Remembering the Levitas Salon

...The dreadful reality was that in "objective" historical terms the Stalinists were correct in saying the first item on the agenda was winning the Civil War, though in "subjective" historical terms their goal was the Stalinization of Spain...

...But as I set about reading the book it somehow opened up the memory tunnel...

...My initial encounter with The New Leader ambience was quite accidental...

...Veteran New Leader readers, recalling the libel suit J. Alvarez del Vayo of the Nation filed against Clem Green-berg in 1952 for calling him a Stalinist in these pages, will be delighted at the job Bolloten does on that viper in the Socialist bosom...

...Having watched the leader of the Young Mensheviks, Daniel Bell— who became managing editor of The New Leader—organize a one-man movement, I declined with thanks...

...With the appalling chutzpah of the auto-didact, I lectured my peers on how Berle and Means, in their study of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, had made the whole Marxist concept of "ownership is control" archaic...

...After he saw the light, he came back from Spain on the same ship with Norman Thomas, and rumor had it that he convinced the Socialist leader to repudiate the united front tactics then popular in the Socialist Party...

...They wanted and launched a genuine, ferocious social revolution just at the time Franco's fascist legions were threatening their very survival...

...One of the things I learned in Levitas' salon was the true nature of the Spanish Civil War, thanks in large part to Liston Oak, a New Leader editor bearing a remarkable resemblance to Lenin...

...But I was introduced into this incredible Rand School universe and allowed to hang around...

...And on that subject, the techniques of Stalinist noy-autage, of infiltrating and colonizing the institutions of the Republic, Bolloten provides a definitive study that is not without meaning for our time...

...As a non-Marxist convert to the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL), I had at the group's 1939 convention opposed the traditional planks calling for the nationalization of the "commanding heights of the economy," or some such...

...he roared...

...I may have been saved by affirmative action: In the YPSL, Irish-Americans were in short supply...

...But Sol Levitas, who took me under his protection and later became a dear friend for whom I wrote a number of pieces—and who during many happy summer hours would teach me fishing at Menemsha—managed to find simultaneous translators for me...

...Borkenau, who was once accused of believing nobody died a natural death, was convinced the "pirate submarine" that had prowled the Mediterranean in 1937-38 sinking British and French ships was really Soviet...

...Thus he wanted the Civil War to drag on without a winner...

...Suddenly I was back in The New Leader's old offices in the Rand School at 7 East 15th Street, between 1939-42...

...Maybe I dreamed it all up—I am the kind of nut who has political dreams—but I swear that sometime in 1941 or '42 Borkenau, author of European Communism and a model survivor, arrived at Levitas' salon and explained at length why Stalin had not wanted the Republic to win the Spanish Civil War: The Soviet dictator hoped Spain would be the catalyst for a British, French and Spanish Republican war against Hitler and Mussolini...

...The assembled comrades looked with pity on me for my naivete, though I think a few felt I was a provocateur who should be kicked out...

...Sure enough, in May Maxim Litvinov was replaced as Soviet foreign commissar by Vyacheslav Molotov— "hammer" in Russian...

...News of the imbroglio reached Algernon Lee, director of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF)—another Rand School tenant—and I received a phone call inviting me to see him...

...But a normal minyan consisted of three ex-Menshe-viks, four ex-Comintern apparatchiks, two Bundists, and an Austro-Marxist...

...Down the hall the Russian Social Democrat Raphael Abramovich also published the Russian-language bimonthly, Socialist Courier, with the aid of an exiled German Left-winger—an eccentric Berlin Marxist going under the name of "Louis Clair...

...These volunteers for the International Brigades (as William Herrick recently noted in the NL, the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" was the invention of a Stalinist public relations man in New York) had been accused of Trotskyism, but were saved by their American citizenship...

...It was tough: The conversations often seemed to be simultaneously conducted in German, Russian and Yiddish...

...I next came upon Clair (sub nomine Lewis Coser) in 1956 after I joined the faculty at Brandeis, where he impressed me as one of the few sociologists who does not commit grand larceny every month when he accepts his salary...

...Doc's distinctions included being dismissed from his teaching post at the University of Michigan in 1910 for professing Socialism outside the classroom...

...Then there was Alexander Kerensky, still trying to figure out how Lenin did it...

...Bolloten treats with great sympathy the tragic historical position of the Anarcho-Syndicalists—the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the National Confederation of Labor (CNT...

...The British and French were supposed to assume it belonged to the Axis and go on the warpath...

...Bolloten has read everything and offers invaluable sources on the struggle within the Republican ranks between the Socialists, the Stalinists, the POUM, and the Anarcho-Syndicalists...

...An inquisitive littlepish-er, I listened to men who had been to the other side of the moon talk about Stalin, the Spanish Civil War and theopera-tions of the Comintern...

...Several others had themselves been interrogated by the NKVD in its private prison at Alcala de Henares, outside Madrid—where Andres Nin, the leader of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM), was tortured and murdered...

...There were more witnesses, including Abramovich, whose son Mark Rein was seized by the NK VD in Spain and is believed to have been shipped to Russia and murdered...

...He notes correctly that the POUM, far from being Trotskyist, was denounced by the Fourth International (see Felix Morrow's Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain) for selling out the workers and peasants...

...Oak had been the chief Stalinist censor of reportage on the International Brigades...

...Perspectives REMEMBERING THE LEWAS SALON BY JOHN P ROCHE My assignment forthis Christmas Book Issue was simply to review Burnett Bolloten's monumental study The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power During the Civil War (University of North Carolina, 691 pp...

...The place was practically a salon for veteran anti-Stalinists with Sol Levitas—the NL's executive editor for some 30 years, until his death on January 3,1961—as the impresario...

...Thus I recall vividly that in the spring of 1939 Boris Nicolaevsky, formerly of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, predicted the advent of a Nazi-Soviet Pact on the basis of a Stalin speech...

...Frequently present, too, was the legendary Franz Borkenau, a prominent member of the Comintern in the '20s who left Germany for Britain in 1934, was interned by the British after Dunkirk along with all other "enemy aliens" and subsequently was deported, I think to Canada...

...Actually, the POUM was a clone of Marceau Pivert's French Socialist Party of Workers and Peasants...

...Now Maxim will be hammered...

...Occasionally the nominal editor, "Doc," as we called William E. Bohn, would appear and regale those present with his reminiscences of Eugene Debs and "Fighting Bob" LaFollette...

...The long and short of it was that he offered me the position of youth director for the SDF...

...it was hobbled by Marxist cliches and bitter personal animosity toward the Socialist establishments...

...For a participant in the Levitas salon there are no surprises in Burnett Bolloten's huge book...

...29.00...

...Have you read The Spike...