Foreign Communists and Their Learning Experiences in Stalinist Soviet Society

By Michael Rausch

The term “useful idiot”, often falsely attributed to Vladimir Lenin, has often been widely used to describe someone who supports a particular ideology so dogmatically that they are unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe. Blinded to the truth of the system they believe in, these individuals often suffer from what is referred to as cognitive dissonance or fetishist disavowal, a term described by Slovenian Philosopher SlavojZizek in his work titled, Violence: Six Sideways Expressions. They are described as individuals who believe in an ideology so strongly that they are simply unable to handle the factual truth of the system that is presented to them. As Zizek states regarding this, "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know” (Zizek 53). In other words, certain individuals may have a sense of the reality of the ideology to which they subscribe but, due to their rigid beliefs, refuse to accept the truth in exchange for the comfort of delusion and comfort that ideology can provide. This sort of thinking would prove disastrous for many foreign communists, such as Americans Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman and German communists such as Margarete Buber-Neumann who fell victim to the xenophobia that took over the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. The experiences depicted in the autobiographies they left behind contributed to the strengthening of a right wing conservative movement.

To understand how this sort of thinking can develop, one has to understand the concept of cultural hegemony which was laid out by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. According to Gramsci, “men become conscious of their social position and therefore of their tasks on the terrain of ideologies” (Gramsci 196). Consequently, many of the attitudes people possess can be directly linked to the social environment in which they live and the ideology that rules over their social environment. How people view their respective societies is very much dependent upon the weight certain ideologies hold in each society. Attitudes towards philosophies such as capitalism and communism can change drastically depending upon the community in which individuals live and the sorts of languagethey take in throughout their daily lives, from the propaganda presented in media outlets such as the news and sales advertisements created by the capitalist ruling class to the education system and authority figures who lead it such as teachers, philosophers, politicians.

While it is the ruling class’s ideas which dominate and lay down the mainstream cultural hegemony, Gramsci mentions that class warfare between the ruling class and the suppressed classes does lead to cracks within this ruling ideology as movements, such as those of the working class work to defeat it. As Joe Cleffie writes for the Socialist Review in his article titled, "Rescuing Gramsci from His Misinterpreters", “The working class, through its political parties, struggles to achieve hegemony among the oppressed classes (the subaltern) and in its struggle with the ruling class” (Cleffie). Through this struggle, working class movements, such as communist movements, can achieve their own sort of cultural hegemony over their own constituents which challenges and at times, overcomes the social conditioning they experience from the mainstream ideology. Through producing communist texts and works such as pamphlets, books, newspapers, and films to holding meetings, rallies, protests, and educational classes where people can come together to share and strengthen their communist views, working class movements can create their owns sort of cultural hegemony within a mainstream capitalist cultural hegemony. Through their social networks, they can minimize the impacts of mainstream cultural hegemony.

Due to social conditioning, individuals who reside within such a cultural hegemony can adopt the sort of fetishist disavowal that Zizekdiscusses. This creates a belief in an idealized version of the system they believe in. Factual truths become ignored or disregarded.

As historian Tim Tzouliadis makes clear in his work, The Foresaken: An American TragedyinStalin’s Russia, thousands of Americans who left the US for the Soviet Union in the 1930s suffered under this sort of delusion. Ignoring other evidence left by those who had fled the Red Terror in the Soviet Union, many Americans bought the Soviet propaganda. Believing that the grass was greener on the other side in the Soviet Union, which was portrayed as a communist paradise putting the working man at its center, many Americans were convinced by the glowing accounts that they could find meaningful work as well as many other free social benefits for their families, such as free libraries, free swimming pools, free cafeterias, and free nurseries for their children. In short, they could find paradise under communism (Tzouliadis 5-6). Hence, convinced, many American workers as well as communist ideologues who had faith in communism applied in mass to immigrate to the Soviet Union. Overall, 18,000 Americans would take up work in the Soviet Union (Fegelman).

