A Witness and a Warning

Under the fiction of unity, the factions fought fiercely and shamelessly. Each sought to gain control by any means of the party press and all the units of the party organization. Each circulated secret mimeographed attacks on the other or promoted scandalous whispering campaigns…. [206]

The word “intellectual” was the most lethal in the invective vocabulary of Communism. No one who could read or speak fluently was entirely invulnerable to it. Even a high-school education laid a man open to attack. No matter how ably a Communist might argue a point, he could almost always be stopped by any illiterate who chose to fling the annihilating term. “Isn’t he an intellectual?” one comrade would ask about another in a tone of one teetotaler asking about another: “Isn’t he a drunkard?” [207]

No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange; that was commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else. More adroitly and more completely than any other Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction that the party line is always right.

He had been an ardent admirer of Trotsky. “The three greatest minds of our times,” he said to me more than once, “are Freud, Einstein and Trotsky.” But the moment Trotsky fell from power, Harry Freeman became a Stalinist overnight, and so completely a Stalinist that he was outraged that I should suggest that he had ever been anything else. I dwell on this because he was a faultless example of the Stalinist mind — instantly manipulable, pragmatic, motivated by the instinctive knowledge that political position (contingent in the Communist Party on unfailingly correct official views) is indispensable to political power. And that power he desired, not for itself, but for revolutionary ends, for without political power, nothing can be achieved in history — certainly not a revolution. [217-218]

Something in me more lucid than mind knew that I had reached the end of an experience, which was not only my experience. Out of that vision of Almighty Man that we call Communism and that agony of souls and bodies that we call the revolution of the 20th century was left that pinch of irreducible dust: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” It might stand as the motto of every welfare philosophy…. Henceforth I knew that I was in the pit, though my mind would seek to elude the knowledge for many months. [414-415]

His story has become a fairly familiar pattern since then. As soon as he reached Russia, after his recall from Japan, his passport had been taken away from him. He was completely without identification…. In effect, he was a prisoner…. Despair engulfed him — the despair of a man who finds himself in a hermetic trap from which there is no apparent escape, who realizes that he has given the better years of his life to an activity that he suddenly perceives to be monstrous, and who remembers that, far away and beyond communication, a wife and small child are waiting for him, and that he may not see them again.

His despair was heightened by the discovery that he was not alone. He found that there were a score of other Americans in Moscow, hopeless, wretched derelicts of Communism, who, like him, had been used and cast away, but who were not permitted to leave Russia. [408-409; See also Book Review of the Forsaken, about American emigrants who perished in Soviet Russia.]

More nonsense, if possible, has been written about the Purge than about any of the great events of our age…. The Great Purge was in the most literal sense a massacre. It was like one of those Western jack-rabbit hunts in which a whole countryside forms a vast circle that finally closed in on its victims and clubs them to death. The purgees, like the rabbits, had no possible chance to escape; they were trapped, arrested, shot or sent to one of those Russian slave-labor camps on which the Nazis modeled their concentration camps, substituting the gas oven for death by enforced starvation, hard labor and undoctored disease. This great massacre, probably the greatest in history, was deliberately planned and executed. In the interest of the Revolution … the group of Communists headed by Stalin decided that the historical situation through which the world and the Communist Party was passing, justified them in killing off those Communists who opposed their indispensable strategy and tactics. Those killed have been estimated from several hundred thousand to several million men and women….

The principle is the old Oriental one whereby a great king commanded a group of slaves to dig and construct a treasure vault. When the treasure was moved in, the king commanded a second group of slaves to massacre the first group, so that the secret of the vault and its location died with them. To make doubly sure, he then commanded a third group of slaves to massacre the second group, so that even the knowledge that the second group had massacred the first group was buried with them…. [76-77]

On a Communist, not only the numbers, but the revolutionary stature of the purgees, had a shattering impact. To the Western world, those strange names — Rykov, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Rakovsky, Krylenko, Latsis, Tukhachevsky, Muralov, Smirnov, Karakhan, Mrachkovsky — were merely tongue twisters. To a Communist, they were the men who had made one of the great transformations in human history — the Russian Revolution. The charge, on which they were one and all destroyed, the charge that they had betrayed their handiwork, was incredible. They were the Communist Party. If the charge was true, then every other Communist had given his life for a fraud. If the charge was false, then every other Communist was giving his life for a fraud. This was a torturing thought. No Communist could escape it. [78]

