American Communists Come Home, on Microfilm
By IRVIN MOLOTSKY
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 - In 1993, John Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress, was in Russia meeting with the head of that nation's archives when he was startled by a sudden remark.
"Did you know that the Comintern has the American Communist Party records?" the Russian official, Kirill M. Anderson, asked Mr. Haynes. The Soviet Comintern controlled the Communist parties in the United States and in other foreign countries.
Mr. Haynes replied that American scholars didn't even know that the records existed.
"They stuck me in an office and wheeled in a cart with these files," he recalled. "They were literally dust-covered folders. I blew off the dust, untied the ribbon and pulled out the papers. These were the American party's own records: letters, summaries of agendas, discussions, decisions, arguments over expense reports, like `We're going to get the money to you but, by the way, this looks out of line.' They were the real records, not copies."
Mr. Haynes learned that from the 1920's to the 40's officers of the Communist Party in the United States routinely shipped their records to the Soviet Union for safekeeping.
In 1998 the Russian archives agreed for a $100,000 fee to make microfilm copies of the material. Now the papers have come home, in the form of 435,165 microfilmed pages at the Library of Congress.
Because scholars have seen just a fraction of the reports, which were delivered in batches to Washington last year, it is too soon to tell whether they will result in any major discoveries. Mr. Haynes has already published figures that show that the drop in American Communist membership resulting from the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was not as great as previously thought.
Some of the records have a familiar ring. A Soviet leader tells American Communists in 1919 to expose President Woodrow Wilson "as a hypocrite and murderer, in order to discredit him with the masses." In a 1920 report a Communist boasts of doing better than the Socialist Party: "In instances we have held larger mass meetings than the S.P. ever held in its balmiest days. These mass meetings have gone forward without interference to now. We have conscripted the best of speakers and they are making national tours. Results have been exceptionally good."
The writer adds, "It is probably known to you that the officialdom of the A. F. of L. is so reactionary," a reference to the union organization.
A 1931 statement called for a boycott of the 1932 Olympic Games, which were held in the United States. "The National Provisional Counter Olympic Committee declares that the Olympic games are the creation of a few self-appointed millionaires, counts, army officers and Amateur Athletic Union job holders. The games serve the purpose of distracting the attention of the masses of the sport-loving youth of the United States and the entire world, most of whom are suffering under the burden of the economic crisis, from their own immediate problems. It is calculated to keep the minds of the masses on the question of Olympic victories and star performances rather than on the problem of keeping body and soul together. . . `WIN FAIR OR FOUL, BUT WIN!' is the commonly accepted slogan of the Olympic games."
Then the writer complains that the Soviet Union was not been invited to participate....
...Harvey Klehr, a historian at Emory University described the materials as "certainly the most thorough resource that scholars have had on the history of American Communism."
Professor Klehr worked with Mr. Haynes in getting the archive to the United States and has written books with him on its contents ("The Secret World of American Communism," with a third author, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, published by Yale University Press in 1995).
"Everything in the past had been bits and pieces, stray documents," Professor Klehr said. "It's really a marvelous resource. When we were told that the Russians had the American Communist records, we were both skeptical. We were afraid it was just a file of clippings from The Daily Worker."
But there it was, millions upon millions of words. Most of it is in English, the exceptions being some of the earliest documents, written when many American Communists were foreign-born and wrote in their native languages. By the 1930's the majority of party members were American-born.
The archive is rich in material about women, particularly Emma Goldman, and labor unions, civil liberties and court cases. "It just makes you salivate," said Ellen Schrecker, professor of history at Yeshiva University and author of "Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America" (Little, Brown, 1998). Mr. Haynes said that perhaps a dozen Americans had looked at the archive's originals in Moscow and perhaps a dozen more had seen the microfilm copies in the Library of Congress.
There is no index of names, so it is difficult to find information on individuals. The Library of Congress has compiled a 166-page guide that lists general subjects in chronological order, but it will be years before the complete value of the trove will be realized.
As the records accumulated, the American Communists packed them up and shipped them to Moscow, Mr. Haynes said. The party was not illegal and there was no restriction on exporting such files, so the papers are thought to have simply been sent by freight until World War II broke out in 1939 and Soviet diplomats probably sent them out in pouches.
Few people in Moscow evidently took the time to read them, and they were eventually placed in storage in western Siberia to be largely forgotten until Mr. Anderson, the Russian archivist, mentioned them to Mr. Haynes.
"It was a weird feeling to see this material pop up, material that I never expected to see," Professor Klehr said. "I'm not even sure members of the Communist Party knew it existed."