Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  The enforced unity of the American party was based on raw power. That power, in turn, depended on the favor of the ruling faction in Moscow. Policy consisted chiefly in guessing the winner in the struggle between Stalin and Bukharin. John Pepper, who prided himself above all on his political astuteness, was a Bukharin man. The Lovestoneite leaders would have embraced any winning Russian faction to secure their power, but they were tied to Pepper by the fact that he was the C. I. Rep.

  In the spring of 1929, Lovestone and several of his leading colleagues were invited to go to Moscow. They left, to all appearances, gayly. A special commission of the Communist International was going to settle “the American question,” by which was meant the leadership of the American Communist Party. The Lovestoneites had gone to receive the orb and scepter. For was not Comrade Bukharin, the great Russian leader, the protector of the Lovestoneites?

  In the absence of Lovestone and the other hierarchs, Robert Minor had been left in charge of the party. In those days, I saw even less than usual of my absentee editor. But from time to time he would tear into the office with a “must” news story written in the “national office” on 125th Street, favorable to “com-rade Boookhhar-reen.” In those days, Minor was radiant.

  One afternoon, he brought me, scrawled out in his handwriting, a big banner head to spread across the top of the Daily Worker. It said in effect: “Lovestone Backs Bukharin.” With it came a long story to the same effect. Minor’s instructions were meticulous. I was to let no one touch the story. I was personally to see it through the press. “Guard it like your life, Comrade Chambers,” said Comrade Minor. Faithfully, I watched while the story was set and Sam Shoyet set up the head. I was just about to lock the form when a frantic Minor shot into the composing room. He was hatless, breathless and very pale. “Stop press!” he shouted, for he was curiously given to melodramatics. One of the Lovestoneites in Moscow had somehow managed to get out the awful truth. They had backed the wrong man, after all. Stalin had won. Bukharin had begun a long death march that would take him, like John Pepper, to an execution cellar.

  Frantically, Minor tore out the banner head and substituted another. In effect it said: “Lovestone Denounces Bukharin.” Then, standing at a composing table, doctoring and rewriting, Minor exactly reversed the sense of the earlier story.

  It was too late. Stalin, as Alger Hiss was to observe to me admiringly some years later, always plays for keeps. He never forgives those who play against him. Appeasement moves him only to contempt. Stalin decided to transform the minority of the American Communist Party into the majority by a simple method. He would expel the majority as enemies of Communism. But since the art of politics consists not only in robbing an opponent of his power, but also of his following, those members of the majority who crawlingly confessed their political heresy and denounced their former leaders could remain within the party. This was a simple necessity. It was plainly impossible to expel all the Lovestoneites because there were not enough Fosterites to man a party. Moreover, the confessions of heresy would serve as handy political blackmail against the men who made them.

  XXIII

  I was now to witness something for which nothing in my Communist experience had prepared me and which would soon cause my first break with the Communist Party. I was about to witness the coming of fascism to the American Communist Party, and the American Communists were probably the first group on this continent to whom it came. At the time, and for a long time afterwards, I supposed that what I had witnessed was, to a large degree, simply the imprint of the peculiarly malevolent character of Joseph Stalin, his personal perversion of what in itself was good. Not until much later would I recognize that Stalin’s personal character was not the point at all.

  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.

  I recognized the effects and reacted from them violently, but I failed to identify them for what they were. As usual in such a failure of intelligence, the penalty was high, for if I could rightly have understood what then I saw, I should have ceased to be a Communist, and many people, including myself, would have been spared much suffering later on. As it was, my reaction was strong enough to drive me out of the Communist Party for a time. But since my break was not intelligent, since I broke with effects and not with their cause, with Stalin and not with Communism, I would presently return to the party, a more devout Communist than when I left it.

  The reception of the Lovestoneites in Moscow had not been warming. They found themselves virtual prisoners. The hearings before the special commission were an inquisition. At one point, Comrade Stalin himself, through an interpreter, took a hand in interrogating Lovestone. Mimeographed transcripts of that hearing were soon circulated in the American Communist Party, and Comrade Vern Smith triumphantly let me peep at a copy.

  One passage fixed itself in my mind. The ruined Lovestone had been trying to shift responsibility for his pro-Bukharin activities onto Comrade Pepper. “But did not Comrade Lovestone know,” asked Comrade Stalin gently, “that he should not have been friendly with Comrade Pepper?” I never forgot the line in whose blood-chilling softness could be felt the constriction of a serpentine force. For Comrade Pepper was delegated by the Communist International precisely to advise and direct Comrade Lovestone, and there was no reason at all why Lovestone should not have been friendly with him, and every reason why he should. And that no one knew better than Comrade Stalin.

  Lovestone and the others were held prisoner for several months. Meanwhile, the Fosterite leaders, who were also in Moscow, were sent home to shatter Lovestone’s power in the American Communist Party by a reign of terror such as I had never beheld. There had been much that was politically corrupt and high-handed in the Lovestoneite control of the party. But there had still been two factions theoretically sharing equal rights. The Fosterites were harried and hampered, but they were recognized as a legitimate group. They were free to express their viewpoint in party meetings and in the party press. They held party offices; they had members on the Central Committee.