Among these immigrants were individuals such as Thomas Sgovio, and Victor Herman. Born in Buffalo, New York, Thomas Sgovio mentions in his autobiography, Dear America! The Odyssey of an American Communist Youth who Miraculously Survived the Harsh Labor Camps of Kolyma, that he spent his early years following in the footsteps of his father who was an Italian communist activist. Raised in this communist cultural hegemony created by the local communist movement in Buffalo, Sgovio spent his school days undertaking communist agitation work as a member of the Young Communist League. As a student, Sgovio was once arrested for handing out communist leaflets and given a five day jail sentence (Sgovio 15-17). Not deterred by this experience, Sgovio would spend much time undertaking other communist activist projects, such as painting placards for outdoor communist demonstrations. Many family dinners were spent in the company of communists where spaghetti was served alongside communist theory (Sgovio 70-73). Sgovio and his father were huge admirers of Lenin and believed themselves to be following in his footsteps. Like many other communists, they were influenced by and strengthened Soviet communist hegemony.

Due to his communist beliefs, Sgovio’s father was eventually arrested and expelled from the US. Ignoring the wisdom of his art teacher who had experienced the realities of the Soviet system firsthand and strongly warned him against going, Sgovio, influenced by a sort of fetishist disavowal, laughed at his mentor’s fears and decided to follow his father to the Soviet Union in 1935 (Sgovio 87-89). Sgovio believed that a communist society would be paradise and ignored what would factually stain that image.

Sgovio was not alone in this mindset. Victor Herman was another American communist who followed in his communist father’s footsteps and took a journey to the Soviet Union in the 1930s influenced by communist cultural hegemony experienced in his own local communist movement. Born in 1915 to parents both born in Ukraine who had come to America in 1909 after spending years in the Russian Revolutionary left fighting the Tsarist government under Tsar Nicholas II, Victor Herman also spent his formative years involved in communist activism in Detroit. Like Sgovio, Herman took part in communist youth work in the communist youth group, the Pioneers. He delivered socialist propaganda and tried to help forge a communist society in the US (Herman 8-10). His father, blacklisted due to his beliefs in 1929, decided to move his family to the Soviet Union. In 1931, Herman’s family left and took up work in the Ford Factory in Gorky (Herman 13-17). As he states in his autobiography, Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life, “………….I was an American, a boy from Detroit who went where his parents took him and who paid what his father’s dream cost” (Herman 7). Like Sgovio, Herman would end up eventually suffering due to his faiththat he would find career advancement in the Soviet Union.

German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann was another individual among many German communists who ended up in the Soviet Union influenced by the cultural hegemony she grew up in. During her early years in Berlin immediately following World War 1 and into the early 1920s, she witnessed a city in political turmoil. The German communist party, which commanded an impressive presence in Germany boasting hundreds of thousands of members, launched strikes, demonstrations, uprisings, and committed assassinations as they fought for power over Germany. Influenced by the romantic image of this group and the poverty they fought, she joined the German Communist Party youth movement in the spring of 1921. That year, a newly ardent communist believer, she marched amongst a sea of communist red flags (Wachsmann viii-ix). She saw the Soviet Union as the “model for a better world, come true”. Considering the political wars fought between the communists and other political groups such as the fascists within Germany at the time and considering she would have had access to other knowledge that countered this utopian vision both from them and the exiles who fled there following the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, she, like Sgovio and Herman, suffered from a sort of fetishist disavowal.

After her first marriage failed, Buber-Neumann would dedicate herself fulltime to the communist movement in the late 1920s when she found work in the Berlin headquarters of the KPD. She became the chief officer of the paper of the communist international (Wachsmann ix). She also took part in local agitation for the KPD, which she had joined in 1926. She, like Sgovio and Herman, believed in taking to the streets frequently to spread the communist cause.

Her love life also reflected this commitment to communism through her marriage to Heinz Neumann after meeting him in 1929. A political celebrity in the German communist movement, he had managed to build up a reputation as a great communist activist. His political skill would lead him to represent the KPD in Moscow on the executive committee of the Comintern. He also worked as a KPD leader in Germany where he held several key positions and edited Red Flag, which was an influential Communist daily newspaper (Wachsmann ix-x). They were the perfect match.

