exposing the obscenity as they had been in concealing or justifying it...

...In due time I was to describe it all in a book, Assignment in Utopia...

...Few of these have been as outspoken as American novelist Howard Fast, a 1953 Stalin Prize-winner...

...Surely you understand that as long as arbitrary violence--what your own leader, Eugene Dennis, calls "the use of tortures and rigged trials"--can be employed against "enemies" by the very dictators who alone decide who is or is not an enemy, nothing has changed...

...Will you join this company of the damned--those who, because they know the truth they deny, envy even as they despise their know-nothing comrades...

...The rationale for this period is already available: in the long thesis by Eugene Dennis (Daily Worker, June 18) which, while your present state of mind lasts, you will recognize as a brew of lies, half-truths and stale slogans...

...Among the generations of disillusioned Communists and pro-Communists, some were shocked into agonizing moral awareness by the cruelties of collectivization, others by the massacres of the blood purges of 1936-38, or the Nazi-Soviet deal that touched off a world war...

...Is our rare mishandling of the habeas corpus comparable to the complete denial not only of habeas corpus but of habeas cadaver...

...Fast, from a source you cannot wholly disown, is a forthright verdict on the Soviet regime--not as it was in Stalin's time but as it is now...

...But you might have gone on and noted the more startling omissions...

...No society is good in which men fear to think--much less speak--freely...

...In your grief over the Soviet horrors, you fall back upon the least clever of the standard rationales, that of equating flaws in free societies with barbarous crimes in the Soviet Union...

...Or will you find the strength to break out of the closed world of Communist alibis for unlimited horror...

...Instead I learned that three more executions had been announced from the Soviet Union, and my stomach turned over...

...Lyons, now a roving editor of Reader's Digest, is author of Assignment in Utopia, Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia and several other books...

...For in the very moment of swearing to respect truth and abjure phony rationalizations, you indulge in childish alibis based on transparent falsehoods...

...There...

...Why do you find that heartening...

...When a system breeds monsters, as they say their secret-police system had bred monsters for 20 years, then something must be wrong with the system...

...You continue to love America despite its faults, you argue, and therefore can continue to love the Soviet regime despite its faults...

...I for one looked hopefully but vainly...

...Having read the Khrushchev speech, you know that he did not renounce terror as such, but only terror against selected people...

...All the same, it seems to me an act of courage and contrition by a man deeply troubled...

...Most of them fled from the scene of the crime...

...Fast: Your column in the Daily Worker of June 12, dealing with the terrible revelations in Nikita Khrushchev's "secret" speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, attests your shock, despair and, most encouraging, your sense of personal guilt as a long-time Communist...

...Whether you are conscious of it or not, Mr...

...He admitted: "I knew that the death penalty existed in the Soviet Union...

...But having passed that point, he was at last free...

...Will you rejoin the world of free men, where your conscience will be truly at peace and your talents, released from the Party-line strait-jacket, can really flourish...

...But always there were weaklings--you count them today among your comrades--who swallowed the "clever rationale" of the period...

...In my case the process was spread over several years, while I was living and working in the Soviet Union...

...To me the column rings true...

...You call the speech "a strange and awful document without parallel in history...

...Every subsequent shock renewed the pain and the bleeding, calling for yet stronger drugs...

...The experience, however, left throbbing wounds in their souls which never quite healed and required continuous treatment with the opiates of self-deception...

...I knew that writers and artists and scientists were intimidated . . . but I accepted this as a necessity of socialism...

...Sincerely yours, Eugene Lyons In the shock wave following the Khrushchev "secret" speech, many Communists have criticized aspects of the Stalin and post-Stalin regimes...

...On a more cerebral but less sensitive level, read Where We Came Out, by Granville Hicks...

...a record of barbarian and paranoid blood-lust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man...

...There was no reference to...

...What is more, it is quite evident that the Khrushchev confessions merely brought to a focus secret doubts and rebellions which have tormented you for some time...

