No. 142: In Denial: Leftist Scholars Turn a Blind Eye to Soviet Espionage

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage; Encounter Books; 2003; 316 pp.; $25.95

The truth about the tragedy and brutality of the Soviet regime was available for all those with eyes to see and ears to hear for the entire 75-year history of communism in the Soviet Union.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, a number of formerly secret Soviet archives have been selectively opened for periods of time, allowing Russian and Western scholars to look directly into that country’s history of horror. Among the documents partially made available were some relating to Soviet espionage in Western countries, including the United States. Two American historians, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, have devoted their research to the activities of the Communist Party of the United States and its connections to and funding by the Soviet authorities in Moscow. Their two books on this theme are The Secret World of American Communism (1995) and The Soviet World of American Communism (1998).

Assisting these investigations into Soviet spying in America has been the release of the Venona papers — the U.S. intelligence code name for the intercepted messages and communications between Moscow and their agents in the United States. Haynes and Klehr summarized those documents in their book, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999).

What has been a surprising result of those revelations is the resistance by many American historians to admit and incorporate these new findings into their accounts of 20th century U.S. history and the place of communism in that story. This peculiar and pervasive phenomenon is critically evaluated by Haynes and Klehr in their new book, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage.

The fact is that a sizable majority of historians are on the Left, and view themselves that way. That is especially true among historians who have written on the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and the American Communist Party. Their sympathies have been with the ideas of social reform and revolution. They are either strongly antagonistic to capitalism or, at least, highly suspicious of a market-oriented society. With all of its imperfections, the Soviet Union captured the ideal of a social order remade in the direction of “social justice.” To admit the truths about the Soviet experience, as far as many of these historians are concerned, is to concede the debate to the forces of profit and human exploitation.

Hence, those historians resist admitting such things as the fact that Soviet totalitarianism was worse in its long-term effect than Nazi totalitarianism, if for no other reason than that it lasted so much longer and affected far more lives around the globe. In particular, they have been reluctant to admit the numbers of people killed by communism during the 20th century — well over 100 million — even in the face of irrefutable evidence including the type of documentation one finds, for example, in the excellent, multiauthored work, The Black Book of Communism (1999).

In Denial dissects the refusal of those historians to accept that the American Communist Party was heavily funded by and rigidly under the control and supervision of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They cling to the starry-eyed notion that the CPUSA was an independent force for social change in America, merely responding to and reflecting the vision of a better and more just world.

Why is there such resistance to admitting these facts? The authors do not examine that question in much detail. But a clue is offered in another book, Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992), and is typical of the mentality that Haynes and Klehr discuss. Bullock says at one point, “The corruption at the heart of Nazi ideology lay in its ends. Domination, enslavement, extermination are evil in themselves and will corrupt any movement that pursues it.

“The corruption at the heart of communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally were the inhuman methods employed to achieve them.”

The blind spot comes from the inability to see that no system that wants to politically redistribute income, impose economic equality, and centrally plan what gets produced and supplied to whom can be humane.

The pursuit of such ends must always result in coercive means, regardless of the label under which it is undertaken or the people in whose name it is done. Thus, Soviet communism was no less evil in its chosen ends than those pursued under the Nazi regime.