Stephen Koch: Double Lives. Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. NY: Free Press, 1994. 419 pp. Ill.
Stephen Koch has many talents as a writer; one of them is the ability to things as they unfolded at the time, not through the prism of the present exclusively. He can make plausible, for example, how a fanatic like Felix Dzerzhinsky was able to inspire such loyalty:
“In the glory days of the Revolution, when Dzerzhinsky and Lenin were laying the foundations of the totalitarian police state, life in the Cheka seemed invested with the prestige of a righteous elect, both at home and abroad…. Indeed, in the days of its innocence, before it became so very obviously the province of murderers and thugs, the revolutionary secret police looked like the natural habitat of the new clerisy, a puritan high-priesthood, devout in its atheism.” (pg. 7)
This helps explain what others have said about the motivation of people such as Kim Philby: He agreed to pass secrets to the USSR in part because doing so made him an early member of an elite club, one of the select few who were fighting a secret war.
Koch’s main focus, though, is neither on Dzerzhinsky nor Lenin; rather he concentrates on the generation that came after them – among them Willi Münzenberg, whom he calls the organizer of idealistic Stalinism.
“Both before Hitler and after, Münzenberg’s true role in the world was a closely guarded secret, though in keeping with this particular talent, it was concealed in conspicuousness.” (pg. 12) Much the same could be said of one of Philby’s colleagues: “the Bohemianism and flamboyant homosexuality of Guy Burgess were an indispensable part of his slick Stalinism and central to his place in Bloomsbury.” (pg. 20)
At bottom, Koch presents a study of infiltration, how the USSR exercised control over famous men through their wives and mistresses, whom he dubs “the Ladies of the Kremlin.” (pg. 21) The Soviet agent who ran Romain Rolland was his wife – something he seems never to have suspected.
Münzenberg’s long reach even touched Felix Frankfurter. Before being named a Supreme Court justice, he was manipulated into becoming involved in the defense of Sacco & Vanzetti. The strings were pulled by a Münzenberg operative who knew Frankfurter’s wife. The result: The accused were, to be sure, found guilty and executed, but proving their innocence had never been the goal of the operation. Mobilizing mass support for their case and thus reviving the moribund CP/USA – that was the point.
The Reichstag Fire
Double Lives is written almost like a detective story. Koch knows how to spin a yarn, even if on the surface it may seem implausible. Some of his interpretations are eye-opening, particularly when it comes to allegations of cooperation between the dictators. “Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Stalin was sponsoring the appearance of antifascism in such as way as to have the curious result of not hampering Hitler in any practical terms.” (pg. 43) The confrontation between the two that began with the trial over the Reichstag fire is here termed a “deception.” (pg. 48) Stalin’s secret policy towards Hitler was one of “placation and appeasement” concealed beneath “the outward appearance of hostility and confrontation.” “Stalin needed to appear entirely hostile to Hitler and Hitlerism; Münzenberg would help him create that appearance, as a cover of the actual appeasement going on and providing it with deniability.” (pp. 54-55)
Evidence of their collaboration? He asserts that the most prominent accused, Georgi Dimitrov, was never in any danger even while under arrest. In this view, the whole event (he calls it “the Dimitrov conspiracy”) was “rigged” and a “charade.” (pp. 58, 101, 108) Far from being an example of the degree to which German justice had not been completely taken over by the regime, the acquittal of Dimitrov and the others – excluding the hapless van der Lübbe – was a set-up agreed between the dictators. According to this theory, the Nazi-Soviet collaboration began not in 1939, but in 1933.
(Montage by John Heartfield)
What did Stalin get from this deal? Didn’t the Nazis round up a lot of German communists? The trial let him take the high moral ground for his own devious reasons. He collaborated with Hitler to get rid of the wrong kind of communists – those with any independence. Veterans of the Spanish Civil War were interned in French camps like Le Vernet, and Stalin did not lift a finger to get them out before France was overrun by the Germans.