The Communist Party, despite occasional pious statements to the contrary, is a terrorist organization. Its disclaimers are for the record. But its record of kidnappings, assassinations, and murders makes the actions of the old Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party look merely romantic. [65-66]

One thing I knew: I was no longer a Communist. I had broken involuntarily with Communism at the moment when I first said to myself: “It is just as evil to kill the Tsar and his family and throw their bodies down a mine shaft as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death. More bodies are involved in one case than the other. But one is just as evil as the other, not more evil, not less evil.” … With that thought I had rejected the right of the mind to justify evil in the name of history, reason or progress, because I had asserted that there is something greater than the mind, history or progress…. this Something is God. [81]

The point was not that Stalin is evil, but that Communism is more evil, and that, acting through his person, it found its supremely logical manifestation. The important point was not the character of Stalin, but the character of Communism, which, with an intuitive grasp that was at once the source of his strength and his mandate to power, Stalin was carrying to its inevitable development as the greatest of the fascist forms…. [249]

That was the horror of the purge — that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not the evil, it was the sad consequences of the evil. It was Communism that was evil, and the more truly a man acted in its spirit and interest, the more certainly he perpetuated evil.  [79]

In 1937, I repudiated Marx’s doctrines and Lenin’s tactics. Experience and the record had convinced me that Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul. I resolved to break with the Communist party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family. [541]

I began a long recital of the political mistakes and crimes of the Communist Party: The Soviet Government’s deliberate murder by mass starvation of millions of peasants in the Ukraine and the Kuban; the deliberate betrayal of the German working class to Hitler by the Communist Party’s refusal to co-operate with the Social Democrats against the Nazis; the ugly fact that the German Communist Party had voted in the Reichstag with the Nazis against the Social Democrats; the deliberate betrayal of the Spanish Republican Government, which the Soviet Government was only pretending to aid while the Communists massacred their political enemies in the Spanish prisons. This gigantic ulcer of corruption and deceit had burst, I said, in the great Russian purge when Stalin had consolidated his power by massacring thousands of the best men and minds in the Communist Party on lying charges. [72]

There came a moment so personal, so singular and final, that I have attempted to relate it to only one other human being, a priest, and had thought to reveal it to my children only at the end of my life.

One day as I came down the stairs in the Mount Royal Terrace house, the question of the impossible return [to living openly in society as an ex-Communist] struck me with sudden sharpness. I thought: “You cannot do it. No one can go back.” As I stepped down into the dark hall, I found myself stopped, not by a constraint, but by a hush of my whole being. In this organic hush, a voice said with perfect distinctness: “If you will fight for freedom, all will be well with you.” The words are nothing. Perhaps there were no words, only an uttered meaning to which my mind supplied the words. What was there was the sense that, like me, time and the world stood still, an awareness of God as an envelopment, holding me in silent assurance and untroubled peace. There was a sense in that moment I gave my promise, not with the mind, but with my whole being, and that this was a covenant that I might not break….

The moment itself was something which to deny would be a blasphemy. It was decisive for the rest of my life, and incomparable in that I never knew it again….

Henceforth, in the depth of my being there was a peace and a strength that nothing could shake. It was the strength that carried me out of the Communist Party, that carried me back into the life of men. It was the strength that carried me at last through the ordeal of the Hiss Case. It never left me because I no longer groped for God; I felt God. The experience was absolute….

[Never] did I regard myself as an instrument of God. I only sought prayerfully to know and to do God’s purpose with me. And I did not suppose that those words, “All will be well with you,” implied my happiness, for I never supposed that what man means by well-being and what well-being means to God could possibly be the same. They might be as as different as joy and suffering. I only knew that I had promised God my life, even, if it were His will, to death.

