Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 3: The Academics

The Dominant Paradigm

The stereotype of the Soviet Union as the implacable enemy interacts with the view which many ordinary people in the West have of the Soviet Union. That is, it both reflects that view and endorses and consolidates it. Indeed the government would not be able to sustain the contention that the Soviet Union were the enemy unless its constituents also believed that to be the case. The views of ordinary people, therefore, and how they are formed and sustained are an important part of the defence mechanism of the system. They are not left to chance.

The picture of the Soviet Union and of Soviet people which is conjured up in the minds of people in capitalist societies is formed by a continual presentation of interpretations about it, depicting its life, its institutions, its morality, its intentions. These interpretations enter the consciousness of people through the usual ways in which ideas are communicated, through the written and spoken word via newspapers and journals, radio and television, videos and films, novels and text books. Through these channels a picture is formed which becomes the basis for conversation about the Soviet Union and is communicated to children and kinsfolk in general. It enters into the educational system where it is reinforced by text books. Eventually the picture becomes folklore. Images of the pictures enter language and are reflected in words and concepts.

This ideological process works subtly on the mind until it enters the consciousness of each person. In doing this it becomes a part of the dominant paradigm. In other words it helps to form the linguistic terms of reference which act as the basis for their perception of events and in doing so both defines the questions people ask of Soviet situations and presents them with the answers. It is dominant in the sense that it has priority over all other views in all the channels of communication and this is because it reflects the attitudes of the dominant bourgeois class towards the Soviet Union. In some societies in some periods it has such absolute priority that no other views can be expressed except at the risk of punishment. But this is an extreme and tenuous situation for it indicates that the society can only survive if protected by physical coercion. A society is in its healthiest condition when its dominant protective ideas act on people’s consciousness so that they think that the ideas are their own. It then so formulates the answers that when issues arise about, say, the Soviet Union, individuals have ‘instant’ explanations. They do not have to think a question out or delay a comment until some information has been collected. They draw on the image which has been created for them but which they now believe constitutes their own opinion. Opinion-forming is a very devious process for people can communicate ideas which they believe are their own but which reflect the interests of others. This is often the case in class dominated societies such as Britain and the USA.

An example of the lengths to which this opinion forming process can go was provided by Professor I Rabi of Columbia University, a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics in 1944 and a Presidential Adviser. He said “From the beginning we have coupled how terrible the weapons are with how terrible the Russian are. So the more you describe the horrors of nuclear war, the more you fear the Russians. One doesn’t even think of them as human at all; the diabolical Russian . . . We have wasted our substance now for 30 years and more fighting some phantom Russian . . . There are people in this country who hate Russians more than they love America.”1 The former New York Times correspondent in Moscow, David K Shipley, described how media copywriters went about this task when he wrote that “Vicious and absurd caricatures of Russians have become standard fare in a current genre of commercials and films. Russians are made to look like the Nazis and even speak with German accents”. 2 This process reached the level of absurdity in the USA in the 1980s with the production of such crudely anticommunist and anti-Soviet films as Rambo and Amerika.

Fortunately the authority of a dominant paradigm is never absolute. Where it does not reflect the actual experiences of people and appears to misrepresent them and, therefore, to mislead them, then it tends to become displaced and people look for alternative explanations. The displacement of inappropriate ideas is continually underway but it is a long process, proceeding unevenly and erratically. But it does mean that if the view of the Soviet Union as the enemy does not reflect the reality of the position of the Soviet Union, it will have only a tenuous hold on the imaginations of people. The more it is shown to be false then the more people will discard it, not all at once, but by questioning its relevance in bits and pieces until it all falls apart.

In the meantime, however, the commonly held perception of the Soviet Union performs the dual function of reinforcing the stereotype and of acting as an obstacle to understanding it. If people want consciously to understand the Soviet Union what should they believe, who should they believe, to whom should they turn for the truth? How can they penetrate the propaganda which has been layered on for decades? Should they turn to the experts, the Sovietologists, the Kremlinologists, who have researched the Soviet Union in all of its facets and have produced libraries of footnoted texts? And if they do turn to them what will they find?

