by Patrick Iber
Times were lean, and the two men could do little but try to publish. Gorkin worked with another exile, Bartolomeu Costa Amic, to establish a publishing house. (Costa Amic had been sent to Mexico in 1936 by the POUM to lobby for aid to the Spanish Republic.) The product of their collaboration, Ediciones Quetzal, published Serge’s Hitler contra Stalin, explaining the reasons for Hitler’s attack on Stalin and making potentially scandalous claims, such as suggesting that peasants mistreated in the Soviet Union might be grateful to German occupying troops who provided them with food. (This might have been true had it come to pass, but in fact millions of Soviet citizens, most of them prisoners of war, were starved to death under Nazi policies that prioritized food for war needs and the German people.) Quetzal also brought out Gorkin’s account of his time in Spain, Caníbales políticos, which argued that Hitler and Stalin had both been counterrevolutionary actors in the Spanish Civil War. Serge and Gorkin’s arguments had no audience under existing conditions of war, and, short of funds, Quetzal folded shortly after publishing Serge’s book.50
But if they struggled for influence, Serge and Gorkin were the targets of a formidable campaign of defamation. In early January 1942 Lombardo Toledano’s El Popular accused Serge and Gorkin of forming a Nazi-fascist “Fifth Column.” Responding to the newspaper in a statement addressed to the Mexican public as well as government officials, Serge and Gorkin noted that their perspective was one of opposition to totalitarianism of all kinds. But that was hardly the point: their ongoing criticism of Soviet political terror was dangerous because, at least in theory, it threatened to undermine Allied cooperation. Given Trotsky’s fate, Serge and Gorkin believed that such a charge put their lives in danger. It was at this time that they wrote to President Ávila Camacho, declaring that they had no heart ailments or intention of killing themselves.
The campaign of defamation seemed designed to ensure that neither the Mexican government nor the United States would support or defend Serge and Gorkin. In contrast to the troublesome critics of the Soviet Union, Communists were playing valuable roles in the war effort; even the United States was pleased with their messages of unity and their negotiation of no-strike pledges. Exploiting that perception, one Communist newspaper in the United States published an article saying that Serge and Gorkin were giving the orders behind a series of “Trotskyite” wildcat railway strikes that were intended to disrupt shipments of vital war materials to the United States. In reality, the isolated voices of the anti-Stalinists were not a serious threat to wartime unity. On the question of defeating fascism, there was broad agreement to postpone and even accommodate ideological differences. In a pamphlet they published in their defense, Serge and Gorkin stated very clearly that their position was to celebrate the victories of the Soviet Red Army over Nazi forces. What they did not want to see was the use of these victories to justify Stalin’s past crimes. “Within democracy under threat,” they wrote, “within socialism and the workers movement we defend, essentially, freedom of opinion, the dignity of the militant, the rights of minorities, the critical spirit … We are profoundly convinced that it is not possible to defeat Nazi-fascism by accepting another totalitarian servitude, even if this should have a different basis.” Serge wrote about GPU tactics in foreign publications, and he and Gorkin argued that this was one reason Communists wanted them eliminated or kicked out of Mexico, from which they would be sent to another country and shot.51
The international attention that they received afforded them some protection, but Serge and Gorkin’s shared apartment was monitored threateningly. Serge’s widow, the archaeologist Laurette Séjourné, recalls that Serge was often followed; his son, Vlady Kibalchich, who became a major painter in Mexico, remembers a drive-by shooting during which his father threw him behind a tree to protect him. In February 1942 a signature campaign from the United States—with support from more than 170 prominent intellectuals, including Roger Baldwin, Daniel Bell, James Burnham, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Reinhold Niebuhr—asked that Serge and Gorkin be protected and that the smear campaign against them come to an end. The signatories—especially when added to labor leaders whose signatures arrived later and were sent as an addendum—made up a who’s who of those who would directly engage the Soviet Union in the phase of the U.S.