The “Mental Comintern” and the Self-Destructive Tactics of CPUSA, 1945-1958
The Communist Movement, 1944-1956
28 September 2007
By John Earl Haynes
Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) emerged from World War II with significant
institutional strength. Its membership
exceeded 60,000 and largely consisted of native-born citizens, unlike the
prewar party that had a large noncitizen immigrant membership. CPUSA had achieved a base in the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), the second largest of America’s two trade union
federations, with Communists leading unions with a quarter of CIO’s
membership. Communists achieved a
significant role as part of the New Deal political coalition’s left-wing and
were influential in mainstream politics in the states of
1958 all had changed. Membership had
collapsed to about 3,000, and Communists had been expelled from the CIO. CPUSA had become a political pariah and
retained no influence in the Democratic Party, the nation’s dominant political
party. Traditionally, the collapse has
been attributed to government persecution and public anti-Communist sentiment
brought on by the Cold War. And, indeed,
both factors played a role. Less
appreciated is the extent to which the CPUSA contributed to its own collapse by
making disastrous political choices based on a misunderstanding of what
The Comintern Era
1919, radicals inspired by the Bolshevik revolution founded two new parties,
the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. Both parties proclaimed their adherence to
the newly organized Communist International (Comintern) and sent emissaries to
demanded and achieved merger of the two competing parties. Numerous Comintern representatives journeyed
final stage of the American party’s willing subordination to
You declare you have a certain majority in the American Communist Party and that you will retain that majority under all circumstances. This is untrue, comrades of the American delegation, absolutely untrue. You had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as the friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party. But what will happen if the American workers learn that you intend to break the unity of the ranks of the Comintern and are thinking of conducting a fight against its executive bodies -- that is the question, dear comrades? Do you think that the American workers will follow your lead against the Comintern, that they will prefer the interests of your factional group to the interests of the Comintern? There have been numerous cases in the history of the Comintern when its most popular leaders, who had greater authority than you, found themselves isolated as soon as they raised the banner against the Comintern. Do you think you will fare better than these leaders? A poor hope, comrades! At present you still have a formal majority. But tomorrow you will have no majority and you will find yourselves completely isolated if you attempt to start a fight against the decisions of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.
Stalin was right. Once American
Communists heard that Lovestone, Gitlow, and Wolfe had lost
In the 1930s the Great Depression caused a segment of Americans to question the adequacy and justice of the capitalist economic system, and the rise of Fascism and Nazism also called into question the will of the Western democracies to resist Fascist aggression. In the circumstances, the CPUSA grew rapidly, particularly after 1936 when its “Popular Front” stance allowed Communists to adopt patriotic rhetoric and use antifascism as a platform for alliances with the broad coalition supporting President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. CPUSA reached a peak membership registration of 66,000 in January 1939, established a strong presence in the new trade union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), won prestige in intellectual circles, and achieved modest but significant influence in mainstream politics.
the CPUSA under Browder’s steady leadership, Comintern reduced its
Loyalty to the “Great Land of Socialism”
continued to be a core value of American Communists. In the mid-30s new members of the CPUSA
recited a pledge to “defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious Socialism”
and to bring about “the triumph of Soviet Power in the
Browder and other party leaders and well as most rank-and-file members accepted the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 Pact without hesitation. Comintern did find it necessary to fine-tune the CPUSA’s stance. Immediately after the Pact, Georgi Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern, sent a ciphered message to Browder explaining that the CPUSA’s line supporting the Pact was not fully correct because while it broke with President Roosevelt’s policy of supporting Britain and France in their resistance to Nazi aggression, it failed to take the additional step of breaking with FDR’s domestic policies as well. Browder and the CPUSA immediately made the required changes in its policies, and in 1940 the CPUSA did it best to prevent FDR’s reelection to the presidency. And in 1940 young organizers marked for future party leadership heard senior leaders lecture:
The single country where the
dictatorship of the proletariat has triumphed represents a wedge driven into
world capitalism by the world proletariat.
