FLASHBACK TO MY LONG AGO COMMUNIST YOUTH

 

Though sorrow lay deep on our souls

Though tears welled in our eyes

We gathered new courage from the grave

Where our brave comrade lies

Recently we went to the San Francisco Ballet performing a Shostakovich Trilogy. Gail had thrilled to this program a year ago and made sure I wouldn’t miss the repeat.

At one point in the marvelous performance, my tears poured out. At intermission, I tried to sing to Gail the words of a song that Shostakovich used as a theme in the Chamber Symphony. I couldn’t because sobs choked me again and again. The Chamber Symphony is based on his Quartet No. 8, dedicated to his friends who died in World War II and to all the lives lost in the Nazi holocaust. The theme (words above) was a workers’ funeral dirge dating back to revolutionary struggles in Czarist Russia.

Can I understand the tears? Can I explain the unquenchable emotion that still beats inside me from a childhood and youth such a long, long time ago?

The tears were for remembered heroes and martyrs of the 20^th century. They were for slaughtered millions on millions whose lives were known only to their loved ones and acquaintances. But the images that overwhelmed me were distinct and personal, especially vivid as they marked my childhood memory. 

There was Harry Hersh Simms, his murdered body carried home on the train that paused in Stamford, Connecticut as my family came to pay respects. A young communist, he was shot by hired thugs in West Virginia where he had gone to help miners organize. There was DeWitt Parker, family friend, who died in Spain fighting fascism as a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

When I was 11, I heard of Angelo Herndon, an African-American labor organizer arrested and convicted for insurrection after attempting to organize black and white industrial workers together in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. When I was even younger, there was Maurice Fitch, a black man beaten most brutally in the Stamford police station where my father and eleven of his comrades were assaulted because they had demonstrated for unemployment insurance.

I note here only a few distant memories that moved me deeply when I was very young. But that’s just a narrow window on a deep concern that matters so much from the vantage point of my tenth decade. That’s about the simplistic and distorted “history” of Communism that prevails today, especially in our country.

The history of the last century, so vital to our understanding of the world of today, is buried under a largely unchallenged establishment version that equates Communist with Stalinist and Stalin with Hitler. That version allows for nothing other than recounting the devastating crimes associated with Stalin and acolytes who replicated his tyrannical methods.

Socialist movements in general, and the communist current especially, became very influential in the first half of the 20th Century because they challenged an imperialist system that was generating global catastrophe. There were two unimaginably devastating world wars within little over twenty years and the unparalleled global economic depression of the 1930s. Moreover, Western capitalism sustained colonialism and the lingering legacy of recent slavery.

In 1917, during the chaos of the First World War, the brutal and backward regime of Czarist Russia was overturned and, after a fierce civil war, the Soviet Union was established.

Many people everywhere saw this as the dawning of a new social system, Socialism, based on the interests and power of working people, the majority, as opposed to the interests of a small super-rich ruling class.

In the aftermath of a devastating war and the successful Soviet revolution, there was an upsurge of communist, socialist, labor, progressive, and anti-colonialist movements all over the world. Their influence grew through their response to the deep depression of the 1930’s, the rise of fascism, and the defeat of fascism in World War II. Over the course of decades, several additional revolutions overthrew oppressive capitalist governments, most notably in China, Cuba, Vietnam and South Africa. Also, much of the traditional system of colonial rule by Europe’s major powers collapsed following World War II.

The history of communist movements in the 20^th Century is really two (or more) vastly contrasting stories, each highly relevant in the world of the present.

From one perspective — the one that pseudo-history wants to erase — communists showed remarkable courage and foresight in struggles for social justice everywhere. In the United States, where the communist movement was never large, it played an outsized role in building industrial unions, supporting legislation for unemployment insurance and social security, combatting lynching and Jim Crow. Internationally, communists were the first to recognize the nature of fascism and to fight it in the ‘belly of the beast’ in Italy and Germany. No surprise that the first target of the Nazis, signaled in the famous Reichstag Fire frame-up, was extermination of the communists. Enemy number one in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was the Soviet Union.

