An Abiding Skepticism

...Born into a Zionist family in a Russian shtetl, Levine made his way to the United States before the start of World War I. found employment in journalism with the aid of fellow-Zionist Louis Brandeis (it was to be Levine's destiny to soar easily into contact with the famous), and rapidly rose head and shoulders above most of his colleagues...

...On the whole, Levine seems overly satisfied with his approach toward the USSR...

...Even albert Einstein, an opponent of all dictatorship, became an apologist for Stalin as a result of the Nazi threat...

...advised by a friend on the Saturday Evening Post to "specialize," the budding reporter turned to the Bolshevik Revolution, becoming an expert on a subject whose scope was worldwide, and thus securing a place for himself at the top of his profession...

...In addition, Levine minimizes the dimensions of the notorious "Moscow Show Trials" of 1936-38, the facade that allowed Stalin secretly to slaughter 8-9 million people as Trotskyite agents-at a time when their supposed leader was a helpless exile...

...In an earlier era, when the primary need was to expose the Soviet rulers, this may have been sufficient, but now it merely restricts the author's historical perspective...

...The skepticism of the boy was reenforced in the youth...

...and Levine also shows how President Roosevelt himself, either through intellectual corruption or a light-minded overestimation of his own charm, was blind to reports about Communist infiltration of his administration, although those reports came from such men as adolph Berle...

...He always saw with dazzling clarity just what the Revolution was-the seizure and brutal exploitation of power by a small number of men in the name of a larger ideal, one that was to culminate in the slaughter of millions...

...He remains, however, a thoroughly readable and intelligent journalist, and his book can well serve as a fascinating pointer to the incalculable depths that lie beneath it...

...the tenuousness of the Revolution in its first phase, and the phony identification of the Communist takeover with the democratic Soviet (possibly Trotsky's major contribution to history), Levine, in effect, accepts the Bolshevik claim that the Party was swept into power "representing" some large-scale force...

...as Levine demonstrates, it was an epoch when american liberals were incredibly gullible, indeed criminally naive, with regard to the Russian regime...

...The key to his swift climb was Soviet Communism...

...The Dreyfus affair caused a furor when he was growing up, and innoculated him once and for all with an organic distrust of institutional deceit...

...This sketch of the period helps to explain the subsequent, albeit short-lived, success of Senator Joseph McCarthy-of whom Levine totally disapproved...

...Levine introduced Whittaker Chambers, a long-time acquaintance, to Walter Krivitsky, the Soviet political police defector who was one of the first to expose the Communist purges, and was later found murdered in a Washington hotel room...

...It was this iconoclasm that created the journalist, propelling him through the labyrinth of modern politics, guiding him in his search for the facts amid the bewildering events of the recent past...

...Nonetheless, Levine's account is absorbing, especially for the insight it offers into the climate of opinion during the late '30s and '40s...

...Levine skims over all this, perhaps because he lacked the time or inclination to tackle it...

...The journalist portrays Chambers as a true mystic, yet seems a little unfair to the ex-Soviet spy on a personal level, dropping the usual sneer about Chambers' appearance and making much of his timorousness...

...Probably most important was his connection with the alger Hiss case...

...But he did not accept the Communist takeover as the natural and inevitable outgrowth of that hope...

...The continuing significance of the USSR as a "beacon" for change among sectors of the intelligentsia throughout the 20th century further insured that Levine would never fall from his position of prominence...

...Yet Eyewitness to History has the defects of its virtues...

...Dignified, respectable governments, he learned, staffed by dignified, respectable men, could create conspiracies out of whole cloth, and foist them on an intelligent public...

...In 1931, Levine was able to piece together the first biography of Joseph Stalin from the little data then available...

...Working in the office of a sugar baron and as a tutor to wealthy children, the 17-year-old Levine had the opportunity to observe the celebrities of Kiev close-up...

...Reviewed by Joel Carmichael a uthor, "The Shaping of the arabs," and a forthcoming biography of Leon Trotsky This autobiography by a distinguished american journalist who has opposed the Soviet dictatorship unwaveringly from its beginnings down to the present is a remarkable success story...

...Before the 1917 upheaval, Levine had shared in the pervasive and optimistic belief that a "democratic revolution" in Russia was imminent...

...The questioning temperament that led Levine to reject the Bolshevik mythology-when so many others were taken in-was something he had acquired early in life...

...He was instrumental, too, in proving that the man who killed Trotsky was an agent for Stalin, and he was intimately involved, as well, in the disclosure of the assassination of the Russian imperial family...

...With hindsight, it is hard to believe that alger Hiss, in view of the damaging evidence at hand, was retained as a topflight functionary, only two slots below the Chief Executive, at Yalta and at San Francisco...

...This massive sociopolitical phenomenon-to my mind the consummation of the tyrant's career and the real foundation of the present Communist state-obviously calls for an explanation based not on Stalin's dementia (for which there is no evidence), but on an examination of the society that emerged from the 1917 cataclysm...

...after a year of living on the fringe of Russian high society, he concluded with amazement: "There are no supermen...

...Of course, the choice to specialize in Soviet affairs was hardly fortuitous...

...By disregarding the German subsidy to the Bolsheviks in 1917-the equivalent of half a billion dollars...