-supported Cultural Cold War that began in the late 1940s. The case of Victor Serge did not bring them together for the first time; they were mostly drawn from the anti-Stalinist circles of “New York intellectuals,” of varying Trotskyist, anarchist, socialist, and left-liberal political views, who felt deeply that purging the political Left of Communist influence was a vital task in the United States and around the world. But the case of Serge and Gorkin shows the dense connections that linked these U.S.-based anti-Stalinists and their allies in Latin America. They read and wrote for each other as well: Serge wrote for magazines in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it was also in this period that Octavio Paz joined Serge’s circle of friends, learning more about the POUM’s experience during the war and being introduced to the cornerstones of the anti-Stalinist left in the English-speaking world, Partisan Review and the books of George Orwell, who had fought with the POUM in Barcelona.52
But instead of finding safety in the support of their U.S. allies, Serge and Gorkin saw their danger escalate. In April 1943 they suffered a real attack at the Erlich-Alter-Tresca memorial. Many details of the violence that erupted that night remain obscure. El Popular, the newspaper of the CTM controlled by Vicente Lombardo Toledano, in which coverage of international events coincided with the Soviet perspective, reported that the speakers’ words were met with “unanimous objection that gave rise to violent incidents and scattered clubbing … [The act] had to be suspended.” That much was true: the event was suspended by the police, who eventually arrived to interrupt the brawl. El Popular omitted, however, any indication that the fight was incited by ninety-odd armed men recruited to break up the meeting. Serge wrote that the mob was led by Communist Party militants. Although the police arrived in time to prevent any deaths, several were injured in the attack, including Gorkin, who acquired a prominent indentation in his forehead that remained for the rest of his life.53
Some of the attackers were arrested at the scene. According to Serge, all offered a coordinated response to police questioning, giving a false account that they had broken up a fascist meeting, spontaneously enraged when they heard shouts of “long live” Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini. There were members of CTM unions among those taken into custody, and affiliated unions immediately undertook a campaign of letter writing to the president of Mexico. Claiming that their members had been arrested unjustly while acting to defend Mexico from fascists and “Jewish Trotskyists,” the letters accused Serge and Gorkin of being Gestapo agents and requested that they be placed in concentration camps or expelled from the country.54
Two days after the assault, in the pages of the anti-Communist establishment newspaper Excélsior, Gorkin accused Vittorio Vidali and three other foreign Communists of having masterminded it. Five days later he went to the authorities with the same complaint. Gorkin and Vidali had exchanged accusations for some time: Vidali held Gorkin responsible for his arrest and solitary confinement two years earlier. (He had been pardoned directly by the president after the personal intervention of Siqueiros, who had fought with Vidali during the Spanish Civil War and was at the time jailed for his involvement in the first, failed attack on Trotsky’s compound.) It is likely that both Gorkin and Vidali exaggerated the influence of the other, cloaking political resentment in fantasies of sinister power.55
Rather than protecting them as it had Trotsky, the Mexican government viewed the presence of Serge and Gorkin as inconvenient. One Mexican weekly that brought on Gorkin as an editor and Serge as a contributor fired them under pressure from the Soviet embassy after a failed attempt to force them out by Minister of the Interior (and future president) Miguel Alemán, who was, in turn, pressured by the Soviet and British ambas
sadors to deny Serge and Gorkin a public platform. When an article appeared in Excélsior in 1944, likely based on a forged document, alleging that foreign agents were preparing the Sovietization of Mexico, the authorities interrogated Serge, Gorkin, and their friend Marceau Pivert, worried that they might have been involved in the article’s preparation. They seized anti-Stalinist writings from Serge and Gorkin’s home.56
