From: Jesse Lemisch <utopia1 at attglobal.net>
To HOAC: I started this as a letter to an interesting and nice person in this group, of a different political complexion from myself, with whom I have been corresponding off-list. Then I realized that my narrative and the questions to which it leads should be addressed to the expertise available on this list. (I may have presented fragments of this at some point before.)
Here is an outline of what happened to me in Moscow in 1978. Somehow I've never brought this up to any Party member, while in fact people in the Party would be able to shed light on this, which has to do with the relationship between the US CP and the Soviets.
There is (or was) a student and faculty exchange between SUNY and Moscow State. At SUNY-Buffalo it was used by faculty Communists. among others. It allowed for short-term exchanges, and two weeks was all I could give it. My wife Naomi Weisstein, a founding feminist and an important figure in neuroscience/perception/cognition was also on the SUNYAB faculty, and although she was reluctant, I persuaded her to apply. (When we got to Moscow, where old Russian traditions of good work in these fields survived, there was enormous excitement over her presence: the chair of the Moscow State Psychology Dept said, "If only my colleagues in East Germany knew that I was walking through Red Square with the great Naomi Vyshtain [as he pronounced it]" They were sweet and touching classic intelligentisia, who took us to the Tretyakov, and were ashamed when I gave attention to the huge portrait of Brezhnev at Anzio.)
In 1975-76, as a kind of alum activity, I had been a leader of the campaign to oppose Yale's barring of Herbert Aptheker from a one-semester minor appointment to teach a student-initiated seminar. I come from a Communist family, was not close to the Party (except perhaps in the usual emotional ways, and, like Ron Radosh, for the folk music), and had worked on Aptheker-Yale partly out of principle, a feeling of duty as Yale's own radical, and some sympathy for Herbert's human plight in misguidedly feeling himself to be a gentleman scholar who could not comprehend why his fellow gentleman-scholar Vann Woodward was treating him so poorly. Herbert was brusque and difficult, didn't understand the academic freedom principles involved, and was furious about the ACLU's defense of the Nazis' right to march through Skokie. As for his brusqueness, a friend offered the bon mot that Herbert was acting as if I had been assigned to him by the Party and didn't know it.
Herbert, for perhaps a mixture of scholarly and political reasons, liked my research, particularly my "Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America" (William and Mary Quarterly 1968) and had apparently passed on word of my virtues to Soviet Americanists, particularly in the Institute of General History. They had begun to write of my work, and had counterposed me to Bernard Bailyn (although they were somewhat Bailynesque in preferring to stick with the paradigm of a bourgeois revolution). Foolishly, not particularly thinking of the consequences, I asked Herbert to write me a letter of introduction, and he gave me a list of people to look up.
So there we were, two American academics, leftists but not Communists, around Thanksgiving 1978. (The psychologists, cut off from Western journals, poignantly obsessed with hearing of Naomi's brain research, worked her so hard that we had to invoke "old American holiday" to get her a day off.) We went to the Writer's Union, where we were the beneficiaries of the privilege involved in such institutions (later I read Vladimir Voinovich's comical writing about this awful institution). Tuxedoed waiters brought us the finest chicken tsatsivi that I had in Moscow, and the food was in every way better than that at the Praha (where nonetheless the atmosphere was more interesting, thirties eastern European, with piano.).
Then the two of us were taken to a personal meeting around the round table in the office of the head of the place, accompanied by my contact, Frieda (? ) who was the liaison to Americans. The head held forth on various topics, including the proper relation between the writer and the masses (I have notes and could reconstruct this). Suddenly, the phone rang, and Frieda was engaged in conversation with a Soviet colleague -- but in English, presumably for our benefit. There was an air of emergency. We learned that the colleague was ill, needed a drug available only in the US (something like Pironen?), and it was implied that we would fly back to JFK and then bring it back.
Naomi, more intelligent than me, was stage-whispering to me, "No, not in a thousand years," and other related sentiments. Out of ignorance and stupidity, I accidentally came up with the right line, "perhaps if we went to the US embassy, they might arrange this as a humanitarian gesture." Naomi cringed. But my remark showed that I was either too stupid or too smart for this project. Shortly thereafter we were put in a taxicab, which I have since imagined to have had a big flashing "KGB" sign on its roof, accounting for people on the streets running away from it, and evading when the "cabby" asked directions to some high-rise concrete structure where the next person on Herbert's list lived.
What we did afferwards is a story for another time. (Nothing particularly bad happened, though we immediately burned the addresses of refuseniks that we had been given by Adam Hochschld, did not go to the famous mathematician's seminar, and the bulb in our room was replaced immediately after we mentioned to each other that it had burned out. The Kapitsas -- of whom we saw a fair amount, both in Moscow and in the dacha -- Masha was in the MGU psychology dept -- sensed that something was wrong and somehow doped out that we had used our time off to go to the US embassy, but we didn't discuss it)
But now, the question is, what to make of it. 1) entrapment? Some other American had been arrested at the time for alleged smuggling, and had we been stupid enough to go on this mission, it could have been an obvious set-up. I also recall from something Joe Starobin wrote that the US Party was treated with contempt by the Soviets, something about a guard with a machine gun while Joe visited with a Kremlin official. So it would have conveyed some kind of message to lock up somebody with a letter of intro from Herbert. 2) an old ploy: were we willing to do something obviously (even to me) illegal, and would the request then shift to having us run money to the US Party, or even courier documents (e.g. a Mohawk Airlines timetable?) 3) given the horrors of the Soviet medical system, even for privileged Party members, maybe this was a genuine request for legal importation of a drug available in the US.
As I've said, Naomi and I have been speculating about this for almost thirty years, and so I would appreciate relevant observations from the experts, of whatever political persuasion, on this list.
Jesse Lemisch