This is my ultimate witness. [84-85]

I held certain facts to be self-evident on the basis of almost every scrap of significant foreign news: 1) the Soviet Union was not a “great ally” — it was a calculating enemy making use of World War II to prepare for World War III; 2) the Soviet Union was not a democracy; it was a monstrous dictatorship; 3) the Communist International had been dissolved in name only; in effect, it still functioned; 4) the Soviet Union was not a thin-skinned, under-privileged waif that must at any cost be wheedled into the family of free nations, but a toughly realistic world power whose primary purpose at that moment of history was conquest of the free world; 5) the indispensable first step in that conquest was the control of Central Europe and China; 6) the Chinese Communists were not “agrarian liberals,” but Chinese Communists, after the Russian Communist Party, the Number One section of the Communist International.

History has proved that, in the main, these views were right — at least, I think, no soldier in Korea would seriously question them. But in 1945, when it was most important to assert them because there was then still time to avert some of the catastrophe that would inevitably follow from a failure to grasp their reality, those views were anathema. They challenged an impassioned, powerful and all but universal official and unofficial pro-Soviet opinion. [497. For a similar viewpoint, read George Orwell’s forward to Animal Farm]

The fight in Foreign News was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine. It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning. [498]

To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else. [477-478]

Like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others. [499]

I thought about these things a moment that August evening after the telephone call from Washington, sitting quietly in the gathering dark. Then I snapped on the light and wrote my managing editor and understanding friend a brief memo. I told him that I expected to be subpoenaed. I told him that any act a man performs, even the simplest and best, may set up reverberations of evil whose consequences it is beyond our power to trace; that my action might cause great suffering. But one man must always be willing to take upon himself the onus of evil that other men may be spared greater evil. For the sake of his children and my own, that all children might be spared the evil of Communism, I was going to testify. [531]

I believed that I was not meant to be spared from testifying. I sensed, with a force greater than any fear or revulsion, that it was for this that my whole life had been lived. For this I had been a Communist, for this I had ceased to be a Communist… This challenge was the terrible meaning of my whole life, of all I had done that was evil, of all that I had sought that was good, of my weakness and my strength. Everything that made me peculiarly myself, and different from all others, qualified me to testify. My failure to do so, any attempt to evade that necessity, would be a betrayal that would measure nothing less than the destruction of my own soul….

For the moment had arrived when some man must be a witness, and so had the man. They had come together. The danger to the nation from Communism had now grown acute, both within its own house and abroad. Its existence was threatened. And the nation did not know it. [531-533]

The Communist Party exists for the specific purpose of overthrowing the Government, at the opportune time, by any and all means; and each of its members, by the fact that he is a member, is dedicated to this purpose.

It is ten years since I broke away from the Communist Party. During that decade, I have sought to live an industrious and God-fearing life. At the same time, I have fought Communism constantly by act and written word. I am proud to appear before this Committee. The publicity, inseparable from such testimony, has darkened and no doubt will continue to darken my effort to integrate myself in the community of free men. But that is a small price to pay if my testimony helps to make Americans recognize at last that they are at grips with a secret, sinister and enormously powerful force whose tireless purpose is their enslavement. [542]

There is probably no important magazine or newspaper in the country that is not Communist-penetrated to some degree. A staff member of one of the most persistently anti-Communist dailies in the country told me recently that the Communist Party book and registration number of its city editor, a man unsuspected and trusted for years, had just been discovered. So had the party book and registration number of another editor, of even longer standing and greater trust, while a switchboard operator, spotted by one of the paper’s reporters who had been smuggled into a Communist rally, turned out to be a high official in the Communist Party’s local bureaucracy. [475]

That power to influence policy has always been the ultimate purpose of the Communist Party’s infiltration. It was much more dangerous, and, as events have proved, much more difficult to detect, than espionage, which beside it is trivial, though the two go hand in hand. [427]

All the New Dealers I have known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends… I had noted its obvious features — its coalition of divergent interests, some of them diametrically opposed to the others, its divided counsels, its makeshift strategy, its permanently shifting executive personnel whose sole consistency seemed to be that the more it changed, the more it remained the most incongruously headed hybrid since the hydra. Now with a curiosity newborn of Berle, I saw how misleading those surface manifestations were, and tactically how advantageous, for they concealed the inner drift of this great movement. That drift was prevailingly toward socialism, though the mass of those who, in part directed, in part were carried along by it, sincerely supposed that they were liberals.