So one can see how the Russians benefitted from such an understanding, but what did the Germans get out of it? Koch rightly gives short shrift to the view that Hitler was influenced by concerns for the handful of German technicians Stalin held as hostages. A more serious argument involves the SA: Hitler allegedly wanted to create a diversion before the Night of the Long Knives (end of June and early July 1934). Before that came the trial, lasting from September to December 1933. The communist propaganda apparatus blamed the SA for setting the fire, thus discrediting them for Hitler, who could not do so himself. While Hitler and Münzenberg disagreed philosophically and politically, they shared a hostility to Ernst Röhm, outed in Münzenberg’s Brown Book on the fire as a homosexual.
What to make of this argument? It looks like a stretch. Creating a diversion six months before the events it purportedly diverts from does not exactly speak to careful planning.
The Popular Front and the Purge Trials
Why were Western intellectuals so susceptible to Stalinism? Part of it had to do with their understanding of historical inevitability. “It seems to me likely that it took many enlightened people in the West so long to recognize that communism is monstrous because communism is a monster born from the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is necessary, indeed indispensable, to the hope of civilization in our era.” (pg. 109)
Koch sees the main contrast between Hitler and Stalin less in their policies than in their differing temperaments. “Hitler’s tyranny was defined by impatience. He was fast, and speed was his strength. His disarmed his enemies through the theatrical lightning of his violence. Stalin on the other hand was slow – slowness itself. Hitler acted soon, Stalin at last. Stalin’s was the soul of the bureaucrat, Hitler’s, of an actor. Stalin’s terror owed nothing to effect; its whole power lay in immovable, faceless implacability.” (pg. 130)
One of Stalin’s talents was the ability to juggle mutually incompatible policies at the same time. In the 1930s, he launched just such a tandem operation: Popular Front in Europe, Great Terror at home. “The Popular Front was what no decent person could turn against, in spite of the trials.” (pg. 133)
Only a select few knew of Stalin’s policy of appeasing Hitler. One of them was Karl Radek, “the invisible eminence for all these large events as they led up to the war: the anti-fascist movement, the search for the pact, the Terror…. From his revolutionary youth, Radek had been tight with a kind of ferocious eagerness, but there was also something jeering, abrasive, cynical about him. His mind was marked by a rather special weld of cynicism with certitude…. falsehood became for him a kind of truth. To Radek duplicity was the last word…. He was Stalin’s ideal intellectual.” (pp 134f) BTW, Radek was the subject of Stefan Heym’s last novel (not yet translated into English), which offers a sympathetic portrait. Heym argues that a close reading of Radek’s late journalistic hymns to Stalin were understood by those in the know as in fact treading as close as possible to open criticism.
Be that as it may – what, then, was the hidden purpose of the Great Terror? Surely Stalin did not believe the absurd and ridiculous charges brought against his old comrades that they were German or Japanese or British agents. Koch advances a plausible explanation: “An essential tenet of the NKVD was that the system needed the arrest, torture, and death of thoroughly obedient – therefore ‘innocent’ – people, since without random terror, the innocent would never be afraid, and (even ideologically) the Soviet state was made coherent by fear.” (pg. 136)
Koch thus holds to the view that Leninism was not a perverse form of Marxism but merely its radical application. Far from building utopia, the “Marxist-Leninist system was based on police terror, denunciation, and absolute power, and had been so from the beginning. There was never a moment when these did not dominate the political culture, and it was a culture which naturally favored and advanced Stalin’s kind of sensibility: an intensely intelligent conspiratorial mind, obsessed with a sadistic and paranoiac need for vengeance, dead to all human warmth, and convinced that the only meaningful human motives are greed and fear.” (pg. 136)
Later in the book he returns to this topic. “It is important to remember how audaciously the show trials of the Terror were run… It was as if part of their strategy were literally to defy belief.” (pg. 238) In this context, he discusses the conveniently timed death of Maxim Gorky, after his archive had been returned from abroad and delivered to Stalin personally. Presumably it contained information Gorky had gathered that could have been harmful to the Soviet dictator. Overall, he concludes, “the popular front was set up to mask the Terror.” (pg. 267)