...I had never joined the Party, but I had accepted its philosophy, believed its claims and defended the Communist regime against its detractors...

...In his case it was the Stalin-Hitler pact which played the liberating role that the Khrushchev speech, if you do not hasten to stifle your decent instincts, may well play in your life...

...You say, in concluding your column: "I know of nothing better than for a man to feel whole and say what he thinks bluntly...

...I believe it must ring true to others who have known, in their time, the anguish of a cracking faith and bankrupt hopes...

...Is that really a fair equivalent of the "barbarism and paranoid bloodlust" in the USSR...

...Perhaps my own ordeal, though it occurred very long ago, gives me the right to talk to you--and to them...

...It is an admirable summation, and proof that you are not utterly lost...

...But you can't leave it at that...

...A journalist whom you can hardly dismiss as a capitalist lackey or a gangster of the pen, I. F. Stone, has just emerged from a visit to the USSR...

...It's a cry from the heart...

...Then I found myself in the Soviet Union and, try as I would to explain them away, to justify and rationalize, the harsh realities eroded my imported preconceptions...

...Take the matter of "civil rights, the sacred right of habeas corpus, public appeal to higher courts, judgment by one's peers" for which, as you rightly say, "thousands of brave men had given their lives...

...Do you truly believe that conscience and dignity and truth are no longer dangerous in Soviet Russia in this the fourth year after Stalin's passing...

...The column itself carries the proofs of how deeply you are stuck in the morass...

...Your column is filled with routine Communist self-deceptions...

...As against the "madness and wickedness of a handful of Soviet leaders," you counterpose the conduct of "McCarthy and his contemptible cronies...

...Your act of contrition will be futile, will only compound your guilt, as long as you do not allow yourself to distinguish between a pimple and a cancer...

...You must ask yourself why a man of your intelligence remained ignorant of facts known to the overwhelming majority of civilized men, facts accessible to you in any library...

...This I can never accept again...

...And the Khrushchev inventory of horrors, as you point out yourself, was selective...

...These you sum up as "the holy right of man to his own conscience, his own dignity, his right to say what he pleases when he pleases, to speak clearly and boldly for the truth as he sees the truth...

...I accepted the fact that Jewish culture had been wiped out...

...You cite his failure to deal with the persecution of Jews...

...Fast (cut at left) said he had hoped Khrushchev's speech "would be a warning of the monstrous dangers inherent in secret and dictatorial government...

...You and they have just suffered the impact of disenchantment in one shattering blow...

...It has always seemed to me the duty of free men to offer sympathy and understanding to those who show signs of wishing to escape from the Communist morass...

...How many of them have you read with an open mind...

...for a pledge that the last execution had taken place on Soviet soil...

...In his newsletter of May 23, Stone writes: "The way home from Moscow has been an agony for me...

...Isn't it true that you did not know because you did not dare to look facts in the face, because you had accepted a discipline that cannot survive exposure to truth...

...the brutalities of forcible collectivization, the system of slave labor on a chilling scale, the fake elections at home and fake plebiscites in captive East European countries...

...You try pathetically to console yourself by calling the exposure of Stalin by his surviving fellow-criminals one of the "heartening indications" of change...

...It is a verdict rendered on the basis of those very values you agree must take precedence over the abstraction of "socialism...

...You reproach yourself for not having known the facts and for failure to protest against certain iniquities about which you did know...

...That great reward, which you seized in one heroic moment of crisis, can be yours always, if you succeed in throwing off the Communist weights from your heart and mind...

...I know, in short, what you are going through...

...I think they are mistaken...

...But what, in common sense, is so heartening about accomplices who pillory their dead chieftain without admitting their own guilt, without renouncing the fruits of his blood-lust, without even attempting to explain what it is in the Soviet system that enables the most inhuman of its leaders to take total command of the country and of the world Communist movement...