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution. It was only of incidental interest that the revolution was not complete, that it was made not by tanks and machine guns, but by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, or that many of the revolutionists did not know what they were or denied it. But revolution is always an affair of force, whatever forms the force disguises itself in. Whether the revolutionists prefer to call themselves Fabians, who seek power by the inevitability of gradualism, or Bolsheviks, who seek power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle is for power.

Now I thought that I understood much better something that in the past had vaguely nibbled at my mind, but never nibbled to a conclusion — namely, how it happened that so many concealed Communists were clustered in Government, and how it was possible for them to operate so freely with so little fear of detection. For as between revolutionists who only half know what they are doing and revolutionists who know exactly what they are doing the latter are in a superb maneuvering position. At the basic point of the revolution — the shift of power from business to government — the two kinds of revolutionists were at one; and they shared many other views and hopes. Thus men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves, except that it was just the Communists who were likely to be most forthright and most dedicated in the common cause. The political color blindness was all the more dogged because it was completely honest. For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made. Conscious of their own political innocence, they suspected that it was merely mischievous, and was aimed, from motives of political malice, at themselves. But as the struggle was really for revolutionary power, which in our age is always a struggle for control of the masses, that was the point at which they always betrayed their real character, for they reacted not like liberals, but with the fierceness of revolutionists whenever that power was at issue.

I perceived that the Communists were much more firmly embedded in Government than I had supposed, and that any attempt to disclose or dislodge them was enormously complicated by the political situation in which they were parasitic. Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. If only for the sake of their public health record, the liberals, to protect their power, must seek as long as possible to conceal from themselves and everybody else the fact that the Government had been Communist-penetrated. Unlike the liberals, the Communists were fully aware of their superior tactical position, and knew that they had only to shout their innocence and cry: “Witch hunt!” for the liberals to rally in all innocence to their defense. I felt, too, that a persistent effort by any man to expose the Communists in Government was much less likely to lead to their exposure than to reprisals against him. [471-473]

The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. This is not a charge. My opinion of that revolution is not at issue. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power. And with that we come to the heart of the Hiss Case and its strange manifestations. No one could have been more dismayed than I at what I had hit, for though I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power. [741-742]

A man in late middle age walked over to my table and asked if I were Whittaker Chambers. He was tall, with an austere dignity and evidently poor. He apologized twice for intruding, but, he said, he felt that he must thank me for what I was trying to do. I was embarrassed and said something to the effect that I hoped that my effort would at least be of some help to the American people. “Nothing,” he said bitterly, “nothing can save the American people.” Then he walked away. [764]

What is lacking in Communism? What lack is it that keeps the human level of Communism so low, that makes the party a rat’s nest of intrigue and faction? What is the source of its corroding cynicism, that makes the workers, in contrast to the Communists, seem like heroes of simple honesty, that makes us waste human life and effort without scruple and turns our greatest victories into sordid waste? Why is it that thirty years after the greatest revolution in history, the Communists have not produced one single inspired work of the mind? What is our lack?

No, in my despair, I asked at last: can it be God? … I began to sense that the two mirages that had beckoned me into the desert — the mirage of the Almighty Mind and its powers to plan human salvation — were illusions…. What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man.” The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.

“Man without mysticism is a monster.” I do not mean, of course, that I denied the usefulness of reason and knowledge. What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail — the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God. Thus, in pain, I learned the distinction between wisdom and knowledge — knowledge, which however exalted, is seldom more than the making of careful measurements, and wisdom, which includes knowledge, but also includes man’s mystery. [81-83]

The modern world has nothing better than this [labor / work / struggle] to give us. Its vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized — that is not for us. We do not believe that it makes for happiness from day to day. We fear that it means catastrophe in the end. We fear it if only because standardization leads to regimentation, and because the regimentation that men distrust in their politics is a reflection of the regimentation that they welcome unwittingly in their daily living. [517]