The Story of Collaboration

What they will find is a story of collaboration with the establishment. Academic studies in general do not escape the taint of political manipulation. But in Soviet studies it is obviously and grossly present. Soviet studies, virtually alone amongst academic disciplines, are pursued, in the main, by people in universities and research institutes who are hostile to the subject of their research. The function of the experts in Soviet studies has always been to give intellectual legitimation to the stereotype. Indeed it is more than that for without the credibility which the multiplicity of research monographs provide, the stereotype would collapse. Notoriously, many doctoral dissertations about the Soviet Union have contributed to the subversion of that country. Very few monographs adopt even a dispassionate view of the Soviet Union and even less have positive comments to make about it.3

In the USA the bulk of the funds to finance research institutions and research projects dealing with the Soviet Union comes from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the US State Department, supplemented anonymously by the Central Intelligence Agency. British research is conducted mainly in three specially designated centres, namely the School of Slavonic Studies in the University of London, the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies at Glasgow University and the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at Birmingham University. Of these three, the Birmingham Centre, since it was directed by Professor Alexander Baykov in the 1950s, has contributed most towards understanding the Soviet system. By comparison with that in the USA British research is poorly endowed but it too depends on the government and large foundations for its funding. The intention of the donors is to draw extra lines in the stereotype, to make it clearer and more easily recognizable and the researchers frequently oblige. The work is done in strict conformity with the practices of social science research except that it is started from a hypothesis about the Soviet Union which is merely confirmed. All the ritual of uncovering sources, collecting and collating data and laboriously drawing conclusions is followed. The final results appear in footnoted texts between neatly and often expensively bound covers. They look impressive.4

It is incredibly difficult to find scholarly works in the USA or Britain which portray the Soviet Union in a sympathetic light. The most impressive recent American writer is Albert Szymanski, a sociologist from the University of Oregon, who in the course of writing Is the Red Flag Flying? in the middle 1970s purged himself of prejudice about the Soviet Union. He went on to write a balanced account of human rights in the USA and the Soviet Union called Human Rights in the Soviet Union.5 Szymanski risked the wrath of the US educational establishment with these works. Sadly he committed suicide early in 1985.

More names make up the British list but they tend to be concentrated in the generation which graduated well before the onset of the Cold War. The most notable of them have been Maurice Dobb6, Andrew Rothstein7, Sidney and Beatrice Webb8, and E H Carr, pre-eminent as an historian of the Bolshevik Revolution but also the author of the most lucid analysis of the Soviet impact on the West. The most recent example of a dispassionate analysis of Soviet affairs is the lengthy two-volumed study of the Soviet Union’s war with Germany by John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, 1975, and The Road to Berlin, 1983. There is also a small group of British writers who contribute to our understanding of the Soviet Union but who in varying degrees fail to shake off the influences of bourgeois social science. The most prominent of these are Robert Davies, David Lane, and Mary McAuley.10

There are two other categories of academics who subscribe to the formulation of the stereotype. There are those who do so out of conformity with the capitalist system or its institutions such as Western democracy but without a perverse interest in the Soviet Union. This category has many members from the social sciences. And there are those who regard themselves as a part of the Labour Movement but who do not consider for different reasons the Soviet Union as a socialist society. These emphasize the areas where it is claimed the Soviet Union has deserted or distorted or maligned socialist principles. The details of the criticism in all cases are similar but they supplement each other even when they differ. They are not of equal importance, however. The main body of criticism arises from pressures for conformity within the system. It is this which has priority in the communications channels and becomes part of the dominant paradigm. It most neatly reflects the interests of private capital. The criticisms from within the Labour Movement confirm the stereotype created by the main group. They do not have a separate identity but they are important in that they are directed at people who, other things being equal, are most likely to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union. They reflect ideological divisions which have occured in socialist movements.

The Anti-Soviet Socialists

The primary ideological distinction within the Labour Movement is that between communism and social democracy. Its basis is analytical, involving different, contradictory perspectives of reality. It is not simply about attitudes towards the Soviet Union. Indeed these are by-products of profound theoretical differences about property relations in capitalist societies.

Communists recognize that capitalist property relations, namely the private ownership of the means of production, form the structure of capitalism and, therefore, have a causal significance for everything which happens in capitalist societies. The impact of private ownership is mediated through the class divisions which it creates. It is not possible to make analytical sense of anything under capitalism without first asking questions about class. It is not possible to solve any social, economic or political problems, therefore, without first removing their class causes and this involves changing the ownership of property from private to public. Historical experience has shown that this has not normally been achieved by evolutionary means through parliamentary democratic procedures.

Social democrats on the other hand, see capitalism as a composition of pluralistic interest groups. There is class conflict but also many other conflicts of equal causal value. Each of these conflicts can be treated without reference to the others. Thus the evils of capitalist societies can be remedied through a process of social engineering involving a series of short-run adaptations such as partial public ownership, protective legislation, social welfare schemes and Keynesian economic policies. Underlying this process is the belief that the changes can only be achieved through the normal political decision-making process. Social democratic societies have variable and vacillating mixtures of public and private enterprise but where private capital is dominant.