Although his work could not be published, Serge continued writing, penning his memoirs and two novels, including his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a sophisticated modernist novel of the Soviet purges of the late 1930s. The end of the war thawed Serge’s isolation, and there were offers for some of his works in 1946. But he died nearly penniless, of heart failure, in November 1947, before some of the same political forces that had made his life so difficult created a generous bounty of opportunities for others on the anti-Stalinist Left. Proof of the importance of the change in political climate at the start of the Cold War comes from the publisher Bartolomeu Costa Amic’s trajectory: a failure with Ediciones Quetzal, he returned to printing with an imprint bearing his own name and became the house publisher of the anti-Stalinist Left in Mexico. What was ruinous during World War II would become a tidy, if modest, business during the Cold War. Gorkin, too, would take advantage of the many opportunities that the Cold War granted to professionalize his anti-Communist activities, working closely with the CIA on multiple projects for many years, on the same grounds established by the anti-Stalinist Left in its long years of exile.57
But with respect to the Cultural Cold War, the continuities from earlier decades are more striking than the discontinuities introduced by U.S. government involvement. The Communist movement had spun off dissidents since the 1920s and created more with each passing year. Whatever the circumstances, Soviet propaganda made the USSR out to be the paladin of progressive politics, and its critics the knights of reaction. Anti-Stalinists who tried to make a space for different socialist visions had to call for respecting diversity of thought and art; their experience of the Soviet Union (and that of many others) was totalitarian, so they asked for freedom. With the threat of fascism largely removed by World War II, antitotalitarians were left primarily with anti-Communism, which is what would make them attractive partners for the United States, even though the forms of anti-Communist social democracy most had by then adopted were well to the left of mainstream politics in that country.
Long before the Cultural Cold War of the late 1940s came to be, then, this sometimes bloody international civil war among left-wing intellectuals had already taken shape. The early Cultural Cold War featured organized and often dishonest campaigns by Communists to silence, marginalize, and eliminate their critics. At the same time, professional anti-Communists like Gorkin pinned any evil on Communists on the basis of thin evidence and general principle. While Communists had their own newspapers to advance their claims, the anti-Communists often did so via publishers whose interest did not lie in a socialist critique of Communism gone awry, but who worked on behalf of more conservative interests, eventually including the U.S. government. More generally, the Cultural Cold War’s blurring of the lines between the work of artists and agents, writers and trade unionists, and intellectuals and propagandists was already on full display in these earlier decades. But if some elements of the Cultural Cold War predated the “official” Cold War of the late 1940s, when it did arrive, new state support poured, and then gushed, into the conflict. The USSR and the United States made it possible for the internecine struggles of the Left and its intellectuals to be inscribed in a much grander tale than they would have otherwise managed, while at the same time making words like “peace” and “freedom” simultaneously noble ideas and cheap state propaganda.
CHAPTER TWO
Making Peace with Repression, Making Repression with Peace
The year was 1949, and, contrary to expectations, Pablo Neruda was still alive. Few had seen him for months, and rumors swirled. His home country of Chile, one of the most established democracies in Latin America, had taken a repressive turn. Its president, Gabriel González Videla, had been elected in 1946 in a Popular Front–style coalition that included members of the Chilean Communist Party. In power, however, he turned against that alliance, in part because he needed international loans and had to satisfy a U.S. government that disapproved of coalitions that included Communists. He pushed the Communist Party out of his cabinet and used the occasion of a coal miners’ strike to arrest party leaders and close down their newspaper. His government began to hold hundreds of political prisoners at a concentration-camp town in Chile’s far northern desert.1
Neruda, a party member, might have been among them, but his fame as a poet and his legislative immunity as a senator afforded some protection. In January 1948, on the floor of the Senate chamber, he read out the names of political prisoners and accused the president of betrayal and tyranny. “I am a persecuted man,” Neruda said, “and justly so. A tyranny must begin by persecuting those who defend liberty.” Neruda fled underground, where he spent more than a year hiding from the police in the homes of sympathizers. In September the Chilean Senate and Chamber of Deputies passed—with broad support, including many members of the Socialist Party—the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, unofficially known as the “accursed law” (ley maldita), barring members of the Communist Party from participating in political activity. In mid-1949 Neruda escaped from Chile to Argentina, making the treacherous journey across the Andes on foot and horseback. Eventually he reached Buenos Aires. Crossing illegally to Uruguay, he sailed for Paris, where his friend Pablo Picasso had made arrangements for his arrival. The world learned that Pablo Neruda was alive when he revealed his identity to the astonished and ecstatic crowd meeting at an event known as the World Congress of Partisans for Peace.2
