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%politi[e89,jmc]		The Soviet Union in American Politics
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\title{The Soviet Union in American Politics}

	Since the revolution of 1917, ideas about the Soviet
Union have played a significant role in American politics.
Because of {\it Glasnost} and {\it Perestroika} this role
is changing, and is likely to change still more.  Because
I would like this article to be understandable to Soviets
as well as people in the West, I shall include some well
known material.  We are mainly concerned with the situation
after World War II, but we'll start with the situation
after the Revolution.

	In 1917 the idea of socialism was not very important
to most Americans, but the effect of the revolution to the
few American socialists has had reverberations that
definitely affected American public opinion on a large scale
and influenced American Government policy.
World War I was under way, and the United States entered it
in April 1917.  There was some sympathy with the February
revolution, but it could scarcely have been a matter of
great interest to the public of a nation just about to
get into its first European war.

	The October Revolution was more important, and within
two years led to a split in the American leftwing movements
in general.  Those who admired the revolution did so for
several reasons.

	1. Revolutionary romanticism always attracts some
people.

	2. The fact that the socialist movements of the
European countries had supported their national war
efforts was a great disappointment to  people who
believed that the ideas of socialism were international.
This led to approval of Lenin having taken a position
against his own government's war effort.

	3. Many who supported socialism decided to support
the one ``socialist'' government.

	Against that were two things.

	1. The anti-democratic character of the Bolsheviks
was clear to many from the start.

	2. The demands for subservience to the Communist
International (created in 1919) repelled people with
democratic ideas and people attached to the older socialist
movements.

	The result of this conflict was that the socialist
movement was weaker in the 1920s than it was just before
World War I.

	American foreign policy was anti-Soviet, because the
original actions aimed at keeping Russia in World War I
led to American and European support of the White side
in the Russian civil war.  However, issues about what
to do about the Soviet Union were not important in
American politics.  Herbert Hoover was able to pursue
is relief activities in the Soviet Union without their
becoming much of an issue between the Democrat and
Republican parties.

	However, sympathy for communism and the Soviet
Union began to play a role in Western literary and
artistic circles.

	When the world-wide economic depression occurred in the
1930s, the situation quickly changed.  Socialist ideas became
more popular, and the American Communist Party acquired the
allegiance of a substantial part of the intelligentsia.
Revolutionary romanticism was supplemented by economic
romanticism, which required the belief that the Soviet Union was
leading the way to abolishing the economic disadvantages of
capitalism.  Indeed it became necesary to believe that the Soviet
Union had already overcome many of these disadvantages.  Walter
Duranty of the New York Times received a Pulitzer prize,
essentially for convincingly denying the existence of the great
Ukrainian famine of 1934.

	The next intellectual step was to promote the Soviet
Union as the main bulwark against the menace of Hitler.  This
was awkward, because the 1920s communist policy of regarding the
social democrats as a greater menace than the Nazis was
not fully changed until 1936.

	Nevertheless, the change was made successfully, and it
was aided by the fact that conservative opinion in Britain
and France was very slow to see Fascism as a menace to world
civilization, and one could reasonably regard the Soviet
Union as the major anti-Fascist power between 1936 and
September 1939.

	On the other hand, there was plenty of evidence, for
those who weren't self-blinded, that the Stalin was leading
the Soviet Union in a totalitarian direction.  The trials
were well reported, and most people were convinced of
the ludicrous nature of the charges.  This led to fierce
conflicts between those who were romantic about the
Soviet Union and those who weren't.

	The issue entered party politics to some extent with
the Republicans more anti-communist than the Democrats.
However, the Democratic politicians remained mainly
anti-communist, partly because of the struggle for control
of the trade union  movement with the communists.
Members of the American Communist Party played an important
role in the expansion of trade unionism in the 1930s and
gained control of some unions.  When they gained such
control, they always abused their power, enlisting the
union in various communist and Soviet causes.  The Party
insisted on these expressions of loyalty even though
they often led to subsequent loss of power.

	Naturally, there was a moderate degree of communist
influence in Government, because Government intellectuals were
subject to the same ideological influences as others.  This
wasn't important at the time, because there were no important
secrets, and it only led to policy being somewhat more left than
it would otherwise have been.  However, the communist cells had a
definite conspiratorial character, and defectors from communism
kept the right wingers stirred up by their revelations of
infiltration.

	The communists lost a lot of their influence at the time
of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact just before Germany
attacked Poland on September 1, 1939.  The period between the
pact and the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941
was especially bad for communist influence.  It required great
loyalty for an intellectual to stick with the Commmunist
Party, and probably a majority dropped out.  Besides the
pact itself, there was the Soviet occupation of part of
Poland, the Baltic countries, part of Romania and the
war against Finland.

	When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the line
changed, and when Japan attacked the U.S. and Hitler declared
war on the U.S. in December 1941, we became allies with the
Soviet Union.  This alliance had enormous effects on
intellectual life.  It again led to romanticizing the Soviet
Union, which was doing the majority of the fighting against
the Germans.  Communist strength in the American media greatly
increased.

	After World War II, the qualitative role that the Soviet
Union has played in American politics until the present became
established, although the relative strength of the different
attitudes fluctuated.  Here is a sketch of the forces that
determined attitudes.
\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1989\ by John McCarthy}
\smallskip\noindent{This draft of POLITI[E89,JMC]\ TEXed on \jmcdate\ at \theTime}
%File originated on 26-Jul-89
\vfill\eject\end

The Soviet Union has always been more important in American
intellectual politics than in electoral politics.

Since the Revolution, the Soviet Union has always been important
in American intellectual politics.  It has sporadically been
important in American electoral politics, and when it occurs, this
importance grows out of its intellectual political importance.

A coherent conservative movement has been important in American
intellectual life only since the 1960, when traditional
conservatives were reinforced by converts from the left.