In a discussion between communists and social democrats it may be difficult to differentiate between their ends; they both want a transformed capitalist society. But they differ profoundly over the question of means and these differences are elevated to a matter of principle. Social democrats are committed to a gradual transformation through electoral means and cannot countenance the primary use of extra-parliamentary means. They reject out of hand the very idea of change through revolution.

It is through this principled commitment to electoral gradualism that the attitude of social democrats to the Soviet Union evolves. They are hostile to communism in general for it has a threatening status as an alternative option. In order to denounce communism they search for defects in its practice and condemn the means used to achieve it. Inevitably they concentrate their attention and criticism on the world’s primary illustration of a communist society, namely the Soviet Union. They refuse to accept the Soviet Union as a proper expression of socialist principles and are thus obliged to denigrate it, to highlight its defects. They exploit the same issues as other critics of the Soviet system, perhaps with different emphases but with no less venom for as they adapt to capitalism, they accommodate to its main values and see communism as the main enemy. Social democrats in consequence pursue domestic communists and find no difficulty in joining capitalist alliances against communist countries. All social democratic parties, are anti-communist and, in the final analysis, anti- Soviet.

There has been relatively little theoretical legitimation of social democracy. In the USA there is no public discussion of roads to socialism whereas in Britain it is dominated by the mainstream Labour Party which is social democratic, pragmatic in its approach to politics and reflects the economism of British trade unions. The Labour Party; moreover, is not challenged domestically by parties advocating alternative roads to socialism so it is not compelled to justify itself in relation to the practice of communism. Its anti-Sovietism is a latent factor which emerges through its foreign policies supporting NATO, the ’special relationship’ with the USA and, when in office, through continuing the essential parts of Conservative foreign policies. This assessment is reflected neatly in The Future of Socialism by CAR Crosland, written during the period of the Cold War. Crosland’s book is most probably the most important post-war treatise on social democracy to be published in Britain. He considered it unnecessary to devote any time to a discussion of communism. He rejected Marxism as a body of analysis, in any case. "In my view”, he wrote, “Marx has little or nothing to offer the contemporary socialist, either in respect of practical policy, or of the correct analysis of our society, or even of the right conceptual tools or framework. His problems have been almost without exception falsified ... his teaching . . . holds little relevance today . . .”11 He went on to illustrate from the experience of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s that capitalism had already been transformed through the process of social democracy in that capitalists had lost their commanding position to the state, the government was no longer the executive of the capitalist class, nationalization had transferred power to workers and that industry was largely managed by a non-capitalist managerial class. These ideas sound somewhat archaic in contemporary Britain but they are still how social democrats would explain the socialist transformation process. Crosland, moreover, did not question whether a socialist Britain should remain in NATO, under the tutelage of the USA. The implication of all his references to international relations was that Britain’s alignment against the Soviet Union was correct. This has largely remained the position of the Labour Party.

The experiences of social democratic parties in West Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands confirm that of Britain. This is not the case in France and Italy, however, where social democrats have had to confront large communist parties and, have, therefore, had to be more explicit about their own identity. There is also a greater emphasis on comparative socialist theory on the continent of Europe than in Britain simply because European socialist movements have not been grounded in the economism of trade unions as in Britain. European socialist academics are called on, therefore, to play a greater part in articulating the virtues of social democracy than in Britain.

The second type of ideological division in socialist movements arises specifically out of anti-Sovietism and has been expressed through the rise of Trotskyist splinter groups and the break of Communist China with the Soviet Union in 1967 when the Chinese Communist Party argued that capitalism had been reestablished in the Soviet Union. This division put many members of the radical left in capitalist countries in opposition to the Soviet Union. Some had joined Trotskyist groups in small numbers until 1956 when the events in Hungary and the revelations about Stalin at the CPSU 20th Congress in Moscow created dissension in Western communist parties. After that the anti-Soviet groups grew in size and in number, for their propensity to split continued. The Trotskyists, who were themselves conceptually divided, designated the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers’ state, as Trotsky himself had done. Some of them described this degenerancy as ‘state capitalism’ while others condemned both the Soviet Union and China as bureaucratic.

