Duped and Self-Duped

Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen; Melbourne University Press, 2008, $49.95.

The phenomenon of Soviet fellow travellers is well known—true believers from the West who travelled to the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1950s, many deliriously wanting to believe it was a burgeoning paradise. They were duchessed into believing their dreams were true. The exhaustive exposé on this topic is Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims.

Fellow travellers were not randomly selected—they tended to be people with big egos and ideological minds, both of which rendered them blind to other perspectives. They deluded themselves into believing they could become instant authorities on the Soviet Union in a few weeks. In fact they were out of their depth, as they mostly didn’t know the language; they were in a vast country whose traits were foreign to them; they didn’t understand the unique nature of communism and totalitarianism; they voluntarily withdrew their critical faculties; and their experiences were extremely limited—they met none of the millions of prisoners then in Stalin’s concentration camps who might have set them wise. They developed a foolproof system of avoiding reality—anything bad was part of the dying remnants of the old system, anything good part of the wonderful new system. They were duped and self-duped.

Political Tourists consists of chapters by individual contributors on about fifteen Australian political pilgrims to the Soviet Union in this period, some of whom were given guided tours organised initially by VOKS (a Soviet organisation called the All-Union Society for Cultural Contact with Abroad). But the editor, Sheila Fitzpatrick, who has identified sixty-four such visitors, is out of step with her contributors, who have no doubts about deploying the terms “fellow travellers” and “political pilgrims” as useful tools of political analysis. Fitzpatrick baulks from accepting these terms, using instead the anodyne and uninformative “political tourists” and “travellers”. She blurs the issue by arguing against the straw man that all visitors were “dupes of the Kremlin”, which nobody has ever alleged. As an example of one who was not duped she gives the writer Betty Roland, but Roland joined the Australian Communist Party (CPA) on returning to Australia!

Five political pilgrims—Katharine Susannah Prichard, Ella Winter (wife of Lincoln Steffens), the journalist James Aldridge, the organiser Muriel Heagney, and Jessie Street—come out worst, being the full bottle, very close to the Communist Party, never criticising the Soviet Union, and proselytising for it after they left. Some of them never recanted even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The writer on Prichard, John McNair, shows she was deliberately dishonest in suppressing doubts about the Soviet Union. Another group—the engineer Prof Greenwood, the educationalist Esmonde Higgins, the psychiatrist Reg Ellery, and the writers Guido Baracchi and Betty Roland—were sympathisers, returning to praise the Soviet Union, but later saw they were wrong and to their credit recanted, being bitter at the Soviet authorities for having tricked them. They saw themselves as victims, but as far as I know they didn’t apologise to the real victims—the ordinary Soviet people.

Professors Max Crawford and Eric Ashby, academics who served in the Australian Delegation in the Soviet Union, come out best, as they went as observers prepared to give the Soviet Union a go, but were rapidly disillusioned and made this clear. In discussing their cases, the name of the head of the Australian mission, J.J. Maloney, comes up frequently. Maloney wrote a book exposing the system, Inside Red Russia, which focused on the Soviet Union’s “repressive and oligarchic political structure”. It would have been enlightening to have a chapter in this book on him to show how he in general got it right, in contrast to most of the others.

Kay Dreyfus contributes a fascinating account of the fate of the Weintraub Syncopators, a renowned German Jewish jazz ensemble who got into serious trouble when they toured the Soviet Union, and were harassed by Australian security authorities when they came here in the late 1930s.

The chapters on individuals are frank and revealing; the authors, though generally from the Left, have no interest these days in defending the old Soviet tyranny and its true believers. Some of those who went were women, who naturally looked to the Soviet Union as a beacon of light in the field of women’s rights. But listen to what Sheila Fitzpatrick has to say on this topic:

It was not delusory to come to the Soviet Union if women’s equality was your interest: while Soviet practice was imperfect and Soviet claims often exaggerated, nevertheless the legislation on women’s equality existed, the support network for urban mothers was innovative in principle (however patchy in practice) and women were in the workforce in greater numbers than anywhere else at the time.

This is the true voice of the fellow traveller speaking (in 2006, mind you, not 1936), with all the classic fellow traveller rationalisations, such as that legislative intention mattered. Notice the vague circumlocutions (the double negative “not delusory” because she can’t say “sensible”), the qualifications which throw doubt on each statement, and the absence of concrete examples. One remembers Orwell’s words in “Politics and the English Language”: “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them … A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.” To give a real instance from the time: Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” describes Russian women, Akhmatova included, queuing up endlessly in the cold with food parcels for husbands and sons imprisoned for no reason at all. That was the reality. No wonder Sheila Fitzpatrick doesn’t like the term “fellow traveller”.

One other contributor, Lenore Coltheart, writing on Jessie Street, falls into the same trap when she writes:

If foreign visitors who thought they saw the future in the Soviet Union in the 1930s were guilty of partiality, so were those who saw them all as one great gullible straw “fellow traveller”. Why that pseudo-analysis persists is no less important a question than why foreign visitors knew or reported so little of the underside of the Soviet experiment.

You only have to unpack this notion to see how reprehensible it is: Paul Hollander is as guilty as K.S. Prichard; those who opposed Stalinist tyranny are as bad as those who supported it. Try that for size. False moral equivalence of this kind leads to a complete absence of acknowledging the horror of Stalin’s regime.

Sheila Fitzpatrick has been a leading revisionist historian of the Soviet Union, arguing against the idea that it was a totalitarian monolith with Stalin instigating a reign of terror from the top. She emphasises action from below—“everyday Stalinism”—cadres manoeuvring to get ahead by pushing aside their peers to get on and so instigating a dynamic “from below”, which in her view provided the motive force for the regime as much as Stalin’s “top down” terror. The revisionists have seized on a profound truth about totalitarian regimes, that each person is forced to become both a victim and an aggressor, but they have twisted this insight into putting blame for the terror on the Russian people as well as on Stalin. In the Times Literary Supplement of June 15, 2001, Martin Malia produced a devastating critique of the contradictions in Fitzpatrick’s oeuvre: “It was one thing to say that Soviet Russia had a social history … it is quite another to make social process the explanatory principle of Communism; and this was the revisionist’s real ambition.” It is a misguided critique because, in Malia’s words, “the Soviet regime sought to direct all human activity—economic, social, cultural—to one overriding ideological end, and … it used institutional terror to reach it”.

Although there is valuable material in this book, it skirts around a much more important issue. What fellow travellers did in the Soviet Union pales in comparison with what Soviet agents and their collaborators did in Australia. In Fitzpatrick’s list of the sixty-four Australians who visited the Soviet Union, one name stands out: Ian Milner, who spied for the Soviets. A chapter on him would have told us a lot about the attempted Soviet penetration, aided by some Australian communists and others, of our system over decades. An attempt was made to subvert our democracy, and to infiltrate totalitarian ideas here in government, the public service, universities, the media and cultural bodies. One only has to look at Milner’s activities at the University of Melbourne, the Department of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere.

The documents exist for such a study from Soviet archives, and Western intelligence and other sources. Such studies have appeared in the USA. The Australian journal National Observer recently published a convincingly documented article by Andrew Campbell on Dr Evatt’s closeness to the Soviet operation in Australia. We need more research of Campbell’s, not Fitzpatrick’s, type.