However, political events would force the two to go to Moscow and leave behind capitalist Europe. By 1933, due to political infighting within the German communist party, Heinz fell out of favor with the communist leadership.After writing to an old party friend despite being ordered to stay out of German politics, he was accused of wanting to split the KPD and denounced by his former comrades. Reminiscent of the sort of language later used to describe individuals purged during the Yezhovshchina in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, Heinz was demonized by the party. He was described by the German party executive as a ‘troublemaker’ who needed to be eliminated, and GeorgiDimitrov, who was soon to rise to the position of head of the Cominintern,shared this sort of sentiment. By the end of 1933, he was ordered out of the country to Switzerland where he was joined by his wife (Wachsmann x-xi).

The two would not find a good life in capitalist Switzerland. Having settled there illegally, Heinz found himself under arrest by the end of 1934. Intervening to save the two communists, the Soviet government agreed to take them in (Wachsmann xi). Still influenced by a belief in communism despite the political purge of sorts they had experienced in Germany and the negativity around the movement which had hurt them so, the two took Moscow’s offer and went to the Soviet Union in pursuit of their vision instead of dropping the ideology and returning to Germany. Due to fetishist disavowal, they were able to still believe in the communist dream. They did not subscribe what happened in Germany to something that was part of and would soon become much worse within the communist movement.

Out of all the communists who went to the Soviet Union, Victor Herman received arguably the greatest fame. After passing his courses at the Vodopyanov school of aviation in Gorky where he received his pilot’s certificate in a year and a half which was a feat that normally took 3 years for someone to achieve, he became an instructor at the school. While teaching, he also got into jumping from planes (Herman 62-67). His practice would eventually lead to him breaking the world record for highest free fall jump on September 6, 1934. Going to a height of 24,500 feet, Herman jumped from the plane and entered a 142 second free fall before pulling the ripcord at roughly the 1,200 feet mark while eating an apple. Done over an airfield packed with military men, spectators, and reporters from all over the world, it was an impressive feat witnessed by many. It would earn him the nickname, “Lindbergh of Russia” (Herman 75-78)

However, when asked to report what nation he was a citizen of in order to receive credit when the feat was reported to FIFA, he put down the US as his citizenship. This action, despite pressure from the Soviet authorities to put down Soviet as his citizenship, would later doom Herman in the eyes of what became an increasingly xenophobic and totalitarian Soviet government (Herman 79-80).

This xenophobia would lead, following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, to the event known as the Yezhovshchina of the late 1930s. During this time period, countless millions of Soviet citizens and foreigners were caught up in the state organized terror machine as the government responded to perceived enemies everywhere. Many were either executed or sent to the Gulag system. No one was given a fair legal representation. This paranoia was particularly devastating for foreigners, particularly communists who had been influenced by communist cultural hegemony and hence, had devoted much to the cause. As the late historian Robert Conquest accurately depicted in his work, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, many foreign communists died during this time period. Many German communists staying at the Hotel Lux in Moscow, a political refuge for many communists fleeing persecution in their homelands, were persecuted during this time. Most of the 178 leading German communists who were staying there died in the purges. Many Italian communists also died in the purges, a total which was estimated to be roughly 200. Arrests of Polish communists also took place all over the Soviet Union in the 1930s. By September 11, 1937, the whole Polish Politburo had been arrested. Stalin later signed a proposal in November, 1937 on “cleaning up” the Polish Party. The whole Polish population in the Soviet Union itself suffered, as the population dropped from 792,000 during the 1926 Soviet census to 626,000 in the 1939 census (Conquest 404-406). Many communists of other nationalities also died. Entire populations, such as ethnic Koreans from the east accused of being Japanese spies, ethnic Germans, and other ethnic groups were deported elsewhere in the country on cattle cars (KoryoSaram).