While loyalty to Soviet leadership was by this point a
deeply ingrained part of the world-view of American Communists, World War II,
nonetheless, reduced the direct organization ties of CPUSA to Comintern as well
as drastically reducing the volume of communications. Postal communications became less reliable
and was often delayed and subject to government inspection. International cable traffic was routinely
reviewed by war-time security officials.
Travel to the
The “Mental Comintern”
The CPUSA’s loyalty to
lived in what can only be called “a mental Comintern,” imagining themselves part of something which did not exist. Seen in the best light, they were a species of self-proclaimed guerrillas, operating in what they believed to be a world battle, but having no significant contact with any “main force” and without a perception of the battle plan. They resorted essentially to zodiac signs for guidance. Because they dared not analyze Soviet aims in terms of the hard realities of power, they could not appraise Soviet policy either pragmatically or cynically. . . . The American Communists not only were viewed by others as expendable, but they also expended themselves -- in a noble or pathetic fashion, depending on one’s point of view. Their international commitment was thus a species of drug, contracting the mind as it expanded the illusions of the mind.
loyally sought to do what Moscow wanted, but they could no longer rely an a
constant flow of cables, direct conversations with Comintern officials, and
information picked up by American cadre visiting Moscow to tell them what
Moscow really wanted. Instead, like
later Cold War media, academic, and government experts that came to be called
of “Kremlinologists,” American Communists tried to “read between the lines” of
stories in the Soviet press and intensely parsed the speeches of Soviet
officials to discern what Stalin really wanted.
And, similarly to later “Kremlinologists,” while they often got it
right, sometimes they were only half-right and sometimes disastrously
wrong. On occasion in the 1920s and
1930s Comintern communications with the CPUSA had been blunt and even harsh,
but it had been clear about what
Browder’s Teheran Doctrine and the Duclos Article
In November 1943, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister
Churchill, and Marshall Stalin met in Teheran (spelled
As head of the
CPUSA, Earl Browder considered himself to be the leading Marxist-Leninist
Browder proclaimed what he called the “Teheran
Doctrine” embodying this judgment and proceeded to remodel the CPUSA to deal
with the new era. Most importantly
Browder declared that in the new era there was no political room for an
independent Communist Party in
Browder’s domination of the CPUSA was such that most
American Communists accepted the new line without demurrer. However, a few veteran leaders were
discreetly upset with the sweeping and unorthodox nature of Browder’s analysis. Within the confines of the CPUSA’s top
leadership William Z. Foster criticized Browder’s plans. Although a leading figure in CPUSA since the
early 1920s, he had clashed with Browder over the years and was by this time
isolated and no longer commanded a party faction. Browder, supported by the rest of the party
leadership, brushed aside Foster’s criticism but did agree to forward it to
The Comintern no longer existed in 1944, but there
were remnants of Comintern. Georgi
Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern from 1935 until its dissolution, was still in
Received Foster’s telegram. Please report which leading party comrades support his views. I am somewhat disturbed by the new theoretical, political and tactical positions you are developing. Are you not going too far in adapting to the altered international situation, even to the point denying the theory and practice of class struggle and the necessity for the working class to have its own political party? Please reconsider all this and report your thoughts. Confirm receipt of this message.
Browder, however, did not reconsider. He was confident he knew better than Dimitrov
where history and Joseph Stalin were going.
Meanwhile, he misled his American comrades, assuring them that his
While the war consumed almost all Soviet attention in
The result was consternation in the American Communist
movement. The Duclos article was
immediately recognized not as the singular opinion of a French party official
The Mental Comintern and the Failed Gamble of the 1948 Election
The CPUSA emerged from World War II with significant
institutional strength. Its membership
was around 60,000, close to its pre-war peak, and it maintained considerable
institutional strength in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the
second largest of
The revived CPUSA however, faced a major political
dilemma. The Duclos article had told
American Communists what not to do: they were not to give up their independence
by integrating into mainstream liberalism and they were not to assume that the
postwar world would see a continuation of the wartime alliance. It was also unquestioned that the CPUSA would
defend the interests of the
There were two paths. The first, and more cautious, was to oppose Truman and his policies from within the Democratic Party. Such a path had some hope for success. Truman’s leadership seemed pedestrian after the charismatic FDR, and the demobilization in 1946 had produced a great deal of confusion, waste, and resentment. Republicans won control of the Congress in the 1946 elections, and the trade union movement was feuding with the Truman administration’s attempts to discourage postwar strikes that threatened the economic transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Truman’s popularity sank so low in 1947 that Republicans were confident of defeating him in 1948. If Communists and their allies stayed within the Democratic Party they could appeal to Democrats either disenchanted with Truman’s policies or concerned that the President was unelectable. And they had potentially viable replacement for Truman as the Democratic candidate in 1948: Henry Wallace, who had served FDR as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice-President, and Secretary of Commerce before being fired by Truman for opposing the new President’s emerging Cold War policies. Wallace could potentially challenge Truman in Democratic primaries and caucuses and possibly wrest the 1948 nomination from Truman.
