Читать онлайн "Stalin: The Enduring Legacy" - Болтон Керри - RuLit

We know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as ‘degenerate’. Every free creation is called ‘fascist’ by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution.[80]

The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg, and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell[81] who was vigorous in propagandising on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for The Partisan Review and The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in The Partisan Review, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in 1939,[82] in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium, and equally condemned the ‘socialist realism’ of Stalinist Russia and the volkisch art of Hitler’s Germany, his criticism of Soviet art policy being consistent with the 1938 Trotsky manifesto.

Greenberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, one of the seminal figures of Abstract Expressionism, and in a 1955 essay ‘American Type Painting’[83], he lauded Abstract Expressionism as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the USA had become the guardian of ‘advanced art’. On this basis Abstract Expressionism was adopted by the ‘Establishment’ and the CIA as a method of cultural subversion during the Cold War.

Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)[84], and was involved with ACCF ‘executive policymaking’.[85] Greenberg continued his support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom even after the exposé by the NY Times and Ramparts in 1966 of CIA sponsorship of the CCF and of influential magazines such as Encounter. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to undertake work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information.[86]

Congress for Cultural Freedom

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses◦– yes, even among the soldiers◦– of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people. Professor Sidney Hook, 1949.[87]

Following the publication in The Partisan Review of Trotsky’s Towards a Free Revolutionary Art the Trotskyites set up an international artists’ association to build an anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist movement among artists. This was called the FIARI (Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant). The idea for what became the Congress for Cultural Freedom after World War II, for the purposes of mobilising artists and literati behind an anti-Stalinist movement, seems to have first been created by the Trotskyites of FIARI.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was formally established in 1951 after several preliminary moves. The CCF had its origins in the above-mentioned American Committee for Cultural Freedom which had been organised in 1938 by Prof. Sydney Hook.[88], Hook, a leading socialist intellectual who became an outspoken proponent of US foreign policy against the USSR, and received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Reagan for his services, edited The New Leader, a socialist periodical, with his mentor, Prof. John Dewey, founder of American ‘progressive education’, and head of the Fabian-socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Both had instigated the so-called Dewey Commission set up in 1938 as an ‘impartial enquiry’ (sic) to repudiate the Moscow Trials against Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin et al.[89] In 1948 Hook’s new group, Americans for Intellectual Freedom came to the attention of the Office of Political Coordination, a newly formed branch of the CIA, directed by Cord Meyer.[90] Meyer, an internationalist, became a bitter opponent of the USSR when Stalin dashed the utopian dreams of internationalists to establish a ‘new world order’ after World War II.[91] Meyer was responsible for recruiting Leftists such as Gloria Steinem and psychedelic drugs guru Timothy Leary for the CIA.[92]

The founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA states of the CCF’s founding:

A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[93]

The periodical Hook was editing, The New Leader, was a Marxist publication whose executive editor from 1937-1961 was a Russian emigrant, Sol Levitas, a Menshevik who had been mayor of Vladivostok[94] and who had worked with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin.[95] These Mensheviks and Bolsheviks became fanatically anti-Soviet,[96] with the triumph of Stalin over his political rivals. Saunders quotes Tom Braden of the CIA as stating that The New Leader was kept alive through subsidies that Braden gave to Levitas.[97] Partisan Review,[98] the Leftist magazine that had published Trotsky’s art manifesto, was saved from financial ruin by the Rockefeller and other Foundations and by the CIA.[99]

The CCF was able to recruit some prominent Leftists, including David Rousset, editor of Franc-Tireus[100]; and Melvin J Lasky[101], who had edited The New Leader and was editing Der Monat, a US sponsored newspaper in Germany, and later the influential magazine Encounter;[102] and Franz Borkenau, a German academic who had been the official historian of the Comintern,[103] had fallen afoul of the Communist Party as a Trotskyist, and became one of the founding members of the CCF.[104]

A socialist conference was called in Berlin in 1950 to extend the CCF into a global movement, organised by Lasky; Ruth Fischer, formerly a leader of the German Communist party who had been expelled from the party along with her faction on orders from Moscow; and the above named Franz Borkenau [105] Honorary chairmen included John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.[106] The CIA states of this conference:

Agency files reveal the true origins of the Berlin conference. Besides setting the Congress in motion, the Berlin conference in 1950 helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left◦– the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.[107]