Americans
Moving to American authors, Koch describes Hemingway’s impact: “It is difficult to recall that the style of Ernest Hemingway … once swept through the mind of a generation like a revelation, proclaiming a new and better way to live, a new and better way to feel, a new and better way to tell the truth. It broke on American ears as an ethical voice; it had ethical power, strong with the sound of the new authenticity.” “He rejuvenated the literary language and infused it with the promise of a hard, credible heroism…. In English, Hemingway was the most influential moralist of the Word in his era….” (pp. 213, 287)
The Soviets attempted to co-opt him, make him a fellow traveler. While this did not succeed, he was skillfully manipulated to discredit those whom Stalin’s apparat wanted discredited. Like John Dos Passos. Koch’s judgment is strict but on the mark. “In Russia the bad-boy sound in Dos Passos’s voice vanishes. He ceases to be the jeering wise-guy, cynicism’s upstart sage. He reverts to the rather polite upper-middle-class Harvard man he really was, a good boy who, though unlikely to use the wrong fork, was worried about saying the wrong thing, and above all wanted to be fair, fair about this wonderful humanitarian experiment of the Soviets, fair about socialism in Russia.” (pg. 219)
(Hemingway and Dos Passos)
The breaking point between Hemingway and Dos Passos came during the Spanish Civil War. By the way, their relationship is a subject of special interest to Koch – he subsequently wrote a book that expanded on the treatment given here: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles (2006; recently another book has come out on the topic: James McGrath Morris: The Ambulance Drivers.)
Stalin’s objective in helping the Republican side was not victory. He saw Spain as a bargaining chip with Hitler, drawing his attention westward. The infighting among the opponents of Franco was for Stalin at the very least welcome. Its demoralizing effect “did not trouble him at all.” (pg. 279) His policy of conciliation towards Hitler was calculated to win time; it meant in practice he was willing to sacrifice Spain and many of the communists who fought there.
Near the end of the book, the focus returns to Münzenberg. Koch tells the story of his death with his customary flair, providing much greater color than Sean McMeekin (The Red Millionaire). Münzenberg knew many secrets, and one thing he knew for certain was that obeying a summons to return to Moscow would likely prove fatal. On the other hand, his letters to Stalin playing up his personal friendship with Lenin were if anything counter-productive. But what options did he have? Fleeing to the Western Hemisphere would be no guarantee of safety. It seemed best just to stay put in France. “He needed enough distance from Stalin so that he could discreetly disobey; at the same time, he needed to stay close enough to the apparatus so that it could not shoot him without shooting its own foot. So it was a very special dance.” And for a time it worked. But the Blitzkrieg of May 1940 changed all that, and forced him out of his safe zone down a narrowing path that led to a tree limb in southern France. Koch concludes that the evidence does not allow a definitive answer to the question whether Münzenberg was murdered or committed suicide, though he leans toward the former. Once again, he sees a shadowy collaboration between Hitler and Stalin at work.
The final pages belong not to Münzenberg, though, but to the intriguing figure of Otto Katz. This well-traveled, well-connected agent was involved in the death of many of Stalin’s enemies. His career followed an upward trajectory across Europe, through Hollywood, then after the war back to Prague, at which point Stalin decided he knew too many secrets and had him executed after a show trial. His strategy of cheerfully expressing willingness to confess to whatever the police wanted him to say did not work – they beat him anyway. The day of his execution, Katz wrote to Clement Gottwald, Stalin’s local viceroy, renouncing his forced confession and setting forth the truth as he saw it; remarkably, the letter survives. (For more on him, see Anson Rabinbach, “Anton Katz: Man on Ice” in: Jüdische Geschichte als allgemeine Geschichte: Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 60. Geburtstag [Göttingen, 2006], pp. 325-353.)
