Vyacheslav Nikitin's The Ultras in the USA is a history of the American right from the National Association of Manufacturers to George Wallace, and it is a better book than a reader approaching a Progress Publishers title on American politics has any reason to expect. It is built out of the Congressional Record, the hearing transcripts of the Government Printing Office, presidential memoirs, the American academic literature, and the ultra-right's own press — American Opinion, the John Birch Society's monthly, is cited across a decade and a half. The publisher's own note at the back describes the method accurately: the book "is based on Congressional documents, Presidential memoirs, items from the press, and other American sources, as well as on special studies." It is. There are more than five hundred endnotes, and the great majority of them point at documents an American reader could have checked in an American library.
That matters, because most of what this book describes happened, and much of it was still being minimised in the mainstream American accounts available in 1981. The Smith Act prosecutions happened. The loyalty programme happened. The Attorney General's list happened. The Hollywood blacklist happened. The purge of the left from the CIO unions happened. Nikitin's numbers on the loyalty programme are the government's own: "By June 30, 1950, the government had processed 2,833,846 loyalty forms"; by Eisenhower's inauguration "the FBI had run 4,722,278 name checks on government employees and job applicants." His account of the machinery is exact and unhysterical. He quotes Seth Richardson, chairman of the Loyalty Review Board, telling investigators they were under no obligation to give an employee the reason for his discharge — "No person," read the board's statement, "has an inherent or Constitutional right to public employment. Public employment is a privilege, not a right." He sets out, in a sentence that could stand as the epigraph of the whole period, the trap a witness faced before a congressional committee: "for violation of the Smith Act, if he acknowledged membership in the Communist Party; for perjury, if he denied association with the Communists; or for contempt of Congress, if he refused to answer the committee's questions."
He is good, too, on the long American pedigree of the thing, and he lets Americans say so. He opens the first chapter with I. F. Stone: "the red menace in our history is older than the Reds. . . In the 1890s the first federal income tax law was attacked before the Supreme Court as Communistic." He quotes Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union on the 1949 Foley Square trial — "They are not being tried for a secret conspiracy. They are being tried for openly advocating the Communist program and objectives" — which is the correct legal characterisation and remains so. He notes that Robert Taft called the Nuremberg executions "a blot on the American record," and he does not have to editorialise about it. His best single page reports a Wisconsin newspaper's experiment in July 1951: of 112 citizens approached with a petition assembled entirely from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, one would sign. "That may be the Russian Declaration of Independence," said one of those who refused, "but you can't tell me it's ours."
The closing chapters, on the ideology and the class base of the right, are the most substantial thing in the book and the least ideologically forced. Nikitin's argument is that the American ultra-right is a petty-bourgeois formation — small manufacturers, independent retailers, commercial farmers — squeezed between the monopolies and the unions, mistakenly identifying the second as an accomplice of the first, and reaching backward for a Jeffersonian America of "small, independent manufacturers, each the master of his fate." He supports it with the Final Report of the House Select Committee on Small Business, with Martin Trow's 1958 study in the American Journal of Sociology of small businessmen and support for McCarthy, with C. Wright Mills. On the regional political economy — the "new" capital of the South and West, outside the Wall Street–Washington nexus and therefore structurally available to the right — he is describing, in the 1970s, exactly the coalition that would put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Which brings us to the date on the spine, and to the first thing a reader must be told.
The word "Reagan" does not occur in this book. Neither does "New Right," nor "Moral Majority." Jimmy Carter appears four times, glancingly. A history of the American ultra-right, published in Moscow in 1981, contains no reference whatever to the political current that had just won the presidency.
The explanation is in the volume itself. Progress's own back-cover note says that Nikitin's work "provoked a lively response in the learned periodicals of the Soviet Union and other countries," and that reviews "appeared during the 70s" in Voprosy istorii, Novaya i noveishaya istoriya and SShA. The reviews preceded the English edition by years because the Russian text did. The internal evidence agrees: the citation density collapses after 1976, with a handful of 1977 and 1978 references and effectively nothing after. The single genuinely 1981 item in the book is the epigraph in the preface — a passage from the Central Committee Report to the 26th Party Congress, which met in February 1981, quoted from a Novosti pamphlet of that year. This is a mid-to-late-1970s Soviet monograph with a fresh preface bolted on and a new date on the copyright page. Read it as a book of the détente years, written to explain to Soviet readers why détente was in trouble, and the strange shape of it — the enormous weight on McCarthy, the thinness on the seventies, the confident closing line that "the government of the USA began speaking the language of cold war, as it did decades ago" — resolves.