The barriers to success, however, were large. The majority of Democratic Party national convention delegates were not chosen in primaries but by party caucuses and conventions controlled by party professionals unlikely to support a naive idealist like Henry Wallace. And if Truman won the nomination from the Democratic National Convention in 1948, as was likely, then Communists and their Popular Front liberal allies would face a frustrating situation. The American electoral system was such that if they waited until after the Democratic nomination was decided in the summer of 1948, there was as a practical matter no effective way to offer an alternative to Truman or the Republican nominee in the fall election. Essentially, if Communists and their allies stayed in the Democratic Party and failed to prevail at the Democratic National Convention, the most they could do would be to sit out the fall election and wait until 1950. However, this result also pointed to the safety of this path; even if Communists and their allies were defeated at the 1948 Democratic convention, they would survive to fight another day with their positions in the broad New Deal coalition and the labor movement intact.
The second path was bolder and had greater risk: to pull out of the Democratic Party, create a new third party that could offer an alternative to both Republican conservatism and Truman’s combination of moderate liberalism and an increasingly anti-Soviet foreign policy. Although victory for a third party was unlikely, even a respectable third place would so divide the New Deal voting base that Truman would be defeated and Democrats in 1950 would seek to accommodate progressives by dropping Truman’s Cold War policies for something more accommodating to Soviet needs. And, if Truman’s popularity continued to drop in 1948 and it had in 1947, there was even a possibility that Democrats would fall into third place and the new party with Communists in its leadership would become the primary political vehicle for New Deal voters.
This path, however, also had very grave risks. Once Communists and their Popular Front allies pulled out of the Democratic Party, they were exposed, and if Truman won reelection, their third party might be marginalized and their opportunity to get back into the Democratic party would be limited. Further, to abandon the Democratic Party would put at risk the Communist party’s position in the CIO. Despite feuding with the Truman White House over various matters, most CIO leaders regarded the labor movement’s protection under federal labor regulations as tied to the fate of the Democratic Party. Many CIO leaders would oppose any third parity that threatened liberal and labor unity in 1948.
Which path to take?
There was no longer a Comintern to consult in 1946. And with Dimitrov’s departure for
The CPUSA was desperate for detailed discussions with
the Soviets but little opportunity existed. Soviet diplomats were not
authorized to discuss domestic American politics with the CPUSA. CPUSA leaders had been in contact with Soviet
intelligence officers. But Soviet
intelligence in the wake of the late 1945 defections of Elizabeth Bentley and
Igor Gouzenko had temporary withdrawn most of its field officers from
The first opportunity for a senior American Communist
to talk frankly with Soviet officials came in March 1947 when
In response to Vronsky’s memo, Alexander Panyushkin, a
senior CPSU central committee advisor (to become Soviet Ambassador to the
Childs had asked to meet with a senior Soviet official
so that he could carry back an authoritative answer to the CPUSA. He was allowed to meet with Solomon Lozovsky,
once a deputy foreign minister and former chief of the Profintern. While Lozovsky was known to the CPUSA from
his Profintern days, in 1947 his star was in decline and he was director of the
Soviet Information Bureau, an arm of the International Department. Lozovsky conveyed to Childs the essence of
Panyushkin’s suggestion: the key to the decision over creating a third party
was achieving unity on the progressive left, and Lozovsky cautioned against
jeopardizing the CPUSA’s role in the CIO.