  Now, for the first time, only one group (the Foster-Browder group, as it was called after its leaders), and one viewpoint (the Stalinist viewpoint, which Foster and Browder represented ), was permitted in the party. All semblance of inner-party democracy had vanished. The slightest suspicion of dissent was punished by instant expulsion from the party. Until then, there had been one Central Control Commission, the party’s court of first and last appeal and punishment. Now, central control commissions were set up in all the sections to handle the glut of heresy trials. For a purge was on. The defections from Lovestone had begun. Denunciations were pouring in. The great charge was “Lovestoneism and right-wing deviationism.” Men settled many an old personal score under the dark, roomy folds of that charge. And, since the majority of the party had been Lovestoneites, there were few men and women who were not open to it.

  Someone from Moscow had to direct so sweeping a purge. Who he was I cannot positively say. But I believe, for reasons that I shall presently relate, that Stalin’s agent was a member of the Central Committee of the British Communist Party.

  Among the first to defect from him were some of Lovestone’s most trusted lieutenants—Robert Minor leading all the rest. He confessed his heinous errors and was generously permitted to continue as editor of the Daily Worker, while he zealously helped to prosecute the purge of his fellow factionalists or to bring the waverers over to the Foster-Browder side. Then in one big purge meeting, where the goatish Stalinists were publicly separated from the sheepish Lovestoneites, a dark, rough, slightly sinister figure rose and walked from the Lovestoneites toward the Foster benches. It was Jack Stache
l, another leading Lovestoneite. William Z. Foster saw him rise. “My God,” he muttered, “I believe that son of a bitch is coming over on our side.” He was. And he was welcomed, for Stachel was an important figure in the party’s trade-union work. He is better known to Americans now as one of the eleven Communist leaders convicted of conspiracy in New York in 1950.

  Deals were freely made to win away key figures to the new regime. Some years later, J. Peters was to boast to me that, for a price, he had brought over the Hungarian section of the Communist Party to the Stalinists. The price, he explained complacently, had been his appointment as chief of the whole underground section of the American Communist Party.

  However clouded by personal motives, in the end the question which all such men had to answer in their own minds was simple: which were they loyal to—Lovestone or the Communist International? It is not surprising that they answered as they did. But not all Lovestoneites defected or recanted. Scores of die-hards were summarily expelled. Others, for policy reasons, were not attacked at once. Cat and mouse was first played with them. They were encircled by Fosterite spies, usually in the guise of unwanted assistants whose business it was to contrive a case againt them.

  One of these slow sufferers was Mother Gitlow, then the head of the United Councils of Working Class Housewives (Comrade O’Flaherty’s Uncopwokwifs). The old woman asserted her Lovestoneism as belligerently as she had pled for food for the starving Irish peasants at my first Communist meeting.

  Her son, too, Benjamin Gitlow, refused to recant or confess political errors that he did not recognize and could not repent. A great purge meeting literally howled for his head. And Gitlow, who had gone to prison for his Communist beliefs, accepted expulsion from the party rather than bow to Stalin. His mother watched his public humiliation. It was more than she could bear (she died soon after). “Diamonds,” she screamed above the uproar, “diamonds you are throwing out of the party!”

  XXIV

  I watched the purge with growing revulsion, but it did not touch me personally. There was no political case against me. I had almost no enemies, and, since I was not registered in any unit, I was overlooked in the wild proscription. I had always been neutral in the factional fight, and while I had no illusions about the fate of neutrals in a war, and I assumed that my editorial post was a plum that the Fosterites would sooner or later covet, unlike most party functionaries, I did not care. I was not looking for trouble and I hoped to ride out the storm in peace. But as it lashed up, I grew more and more restive. I spoke and acted with hazardous freedom.

  One night I came upstairs, on one of my frequent trips between the composing room and the editorial desk. In the hall, I found some of my old comrades from the English-speaking branch—David Benjamin, his wife, Eve Chambers, and one or two others. They had just been expelled from the party. Their faces were drawn and distressed. They could scarcely speak. I do not know what impulse drew them back to the center from which they had just been cast out—for good, it developed, for they never returned to the party. I shook hands with them to show that I understood and sympathized. As I did so, I saw Jack Parilla, a hunchback from the Daily Worker business office, widely known in the party as a professional snoop, watching me with the delighted expression of a cat that sees a bird within reach. For even fraternization with expelled persons was ground for expulsion.

  Then the first member of the Daily Worker staff was purged. One night John Sherman was called before his unit meeting. John Sherman had always hated the factional dissension in the party, had deplored its waste and corruption. He had never admired Lovestone but he had let the tide sweep him into voting with that faction. Now he stubbornly refused to denounce Lovestone on command or to repent errors that he felt he had never committed. He was expelled at once.

  He stumbled into the Daily Worker office and sat down at his desk—a solid, solemn, broken man. As he gathered together some papers, tears streamed down his face. No one in the office would speak to him or even glance at him. No one dared. But there were covert smiles among his colleagues. I was busy at the copy desk and did not at once realize what was going on. Then Honig whispered in my ear what had happened. “You must do something for him,” he said.

