Stalin himself delivered the body blow to the faithful with the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fellow travelers found it hard to travel down this road, and Communist parties around the world hemorrhaged members. The New Republic, which had supported the Soviet Union for decades, reversed itself when Stalin attacked Finland. Many who had resisted the concept of “totalitarianism,” which collapsed Stalinism and Nazism into a single analytical category, suddenly saw merit in this formulation. In 1940 Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, an excursion through the prehistory and history of Marxism in thought and in power.57 Once a Communist, later an admirer of Trotsky, Wilson questioned the sureties of his earlier faith and ended up with praise for Marxism’s moral and social vision, while rejecting the authoritarianism and statism of the Soviet model.58 Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), the son of Hungarian Jews, explored his loss of faith in the Communist movement in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940). Basing his hero on Bukharin, Koestler told the story of an idealistic Soviet leader, Rubashov, who agrees to confess to imaginary crimes as his last contribution to the revolutionary cause. Along with George Orwell’s dystopian novels, Koestler’s exploration into the mind of a Bolshevik would become one of the defining literary portraits in the anti-Communist arsenal in the post-war years.
With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, attitudes shifted once again, spawning an outpouring of writing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Some 200 books were published in the United States in 1943–45 alone. Ambassador Davies’s memoir, Mission to Moscow (December 1941), sold 700,000 copies and was memorialized in a splashy Hollywood film that lauded Soviet achievements, “convicted” those charged at the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland, and portrayed Stalin as a benignly avuncular patriarch. A grotesque piece of war propaganda, playing fast and loose with historical fact, the film was widely panned in the press, and leading “progressive” intellectuals, including Dewey, Dwight Macdonald, Wilson, Eastman, Sidney Hook, Farrell, and the leader of the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas, signed public protests against it. Four years after the film’s opening in 1943, Warner Brothers reacted to the onset of the Cold War by ordering all release prints destroyed.59
One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the period was by the Russian-born émigré sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff (1886–1970), whose The Great Retreat showed in detail how the Soviet state had abandoned its original revolutionary program and internationalist agenda in the mid-1930s and turned into a traditional Great Power.60 Instead of the radical leveling of social classes of the early 1930s, Stalinism introduced new hierarchies based on wage differentials, education, party affiliation and loyalty to the state. This Great Retreat represented the triumph of the “national structure,” Russian history, and the needs and desires of the people over “an anonymous body of international workers.”61 Rather than betraying the revolution, the Retreat signaled its nationalization and domestication, the victory of reality and “objective facts” over utopianism and radical experimentation. The book appeared in 1946, just after the highpoint of Soviet–American cooperation, clearly a reflection of the Yalta spirit of the immediate pre–Cold War years. Timasheff predicted that the revolutionary years were over; faith in the Marxist doctrine had faded, and a future development toward democracy was possible. Here he echoed his collaborator, fellow Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) of Harvard, who in his Russia and the United States (1944) proposed that Russia and the United States were meant to be allies, not enemies, and that the two societies were indeed converging along the lines of all other highly industrialized societies. This “convergence thesis” would eventually become standard in the modernization literature of the 1950s, and both in its introduction and its elaboration formed part of a general political recommendation for understanding, tolerance, patience, and entente between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.
The Cold War and Professional Sovietology
In late 1945, American public opinion was generally positive about the Soviet Union. A Fortune poll in September showed that only a quarter of the population believed that the USSR would attempt to spread communism into Eastern Europe. By July 1946, more than half of those polled felt that Moscow aimed to dominate as much of the world as possible.62 Within government and in the public sphere, opposing formulations of the Soviet Union contended with one another. Vice-president and later Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace used the Russian character to explain why a “get tough with Russia” policy would only result in tougher Russians. Others like Walter Lippmann warned that not recognizing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe would lead to a “cold war.” But far more influential, and eventually hegemonic, were the views of a number of State Department specialists, most importantly George Kennan, who did not trust the Soviet leadership.
In 1946, Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, reiterating that Russian behavior was best explained by national characteristics. The inherent, intractable, immutable traits of the Russians as “Asiatics” required the use of countervailing force to contain the Soviets’ aggressive tendencies. When he published his views in Foreign Affairs, famously signing the article “X,” Kennan abruptly shifted his position from considering Marxism largely irrelevant to emphasizing the importance of Marxist doctrine. “The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today,” he wrote, “is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.”63 Soviet ideology included the idea of the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism and the infallibility of the Kremlin as the sole repository of truth. Though his explanation had changed from national character to ideology, Kennan’s prescription for US foreign policy remained the same: the USSR was a rival, not a partner, and the United States had no other course but containment of Russian expansive tendencies.64
Under the imperatives of the American government’s apprehension about Soviet expansionism, a profession of “Sovietologists” began to form, primarily in the United States. In 1946, the first American center of Russian studies, the Russian Institute, was founded at Columbia University, soon to be followed by the Russian Research Centre at Harvard (1948). The first “area studies” centers in the United States became prototypes for a new direction in social science research, bringing together various disciplines to look intensively at a particular society and culture. A generation of scholars, many of whom had had wartime experience in the military or in intelligence, worked closely with governmental agencies and on official projects sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency or the military. Most importantly, the Air Force funded the Harvard Interview Project, questioning thousands of Soviet émigrés and producing valuable information on daily life and thought in the USSR, as well as guides for target selection and psychological warfare. In 1950, the Institute for the Study of the USSR was founded in Munich. Secretly funded by the CIA until it was closed in 1971, the Institute produced numerous volumes and journals by émigré writers that confirmed the worst expectations of Western readers. More interesting to scholars was the American government-sponsored journal Problems of Communism, edited from 1952 to 1970 by a skeptical scion of the Polish Jewish Bund, Abraham Brumberg, which managed to condemn the Soviet Union as a totalitarian tyranny while avoiding the worst excesses of anti-Communist hysteria.
American scholars, particularly political scientists and sociologists, were caught in a schizophrenic tension