> CB: I lean to your side in believing Bettina Aptheker because of the legal
> evidentiary principle that it seems to be a statement against her own
> interests. (And I have a fundamental bias to wish what B. Apthker says is
> not true in that Herbert Aptheker is one of my heroes, penpals.)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Editor-H-HOAC <haynes at mail.h-net.msu.edu> Date: Oct 25, 2006 6:41 AM Subject: CPUSA and 1956 Hungary (Schwartz) To: H-HOAC at h-net.msu.edu
From: "Stephen Schwartz" <karastjepan at yahoo.com> To: "H-Net Network on American communism and anticommunism" <H-HOAC at H-NET.MSU.EDU> Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 11:52 PM Subject: Re: CPUSA and 1956 Hungary
In my view, what is interesting about Hungary, the impact of it on the CPUSA, and the Aptheker book, is simple. Hungary's insurrection was the first event televised around most of the non-Communist world. Even people in Communist states knew what happened. Everyone in the CPUSA knew what happened.
For Aptheker then to put his signature on a work of apologetics for the Soviet massacres in Hungary represented an act of denial so colossal, in the face of such total evidence, that I believe it exceeded anything any CP intellectual had ever before attempted. It did not succeed. In my experience CP people in California considered the book embarrassing even 7 years later.
Aptheker's THE TRUTH ABOUT HUNGARY demonstrates to me, more than any other example, that for a few Stalinists there was no objective standard of truth whatever. I saw this myself at the time of the Soviet invasion of former Czechoslovakia in 1968 when American CP liners argued with complete aplomb that the invasion was necessary to prevent an incursion by then-West Germany.
It does not seem to me useful to simply say that Stalinists were always liars. Some lies were bigger than others, because the truth of the real situation was so obvious to so many people. In reality, few people in the West had the context or information to comprehend that the Moscow defendants of 1936-38 were not spies and traitors, that the POUM and CNT in the Spanish war were not fascist elements, that the anti-CP trade union leaders in the U.S. maritime industry were not company finks, even that the Soviet Yiddish writers were innocent martyrs. All such matters, with the notable exception of the Stalin-Hitler pact, were cloaked in deliberate obscurity, and the burgeoning power of mass communications used to further confuse matters.
But as I recall, although I was a child, the suppression of Budapest was carried out with such naked, open impunity that there was no questioning what happened; CPs in the U.S. and elsewhere were shaken; Tito was horrified... but somehow Herbert Aptheker considered all that irrelevant when it came to bestowing his signature.
I would add that I don't know of any sustained work on the Spanish war, on the assassination of Trotsky, in defense of the Hitler-Stalin pact, or on Tito, the postwar purges, or the Yiddish writers, produced by the CPUSA milieu, that would compare with the Aptheker volume on Hungary. The wretched Sayers and Kahn books on the purges and the vast anti-Soviet conspiracy were apparently not even written by them.
Stephen Schwartz
-- Michael Pugliese
-- Michael Pugliese