  I walked over and placed my hand on Sherman’s shaking shoulders to steady him. I urged him to leave the office quickly so as not to prolong his distress. I stood beside him until he had collected his things. I walked out of the office and down the hall with him. I did not try to comfort him—what could I say?—but, as we parted, I embraced him.

  I walked back to the copy desk through a hushed office. The Stalinists kept their eyes fixed on their typewriters. Everyone knew that I had made my personal demonstration against the purge.

  Few acts of my life ever cost me so dear, for the simple reason that Sherman never forgot it. He was grateful and his gratitude was to be my fate. But there are few acts of my life that I regret less or which I should be so happy to perform again.

  Unlike many expelled people, who hovered, poor, hang-dog ghosts, around the dingy haunts from which they had been banished, snubbed or sneered at by their former comrades, John Sherman disappeared without a trace. During the next few years I sometimes asked what had become of him. Nobody knew.

  XXV

  Still no action was taken against me. No doubt, they reasoned: “Chambers is a sentimentalist. He is harmless, foolish and useful, for he gets out the paper. There’s always time to break a neck.”

  Minor spent most of his days at the Daily Worker now. He was banished from the higher intrigues of the national office and had to prove himself the indispensable editor. He instituted staff meetings, probably by command, for, through these meetings, the Stalinists now had a controlling voice in the management of the paper. Meekly, Minor would listen to Vern Smith and other Stalinists, whom in the past he had scarcely noticed. “Yes, Vern,” he would say deferentially, “that is an ex-cel-lent i-dea, Vern.”

  One day Minor called me into his office, and, after making sure that the door was shut, explained to me in a voice, hushed as much by awe as by precaution, that he must introduce me to someone of “the great-est im-port-ance.” There was someone on an upper floor of the building, who, from now on, would wish to read certain copy that went into the paper. Whatever he asked for I was to give him. No one but Minor and I were to know that the man was there. I was never to mention him to anybody.

  Then Minor led me upstairs to a room at the front of the building and knocked three times on its door. There was a sound of light footsteps. A lock turned and the door opened. In the big, bare, rug-less office stood a withered, gnomelike little man. “This,” said Comrade Minor, as soon as the door was carefully bolted behind us, “is Comrade Chambers, and this is Comrade Cohen.”

  Comrade Cohen took my hand limply, looked at me suspiciously and with apparent distaste, and uttered, in a richly unintelligible Scottish burr, something that I took to mean: “How do you do?” Beside this little Scotch terrier, Minor bulked huge. But his manner was little short of terror and mental obeisance. I quickly concluded that I was in the presence of the representative of the Communist International, that this little Scotsman was Stalin’s special agent in purging the American Communist Party, and that he had at last found time to turn his thoughts to its central organ. This view was presently confirmed by Harry Freeman, who, as an employe of Tass, had met the C. I. Rep socially.

  After that, I spent a good deal of time running copy from the Daily Worker editorial office and knocking three times on Comrade Cohen’s door. Comrade Cohen was a great reader of Daily Worker editorials and stories that dealt with internal Communist affairs. Just how much he edited them, I have forgotten. Sometimes he had original copy for me. For he spent part of his days, which must have been rather lonely in the big, bare room, writing occasional editorials for the Worker. I remember one about Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Labor prime minister, who had just made some abating gesture in that permanent crisis which, between the world wars, was known
as “peace.” The editorial was a fairly crushing assault on the prime minister’s honesty, and Comrade Cohen had headed it: Who Are These Angels of Peace? He was rather taken with the title and asked me, with shy complacence, as one practitioner to another, what I thought of it. I said I thought that it was really awfully good.

  One day Comrade Cohen jellied me by asking unexpectedly: “Do we have any feuilleton today, Comrade Chambers?” After I had clawed through the Scottish brogue, I decided that the unfamiliar sound at its core was the French word, feuilleton, which is European journalese for light reading. I told Comrade Cohen that I would show him what we had on hand. I rummaged through my “dead basket” and gathered up an armful of boiler plate so leaden that I had hesitated to print it. Comrade Cohen said that some of it was very acceptable feuilleton.

  But our acquaintanceship was destined to be brief. The formidable little Scotsman was still sitting alone in his big room, answering to three knocks on his locked door and terrifying Comrade Minor when I first broke with the Communist Party. I never saw him again.

  XXVI

  After several grinding months, the Fosterites had firm control of the party. Lovestone and his colleagues had been expelled. They had at last been permitted to leave Russia and return to the United States, where they promptly organized an opposition group and loudly proclaimed their dwindling minority to be the true majority of the American Communist Party.

  Within the party, the uproar slowly simmered down. Confessions were still published in the Daily Worker, but it had become an offense, itself subject to denunciation to the Control Commission, to reproach a Lovestoneite with his political past. Despite my provocative behavior with John Sherman and others, I seemed to have survived the purge. But I found that it is not enough merely to survive such an experience. I was confused and troubled, and more and more I felt that I had no moral right to continue editing the Daily Worker, where I had daily to set forth a political line with which I found myself in deep disagreement, and which I held to be often absurd, always harmful and dangerous to those who followed it.