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  • Confessions from the Cold War
  • D. E. Richardson (bio)
The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War by John V. Fleming (Norton, 2009. 362 pages. $27.95)

During her scrappy if unsuccessful fight with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hilary Clinton claimed that she was not really a liberal but a progressive. Her disavowal of the label liberal may have revealed her fear that the label was suspicious or tiresome to some swing voters. She is not the only politician on the left who has pondered whether the label liberal is excess baggage to be thrown overboard or is a badge of honor. More interesting than her distancing herself from liberal was her embrace of progressive. She may have hoped the latter term carried a thoroughly all-American ring: after all Teddy Roosevelt is called a progressive, and small-town Rotary clubs think of themselves as progressive. Hilary Clinton may have hoped her left-wing supporters would have heard the term differently. For progressive was, in the middle of the last century, what socialists and communists used for themselves because they believed they had the key to the future. Readers of the left-wing magazines, such as the Nation and the Progressive, even today will recognize the term as a marker for anticapitalist views to the left of ordinary liberalism. Thus in politics—especially in politics—a word can evoke different meanings for different constituencies at different times. Of those who take progressive in its radical left, rather than all-American Teddyesque, significance, how many would hear definite allusion to the fierce political allegiances of the 1930s? Is it likely that any but a few Americans born after 1968 or especially after 1989 would pick up such a signal? Did Hilary Clinton herself have a sophisticated understanding of the history of the word progressive?

John V. Fleming has written a lively and accessible book for just such a reader, for whom the middle decades of the twentieth century seem distant. He is a well-known medievalist—in fact, a former president of the Medieval Academy of America. Recently retired from a distinguished career in the English department at Princeton (where he was also university marshal), he taught not only courses in medieval literature but also a course in which books from other periods his students may not otherwise have encountered were read. One was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a fictionalized account of the experience of the victims of Stalin's show trials. During the trials many prominent old Bolsheviks confessed to crimes against the Soviet Union and international communism which they had not committed. Why did they do that? What were they thinking? Koestler's own story provides an answer. When his revelations about Stalinist oppression and the innocence of the old Bolsheviks were published, large sectors of the political left (particularly in France) called him an anti-Soviet liar. In particular Jean-Paul Sartre repudiated Koestler because he thought it was always better to hide the shortcomings of [End Page xxxvi] the Soviet Union than give comfort to anti-Communists. Later Sartre would say that every anti-Communist is a dog.

Many, perhaps most, European and American intellectuals believed the charges made against the old Bolsheviks that today seem preposterous—or at least they tried very hard to believe them. The same was true of the press. Such people hoped passionately that communism could deliver the West from the evils of capitalism, which the Depression and post–World War ii confusion in Europe had put in crisis. The Soviet Union benefited from such anxieties and hopes: people wanted to believe that the Soviet Union was a noble community moving happily toward the establishment of a prosperous classless society. When early reports of Soviet political prisons and brutal policies of forced starvation of peasants got to the West, intellectuals on the left refused to believe them. They instead assumed that criticism of the Soviet Union was motivated by "reactionary" or antiprogressive motives. When the United States became an ally of the Soviet Union in World War ii there was another reason to suppress the truth about the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor the...

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