by Preston Paul
I think my strongest instinct is curiosity. When aroused, I suffer if I do not know what I want to know, and Moscow aroused me powerfully. Under the bombardment of its kaleidoscopically changing events, there could be no intellectual laziness or complacency. I read a lot, travelled, and talked with those foreign correspondents who felt Moscow’s excitement.7
In the summer of 1923, he returned to Germany and wrote five substantial articles on Soviet Russia. He then took them to New York, where he hoped to use them to get an assignment from the left-wing weekly magazine The Nation. He had first contributed to the magazine in 1920 with an article about Palestine.8 His Russian articles made a favourable impression on one of the magazine’s principal editors, Freda Kirchwey, who decided to publish all five of them, and this led to him being appointed as The Nation’s special European correspondent. Returning to Europe, he wrote articles on Russia and Germany for both The Nation and other newspapers. Eventually, his articles would be syndicated to several papers including the Baltimore Sun, Reynolds News in London and others in Prague, Oslo, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This would provide him with sufficient income to travel widely. On 3 June 1925, he published an article commenting on the fact that Hitler got six months for his part in the beer hall putsch whereas Communists who planned an insurrection got ten to fifteen years’ hard labour. Hitler wrote a letter of complaint, pointing out that he had actually served thirteen months in jail. In fact, it was partly Fischer’s observations of the rise of Nazism in Germany that intensified his sympathy for the Soviet Union: ‘Each time I got disgusted with Russia I had only to return to central and western Europe. The disgust dwindled.’ In the summer of 1927, along with a delegation of prominent American labour leaders and intellectuals, Fischer spent over six hours in Stalin’s company. He noted that he had ‘crafty eyes’, a ‘low forehead’ and ‘ugly, short black and gold teeth’, but was impressed by his slow, methodical method of argument. Fischer left convinced that Stalin was ‘unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous, and irresistible’.9
The other motivation behind Fischer’s sympathy for the Soviet Union was what he called its ‘spectacle of creation and self-sacrifice’. Having witnessed on his many travels the degrading poverty of much of rural Russia, he was enthusiastic about the prospect of the revolution bringing better food, hygiene, education and medical care. He had been struck, as he travelled across the steppes by night train, by the hundreds of miles of unrelenting blackness: ‘Now the electric bulb was invading the bleak black village; steel and iron were vanquishing Russia’s wood civilization. I translated Five Year Plan statistics into human values.’ In the grim years of the depression in America and Western Europe, the Soviet experiment seemed to Fischer, as to many other Western observers, to be a beacon of hope. At his Moscow apartment, he welcomed streams of American, British and European liberal enthusiasts who shared his views. Among them was the Spanish journalist Julio Álvarez del Vayo. He would contact him again in Spain in 1934 and yet again in 1936, by which time del Vayo would be Foreign Minister. Thus, Fischer came to know a huge array of influential intellectuals and politicians, most of them only too eager to believe the best of the Soviet system. He claimed acquaintance with George Bernard Shaw and Theodore Dreiser, with Sydney and Beatrice Webb and Harold Laski, with Jawaharwal Nehru and Rabindrath Tagore, with Lord Lothian and Lady Astor. He would never be shy about re-establishing contact with them in the future, particularly when he began to lobby on behalf of the Spanish Republic.10
These individuals – and their reactions to the Soviet Union – fascinated Fischer. After one tour with a group, he wrote to Freda Kirchwey:
those tourists whom I bossed around the country for forty days taught me a great deal… though I showed them the good and the bad, and finally delivered a whole lecture on Soviet weaknesses, they all went away as Soviet patriots. Indeed, towards the end, I was trying to check their enthusiasm and make them more critical because I have often noticed excitement over the USSR evaporate at the first contact with a cold wind of shortcomings unless the excitement is tempered with understanding.11
One of his colleagues who, retrospectively at least, did not share Fischer’s enthusiasms, no matter how tempered, was Malcolm Muggeridge, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Years later, converted to Catholicism, he wrote with jaundiced hindsight of the same people whose presence had delighted Fischer. Their credulity provided only ‘comic relief’, their praise for the system ‘as though a vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism’. He mocked Fischer’s readiness to give the Soviet experiment time to deal with centuries of backwardness: ‘Fischer was a sallow, ponderous, inordinately earnest man, dear to Oumansky [Konstantin Oumansky was then head of the Press Department of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs] as one who had never once through the years veered from virtuously following the Party Line.’12