The student unrest in the USA, France and West Germany in the 1960s introduced many new recruits to the radical left who admired the Chinese Revolution and followed the Chinese analysis of the Soviet Union. They joined the Maoist groups which believed that the Bolshevik leaders had “erected an out- and-out capitalist economic structure of a state monopoly type (which) conforms in all essential features to the classical analysis of imperialism given by Lenin.”12

The Trotskyist and Maoist diversions attracted few workers but had a fascination for students at the undergraduate and postgraduate level as well as university teachers. In consequence it turned some academic Marxists to anti-Sovietism who were more perceptive and more persuasive than the conventional Sovietologists and Kremlinologists who attacked the Soviet Union. Such prominent Marxist writers as Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review, and Charles Bettelheim who had written extensively about class in the Soviet Union as well as about the Cultural revolution in China,13 took up the Chinese position. Ernest Mandel rewrote Marxist economic theory to take account of his Trotskyist interpretation of the Soviet Union while Isaac Deutscher expressed his Trotskyist perception of the Soviet Union through his nonetheless scholarly biographies of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. There have, of course, been other intellectuals, especially from the “New Left” which tends not to dirty its fingers in practical politics, who have made their contributions to the stereotype, usually around the question of ‘human rights’.14

The latest relevant ideological division within the Labour Movement is that caused by the rise of Eurocommunism within European Communist parties. As in the case of social democracy, the Eurocommunist attitude towards the Soviet Union is a consequence of the rejection of a class analysis of capitalism in general. The Italian Communist Party, which has been at the margin of electoral success for many of the post-war years, started the process by postulating that the transition to socialism had to be through existing capitalist institutions. It was followed by a number of European communist parties, including that in Britain. The main theoretical case for Eurocommunism was articulated by Santiago Carrillo, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, in 1976 though he fairly quickly deserted it.15

The rejection of a consistent class analysis meant that the political categories which flowed from it, such as the leading role of the working class, the strategic importance of trade unions, the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist basis of the Soviet Union, were also rejected. Although the Eurocommunist approach to the Soviet Union was a consequence of an analytical position rather than a cause, the Soviet model was a specially important factor because Western European communist parties began to see an identification with it as an obstacle to electoral successes. This encouraged them to adopt a pragmatic approach towards the Soviet Union. They did not regard the Soviet Union with uniform suspicion and hostility as did social democratic parties and in the main continued to have a relationship with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They joined with social democratic parties, however, on selected issued such as the crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the legitimacy of Solidarity in Poland and over the question of human rights in general. They became involved in anti-Soviet alliances within the Peace Movement. Thus in this way a new source of academic critics of the Soviet Union was uncovered which effectively endorsed the Western stereotype of that country. The occasional support of Eurocommunists for Soviet policies was smothered by the establishments’ acclaim for their criticism. Up till the present, however, Eurocommunist academics have not made a significant intellectual contribution one way or the other to the debate over the Soviet Union.

The Legitimizers of Capitalism

The reason why so few academics are willing to write favourably about the Soviet Union does not reflect well on their intellectual integrity. That is, it is not because the majority have analysed the Soviet Union and have made their preference for the Western way of life. Most academics either duck the issue or make their preference known simply by projecting Western institutions as ideal types, thus denigrating Soviet ones by implication. In their work, for example, whether it is about poverty, unemployment, crime or industrial unrest they locate the causes in the malfunctioning of the system and not in the structure of capitalism itself. In effect they are saying that there is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, that nothing would be gained by changing it and, that, therefore, there is nothing to be learned or gained from differently structured societies such as the Soviet Union. Some go further than this and say that if only the malfunctioning could be cured everything would be perfect. These academics depict Western institutions as ideal types. Private ownership, the free market, the secret ballot, parliamentary democracy, the profit motive are all attributed with the virtue of perfection so long as they are allowed to function without interference, aggravation or modification. They state that economic resources can only be effectively distributed through the free market mechanism; that incentives to invest, to work, to innovate can only arise from the profit motive; that democracy can only exist where there are free elections with competing candidates in multiple parties. It follows that a society without a free market, with no profit motive and which is not governed through a parliamentary system must suffer from major economic and political defects which are expressed through inferior economic performances and a denial of political rights. Put differently, the inference is that private ownership is good in itself and that public ownership is bad; that individualism is good and that collectivism is bad; that the free market is good and that state planning is bad. By all or any of these scores the Soviet Union is malformed.

