THE PEOPLES OF THE SOVIET UNION by Corliss Lamont was reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe. Lamont was a relentless apologist for the Soviet Union and fervent supporter of Stalin. Wolfe was co-founder of the Communist Party USA and principal author of its manifesto.
Lamont insisted that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. This is disingenuous. He may not have had a membership card in his wallet but he was a true believer, a committed ideologue, a fundamentalist in the cult of Stalin and a key supporter, strategist, propagandist and financer of party activities, remaining faithful to the party line through all its devious twists and turns. He was far more useful to the Party as an “independent thinker” who "independently" thought that Stalin was a great leader, the Soviet Union a near perfect state and the Communist Party the answer to society's woes. As a birthright member of the economic establishment, he was relatively immune from the punishments meted out postwar by the right to the politically suspect.Wolfe, on the other hand, was a former Communist who had turned on the Party. Like many idealists in the early twentieth century, he had believed that Socialism would bring about a more just and equitable society. He initially supported the Soviet experiment and hoped it would lead the way to a more equitable world. He forgave the Revolution some of its early excesses, recognizing that the fledgling nation had powerful enemies within and without who sought to crush the experiment at the first opportunity. He trusted that in the end a true democracy would emerge. He had served as a delegate to several Communist Internationales. But at the 1928 meeting, his attempt to convince Stalin of the need for the US party to maintain an independent course was met with a six month house arrest in Moscow and expulsion from the party. Afterward Wolfe formed an independent Communist Party which was unable to attract more than a handful of members. His enemies on the left painted him as a disgruntled opportunist whose chief complaint was that he had not been given a leadership role.
Wolfe like other dissidents in the party in the 1920s had been influenced by the writings of Nikolai Bukharin. When Stalin murdered Bukharin along with his other rivals, Wolfe came to recognize the full brutality and totalitarianism of the Soviet state, seeing it as a perversion of Communist principals. Wolfe continued to support some party positions, for instance opposing the entry of the US into a war he believed was imperialistic in the 1930s. At war's end, he still considered himself a Marxist but his growing distrust of the Soviet Union would lead him increasingly to the Right.
In his review, Wolfe found Lamont's encyclopedic account of the various nationalities of the Soviet Union highly informative and useful but wrote that the “black-past and shining-white-present historical sections are of little value.” He noted that Lamont wrote that the Jews of the Soviet Union “enjoy a fully rounded ethnic democracy that no other country in the world at present gives the Jewish people.” While Wolfe acknowledged Soviet progress in eradicating the virulent anti-Semitism of the czarist era, he criticized Lamont for failing to acknowledge the progress of Jews in the US or England and for glossing over the suppression of the Hebrew language and Zionism in the Soviet Union. He criticized Lamont's nonsensical assertion that “Soviet authorities regard the right to secession very seriously,” which ignored Stalin's execution of the presidents of several supposedly autonomous republics for allegedly urging separation and his withdrawal of the previously granted right to secession to the Baltic Republics once his army had occupied them. But more importantly, Wolfe wrote, he objected to Lamont's consistent use of the term “ethnic democracy” in describing the status of the subject nationalities. To Wolfe, “ethnic equality” would be acceptable, although he noted you could claim “equality” in a system where no one had any rights.
Another book about the Soviet Union, RUSSIA AND THE WESTERN WORLD by Max M. Laserson, was reviewed by Hans Kohn. The book dealt with the relationship of the Soviet Union with the western world and provided a more balanced view of Stalin’s state than Lamont’s propaganda vehicle. No admirer of the dictator, Laserson was optimistic that Russia would move toward democracy and a better relationship with the non-Communist nations in the postwar era. "The reader need not share his optimism to benefit from his dispassionate and well-informed discussions," wrote Kohn.
In the book, according to Kohn, Laserson argued that the Soviet Union had strayed far from Lenin's intentions and did not represent the triumph of true Communism. The nation's industrialization and collectivization had required the participation of the capitalist world. The Soviet brand of Communism gave primacy to nationalism. State power and militarism had not withered away as originally promised but intensified. This evaluation squared with the criticisms of other democratic Marxists who had grown disenchanted with Stalin and the totalitarian state he had established. Kohn wrote that the question for the future was whether Russia would move toward democracy or remain committed to a "social ideological system."
Laserson expected that the rigid control by the state of every aspect of life eventually would lead to a public backlash demanding greater liberty. He trusted that greater literacy was conducive to democracy. But Kohn pointed out that high literacy rates in Japan and Germany actually had made government manipulation of public opinion easier. What might eventually bring change in Kohn's opinion was the growing contact with the West, the rise of Russian social welfare to the standards of the western democracies and the opening of Russia to freedom of information and cultural contacts.
In the recent reissue of this book, the author's name is given as Max Laskerson.
The son of the chairman of J. P. Morgan, the Exeter and Harvard-educated Lamont was a member of the establishment and enjoyed a life of lavish privilege, waited upon by servants in his Upper West Side apartment. Howard Fast wrote of one dinner party that Lamont threw for Communist Party members where Lamont's butler brought in a huge brick of ice cream in a silver tureen. As his proletarian guests watched in dismay, Lamont let the ice cream melt unserved.
Lamont is often portrayed as a civil libertarian, humanist hero and progressive leader. This assessment is based largely on his virulent attacks on anti-Communists and anyone who criticized Stalin. His concern for civil liberties and humanism did not extend to the Soviet Union or to American critics of Stalin. When Stalin's purge and execution of of his rivals led many on the Left to break with the Soviet Union, Lamont praised the working of the Soviet justice system and called on those on the Left to demonstrate their solidarity with Stalin by supporting the purges. He denounced those independent Communists, Marxists and Socialists and other former colleagues in the Popular Front, who refused to defend Stalin's actions, labeling them all as red-baiters. Lamont praised Stalin's pact with Hitler as thousands of rank-and-file members fled the party in disgust. After the war he wrote a book on TheMyth of Soviet Aggression. When the non-Communist liberals and progressives withdrew from the American Labor Party, which had become dominated by Communists and party sympathizers, to form the Liberal Party, Lamont ran as the ALP candidate for US Senate in New York.
Lamont sometimes provided financial support to dissident factions of the Communists as well as to the mainline party organizations, but those former colleagues who had grown disillusioned with Stalin dismissed his claim to be an “independent thinker.” In private conversation with them at times he expressed some personal hesitancy about the Soviet Union, but, they pointed out, he thought it his duty to proclaim the Party line and defend Stalin in public discourse.
Laserson was an historian and legal scholar who taught at Columbia. He was born in Latvia and had served as Deputy Director of National Minorities in the Ministry of Interiors in the Kerensky government after the Revolution. He also worked with the Goskhran, the Soviet agency that confiscated privately held valuables and art works in the early 1920s. He returned to Latvia where he represented the Socialist Zionists in the parliament from 1922-31. When a dictatorship was established in Latvia in 1934, all political parties were banned. Laserson was arrested. He then left for Palestine. He emigrated to the US in 1939.
Like Laserson, Hans Kohn was a college professor, historian, lawyer and Zionist who was born in Europe and had immigrated to the US from Palestine. He wrote extensively on nationalism, Zionism and Pan-Slavism.