Buber-Neumann’s autobiography paints an effective atmosphere of the experiences individuals suffering under this persecution went through. After her husband’s arrest by the NKVD on April 27, 1937 after 2 years of witnessing friends persecuted which shattered the fetishist disavowal she had held regarding communism, she was sent to a special section of the Hotel Lux called the NEP wing which was for families of those who had been arrested. There, she met many Polish women who had husbands arrested by the government. All of them had been Old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor with Stalin’s government. Speaking about the conditions, she wrote,

“Every room in this wing held a similar tragedy. Mothers and wives spent their days going from one prison to the other in the hope of finding the whereabouts of a husband or son. They were forced to sell their little possessions one after the other, for there was neither support nor work for those ‘left behind’ and at night they waited for their own arrest. For weeks and months the bag which was to accompany them to Siberia stood ready packed in a corner” (Buber-Neumann 7-8). These Polish women eventually were all arrested in September 1937 (Buber-Neumann 16-17).

By the end of that September, she was expelled from the German communist party and kicked out of her residence. After struggling to scrape an existence in a growing xenophobic society, she attempted to leave after being given a document by a French consul pledging her safe conduct to Paris and permission to stay for 3 months. Her experiences with Soviet xenophobia and nationalism had pushed her to reject communism as an ideology. However, the Soviets refused to give her an exit permit, concerned that people like her leaving to speak the truth would damage the Soviet Union’s reputation, and on June 19, 1938, arrested her and sent to a Gulag camp in Karaganda located in Kazakhstan (Buber-Neumann 22-23).

Many Americans living within the Soviet Union were also persecuted. By the end of 1937, with his illusions of the Soviet Union shattered by all the suffering around him due to the Soviet xenophobia during the Terror, Sgovio, like Margarete, decided he had had enough of the Soviet system. In January 1938, he went to the US embassy for the first time to file an application for an exit visa and renunciation of Soviet citizenship. After leaving the American embassy in March, Sgovio was arrested for his attempted escape and eventually given a five year sentence in the Gulag system without the benefit of a fair trial (Sgovio 5-10). This resulted in Sgovio being sent to Kolyma where he undertook various jobs such as gold mining and logging as part of a vast slave labor army the Soviets used to exploit the natural resources of the region for industrialization (Sgovio 147, 166-168).

Knowing that free labor would not move to such regions as Kolyma where the temperature could drop to -70 and jobs such as gold mining were often deadly, the Soviets, in order to also separate a population of people deemed “socially dangerous” elements, decided to use slave labor. As historian Paul Gregory states in the Economic of Forced Labor The Soviet Gulag, “Gulag labor was principally concentrated in remote regions that had difficult climates and that would have been costly to settle with free labor”. This penal labor was partially designed to achieve economic surpluses for the state which would come at the expense of millions of lives (Gregory 5).

This notion of economic slavery and the need to use forced labor is supported through a vast amount of literature on the Gulags, most notably by former dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his work titled, The Gulag Archipelago. As he stated regarding this,

”Who, except prisoners, would have worked at logging ten hours a day, in addition to marching four miles through the woods in predawn darkness and the same distance back at night, in a temperature of minus 20, and knowing in a year no other rest than May 1 and November 7? And who other than the Archipelago natives would have grubbed out stumps in winter? Or hauled on their backs the boxes of mined ore in the open goldfields of the Kolyma? Or have dragged cut timber a half mile from the Koin River through deep snow on Finnish timber-sledge runners, harnessed up in pairs in a horse collar?” (Solzhenitsyn 578-579). As he illustrates quite well, considering the brutal work conditions found in such regions, only slave labor could be “convinced” to work there.

For his “crime” of not putting down the right nationality, a symbolic rejection of the Soviet community, Herman also found himself persecuted by the Soviet due to Soviet xenophobia. He was arrested and eventually sentenced to the Burepolom Gulag where he was put to work cutting wood (Herman 208). Given a work quota of twenty cubic yards of wood a day in often freezing temperatures, he spent 3 days working before he was allowed to eat as the Soviets fed workers based on how much work or profit you produced in their eyes (Herman 215). Failure to produce the desired work quota often met a reduction in food rations which were terrible to begin with and in cases, physical punishment or execution by bullet.