It is certainly the case that Fischer, like most other correspondents, failed to report fully the great famine of 1932, although whether the Soviet censorship would have let them do so is a moot point. How much he knew is also a consideration, although he did occasionally refer to the famine as an unfortunate consequence of a necessary restructuring of Russian agriculture. Although he always looked at the Soviet experiment with hopeful expectancy, Fischer would, of course, eventually be disillusioned by the all-pervading sense of terror and insecurity. After the murder of Kirov, when the murderously repressive nature of Stalinism intensified with the judicial murder of the Old Bolsheviks in the Moscow trials, Fischer’s faith began slowly to be undermined. At first, he made a distinction between the trials and the social progress. To Freda Kirchwey, he wrote at the beginning of 1934:
you can’t shoot 103 whites thus giving the impression of a whiteguard plot and then exile Zinoviev etc. as the inspirers of the deed… I can’t write on it yet because the matter is not clear in my mind… I am convinced this is a regrettable and serious interruption, but only an interruption in Russia’s progress towards greater liberalism, but not much liberalism, nevertheless.
Just before leaving to cover the Spanish Civil War, he wrote in similar terms to his friend Max Lerner: ‘I believe that even the Zinoviev etc trial will not stop the growth of democracy. That growth is the product of economic improvement and social peace – the existence of both these phenomena is not subject to the slightest doubt.’13 His gradual, but unmistakable, change of heart would eventually earn him the hostility of the famous pro-Stalinist New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who would later refer to him as ‘the rat who left the sinking ship that didn’t sink’.14
During these years in Russia and Germany, Fischer perfected the technique that was to give him such influence, an influence that reached its apogee during the Spanish Civil War. In order to understand the Soviet situation, he travelled widely, but he also made a concerted effort to become personally acquainted with key politicians and then demonstrate to them that he was to be trusted:
The Bolsheviks were pleased to see a serious approach to the life of their country. Moreover, politicians talk freely when they are certain they will not be quoted – some politicians, I should say – and I gave proof in Moscow that I would be discreet. What I was told in secret I kept secret. I went on the good journalistic principle that a statesman’s information is his own until he releases it for publication. (Death also releases.) Besides, I am a good listener, and most men will talk about themselves or their work to a sympathetic listener.15
As he would later in Spain, he travelled in order to talk to ordinary people and to contrast their perceptions with what he had been told by the great and good. Through the success of his book Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum (1926), which was translated into French, German and Russian, he was commissioned to give lectures in the USA. In the course of research for his next book The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), he came to know the Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin and his deputy and, from 1930, successor,
Maxim Litvinov. He enjoyed a warm friendship and a rich correspondence with Chicherin, helped no doubt by the fact that his wife, Markoosha, had once worked as secretary to the great man. At first, Litvinov was highly suspicious of journalists and difficult to interview. By dint of persistence, and because they had apartments in the same building, Fischer gradually won his confidence. With his young children next to him in the evenings, Litvinov would tell Fischer of his meetings with Briand, Chamberlain and Lloyd George. With Litvinov’s help, he gained access to the exiled Trotskyist Kristian Rakovsky, who had been Soviet Ambassador in London and Paris before being exiled. Rakovsky uninhibitedly shared with Fischer both his memories and swathes of important documents. His two-volume work The Soviets in World Affairs (1930) was thus immensely well-informed. It was translated into French, German and Russian, but the Nazis came into power before the German edition could appear and Stalin refused permission for the Russian edition. Nevertheless, the book saw Fischer recognized in the United States as a leading expert on Russian politics and this eventually secured him ready access to successive Secretaries of State, Henry L. Stimson and Cordell Hull.16
