To say that the CCF and fellow-travellers were ‘anti-communist’, as the CIA rationalises its support, is nonsense. While the CCF and other CIA and Foundation protégés included non-communist Leftists, such as liberals, social democrats and Menshevik veterans, it is wholly inaccurate to refer to this cultural subversion as ‘anti-Marxist’. The cultural offensive and the factor that united disparate elements was anti-Stalinist and such was the obsessive hatred of many Marxists, especially Trotskyites, against the USSR that they were willing to become conscious tools of the CIA and the Foundations of the wealthy. They saw Stalinism as a betrayal of Communism, to the extent of regarding US imperialism as a necessary means of fighting the Stalinists, and provided the ideological foundations for the Cold War and what continues to be mistakenly called ‘Right-wing’ and ‘conservative’.
Around the same time that the Trotskyite-capitalist-CIA axis was planning a world cultural revolution apparently based on the Trotsky-Breton-Diego manifesto, the USSR began a cultural counter-offensive, building on Zhdanov’s 1948 speech outlining a definition of ‘Soviet culture’ and repudiating ‘leftism’ in the arts.
In 1949 in the organ of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, F Chernov condemned the infiltration of cosmopolitanism in Soviet arts, sciences and history.[108] The article stands as a counter-manifesto not only to the Trotskyites and the ‘cultural cold war’ of the time, but also as an enduring and relevant repudiation of modernism and rootless cosmopolitanism as it continues to manifest in the present age of chaos. I would go so far as to suggest that the Chernov article, despite the occasional splattering of Marxist rhetoric, and some time-specific issues, provides a perceptive critique of the modern world in accord with Conservative thinking.
Chernov began by referring to articles appearing in Pravda and Kultura i Zhizn (‘Culture and Life’), which ‘unmasked an unpatriotic group of theatre critics, of rootless cosmopolitans, who came out against Soviet patriotism, against the great cultural achievements of the Russian people and of other peoples in our country’. Chernov described this coterie as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and ‘propagandists for decadent bourgeois culture’, while they were ‘defaming Soviet culture’. The culture of the ‘West’ is described as ‘emaciated and decayed’, a description with which any Conservative critic of Western modernism, such as the poets T S Eliot and W B Yeats or the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler, would concur. The ‘Soviet culture’ referred to by Chernov is the classic ‘great culture of the Russian people’, and is therefore of a folkish-national character and there is nothing Marxist about it. By 1949 the highest Soviet authority◦– Stalin◦– whose views Chernov must have been conveying, had perceived that the USSR was the target of broad-ranging cultural subversion:
Harmful and corrupting petty ideas of bourgeois cosmopolitanism were also carried over into the realms of Soviet literature, Soviet film, graphic arts, in the area of philosophy, history, economic and juridical law and so forth.[109]
It seems that these ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were stupid◦– or arrogant and conceited◦– enough to believe that they were in a State that was still pursuing Marxian ideas, despite the repudiation of all the main tenets of the original Bolshevik regime of Trotsky and Lenin. One, comrade Subotsky had, as presumably a good Marxist, sought to undermine the concept of nationality, and repudiate the idea of the heroic ethos that had become an essential ingredient of Soviet life and doctrine, especially since the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (World War II). Hence Chernov wrote damningly of this ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ whose views on culture seem suspiciously Trotskyite:
The rootless-cosmopolitan Subotsky tried with all his might to exterminate all nationality from Soviet literature. Foaming at the mouth this cosmopolitan propagandist hurls epithets towards those Soviet writers, who want ‘on the outside, in language, in details of character a positive hero to express his belonging to this or that nationality’.[110]
The USSR had become a nationalist state founded on the Russian cultural heritage, nationality and traditions; advocating nationalism and folk-culture antithetical to the internationalism and materialism of classical Marxist ideology.
Chernov continued: ‘These cosmopolitan goals of Subotsky are directed against Soviet patriotism and against Party policy, which always has attached great significance to the national qualities and national traditions of peoples’.
Chernov next described an ‘antipatriotic group’ promoting ‘national nihilism’ in theatre criticism, this concept being, ‘a manifestation of the antipatriotic ideology of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, disrespect for the national pride and the national dignity of peoples’.
Chernov directed his attention to individuals of a ‘national nihilist’ tendency in the sciences and philosophy, citing one Kedrov, who had sought to develop a ‘world philosophy’ devoid of ‘national distinctions and features’:
Here, Kedrov’s cosmopolitan orientation is obvious, advocating a scornful attitude toward the character of nations, towards their distinctive qualities, making up the contribution of nations to world culture. Denying the role of national aspect and national distinctive features in the development of science and philosophy, Kedrov spoke out for ‘solidarity’ with reactionary representatives of so-called stateless and classless ‘universal’ science. Meanwhile, the slogan ‘united world science’ is profitable only to our class enemies.[111]
Chernov was repudiating any notion of universalism, even in areas of science that are still generally perceived as ‘universal’, as belonging to everybody and nobody, such universalism being seen as a tool of the enemies of the USSR. Chernov cogently warned that ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the name of ‘international solidarity’ has as its goal the ‘spiritual disarmament’ of the Soviet◦– i.e., Great Russian◦– people:
The forms in which bourgeois-cosmopolitan petty ideas are dragged into the area of ideology are multifarious: from concealment of better products of socialist culture to direct denigration of it; from denial of the world-historical significance of Great Russian culture and elimination of respect for its traditions to the frank propagation of servility before decadent bourgeois culture; from the spreading of national nihilism and negation of the significance of the question of priority in science to the slogan about "international solidarity" with bourgeois science and so forth and so on. But the essence of all these forms is this antipatriotism, this propaganda of bourgeois-cosmopolitan ideology setting its goal of spiritual disarmament of the Soviet people in the face of aggressive bourgeois ideology, the revival of remnants of capitalism in peoples’ consciousness.[112]
Chernov identified ‘rootless cosmopolitism’ as part of a specific foreign agenda, which was certainly formalised that year◦– 1949◦– with the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom:
In the calculation of our foreign enemies they should divert Soviet literature and culture and Soviet science from the service of the Socialist cause. They try to infect Soviet literature, science, and art with all kinds of putrid influences, to weaken in such a way these powerful linchpins of the political training of the people, the education of the Soviet people in the spirit of active service to the socialist fatherland, to communist construction.[113]
108
F Chernov, ‘Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its reactionary role’, Bolshevik: Theoretical and Political Magazine of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ACP(B), Issue #5, 15 March 1949, 30-41.