That closing line is also the commission. This is not a disinterested history. It was written to establish that hostility to the Soviet Union in the United States is the work of a reactionary faction rather than a settled policy of the American state, and that the American right is the enemy of American liberals and trade unionists as much as of Moscow. The first half of that proposition is a diplomatic position. The second half happens to be true, and the book proves it.
Search this book for the words Stalin, samizdat, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, or Gulag, and you will find none of them. The Moscow Trials are not mentioned. The year 1937 appears five times, always in connection with an American organisation founded in it. Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code — "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," the statute under which Soviet citizens were prosecuted for what they said and wrote throughout the years Nikitin was writing — does not appear, and could not.
The silence is not incidental to the book; it is structural, because the categories Nikitin has assembled to indict the United States are precisely the categories that describe the state he was writing in. He is outraged, correctly, that men were imprisoned for what they advocated rather than what they did. He is outraged, correctly, that a citizen could be ruined by a secret informer whose evidence he was not shown. He is outraged, correctly, that an official list of proscribed organisations was compiled by the executive and used to destroy them, that membership in a lawful body was made grounds for dismissal, that loyalty was made a condition of employment and adjudicated by boards that were "investigator, prosecutor, and judge" at once. Every one of those sentences is a more exact description of Soviet practice in 1949, or in 1975, than it is of American practice.
In January 1980, while this book was in production, Andrei Sakharov was seized in Moscow and exiled without trial to Gorky. He was not a defendant; there was no proceeding. There was no New York Post to break the story, no American Civil Liberties Union to write to the Procurator General, and no court that could have reversed it.
That asymmetry is the point, and the honest way to make it is with the book's own material. Nikitin's story of the American witch-hunt has an ending, and the ending is that the witch-hunters lost. He records it himself: Pennsylvania v. Nelson in April 1956 striking down the state sedition laws; the Supreme Court's retreat; the eventual abolition of HUAC, of the Subversive Activities Control Board, of the Justice Department's lists — which he attributes, fairly, to the persistence of American democratic forces. A system that can be beaten by its own citizens using its own courts and its own press is not the same kind of system as one that cannot. Nikitin has all the evidence for that conclusion in front of him and is professionally unable to draw it.
Here the omission is not a matter of the horizon of a Soviet scholar. It is a specific erasure, and it goes to the heart of the book's strongest chapter.
Nikitin writes: "In 1940 the Alien Registration or Smith Act was adopted at the suggestion of the House Committee on Un-American Activities." Then: "In the years after the war the Smith Act became one of the right's chief weapons in its struggle against the Communist Party." Then he goes directly to 17 January 1949 and the eleven Communists on trial in New York.
Between 1940 and 1949 there is a gap, and in it stands the first prosecution ever brought under the Smith Act. On 15 July 1941, twenty-nine leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and of Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis were indicted for seditious conspiracy. Eighteen were convicted and imprisoned. The full text of the federal indictment was printed in Fourth International, August 1941. The immediate cause was a jurisdictional fight: Local 544 had voted on 9 June to leave the AFL Teamsters for the CIO, and Daniel Tobin, the Teamsters' president and Roosevelt's chief labour lieutenant, telegraphed the White House. Stephen Early's reply was issued the same day and quoted in the New York Times of 14 June 1941: "When I advised the President of Tobin's representations this morning, he asked me to immediately have the Government departments and agencies interested in this matter notified." The FBI raided the Minneapolis and St. Paul headquarters of the SWP on 27 June. Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that the party's leaders "have gained control of a legitimate labor union to use it for illegitimate purposes." The American Civil Liberties Union, after investigating, wrote to Biddle on 20 August that "the government injected itself into an interunion controversy in order to promote the interests of the one side (Tobin) which supported the administration's foreign and domestic policies." All of this was set out in Fourth International, October 1941, five weeks before the trial opened.