As for the Soviet Union, it was pivotal in turning the tide of World War II against Hitler’s armies at enormous cost in human life. The Soviet Union, along with the rise of Communist China, was a major catalyst in the collapse of the colonial system. Its support, and the role of South African communists, were credited by Nelson Mandela as vital to the victory of the African National Congress over apartheid.

As we remember the millions of Jews, homosexuals, trade unionists and victims of many nationalities who were murdered in the Nazi holocaust, we should remember that the blood of countless communist and socialist revolutionaries is spread to far reaches of the earth.

From another perspective, there is tragic paradox. The greatest and most obvious paradox is that Stalin’s rule was responsible for myriads of deaths and that he murdered thousands of communists in the name of “Communism”. The governments formed in Eastern Europe, within the USSR’s sphere of influence after World War II, instituted methods of autocratic rule, extensive surveillance and harsh suppression of opposition.

As in the Soviet Union itself, wherever communist-led or influenced governments gained power, there were major advances in literacy and in implementation of basic rights to education, health care and social welfare. Formerly very backward countries saw significant improvement in the place of women in society. But the contradiction between advancing social progress and the suppression of dissent only became more fixed over time. Anti-Semitism, rooted deeply in Czarist Russia and declared illegal in the early years of the USSR, rose strongly again after World War II.

Another tragic aspect of the paradox between the great good and undeniable evil that marks 20^th Century communist history is that it took so long for most communists to recognize the Mr. Hyde side of the contradiction. For me, it wasn’t until it was exposed by then Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. I explored this to some extent in my 1995 memoir, “Looking for the Future”.

Why come back to it now? Because both of the contrasting stories remain unfinished business of no small importance today.

It is not simply a nostalgic matter of doing justice to the idealism and hope of earlier socialist movements, and to the heroism and self-sacrifice that communists contributed. The imperialist system that plagued the planet and called forth the historic revolutionary challenge of the 20^th Century remains a menace today. Capitalism continues to generate inequality, now at an exponential rate. It plows on, fueled by an inherent and insatiable greed that subverts any serious effort to deal with climate change and environmental crises. Profit and markets take precedence over the existential need for cooperation among nations to eliminate cascading wars and the ultimate threat of nuclear disaster.

It is an oppressive system that favors oligarchy over democracy wherever it is dominant. Every movement for social change in our country confronts the obstructive power of huge financial interests. Significant reforms have been and can be won. There isn’t a major issue where that’s not possible, domestic problems and even foreign policy included. But though reform is not revolution, the struggle is all the more effective to the extent that movements recognize the system they’re up against.

We’re just coming through an impressive learning experience during the two-term presidency of Barak Obama. One can speculate over what President Obama should or shouldn’t have done, but any positive step evokes the fiercest opposition from the GOP and its obscene billionaire sponsors, the Koch brothers and the Adelsons (not to ignore some Wall Street-friendly Democrats and all the racists who want to make the White House “white” again). Obama, backed by two strong electoral majorities, came head-on up against the system even though he tried hard to gain its confidence.

The battles to change society for the better continue in various forms in every part of the globe. Given the precarious state of today’s world, that’s a dire necessity, not simply an expression of idealism and hope.

Both the achievements and the failures of revolutionary movements of the last century impact the prospects for social change and survival in this century. Much is still to be answered about why the revolutionary challenge to imperialism fell short, why efforts to create socialist societies proved so difficult, why grotesque distortions undermined noble aspirations. The questions are many, the answers still to be developed through new experience and new thinking.

My purpose in this reflection on the past is simply to advocate for an honest and necessary look at a whole history. It’s not only with regard to communism that history has to register dramatically contradictory realities. That’s reflected in the evolution of most social movements and certainly in the history of nations, a primary example being our United States. What is harmful and shameful is to bury the history of movements for a better society under an anti-red cloak of denial.

As I write this, Shostakovich’s powerful tribute is with me again. And I remember many gentle and idealistic folk, now gone, whose daily lives were selflessly committed to a decent and humane future of full equality. Among them were my parents. I remember with pride.