Mini-Review: The Anticommunist Manifestos

For a faith born out of books—the books of Marx, to be precise—communism was never very keen on literature. Fiction, or at least fiction not devoted to the glories of the Five Year Plan, was bourgeois. So were biographies and memoirs. Political texts were subversive. In short, everything not bearing the name Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, or praising one of those three, was verboten. Small wonder, then, that books proved such a powerful counterargument to communism. In “The Anticommunist Manifestos,” John Fleming treats on four books that battled the Bolshies.

Two of the titles, “Witness” and “Darkness at Noon,” might be familiar to history-minded readers. The other two—“Out of the Night” and “I Chose Freedom”—are more obscure than the post-Wham career of Andrew Ridgely. Yet in their day, all four were widely read, widely discussed, and widely condemned by communists and fellow travelers in America and across the world.

People often assume anti-communism was an American phenomenon. The archetypal anticommunist, Joseph McCarthy, was as jingoistic as jingoes come, and the whole idea of anti-communism seems to float in a red, white, and blue haze. In reality, it was as much a global phenomenon as the ideology it fought against. “Darkness at Noon,” the chilling story of a Soviet political commissar sacrificed on the bloody altar of communism, was written by Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler and first published in France; it dealt a near-fatal blow to the fortunes of the French Communist Party.

“Out of the Night” by Richard Krebs (published under the pseudonym Jan Valtin) and “I Chose Freedom” by Victor Kravchenko were both exposes written by Soviet defectors. Both were published in America thanks to the work of dedicated anti-communists like Isaac Don Levine and Eugene Lyons (himself an ex-communist). “I Chose Freedom” made perhaps the bigger splash. When the French communist paper Les Lettres Francaises accused Kravchenko of fabricating tales about gulags, political executions, and mass starvation, he sued them for libel—and won, after a chaotic trial brilliantly retold by Fleming.

Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness” marked the end of an era for American anti-communism. Not that Americans no longer opposed communism. But the Communist Party, which had once been so vibrant, was by that time a moldering corpse. The Alger Hiss case and
“Witness” simply interred the body. From then on, the serious battles against communism would be fought on foreign fronts. “Witness” served as a rallying cry for this coming battle. Chambers, a communist-turned conservative and an atheist-turned Quaker, warned Americans that beating the Soviets would require more than topping them in the annual production of dishwashers. Victory in this battle would require faith, faith in God and in democracy. The perpetually gloomy Chambers feared that neither would take root.

In his book—actually more a series of essays, joined under the spacious anti-communist umbrella—Fleming retells these stories with elegance, intelligence, and a slight smidgen of humor. You feel drawn back to the 1940s, the age of the Popular Front, the age when it sometimes seemed that the only thing standing between America and communism was a few hundred bound pages.