The Communist Party USA supported that prosecution. The Party was then in the phase that followed the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Trotskyists were its most dangerous rivals on the left, and it welcomed the government's action against them. Eight years later the same statute was turned on the Communist Party's own leaders. The Fourth International of August 1948, reviewing the indictment of the twelve, made the connection without any pleasure in it:
It was under this very law that 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis Truckdrivers Union were indicted in 1941 and later convicted. The teachings of Marx and Lenin which are to be found in every library of the country were construed by the Justice Department as a conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence.
And it recorded that the CPUSA "did everything in their power to sabotage the fight of the Trotskyists against the sinister Smith Act in the famous Minneapolis trials." The resolution adopted by the SWP's National Committee in February 1950 and printed in Fourth International, March–April 1950, put it in one sentence: "In 1941 the CP applauded the prosecution of the 18 Trotskyists in Minneapolis under the Smith Act which provided the precedent for their own trial and conviction in 1949."
The same journal, in the same resolution, called on the whole American labour movement to defend the Communist leaders anyway — "not out of agreement with the Stalinists or in remission of their crimes, but solely because of our unwavering adherence to the principle of class solidarity." The SWP wrote to the Communist Party's Central Committee proposing a united front against the indictments. The proposal was not allowed onto the floor of the CP's convention.
None of this is in Nikitin's book. Not the 1941 case, not Local 544, not the SWP, not the words "Trotsky" or "Trotskyist," which occur nowhere in a book largely devoted to the American left under repression. The consequence is not only that a page of history is missing. It is that Nikitin's central claim about the Smith Act — that it was "one of the right's chief weapons in its struggle against the Communist Party" — is put in the wrong tense. The Act's first weapon-use was by a Democratic administration against revolutionary socialists and a militant union local, with the enthusiastic approval of the Communist Party, and the precedent thereby established was the one that convicted Eugene Dennis.
There is a second, smaller absence of the same kind. Nikitin devotes many pages to the Attorney General's list and to the loyalty programme, and he is right that both were instruments of political proscription. The Socialist Workers Party was on that list. The most publicised individual loyalty case of the whole period — front-paged from coast to coast at Christmas 1955, and reported in Fourth International, Winter 1956 — was that of James Kutcher, a legless veteran and Purple Heart holder whose disability pension the Veterans Administration suspended on the ground that the Socialist Workers Party had been determined by duly authorised officials to be "an organization which seeks to alter the form of Government of the United States of America by unconstitutional means." Public outrage forced the VA to rescind the suspension within six hours of the story appearing. Nikitin's chapter on loyalty tests does not contain the case, because it does not contain the party.
The third silence is domestic to the American Communist Party. Earl Browder led it from 1930 to 1945, and his name does not occur in this book. Nor does the line change of 1939–41. Nikitin writes that in the late thirties and early forties "rightists opposed American participation in the war against Hitler," which is true; between September 1939 and June 1941 so did the Communist Party, and a history of American anticommunism that is silent on the fact leaves its central actor without a biography. When Nikitin reaches the war years he writes that the government "tolerated, to a certain degree, the activities of the Communist Party, which favored a system of collective security and in every way supported the USA's effort in the war against the Axis" — accurate for 1942–45, and reached without passing through the two years before it.
Read it for the machinery. Nikitin has done real archival work on how a state that guaranteed freedom of opinion in its constitution built, in a decade, an apparatus for punishing opinion — through employment rather than through the criminal law, through private employers acting under public pressure, through lists and affidavits and secret informers, and with the collaboration of the union leaderships whose members were its eventual victims. On that he is a useful and well-documented witness, and there were American historians in 1981 who were less honest about it than he was.
Read it also as a document of what a Soviet scholar of the seventies could and could not say. The book's evidence and the book's silences are the same evidence. Every count in its indictment of the American loyalty apparatus is a count that could have been laid, more heavily, against the state that commissioned it — and the reason Nikitin could publish the first and not the second is itself the difference the book is unable to name.