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Former Vice President and failed presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace was in the latter camp. He’s resurrected by filmmaker Oliver Stone and history professor Peter Kuznick. In a TV documentary series and book they depict the politician as the man who could have ushered in an era of prosperity and international good-fellowship.
Wallace made his presidential bid as candidate of the Progressive Party, a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Communist Party. Perfect for the part, Wallace had visited Siberia in 1944 without, apparently, realizing that its population consisted of labor camp prisoners and their guards. “Compulsion everywhere appears to him as the spontaneous will of the people,” Dwight Macdonald wrote of Wallace’s rhapsodic account. In which he likened Siberia’s population to 19th-century American homesteaders. (By 1952, historian Sean Wilentz notes, Wallace reversed course and denounced Soviet communism as “utterly evil”).
In the 1930s, when Wallace was climbing the rungs of the U.S. political system, Jean, a friend and comrade of my parents since those years, was serving as Trotsky’s executive assistant – translator, bodyguard and negotiator with foreign governments. He had been recruited for Trotsky’s staff from the French Trotskyist movement at age 20,in part because he had taught himself Russian.
The job was not for the faint-hearted. Jean worked closely with three men who would be murdered or “disappeared” by Soviet agents: Erwin Wolf, kidnapped by NKVD operatives in Spain and never seen again; Rudolf Klement and Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s son, who were killed in Paris. Within the USSR, about 1 million people accurately or not accused of Trotskyism were executed, in addition, of course, to the millions of peasants who were killed or died of starvation in the forced collectivization of agriculture. All in all, Stalin’s victims number at least 15 million, historian Robert Conquest has calculated.
Trotsky himself met his end in 1940, in Coyoacán, Mexico. Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent born in Barcelona, used a cut-down mountaineering axe, driving its broad end into Trotsky’s brain. Mercader had infiltrated French Trotskyist circles and then the Trotsky household by seducing a young American Trotskyist. Her sister had done secretarial work for Trotsky in Mexico, which helped give the unwitting Soviet tool entrée to the exile’s household – entrée to the assassin as well. The woman had been spotted as a prospect for Mercader’s attentions by an American communist who had infiltrated the U.S. anti-Stalinist left.
Responses to “The real “Van””