This form of anti-Sovietism is a corollary of the need for capitalist societies to protect themselves with ideas which convince their populations that they live in the best of all possible worlds. Academics help fulfill this need with complex theories which do not necessarily refer to the Soviet Union but which analyze efficiency, freedom, democracy and equality solely in terms of Western capitalist values. Some of the most influential legitimizers of capitalism have, however, made direct references to the Soviet system and its form of organization. The most important contributors in this group are F A von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the principal theorists of monetarism, and Karl Popper, the most influential philosopher for capitalism in recent history. Both Hayek and Popper began to make their impact in the English speaking world with a frontal attack on marxism as a method and communism as a practice while the Second World War was in progress. They interacted with each other to provide formidable intellectual reinforcements for capitalism at a time when there was a widespread distrust of free market forces. Both wrote major works attacking the basis of communism whilst the Soviet Union was repelling the Nazi invaders. In fact, Hayek attempted to show in his book, The Road to Serfdom,16 that communism was a totalitarian form of government which gave rise to fascism. Thus while the Russians and Germans were locked in bitter battle he tarred each with the same brush and posed them both as evil options to liberal capitalism. In order to do this he projected his own unique sequence of historical stages. Socialist societies, he claimed, arose because of the failure of political leaders to protect the conditions necessary for the operation of the free market. In other words they arose because free enterprise was not achieved rather than because of inherent defects in it. He emphasized totalitarian trends in socialism and compared them with fascism. To make this sequence credible Hayek defined the Weimar Republic as socialist, claimed that many of its leaders inevitably became fascists and that Nazism was a form, an outcrop of socialism. His arguments formed an intellectually devious case for free private enterprise but they were the soil in which the anti-state monetarist views of Milton Friedman were cultivated. Karl Popper, who was Professor of Logic and Scientific Method at the University of London, provided the philosophical arguments for Hayek and those economists, sociologists, political scientists and historians who supported the capitalist status quo. His book The Open Society and Its Enemies published in two volumes in 1945, was acclaimed by the classical economists of the time for its purported exposé of marxism. His work has continued to give encouragement to those academic social scientists who are busily legitimizing the capitalist system.

The Cost of Dissent

Just as societies encourage and facilitate ideas which support them so they disapprove of those which question their legitimacy. The effect is to reward academics whose work endorses capitalism and to penalize those whose work undermines it. The penalties vary but they can be severe. It would be misleading to show intellectual activity responding solely to rewards and penalties but there is undoubtedly some relationship. There are stereotypes about professions as well as about societies. That which portrays the academic profession shows it to be motivated by a search for truth above all else, and concerned with learning, developing and communicating knowledge. This image helps to protect a working environment in which free intellectual activity can take place. There are impediments in the environment, however, which are not easily recognized as such. Academics themselves are products of an intellectual milieu in which capitalist values predominate; they are as responsive as other persons to the pressures for conformity; they are involved in professional intellectual activity as a means of subsistence and are as concerned as managers or civil servants with their security of employment, promotion, status and rewards. In the same way, as with all other employees, the product of academic activity is not the object of that activity which is to subsist.'7 If ideological conformity produces stable and secure employment and intellectual enthusiasm for capitalist values results in promotion, and if promotion brings high status and material benefits then all of these factors will enter into the perception by academics of the character and purpose of their work. Moreover, in case there is a tendency to feel that the single-minded pursuit of subsistence is contrary to the single-minded pursuit of truth, then capitalist ethics equate high status and income with high quality intellectual activity. Those who make it in the profession need have no qualms about what they have done to get there.

So academics can conform to capitalist values in the righteous belief that they are adhering to the highest intellectual values. But just in case they have doubts and might even be considering dissent, they learn that there are costs for non-compliance.

The costs of expressing dissenting views are often difficult to assess because, in many instances, they are hard to discern. But everyone in academic life knows they are present. They have always existed, as a survey of the history of science or of ideas in general would show. In academic circles, of course, dissent is not necessarily a political act. It refers to any disagreement with prevailing theories and can be as vituperous in the subjects of English Literature and Philosophy as in Economics or Politics as shown by the long saga surrounding Dr Leavis in the English Department of the University of Cambridge and the hostility shown by Oxford Philosophers to their critics in the post-war period. Life may be just as difficult for a dissenting specialist in mediaeval comedy as for one in contemporary social science.

Politically dissenting academics, however, confront not simply the hostility of an irascible professor backed by a university administration but the multifarious power of the state, exercised by the government and its security services, the press, television, publishers, editors of journals and their conforming peers. In this situation the costs of dissent are wide-ranging. Applicants for academic posts in the USA and Britain who have known dissenting views find it difficult to get them though rarely is the real reason for rejection exposed. Such candidates are usually told that they are under-qualified, over-qualified or wrongly- qualified. Where academics are employed on short-term contracts or where there is a tenure system as in the USA where all new entrants to university posts are compelled to seek tenure of employment after six years and in that period are judged by the scale of their published work, it is difficult for dissenters to survive.