Fischer was an immensely gregarious man. He prided himself on having regular bouts of laziness: ‘In Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York I loafed, played tennis, met journalists, family, relatives and friends and played poker with a passion. Once in Berlin I participated in a correspondents’ all-night poker game in which I won one hundred and twenty-five dollars. It seemed like a million in those days.’ He loved to talk shop with his fellow correspondents. In Moscow, he established friendships with many who would later share his support of the Spanish Republic, including John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, Walter Duranty, Anna Louise Strong and James Vincent Sheean. In Berlin, he met Edgar A. Mowrer, Hubert R. Knickerbocker and the man who became his closest friend, Frederick Robert Kuh of the United Press. While Fischer concentrated on meeting people, his wife Markoosha supported herself and their two children. In fact, he seemed never to put much energy into his marriage or his children and had girlfriends in various parts of Europe. He started to make a decent living from 1929 and only then was able to accept ‘partial financial responsibility for the family’. He remained jealous of his independence:
I have never been a member of any political party or of a trade union or, after my youth, of any club. I am essentially a libertarian and resent shackles, even personal ones. I can impose discipline upon myself but I would fight its imposition on me by others. This applies especially to intellectual discipline. For me the question of joining the Communist party never arose because I would not allow another person to tell me what to write or what to think.
He was often accused of being either a Communist or else in the pay of the Soviet regime, which he always categorically denied, stating: ‘If I had been a Communist I should not have been ashamed or afraid to affirm it.’17
Fischer’s eminence as a Sovietologist and as someone who moved back and forth to Russia led to British Intelligence taking an interest in him. Guy Liddell, the head of the security services, wrote that he ‘has written several books very favourable to Soviet Russia, and who, if not actually a Communist, is a very deep shade of pink’.18 They were equally interested in his friend Frederick Kuh, a pro-Communist journalist who used to be the correspondent of the Daily Herald in Vienna and was now the London representative of the United Press Association. In a letter to Kuh, somehow intercepted by the British security services, Fischer wrote from Moscow: ‘I haven’t seen anybody yet. I merely walk the streets to gather impressions.’ He wrote in an oblique reference to Stalin:
I heard that their big chief has frequent and more frequent fits of hysteria, has stamped his feet and raged even in interview with diplomats, and yells at the top of his voice and tears his hair when seeing his own people. He does not brook any opposition in even slight matters. The whole structure, however, is very strong. But the personal intrigues are endless, everybody being against everybody else.19
Fischer first visited Spain from late February to late March 1934. He travelled widely in the rural south. He interviewed numerous professors, journalists, parliamentary deputies and ex-ministers, including the ex-prime minister, Manuel Azaña.20 He renewed his friendship with Luis Araquistain Quevedo, whom he had met in Berlin when he was Spanish Ambassador there. A close adviser to Largo Caballero, Araquistain was founder and editor of the Socialist theoretical journal Leviatán, to which he had invited Fischer to contribute. He did, in fact, write six major articles for the journal, five on the Soviet Union and one on Poland, between June 1934 and June 1936.21 In Spain, Araquistain introduced Fischer into Socialist circles. Married to a Swiss woman called Trudy Graa, Araquistain brought Fischer back into contact with his brother-in-law, the journalist Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who was married to Trudy’s sister Luisi. Álvarez del Vayo, whom Fischer had first met in Moscow, was also close to Largo Caballero and had been his Ambassador in Mexico. Fischer carried a letter of introduction from Frederick Kuh to Lester Ziffren, the chief of the United Press bureau in Madrid, who thus became his guide to the circle of foreign and Spanish correspondents. He also hit it off immediately with the US Ambassador, Claude G. Bowers, with whom he became firm friends, united with him in commitment to the Republican cause. He also established close friendships with the artist Luis Quintanilla, who drew his portrait; with the physiologist, Dr Juan Negrín, with whom he spoke German; and with the American journalist, Jay Allen. Fischer quickly set off for a tour of rural Spain and what he saw made him fall in love with the country. It also left him with the conviction that so much poverty would lead to bloodshed. Indeed, he was shocked by a lack of food that seemed more acute than in a poor Ukrainian village and by the fact that thousands of peasants lived in caves.22
Fischer wrote later of the beginnings of his friendship with Negrín. Together with Jay Allen, they had taken a taxi together to Colmenar Viejo, forty kilometres north of Madrid, and talked to the working men in the plaza and in their homes. Negrín was indignant about the all-pervading poverty and even talked about the need to distribute arms to the proletariat:
We went into the cold stone house of a family which subsisted on bean soup and black coffee. The woman told us that her children had died of pneumonia. Negrín, who is a physician, said it was probably from undernourishment. A third child, seven months old, lay in a crib sick with hernia. The husband had not worked for months. They were in debt up to their ears, and saw no way out.
