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  • Agents of Revolution: Biographical Studies in the Age of Lenin and Stalin
  • Ron Capshaw
Kevin Morgan et al., eds., Agents of Revolution: Biographical Studies in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Bern: Peter Lang Press, 2005. 323 pp. $29.95.

In 1946, the Communist screenwriter Albert Maltz, still in the flush of the party's relatively liberal phase under Earl Browder, argued that Marxism was an "ideological straitjacket" on good writing. The response from his political brethren was predictable and swift: Maltz was attacked for having aided the capitalist cause and was nearly expelled from the party before he recanted. This was a typical clash in the history of the twentieth-century far left: One faction sought to liberalize, and the other insisted on maintaining a rigid dogmatism in order to keep their rival leftists powerless.

What is fascinating about Agents of Revolutionis that both of these yin and yang strands are embodied in each contributor. On the one hand, the editors' decision to use biography—the most politically incorrect of genres—for the study of Communism indicates that even leftist historians have experienced a limited perestroika in seeking to write "good" history. On the other hand, this approach is marred by old dogmatisms. Agents of Revolutioncould just as easily be retitled "Schizophrenia in the Post-Venona Age: The Academic Left in Crisis."

The display of the academic left's conflicted nature as of 2005 is what gives this volume its value. Otherwise, its advertised "new" methodology merely confirms old conclusions. Using William Z. Foster's memoirs to conclude that he was dogmatic, rigid, and impersonal merely gives additional proof to the characterizations of him offered by his friends and foes alike. Edward Dmytryk, once of the "Hollywood Ten," told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 that Foster "represented the inhuman face of the Party." Murray Kempton, writing in 1955, stated that Foster typified the Communist who had no room for mercy or pity and focused only on mechanistic results. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Foster in his memoirs referred to his wife as a "good political comrade" and that, according to the writer James Barrett, Foster's "politics" limited his ability to analyze his personal situation. But Barrett is uncomfortably aware of the camp into which this characterization has led him. By the end of the essay, he assures the reader that he has by no means adopted the thesis of the anti-Communist historiographical school of the 1950s (a school depicting [End Page 143]Communists as psychologically challenged individuals who used the party as a healing outlet). Yet, Barrett's assertion that Foster's chaotic boyhood made him hunger for discipline and a system proves this very point; namely, that the party filled a psychological void for Foster.

Studying the career of the British Communist and member of Parliament William Gallacher, Andrew Thorpe tries to preserve the old myth that Communist Party members in Britain during the Stalin era were not slavishly supportive of every twist and turn of Soviet policy. No amount of nuance, of complicating this "anti-Communist myth," can get around the uncomfortable—and conventional—truth about Gallacher: that he vigorously defended every phase of Soviet policy from the 1930s until his death in 1965. Whatever private doubts Gallacher may have had (Thorpe does a good job of uncovering them) does not change the fact that Moscow exerted far-reaching influence on Gallacher. Thorpe's own admissions defeat his conclusion: Gallacher, he writes, not only was "convinced he had to genuflect if he was to retain Moscow's confidence," but was "loyal to the Soviet Union even after 1956" and "repeated their mantras." Thorpe cautions that Gallacher did so only because of a choice. The Soviet Union paralleled his own thinking and thus earned his support. If that is so, then why did Gallacher privately have doubts that he never publicly mentioned? Why would he have refrained from expressing these doubts unless Moscow exerted some control over the British Communist movement, either through the example of "successful socialism" in one country or through undue pressure? Obviously there were consequences for public rebellions against the Moscow line.

Thorpe...

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