There has been no serious study of the actual costs of political dissent in British universities as there has been in the USA. This may be because of the pretence that such things do not happen in Britain. But in a study which raises the issue in the field of adult education in the Cold War period it is quite clear that academics who disagreed with the Cold War hysteria were excluded from jobs, refused access to particular courses, put under scrutiny and, in isolated Cases, dismissed.18 Moreover, it is known that many activists in the student protest movement in the late 1960s, although academically highly qualified, failed to obtain university posts. This exclusion occurred even though at the time dissent was more permissible in part because the student revolt had made dissenting books commercially profitable.

The British government’s concern about dissent has never been absent but it has vacillated in its intensity with the course of international relations. It was acute in the Cold War period; seemingly declined during the period of detente and re-emerged in the late 1970s with the frenetic growth of the Peace Movement. The state’s attention was then focussed on the Soviet Union as the enemy. Anyone who questioned that perception was singled out for special attention.

The Repression of Academic Dissent in the US

The Cold War period spanned the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, from 1946 until after the Cuba crisis. It was a conflict over communism in the USA and abroad, marked by red-baiting and witch-hunts at home and threats to depose socialist governments in Europe and the Soviet Union. Its essence was described succinctly at the time by Paul A Baran, an economics professor at Stanford University who himself became a victim of the red-baiting, in the following way:

"The Cold War is ... by no means irrational from the point of view of the American ruling classes. Everything synthesizes beautifully in its general effects. It provides the political climate in which an agreement can be extracted from the American people to spend $20 billion annually for military purposes. It sets the stage for the complete destruction of an independent labor movement ... It has reshuffled domestic political forces in such a way that openly fascist organizations and individuals, only a few years ago hiding in the underworld of American politics, are able to operate at the center of the political stage—-witness the current McCarthy affair. And, last but not least, it provides the grand strategy for expanding and protecting American investment abroad ... In one word: it furnishes the political formula for the concerted struggle for (the) preservation of capitalism abroad and for its strengthening and, if necessary, fascization at home.”19

Internal repression was orchestrated by the US Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This last Committee was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy who made the headlines through his assault on liberal opinion-formers in the US and in US agencies abroad. But, as Paul Baran indicated, political repression was an integral part of the period, interacting with the increase in armaments expenditure. There was already a barrage of anticommunist legislation on the American statute book. The Smith Act of 1940, introduced as a federal sedition act and intended for removing opposition to American involvement in the war against Germany, was used to ensnare communists who hitherto had been protected by the Constitution. In October, 1949, 12 of the 13 members of the national board of the Communist Party of the US were imprisoned under the Act for no less than 5 years. There was a clause in the Taft—Hartley Act of 1947 which prohibited communists from holding office in trade unions. The Internal Security Act of 1950 (the McCarron Act) established concentration camps for dissenters though they were never used. President Truman was active in filling up the loopholes through which dissent could be expressed. After the Congressional elections in 1946 in which the Republicans made substantial gains a loyalty programme became a shuttlecock between the parties and, in order to outdo the Republicans “Truman signed Executive Order 9835 which launched a purge on the federal civil service and inspired initiative purges at every level of American working life”.20

Academics were a natural target for the red-baiters and a purge began of what David Caute called the “reducators”.21 The universities in many cases were willing participants thus exploding the self-generated myth of the university as a “free market-place of ideas”. The President of the University of Washington defended the firing of six professors from the University for being members of the Communist Party on the grounds that “the characteristics of the Party were inimical to the future welfare of the institutions of freedom in the United States.”22 Numerous universities including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and New York University, dismissed professors for communist affiliations or simply for refusing to reveal the names and activities of others. They were assisted by a formidable array of informers from the faculties. Secret FBI papers stolen by a radical group from Media University in Pennsylvania in 1971 revealed that campus police worked hand in hand with the FBI and that administrative and faculty personnel were high on the list of informants whom secret agents contacted regularly.23 Sidney Hook, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, internationally known as a scholar of marxism, not only gained a reputation as an exposer of communist indoctrination techniques and the dangers of “Soviet fifth column” activities but established himself as a practitioner of red-baiting by informing against the celebrated specialist on China, Owen Lattimore, and Harry Slochower, a professor of German at Brooklyn College.24 The details of Paul Baran’s life at Stanford University add to the picture of academic establishments deserting academic freedom like the plague at the first whiff of a crisis. Baran was the only marxist economist with tenure at a leading American university during the Cold War. His death of a heart attack in 1964 was “hastened” it was alleged, “by the brutality of the University’s hounding”.25 In a letter to Paul Sweezy in 1964 he wrote that if it were not for his small son “I would literally quit tomorrow . . . rather . . . than have to tolerate those bastards spitting in my face all the time.”26 When Stanford’s confidential file on Baran was leaked to the press in 1971 it contained many letters and memos “from alumni insisting that the Administration . . . take action against Baran for treason and subversive statements . . .”27

