Assignment in Utopia

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The lessons for the modern world in this book are legion.

When I was in college in the late '70s (UC Davis, Class of 1980), so many years ago, I observed that the general favoritism/excuse-making by my professors had an unusual exception: Russian-language professors. Every Russian-language professor I had no hesitation in describing the Soviet Union as an absolute police state that terrorized and oppressed its people.

To really know Communism by being able to speak to the victims of Communism is to really appreciate how awful it is.

This book is an illustration of that principle. Eugene Lyons was born into a Russian-Jewish, New York Leftwing family in 1898. (Lyons was actually born in Russia, which could have led to some problems in leaving the Soviet Union when he worked there as a reporter.) Lyons radicalized in his youth and was heavily involved in radical politics, including supporting the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti, about whom he wrote a book, hobnobbing with radicals, and supporting the fledgling Soviet Union. His Socialist/Leftwing credential were bona fide.

He disappointed his family by turning to journalism instead of medicine. As a young man, he went to Italy after World War I in order to be the John Reed of the expected Italian Revolution, which died in the cradle thanks to Mussolini. In the 1920s, he cut his journalistic teeth by working for the Soviet press agency, TASS. In 1928 he was dispatched to Moscow by United Press International to serve as its local correspondent without speaking a word of Russian, although he made up for this deficiency to be able to conduct the historic first interview with Stalin largely in Russian.

This book is in many ways a conversion story like that of St. Augustine, although the conversion of Lyons was not so total. I suspect that although he was read out of the Left by Leftists, he still remained true to his radical roots. Nonetheless, this story is as much about Lyons and his life as it is about the Soviet Union. Thus, we learn about Lyons' family, his wife, his child, his friends, his vacations, and other items that someone interested only in the historic details might find distracting. However, in some ways, these are the most interesting bits as we see Lyons incidentally and casually interact with Joan London, the daughter of Jack London, Malcolm Muggeridge, e.e. cummings, George Bernard Shaw and host of other notables who came to experience “utopia” and acted in ignorant and foolish ways.

Lyons organizes the book around the theme of his emergence from craven Bolshevik-worship. He started his assignment with the conscious position of being a protector of the Soviet Revolution. He intended not to dispatch anything that would present the Soviet Union in anything other than the best possible light. He was not alone in this mission; it was largely shared by other Western reporters in the Soviet Union. However, Lyons was seeing the obviously shame trials that the Communists were putting up to explain the failures in their economic planning. He was also seeing the reduction of workers and peasants to the status of State Slaves and his faith in Communism was shaken.

However, it was not so shaken as to stop him from being a Soviet apologist. Two items illustrate. In one, Lyons came back from the Soviet Union during an extended vacation where he gave lectures on the Soviet Union. He acknowledges that his concern for not disillusioning the Socialist faithful led him to continue to misrepresent the Soviet Union as a land of milk and honey.

The second instance involves the manufactured Ukrainian famine. Lyons acknowledges that he participated in a conspiracy of silence to prevent the world from learning about the famine, even though it was well-known to every Western reporter in Moscow. This deceit extended to discrediting the veracity of Gareth Jones' absolutely truthful eyewitness reporting on the Holodomir. (Walter Duranty is mentioned, but, interestingly, he is mostly identified as the “New York Times' reporter.”)

Obviously, there are reasons for this. First, telling the truth would probably have meant the expulsion of the reporter from the Soviet Union. Lyons describes how his own stabs at telling the truth transformed him in Soviet eyes from being a totally loyal puppet to someone who they often made wait for a visa. Likewise, the social repercussions in the West were a deterrent. Lyons describes how his occasionally less than glowing reports led his radical American friends to start gossipping about how he had become a counter-revolutionary. Finally, there was simply the weight of loyalty; Lyons did not want to break with his radical ideal of himself.

Interestingly, these things seem to be a constant theme in the lives to those who break with the “Movement.” For example, Whittaker Chambers tortured himself over his loyalty to his fellow Communists to the extent that he chose not to report on them; a loyalty that Communists never reciprocated.

Another theme is the shattering of ideals by reality. For, Lyons it was the show trials of 1930; for Chambers it was the show trials of 1937; for Howard Fast, it was Kruschev's speech about Stalin. For each of them, it was something immediate in their lives. One wonders why they couldn't have learned the truth from the facts that were always before them?

The lessons from these incidents apply to today. I have come to doubt the veracity of reporting from China, for example. Why do we think that reporting out of China is any less distorted than it was for reporting from Moscow in the 1930s?

The lessons for the modern world in this book are legion. We see the thuggery of the left, the narrow provincialism of the left, the granting of power in the left to mediocrities to determine the guidelines of art and culture, and the hatred of the left for the persons before them because they are creating a utopia for the future.

This is a fascinating and deep book that I highly recommend.