Witness: Cold War Classics

Chambers becomes a Communist in part to merge the rebel and monastic impulses that long coexisted uneasily within himself. His brother’s death symbolizes, for him, both the injustice of the world and the need for absolute personal discipline in protecting against the encroachment and corruption of said injustice.

By joining the Party, Chambers rejects traditional American political authority and also gives himself over to a different kind of authority: one with a binding code of individual obedience and collective cohesion. Whether in groups or alone, Communists are taught to operate as an organic whole, which directs its efforts towards following the supposedly objective laws that will usher in historical progress. Yet from the moment Chambers begins his association with the Party, he notices that there is little alignment between its revolutionary philosophical aims and its demands for total discipline. Whereas he expects a small and determined cadre of revolutionary operatives at his first meeting, he instead finds a large and “rather undisciplined group of small delicatessen keepers,” which fiercely debates and squabbles within itself (203). The Party’s polyglot languages and global sensibilities speak to the reality of a global proletarian consciousness.

Although its demands for meaningful action stand in favorable contrast with the armchair philosophizing of Chambers’s Columbia associates, the Party is not designed to empower the international proletariat within its own ranks. Following the Bolshevik model, working-class persons are written off as foot soldiers for the coming revolution and subjected to the ruling ordinances of their better-connected superiors. Although it disdained intellectuals in theory, the Party’s center of gravity was nevertheless occupied by upper-middle-class bureaucrats who transferred valuable confidential information to their handlers even as they indulged in all the comforts of bourgeois life. “Party discipline” amounted in reality to pleasing the whims of middle managers seeking to secure their own status by bullying their subordinates. Not even the status of having fought in Russia under Lenin can protect someone from having to humiliate themselves before whomever is in charge at the moment. Each person has to maximize their own benefit before they are inevitably reshuffled or outright disappeared.

Chambers’s time with the Daily Worker epitomizes the contradictory state of the Party. The Worker was supposed to be the epicenter of Communist ideology in the United States, providing readers with the right theoretical foundations for collective revolutionary action. It should thus seem to matter whether the articles were well-written and well-read pieces. Yet it does not take long for Chambers to realize that the Worker is a tedious screed, with a tiny circulation, whose editorial staff could barely stand one another.

In fairness, Chambers notes that the publication’s weaknesses are due in part to the perilous circumstances facing the Party after Lenin’s death in 1924. While alive, Lenin had sufficient status as the leading figure of the Revolution to maintain the fiction of Bolshevik unity, with the Party (rather than any individual) exercising control. In Lenin’s absence, the Party was plunged into the search for a successor, while unable to admit that it was announcing a successor for fear of causing an open split within itself. The unofficial power struggle that ensued tore it apart—and the reverberations of this intra-Party fight reached all the way across the world, even to its most feeble propaganda outlets in the United States. Without a singular authority, Party discipline becomes a cudgel with which the members of one faction accuse another of insufficient vigilance or idolatrous celebration of an individual. This is especially ironic because such in-fighting was contrary to Lenin’s professed wishes.

Chambers is thus with the Party at its best and worst times. On the one hand, the crisis of the Great Depression is turning radical socialism into a substantive alternative to democratic liberalism. On the other, the Party is developing espionage and counterespionage networks that it uses as often against its own members as it does against revolutionary enemies. Stalin’s consolidation of power turns the Party into a snake that eats its own tail. It finds itself purging the leaders who might have been most effective in challenging Stalin and his lackeys. For example, Trotsky called Stalin a mediocre, petty bureaucrat whose climb to the top was made possible by his lack of moral scruples or romantic visions—and Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick to the back of his head.

For many years, Chambers has sought to cling to the humanistic vision of radical socialism that captured his heart by promising to empower the human spirit. By the late 1930s, Chambers is realizing that Communism is ultimately incompatible with humanism: that it feeds off people’s spiritual desires for the purpose of turning them into machines. No genuinely humanistic ideology could ever produce and elevate a man like Stalin. Chambers’s incipient alienation from the ideology and Party to which he has dedicated his life are emblematized by several key moments in these chapters: by his disgust with his peers’ contemptuous reaction to his marriage to a non-Communist, by the experience of love and humbled awe at the birth of his daughter, and by insistence of showing kindness towards even those Party members who have been denounced as saboteurs.

Chambers cannot bring himself to unsee the humanity of others. He soon learns that kindness is a sin the Party will not forgive.