The effect of the red-baiting was two-fold. The first was that many academics lost their jobs. David Caute has described the extent:

“The political purges that hit American colleges and schools during the Truman—Eisenhower era cost at least six hundred and probably more, teachers and professors their jobs, about 380 of them in New York City. The scale of the intimidation was partly reflected in a survey conducted in 1955 of 2451 social science teachers, in 165 colleges and universities, who reported 386 incidents involving allegations of Communism, subversion or fellow-travelling, 10 per cent of which resulted in dismissal or forced resignation.”28

By June, 1953 more than a half of over 100 professors who refused to reveal names under the protection of the Fifth Amendment had been dismissed or suspended. The University of California alone, had lost 110 scholars by March 1951-26 dismissed, 37 resignations in protest and 47 who had refused appointments. In one bitter year 55 regular courses had to be dropped.

The second effect was incalculable. This was the extent of the suppression of views critical of the USA and supportive of the Soviet Union. American liberalism of the New Deal era was shattered by the Cold War and a new creed, Cold War liberalism emerged “head and shoulders above its competitors to the Left and to the Right as the dominant ideology within government, the press and the world of learning. The linchpin of this creed was hostility toward the Soviet Union and American Communism . . .”29 The Cold War liberals had an obsessive antiSovietism which blinded them to the excesses of those to their Right, like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, who were pressing for domestic purges but who shared their hostility to the Soviet Union. A consequence was not simply that academics became careful about what they said about the Soviet Union but that they tried to avoid the topic altogether. A study of the impact of the Cold War on social science teaching reported that “some teachers omitted certain topics which they believed, on professional grounds, ought to be discussed. Other respondants slanted their presentation away from their professional convictions, or balanced an intellectually preferred but controversial position with discussion of a more popular opposing viewpoint. All three ended up by giving students an altered version of what in their best judgement was the truth . . ,”30 It is hardly surprising, the Report added, that specific omissions occurred in connection with the study of communism, Soviet Russia and Red China and that where people had already published controversial views they engaged in toning them down or rewriting them altogether.

The repression of intellectuals in the USA during the Cold War period was unique only in its intensity. It arose again in the late 1960s following in the wake of the student protest movement and involved dismissals, censorship and police surveillance.31 And it has re-emerged since the intensification of the arms race in the late 1970s. The features of the present international situation closely resemble those of the immediate post-war Cold War period. As Paul Baran commented on the First Cold War, everything synthesizes beautifully for the American ruling classes, particularly the domestic political forces where political authoritarianism and economic liberalism combine to create a consensus in favour of arms production. But there is a difference. Cold War liberalism has maintained an unbroken dominance over government, the media and the institutions of higher learning. The academics do not have to break with progressive habits as was the case with the New Deal liberals. They still have the memory of repression but have lost the habit of genuine ideological protest. Some joined together to protest at the Vietnam War, at US involvement in Nicaragua and at the US nuclear arms build-up, but there has not been any ideological basis to the protests. None of it has involved questioning the legitimacy of capitalism. There is no compulsion on academics to rethink their commitment to the American way of life. Even those who protest have a rhetoric which presents the American people with no options. The effect is that the methods of intellectual repression which were used under Truman and Eisenhower are no longer necessary. The academic milieu is dominated by a frightening consensus which has only shades of distinctions. It is the faithful servant, a compliant tool, of the capitalist system. The situation is different in Britain and more encouraging but until the contradictions in the USA have their own powerful ideological expressions British questioning of the stereotype of the Soviet Union will have little impact on international relations.