Related Matters
Other writers have covered the same territory, but few with such flair. A single, lively page of Koch (pg. 8, for example) gives a better overall impression of Münzenberg than McMeekin does in a whole book. Where McMeekin has dusted off the archives, Koch has met and interviewed the surviving eye-witnesses – chief among them Münzenberg’s widow. Like the others, she appears blessed with perfect recall. And let it be said in fairness that the archives contain interesting material too; Koch overlooks, for instance, the dramatic Münzenberg-Strasser debate in Berlin’s Pharussälen near the end of the Weimar Republic. (See McMeekin, Red Millionaire, pp. 234-237)
At his best, Koch sounds a bit like Christopher Hitchens. Take these words of wisdom: “The life of achievement in art and intellect is not a very forgiving one. What begins as brilliant youth can very easily sink into some awful region between the second and third ranks, the anonymous place where so often even the best of the quite good sinks and drifts forever.” This from a paragraph describing “poor” Guy Burgess. (pg. 197)
In his chapter on Noel Field, Koch provides more insight than Tony Sharp does in his recent biography, Stalin’s American Spy. Both Koch and Sharp acknowledge that one purpose of Field’s arrest in Budapest was to provide propaganda cover for Alger Hiss, on trial at the same time in America. More importantly, though, Koch argues that far from being a victim, Field was “an entirely cooperative fingerman and provocateur, playing the role of the ‘American master-spy,’ whose ‘testimony’ could be used to put to death uncounted numbers of similarly compromised agents and comrades from the anti-fascist movement.” (pg. 328)
Even today, the difficult thing for outsiders to understand is that Stalin’s victims were in no sense his enemies. They were completely loyal, and would have changed places and persecuted their accusers if that had been called for. The problem with them was that they knew too much. They could protest their fealty all they wanted, but they still could not erase their knowledge. That is what Stalin feared – that if allowed to live, they might some day talk. Let them swear their allegiance all they wanted, it made no difference; for him, allies were nothing more than “traitors waiting to happen.” (pg. 329)
A stylistic note: Koch is a fan of the rhetorical device known as anadiplosis, literally “doubling up.” At the beginning of a sentence, he often repeats the last word of the preceding sentence. Rather too often, for my taste.
Errata
While Finland was eventually defeated in the Russo-Finnish War 1939-1940, it was never occupied, so it is misleading to say “Finland was in Stalin’s hands.” (pg. 4)
Koch says Hitler was “legally elected” (pg. 46) – it would be more accurate to say Hindenburg legally appointed him Chancellor. His elevation to office did not come about as a result of winning an election. But this is a common mistake. Speaking of which, Koch is one of many authors who would be well advised to avoid the word “whom.” (pp. 92, 94)
When it comes to foreign places and names, the Landwehr Canal in Berlin is misspelled. (pg. 87) Prozess in German is masculine in gender, not neuter. (pg. 359, note 11) Moabit Prison (demolished in 1955) was located in central Berlin, not “just outside Berlin itself.” (pg. 122) Koch can’t decide whether Prince Hubertus is “zu und von” Lowenstein or “von und zu,” so he uses both. (pg. 222f; in his book The Child and the Emperor [NY: Macmillan, 1945], the Prince styles himself Hubertus zu Loewenstein.) The name of Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg is consistently misspelled “Ehrenberg.”
Update
On further reflection, the possibility should be kept in mind that much of the information relating to the alleged cooperation between Stalin and Hitler was made available to Koch in the early 1990s by individuals interested in blackening the reputation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Some of these informants were sitting in the very offices of those who had once hounded them. Their primary motivation might have been something other than the desire to ascertain historical truth.
Of related interest: See my reviews on this site of Sean McMeekin: The Red Millionaire, Tony Sharp: Stalin’s American Spy; Alexander Solschenizyn: Lenin in Zürich.
© Hamilton Beck
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