Lozovsky also spoke approvingly of Yevgeni S. Varga’s book, Changes
in the Economics of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War, that
had appeared in 1946. Varga headed
Childs dutifully carried this cautious advice on a third party back to his colleagues in the CPUSA leadership along with Lozovsky’s recommendation of Varga’s writings when he returned from the foreign ministers conference in mid-April. In the short run, this advice did little to resolve the CPUSA’s dilemma. The Soviets had not rejected the bold third party path, but they had warned that progressive unity should be maintained and that the CPUSA should avoid severing ties with the CIO and its more cautious liberal allies. But how could one be sure that a third party would or would not break links with the CIO and liberal allies before one actually founded the third party and the political dynamic worked itself out? The American party wanted clear guidance and got cautious ambiguity. So for the moment that CPUSA continued its two-track policy of simultaneously working within the Democratic Party to mount a challenge to Truman and also encouraging militants who were contemplating creating a third party.
The cautious advise that Childs delivered, however,
was quickly undercut by events in the
The anti-Varga campaign had nothing to do with the
cautious advice that Childs had received, but in the absence of adequate
communications, many CPUSA leaders saw a connection. In their “mental Comintern” world, if Moscow
could signal its disapproval of Browderism via an article authored by a
Frenchman in a French journal, Varga’s fall must call into question the advice
that Childs had gotten from Lozovsky, who had spoken well of the disgraced
Varga. Varga’s fall along with
increasingly belligerent statements from
Then in September, 1947,
the division of the political
forces operating in the international arena into two main camps -- the
imperialist and anti-democratic camp on the one hand and the anti-imperialist
and democratic camp on the other. The
main, leading force of the imperialist camp is the
This two camps thesis left little room for accommodation and compromise.
Cominform was not a new Comintern. Comintern supervised Communist movements everywhere on the globe and its mission was world revolution. Cominform had a limited membership and a limited purpose. Only European Communist parties belonged, and not all of them. Essentially, the Cominform was an anti-Marshall plan agency, a mechanism for Soviet coordination of assaults by European Communist parties on Truman’s plan to use American financial aid in a coordinated European economic recovery program.
But although the CPUSA was not a member of
Cominform, and no CPUSA representatives were even present at its founding, once
the news reached the U.S. of the formation of Cominform and Zhdanov’s harsh
assaults on American policies, CPUSA leaders ended their two-track policy
toward the 1948 election. In their eyes,
Popular Front allies of the CPUSA persuaded Henry Wallace to abandon the Democratic Party and lead a third party, the Progressive Party, in the 1948 election. Communist activists in the CIO used all their influence to get their unions to support Wallace’s Progressive Party and defied the CIO’s national leadership decision to oppose the Progressive Party as a threat to liberal unity. Popular Front liberals and Democratic politicians and office holders allied with the CPUSA were encouraged, cajoled, persuaded and in some cases ordered on threat of political oblivion to break with the Democratic Party and join the new Progressive Party. Every magazine, newspaper, journal, front group, civil body, and organization where the CPUSA had influence was mobilized for the Progressive Party campaign that ran not only Wallace for the presidency but candidates for the U.S. Congress, state governorships, and state legislatures as well.
The results was disaster. Anti-Communist liberals, already growing stronger as the Cold War grew more intense, used the creation of the Progressive Party as an illustration of CPUSA manipulation and stressed that any association with Communists was a threat to liberal unity and a political liability. Many liberals who had earlier been allied with Communists in the Democratic party refused to make the jump to the Progressive Party and fled from association with what was perceived by much of the American public as a Communist front. As the election approached in the fall of 1948 the Progressive Party, rather than being the broad progressive coalition it was intended to be, was little more than Henry Wallace, Communists pretending they were non-Communist progressives, a handful of Popular Front liberals, and a few Communist-led CIO unions. Compounding the weakness of the Progressive Party was the revival of President Truman’s popularity as his forceful foreign policy and his criticism of Republican domestic policies struck a chord with the public.
