Washington — Fifty years ago this month in Moscow Joseph Stalin
died. He and his Red Army had been our allies (not formally but
informally) in defeating Nazism and Fascism. Winston Churchill
thought well of “old Joe” for a time. During the war American
propaganda referred to his armies as “Our Heroic Soviet Allies,”
and President Franklin Roosevelt joshed that he was “Uncle Joe.”
Then we had a falling out with the mustachioed Georgian. Upon the
1945 death of FDR (who, historians tell us, was growing uneasy
about Joe), Harry Truman became president. He was even more uneasy
about Stalin than Roosevelt. Truman rearmed the country, was rude
to Uncle Joe’s ambassador, and made Joe angry.
By the late 1940s hostilities between Truman and Stalin had
become serious. World peace was imperiled. Thankfully from the more
sophisticated sectors of American society a peace movement
blossomed. Hollywoodians and professors, usually of a leftish
persuasion, began marching for peace and beseeching Washington to
negotiate with Stalin. Their peaceful protests provoked what
Americans persist in calling the Red Scare, which featured such
scoundrels — the playwright Lillian Hellman’s word — as Senator
Joseph McCarthy, who claimed the peace movement and even the
government were being subverted by Soviet sympathizers and spies.
By the 1960s scholars — then referred to as revisionists — were
advancing the proposition that President Truman’s foreign policy
and the fiendish McCarthy’s Red Scare almost drove us to war with
Uncle Joe, who died on March 5, 1953.
Now after years of research in the Soviet and KGB archives, two
historians, a Russian and an American, are about to publish a
402-page book,
Stalin’s Last Crime, propounding the thesis that Uncle Joe
was poisoned by members of his government probably led by the head
of his secret police, Lavrenti Beria, to prevent Stalin from
beginning a war with the United States, the preparation for which
Stalin by 1953 had well underway. Is it really possible that Uncle
Joe was preparing world war in the early 1950s when the American
peace movement insisted that Washington was the provocateur? The
evidence suggests that it is. In fact, so concerned were Stalin’s
colleagues in the Politburo that he was about to enmesh the Soviet
Union in war with the West that, argue the authors of Stalin’s
Last Crime, they poisoned him, fittingly enough using rat
poison.
Historians, working in Soviet and KGB archives, have also dug up
documents bearing on the Red Scare. From such sources as the Venona
documents and the KGB archive we now know that from the 1930s
through the 1940s there really were reds for Americans to be scared
of. Working as agents for the Soviet Union or as artless
sympathizers, Americans were practicing espionage for Moscow. Just
as McCarthy said they were active in our government, the American
communist party, and the peace movement. Soviet archives have
revealed that such so-called victims of the Red Scare as Alger Hiss
and Harry Dexter White were really working for Uncle Joe.
Now the thought naturally occurs, why would such admired members
of the American establishment as Alger Hiss side with Stalin
against the United States? For that matter why are so many of
Hollywood’s bien pensant demonstrating against the
American government and to save Saddam Hussein’s neck? My guess is
that, as with Hiss, they simply cannot believe that the United
States is a great force for good in the world. What this reveals is
a very low opinion of America and a very cavalier regard for a
dictator’s capacity for evil. Joseph Stalin, we now learn, was
contemplating nuclear war when his colleagues gave peace a chance
and poisoned him. We know this from the Soviets’ own archives. Why
would we doubt that Saddam is up to equally grisly acts?
Both men have quite publicly been responsible for the brutal
deaths of multitudes: for Stalin by 1953 perhaps one hundred
million, for Saddam by now perhaps a million. These are moral
monsters. No one should side with them. Yet members of peace
movements have. Today just as in the 1950s vociferous members of
these movements have made it clear, their major motivation is not
admiration for dictators but misgivings about America. Do I go too
far? The other day Harry Belafonte informed Finnish television that
President Bush and his Administration are “misguided…and I
think they are men who are possessed of evil.” I wonder where Harry
stood on Uncle Joe Stalin when even Joe’s head of secret police
thought he was too dangerous a threat to live.
