Reds by Maurice Isserman

Author:Maurice Isserman [Isserman, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

In Europe, the fighting took a dramatic turn in the spring and summer of 1940. Communists, like many other observers, initially expected the “second imperialist war” to follow the pattern set by the first one back in 1914–1918, that is, a prolonged stalemate that could last years before there was any decisive outcome. Instead, after seven relatively calm months of “phoney war” to the west of Germany, Hitler launched his Western Front blitzkrieg offensive in April, invading and conquering Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxemburg, and Belgium in short order, and forcing France to surrender in late June. Britain came under sustained air assault in August, and the Germans prepared for a cross-channel invasion later in the year. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, initially justified by Communists as a necessary act of realpolitik buying time for the Soviet Union to strengthen its defenses, no longer seemed quite as good a deal. “Will not Hitler, in the event of a crushing victory over Great Britain and France, turn his armies against the USSR?” a reader asked the Daily Worker in June 1940. William Z. Foster replied, with an assured rhetorical shrug, that such an invasion would “provoke a general European revolutionary war” and “put the life of the capitalist system in jeopardy.”42

In Europe in 1940–1941, however, the thunder was distinctly on the fascist right. Italy launched an ill-fated invasion of Greece in the fall of 1940, initially repelled by determined Greek resistance, aided by the British. Then the Germans intervened in April 1941, forcing the British out and the Greeks to surrender. Bulgaria joined the Axis at the beginning of March, and the Germans pressured Yugoslavia to do the same. When the pro-Axis Yugoslav government prepared to do so, the army stepped in and installed a new government, which signed a treaty of friendship with the USSR on April 5. Enraged by this defiance, Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia.

In response to the military catastrophe unfolding in Europe, talk began to be heard in some quarters of the Party hinting at a partial return to an anti-Nazi outlook. Joseph Starobin, a veteran of the City College chapter of the National Student League in the early 1930s, and then an increasingly authoritative voice in Party circles on foreign affairs, argued in the New Masses in mid-April 1941 that the USSR should not be expected “to remain passive” in the face of German advances. The May issue of The Communist declared that “the attacked peoples” of Greece and Yugoslavia were “waging a valiant and just war of liberation.”43

If Greeks and Yugoslavs were lauded by the Party for anti-fascist resistance, that didn’t translate into a reconsideration of the overall nature of the war, which, logically, should have justified Communist support for the British, fighting their own battle for national survival. Without a definitive signal from Moscow, the CPUSA remained committed to the “Yanks Aren’t Coming” line. Stalin, though warned by British intelligence and his own agents in Berlin of an impending German invasion, believed those were Allied provocations.

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