Truman won with 24,045,052 votes, Thomas Dewey (Republican) was second with 21,896,927 votes, and Strom Thurmond of the States Rights party was third with 1,168,687 votes. Wallace came in fourth with 1,137,957 votes, 2.3% of the total. Results for congressional and state elections were even more dismal. Only a single Progressive Party nominee won election to Congress while the revived Democrats regained control of both houses.
Earlier, Communists and their Popular Front allies had been part of the broad New Deal coalition. After 1948, the New Deal coalition was dominated by Truman’s Cold War Democrats and anti-Communist liberals. By leaving the Democratic Party, Communists and their Popular Front allies had exposed, tainted, and marginalized themselves. Even after the collapse of the Progressive Party few were able to work they way back into positions of influence in mainstream liberalism.
The most damaging results for the CPUSA, however, was in the trade union movement. Many union leaders and activists had long mistrusted Communists, but had grudgingly tolerated their presence. And CIO Communists in positions of responsibility in a number of major unions had been able to lend considerable institutional support to Communist causes. But Communist defiance of CIO political decisions in 1948 enraged CIO leaders and ended that toleration. In 1949 and 1950 CIO organizers and staff that were identified as Communists were fired and anti-Communist caucuses in individual CIO unions drove most Communists from union offices. Those few unions that retained Communist leaders were expelled from the CIO, and both the CIO and AFL sponsored competing unions that sought to takeover their members. Within two years the once strong Communist presence in the trade union movement was reduced to a weak remnant.
the 1930s American Communists had built up a formidable array of institutions
and achieved a significant measure of influence in the labor movement and in
liberal-left political circles. In 1948
Communists gambled these assets on the Progressive Party and lost the
gamble. The 1948 Progressive Party
adventure broke the back of communism in
Progressive Party disaster was not the result of the CPUSA blindly following
“mental Comintern” would in a similar fashion lead to additional missteps. In 1950, taking the
The reaction of the CPUSA to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech on Stalin’s crimes further illustrated the power of the “mental Comintern” and its negative consequences. Stalin had been the central figure of the mental world of most American Communists since the 1930s, and Khrushchev’s speech exploded that world. Peggy Dennis, wife of Gene Dennis, CPUSA general secretary in 1956, remembered that on reading the text “the last page crumpled in my fist, I lay in the half darkness and I wept.... For Gene’s years in prison.... For the years of silence in which we had buried doubts and questions. For a thirty-year life’s commitment that lay shattered. I lay sobbing low, hiccoughing whimpers.” Her reaction was typical. Party newspapers and journals, publications that rarely printed internal debate, were for a time filled with angry, outraged, tormented, pain-filled letters, editorials, and resolutions revealing a membership in agony.
disclosed only a portion of the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood that
resulted from Stalinism, and much of what he announced was already know in the
West. However, American Communists and
their sympathizers had not believed the tales of blood-soaked mass terror,
rigged trials, and lethal Gulag labor camps that had been told by
anti-Communists and carried by the mainstream American press. The CPUSA’s theoretical journal Political
Affairs editorialized on “the impact of the Khrushchev revelation,” “these
revelations” and “the shocking disclosures.” William Z. Foster, the party’s
chairman, referred to “the sweeping revelations of the Stalin cult of the
individual.” Max Weiss, a longtime leading party figure, said, “the disclosure
of the mistakes made under Stalin’s leadership came as a stunning surprise to
our Party leadership and membership,” and party chief Gene Dennis wrote, “the
facts disclosed about the errors of Stalin . . . are, of course, new to
us.” The historian Aileen Kraditor
observed that Dennis’s comment was “a literal lie but a deeper truth: the facts
were not new; their meaning was. Truth was not what fitted reality; it was what
[authoritative ideological leaders] . . . uttered. The source of a doctrine,
news item, or any other statement carried more weight than the content of it;
the feeling about the source preceded and determined the true believer’s
reaction.” In other words, Dennis, Foster and other American Communists who
inhabited the “mental Comintern” did not credit the evidence of Stalin’s crimes
until an authoritative Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, ruled that they were
crimes. In the mental world of American
Communists, Stalin’s mass murders were only visible only if
The CPUSA had emerged from World War II with about 60,000 members. As the Cold War gathered strength, as popular American anticommunism grew stronger, as government harassment increased, and after the debacle of the 1948 election and ejection from the CIO, the party steadily shed member. By 1956 it’s membership was about 12,000. Then came Khrushchev’s speech, the Hungarian revolt and the party’s internal agony. In the winter of 1957-58, the CPUSA reregistered its members to get an accurate count of who had survived. The total was about three thousand; the Communist party had lost over three-quarters of its members in two years. While government prosecution and harassment had played a role, the most powerful blows that smashed the American Communist movement were self-inflicted.