Neruda’s choice of venue was a carefully calculated political act. Pablo Neruda, the great poet of love and passion, persecuted by distant tyrants, appeared in Paris to tell the youth of Europe that peace would vanquish warmongers and imperialists. He was received rapturously. Picasso, who had also joined the Communist Party, had painted a dove for the occasion; the poster was plastered on walls throughout the city, and the success of his image made the dove a secular icon of peace from that moment on. The symbolism of the dove and the poet aligned well. Those who sought war would be defeated: Pablo Neruda survived to show that it was so. The conference established the Permanent Committee of Partisans of Peace—re-formed as the World Peace Council (WPC) in November 1950—a body constituted to work for peace and condemn a nuclear first strike. Neruda and other luminaries joined the committee, showing that the world’s great minds were taking responsibility to ensure a more peaceful future for a world shattered by war.3
That, at least, was how its supporters saw it. But the WPC was not simply the spontaneous response of frightened citizens to the specter of war. It was also the first great front group of the Cold War, sponsored, supported, and guided by the Soviet Union. Its understanding of peace corresponded to the needs of Soviet foreign policy, which were assumed by definition to be peaceful. At the beginning of the Cold War, it mobilized mass signature drives and inspired the work of famous artists from around the world. Yet in spite of its importance to the history of the Cultural Cold War, the WPC has received relatively little direct attention from historians. Some simply dismiss it as a fundamentally unserious instrument of Soviet propaganda, and plenty of Communists and participants agreed. Fernando Claudin, the dissident Spanish Communist and historian, called it a “chameleon disguise for the Communist movement and its offshoots.” Picasso, in spite of his participation, was not unaware of its ironies. Privately, he noted that his painting of a “dove” was an appropriated pigeon, and pigeons are quarrelsome birds. Other disgruntled participants called WPC supporters “pigeons” too, holding them in contempt for flocking to see carefully orchestrated tours of socialist states. To them, the WPC served as a kind of intellectual Potemkin village, its noble
rhetoric masking the role it played in shrouding both quotidian suffering and aggressive behavior by the Soviet bloc.4
Historians have observed that the WPC created problems for peace and antinuclear activism that fell outside the Communist orbit. Independent activists in the United States and Western Europe and within the Soviet Union itself grew wary of an organization that associated all aggression with the West. This literature makes clear that in spite of Moscow’s predominance, Communists outside the Soviet Union and even non-Communist groups developed WPC campaigns for their own ends. Yet the WPC, seen as a Communist front, made all peace activities seem potentially subversive, and that was a notion that hostile governments were only too pleased to encourage.5
In Latin America, as elsewhere, WPC activity was largely confined to Communist circles and was best represented by prominent Communist artists such as Neruda, the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, Mexico’s Diego Rivera, and the Argentine writer María Rosa Oliver. But the evidence from the region does show the situational meaning of WPC work and the way in which it created two types of victims. On the one hand, to the Soviet Union, the WPC campaigns were part of broader efforts to rearm and to create sympathetic buffer states, and also part of strategies of intellectual and cultural repression at home. Through the WPC, the Soviet antifascist campaigns of the 1930s were redirected in the early years of the Cold War as antibourgeois, anti-imperialist criticism of the United States and its presence around the world in the postwar order. It articulated a critique of what it called “cosmopolitanism” that served, among other things, as a platform for criticizing the influence of popular culture from the United States. Artists associated with the peace cause tried to craft, either voluntarily or because they were forced to do so, a socialist realism based on the defense of national and folk art traditions.6