What particularly struck him was the dignity with which Spanish peasants bore their poverty, something he contrasted with the abject servility of their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts: ‘The working men in blue cotton shirts, small, puny men, wore a proud look. Their eyes said, “I am a man”, even though life was treating them like dogs.’23
At the end of September 1935, Fischer suggested to Freda Kirchwey of The Nation that she commission a series of articles about the growing crisis in international relations under the heading ‘Arms over Europe’. ‘I will need a lot of money,’ he wrote. As a great admirer of the work of ‘our favourite author’, she replied: ‘We are very eager to have you write for us and us alone.’ After discussing it with the other editors, she replied: ‘I am authorized to offer you the stupendous sum of $125 an article for a series of six to eight pieces.’ This was indeed a fabulous offer, about three times their normal top rate. Fischer acknowledged the generosity of the offer, but commented that his expenses would be such as to ensure that ‘my own income will be next to nothing. But I don’t care. I wanted to do this and I am glad you enable me to do it.’ In one of his letters to Freda Kirchwey, he revealed the seriousness with which he regarded his work: ‘I keep repeating to myself what I always keep in mind when writing: Don’t make predictions.’ He was desperate to avoid writing things that might later be proved wrong: ‘I think you will find me cautious in this series. I check every sentence with innumerable people, with my own background and with documents when they are available. You d
o not, I am sure, want sensations.’24
In the course of his visits in the last quarter of 1935 and early 1936, to London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, he consolidated his remarkable network of influential contacts among statesmen, ambassadors and journalists. He started at the League of Nations in Geneva. There, he renewed his acquaintanceship with a Soviet diplomat who was Russia’s member of the League secretariat, Marcel Rosenberg: ‘A hunchback with deep flaming eyes, he had made a big impression in Paris as Counsellor of the Soviet Embassy, and Paris salons angled for his visits.’ Fischer had known him there and in Moscow where they had often argued about the deficiencies of the Soviet system. His readiness to argue robustly with Soviet leaders led to him establishing a friendship with the head of the Comintern, the Hungarian revolutionary, Bela Kun.25
‘My head and files are full of material,’ wrote Fischer to Freda Kirchwey, and, in consequence, he wrote more articles than was originally planned. Freda was delighted with the quality, although she lamented that he did not employ a more personal ‘eye-witness’ tone. Moreover, the process of getting them and actually publishing them was immensely revealing. Fischer was both a perfectionist and sported a massive ego. He wanted the articles published in their entirety and as they were received, but The Nation simply had insufficient space. Two other problems were that, while travelling, Fischer did not see what else the magazine was publishing on the same subject and that there were inevitable delays in his copy arriving. Inevitably, some of what he wrote overlapped with other things already printed or seemed dated by the time that it arrived. This necessitated editorial intervention on his copy, which in turn led to a sharp response from Louis:
I feel very badly about the way you are using my series. I feel that you ruin this whole big piece of work by stretching it out so long. All the articles were connected in my mind and are connected in subject matter, and to print them over a period of four months just precludes a single, homogeneous impression. […] I cannot stand this way of destroying a piece of work to which I attached such importance and to which I gave so much energy and time and interest.