of the devastating self-inflected wounds resulted from the “mental Comintern”
leading American Communists to misunderstand what
odd note about the restoration of direct communications between the CPUSA and
Hall’s backing, Childs traveled back and forth to
. On the early years of the American party and its
relationship to the Comintern, see: Theodore Draper, The Roots of American
Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957); Theodore Draper, American
Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Harvey Klehr
and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven
Itself (New York: Twayne, 1992); Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill
M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998). For a view that
minimizes as well as justifies Comintern supervision of the American party,
see: Jacob A. Zumoff, “The Communist Party of the
. “First Speech Delivered in the Presidium of the E.C.C.I. on the American Question, May 14, 1929,” in Joseph Stalin, Stalin’s Speeches on the American Communist Party, Delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May 6, 1929, and in the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929.., pamphlet ([New York]: Central Committee, Communist Party, U. S. A., 1931).
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. J. Peters, The Communist Party: A Manual on Organization
. Peters, C.P. Manual, 8, 16.
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. Junius Irving Scales, Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers, assisted by Richard Nickson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 93–84.
. Klehr, Haynes, and
. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 223.
. Earl Russell Browder, Teheran and America: Perspectives and Tasks, pamphlet (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1944), reproduced in Bernard K. Johnpoll, ed., A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), vol. 5, 294, 297, 299–300. The pamphlet contained the main report and concluding remarks of Browder at the plenary session of the CPUSA Ntional Committee, 7-9 January 1944.
. Earl Browder, “Teheran -- History’s Greatest Turning Point,” The Communist, January 1944, pp. 3, 7.
. Earl Browder, Teheran; Our Path in War and Peace (New York: International Publishers, 1944).
. Georgi Dimitrov diary entry, Dimitrov to Molotov, 8 March 1944, RGASPI 495-74-482, reproduced in English translation in Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World, 105–6 and in Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, ed. Ivo Banac, trans. Timothy D. Sergay, Jane T. Hedges, and Irina Faion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 305–7.
. The Russian original: Unsigned, “O Kommunisticheskoy Politicheskoy Assotsiatsii SShA [On the Communist Political Association of the USA],” Byulleten’ Byuro Informatsi Tsk VKP(b): Voproy Vneshney Politiki [Bulletin of the Information Bureau of the CC RCP(b): Issues of Foreign Policy], no. 2 (January 1945); manuscript translation entitled of the Russian article into French, “Au suject de l’Association Politique Communiste des Etats-Unis” attached to a printer’s page proof of the Russian article and to a cover letter dated 19 January 1945 in RGASPI 17-128-754; Jacques Duclos, “A Propos de la Dissolution Du P.C.A,” Cahiers Du Communisme nouvelle série 6 (April 1945); Jacques Duclos, “On the Dissolution of the American Communist Party,” Political Affairs 24 (July 1945). See also Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World, 91–106.
. Daily Worker, 30 April 1946, p. 2.
. B. Vronsky, “Conversations with CPUSA Politburo
Member Morris Childs”, undated but attached to a 10 April 1947 memo, Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) 17-128-1128. Translation into English in Klehr, Haynes,
. Panyushkin to A. A. Zhadanov and A.A. Kuznetsov, 10 April 1947, RGASPI 17-128-1128. Reproduced in English translation in Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World, 270–71.
. He was latter arrested and executed in Stalin’s purge of Jewish “cosmopolitans.”
. An account of Childs’ meeting with Lozovsky is in Philip J. Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), 87–135.
. A.A. Zhdanov, “On the International Situation,” Political Affairs (December 1947), pp. 1095-96.
. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925–1975 (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977), 225.
. Communist Party of the
. John Barron, Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Pub., 1995).