FOOTNOTES

1. The New York Times, Monday 18th November, 1985.
2. ibid.
3. This comment is based on my own recent experience involving research into Soviet trade unions, in the course of which I have consulted most British and American works dealing with the history of labour in general and trade unions in particular in the Soviet Union. Some contain usable information from which negative and derogatory conclusions are drawn; others are completely unusable. In the first category for example, is The Origin of Forced Labour in the Soviet State, 1917-1921. Documents and Material, by James Bunyan, California, 1967. This is an invaluable collection of documents about the problems of labour in revolution and civil war from which many lessons could have been drawn by capitalist nations in World War II. In the second category is The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917-1928 by Jay B Sorenson, New York, 1969. Sorenson, a faculty member of Smith College, Massachusetts drew on many original Soviet sources to create a sick fantasy which has no utility of any kind. There are many such works dealing with the history of the Communist Party in the 1930s, the life of Stalin and Soviet foreign policy. It would be tedious to repeat them.
4. See The Russian Revolution of 1905. The Workers' Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism by Solomon M Schwarz, University of Chicago Press, 1967. This book rewrites the history of the 1905 Revolution to favour the Mensheviks.
5. Is the Red Flag Flying. The political economy of the Soviet Union today, London, 1979, pp. 236 and Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Including Comparison with the USA London, 1984, pp. 338.
6. Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, 1948, pp. 474.
7. A History of the USSR, Pelican Books, 1950, pp. 384 and Man and Plan in the Soviet Economy, London, 1948, pp. 300.
8. Sidney and Beatrice Webb were authors of Soviet Communism. A New Civilization?, a lengthy and detailed study of the USSR in 1935.
9. Carr wrote prolifically from the 1930s until his death at the age of ninety in 1982. He was not a marxist but his 14 volume History of Soviet Russia is a classic, as is The Soviet Impact on the Western World, 1946, a brief, persuasive analysis of Soviet morality and institutions.
10. Robert Davies wrote 2 volumes in “The Industrialization of Soviet Russia” series which were, The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930, 1980, pp. 491 and The Soviet Collective Farm 1929-1930, 1980, pp. 216. David Lane wrote a number of books including The Soviet Industrial Worker, (with Felicity O’Dell), 1978, pp. 167, while Mary McAuley is the author of Politics and the Soviet Union, 1977, pp. 352.
11. The Future of Socialism by C A R Crosland, London, 1956, pp. 20-21.
12. The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR by Martin Nicholas, Chicago, 1975, quoted by Szymanski in Is the Red Flag Flying? op cit, p. 5.
13. Class Struggles in the USSR, 2 volumes, 1976 and 1978. Sweezy and Bettelheim jointly wrote On the Transition to Socialism, New York, 1971, while Sweezy expressed his own thoughts about the Soviet Union in PostRevolutionary Society, New York, 1980.
14. I have concerned myself here only with English speaking academics. All capitalist countries have experienced a similar academic legitimation of anti-Sovietism to that in Britain and the USA. There has been a plethora of academics in West Germany, France and Italy in all of the categories named here who have served the stereotype. There have also been some who have suffered for their non-conformity. West German academics suffered most for under the Berufsverbot decree introduced by Chancellor Willie Brandt’s Social Democratic government in 1972, political dissent cost some of them their jobs. The decree was introduced allegedly to keep enemies of the West German Constitution out of civil service jobs. It was, however, used largely to get Communists and their allies dismissed from government employment. In West Germany university teachers are employees of the state. It covered a rather loose definition of acts considered detrimental to the Constitution but at its core was expressed sympathy with the Soviet Union. The decree’s net was cast very wide, bringing in people who were neither communists nor marxists and who were simply protesting about specific issues such as women’s rights.
15. ‘‘Eurocommunism” and the State by Santiago Carrillo, London, 1977.
16. The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek, London, 1944.
17. See Wage Labour and Capital, by Karl Marx, p. 34.
18. Adult Education and the Cold War by Roger T Fieldhouse, Leeds, 1985.
19. The Longer View, by Paul A Baran, 1969, p. 206. This quotation was written in July 1950.
20. The Great Fear by David Caute, p. 27.
21. ibid. p. 403.
22. “Professionalism in the Social Sciences: Institutionalized Repression” by Marlene Dixon, in Sociological inquiry, 1977, Vol 46, No 3-4. This article is a penetrating exposure of restrictions on academic freedom in the USA.
23. Caute, op cit, p. 428.
24. ibid, pages 319 and 444.
25. Marlene Dixon, op cit, p. 8-25.
26. ibid.
27. ibid, p. 8-20.
28. Caute, op cit, p. 406.
29. ibid, p. 51.
30. The Academic Mind, by Paul Lazarsfcld and Wagner Thielens, Jr, 1958, p. 197.
31. See Human Rights in the Soviet Union by Albert Szymanski, pp. 187-195.