When Politics Was Everything

...Eventually, they were invited to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where they again became stars...

...His Kosovo: Background to a War will be published in Britain next month...

...Four years later came the First World War, which dramatized the social ills the radical Left had decried in a way no speech or poem could...

...I and some others who do not miss communism at all will miss Ella Wolfe enormously...

...The way forward seemed clear...

...Known as American Exceptionalism, it held that a prosperous United States where factory workers owned their own homes and cars could not be won for communism by the grim, conspiratorial methods employed in tsarist Russia or Eastern Europe...

...Thus, American communism had to work out its own program and methods...

...Ella found the feminist canonization of Kahlo more than a little exasperating, especially as museum gift shops came to be cluttered with Frida Kahlo diaries, cocktail napkins, coffee mugs, baseball caps, T-shirts, and so on...

...Indeed, it all had a rather Californian flavor, easygoing and life-loving, at the beginning...

...He and Ella—by then his wife—were no mere activists handing out leaflets on street corners...

...As the 1920s drew to an end, ugly realities intruded...

...With such recruits available, the Comintern's Muscovite bosses tired of quibbling with Lovestone and Wolfe and booted them out of official Communist ranks, although not before the two Americans had personally told Stalin what they thought of him...

...But neither were the Wolfes ideological bureaucrats...

...They became world travelers, penetrating the sacred precincts of the Kremlin as leading functionaries of the new Communist International, or Comintern, then heading down to Mexico, where many believed the peasant revolution of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata would take a Bolshevik direction...

...She remembered everything and everybody and was unfailingly generous...

...She was born a Jew, near Kherson in Ukraine, and was brought to New York City as an immigrant...

...Bert did not live to see the election of Ronald Reagan and the collapse of Soviet communism, but Ella did...

...Stephen Schwartz lives in Sarajevo...

...For most of the 1930s, while a new generation of ignorant and ambitious young people flocked to the Comintern, the Wolfes and Lovestone wandered in a kind of limbo...

...They constituted a small sect—the Communist Party (Opposition) of America —that made some noise in its time, involving itself in a few major union struggles, then disappeared...

...To scholars of 20th-century communism, and to a few ex-Communists, her death is a landmark, for Ella Wolfe was the last prominent survivor of the generation that made Bolshevism a global, rather than a Russian, phenomenon...

...Bert Wolfe died in 1977...

...Stalin's open betrayal of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 and the Bukharin purge trial in 1938 were moments of truth...

...Bert Wolfe, by now a veteran of the American Communist underground, became a secret commander of the slender cadre of Mexican Communists...

...At 14, she met her great love, a Socialist activist named Bertram Wolfe...

...I was researching the Spanish Civil War, and she was a fount of inspiration...

...Also during the 1980s, she began a third career, as the outstanding English-speaking authority on Frida Kahlo...

...Lovestone and Wolfe embraced a theory that has struck numerous historians as supremely common-sen-sical...

...Yet her passing is much more than obituary fodder...

...Stalin and his minions, however, understood something that Love-stone and Wolfe did not: The Stalinist Comintern had no interest in organizing the mass of American workers...

...By the onset of World War II, Bert and Ella Wolfe had reluctantly begun to leave communism behind...

...I came to know Ella at Hoover in 1982, at the time of my own regrettably late break with communism...

...Given her age and infirmities, the news was not a shock...

...Once, when I stupidly asked her to meet with a young friend of mine interested in the subject, she replied, "Not you, too...

...In Mexico City, between meetings of Comintern cells, they became intimates of the artistic circle headed by Diego Rivera—of whom Bertram Wolfe remains the best biographer—and adorned by his nymphet lover, Frida Kahlo...

...But the days of Communist bohemianism were numbered...

...The Rivera and Wolfe salons intersected with that of the photographer Edward Weston and his paramour, Italian-American actress and photographer Tina Modotti, from San Francisco...

...Socialist party, which in 1919 helped found the American Communist organization...

...After Lenin's death in 1924, the Comintern became a theater for strident quarrels among his heirs, notably Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolay Bukharin...

...Then when Ella was 21, from Moscow there came news of the Lenin-Trotsky coup...

...They were lucky to make it back to Manhattan alive...

...Rather, it sought pliable agents to serve as spies and terrorists, and such individuals were plentiful in all the rich countries of the world...

...The so-called Right Wing of American communism, headed by Wolfe and Jay Love-stone, another Jewish radical from New York, temporarily triumphed in the American party...

...They were misfits, alienated pseudo-intellectuals and semi-criminal nihilists, for whom arguments over ideals and doctrine were abstract exercises not tethered to practical reality...

...They turned to a mainly private life, although Bert continued writing and produced his classic Three Who Made a Revolution in 1948...

...Bert Wolfe had become a leading member of the Left Wing faction of the U.S...

...With her death, the line of living witness ends...

...She became a friend, mentor, and confidante...

...The Mexican painter had become a global icon of feminism, and Ella was the main source for much of the "scholarship" that accompanied her cult...