Buber-Neumann’s work testifies to this. She mentions, “Older prisoners who could no longer stand up to the work were sent to a special so called invalid department where they were placed on ‘light work’ and given a ration of only half a pound of bread a day, on which they slowly starved” (Buber-Neumann 74-75). For those who refused to work, execution was mentioned, as she states about the one incident where she heard about the execution of 75 prisoners for “repeated and willful refusal to work” in Dolinki (Buber-Neumann 106). What Herman mentioned is fully supported by her and many other individuals’ testimony.

The food conditions in camps such as these two were often so bad that people resorted to desperate methods to obtain food. Herman mentions prisoners such as himself were forced to eat tree slugs and rats in order to survive at times, which is similar to the desperation seen in starving North Koreans eating tree bark and grass to survive in communist ruled North Korea (Herman 250-251, 277). Sgovio himself deteriorated so much from the lack of good food in Kolyma that he states,

“When I looked at my bones I was scared. I was worse than any of the walking skeletons in the Srednikan recovery barrack. There was no flesh on my bones – only gray, scaly skin. Someone told me to sit down and wait my turn. I could not sit – it hurt terribly. I felt my buttocks – there was none” (Sgovio 216).

Sgovio, Herman, and Buber-Neumann fortunately never joined the ranks of the dokhodyaga which were seen all around them. Dokhodyaga is a Russian term for “goners” which was a state someone entered where they were so physically ill from starvation that their body started to look like Holocaust concentration camp survivors and they consequently no longer looked after themselves. As historian Anne Applebaum notes in her comprehensive work, Gulag A History, they “….stopped washing themselves, stopped controlling their bowels, stopped having normal human reactions to insults – until they became, quite literally, insane with hunger” (Applebaum336-337). Sgovio would meet an American communist by the name of Eisenstein who reached this state. As Sgovio stated,

“At first I did not recognize my friend. Eisenstein did not answer when I greeted him. His face wore the blank expression of the dokhodyaga. He looked through me as if I were not there. Eisenstein didn’t seem to see anyone. There was no expression at all in his eyes. Gathering the empty plates from the mess halls, he scanned each of them for leftover food particles. He ran his fingers around the inside of the plates and then licked them” (Sgovio 161-162).

Sgovio and Herman would remain in the Gulags until the end of their respective sentence when they were then released and eventually managed to find their way back to the United States. Once back, both of them would publish autobiographies that would serve as ammunition to strengthen the conservative anti-communist movement. Regarding his book, Sgovio is quoted on his website about it,

“I did not intend this book to be just another account of Soviet prisons and labor camps – instead, a journey through human experience…my transformation from a communist, atheist child born in the revolutionary movement – into a God-fearing Christian” (Sgovio). Through his book and his illustrations depicting what he experienced in the Gulags, which he often showcased in public seminars, Sgovio used his work as a tool to attack communism and showcase his personal transformation into a right wing political warrior. As his website states, “This was his way of spreading the message of Freedom and Democracy.” For Sgovio and Herman, their cultural hegemony under communist ideology had shattered, replaced by the ideology of the right.

As for Buber-Neumann, her struggles to survive would not end with the Gulag. In February 1940, the Soviets handed her over to Nazi Germany along with many other communists. Her journey would eventually take her to Ravensbruck prison where she would spend the next years until the end of the war (Wachsmann xv-xvi). Eventually though, she would find her way out of captivity.

After her ordeal, she, like Sgovio and Herman, would write an autobiography which would contribute to the right wing anti Soviet movement. She also participated in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a right wing political group funded by the CIA, which brought together European politicians and intellectuals to attack Soviet communism. Buber-Neumann also briefly ran the Institute for Political Education, which was also financed by the US government. A large nationwide campaign for those who were victims of repression in Communist controlled East Germany was another project she attached her name to (Wachsmann xx). She also underwent a significant political transformation

The political transformation of these honest and sincere leftists into right wing political warriors showcases the impact Soviet xenophobia and resulting oppression had on the political left. In many ways, Soviet xenophobia under Stalinism was a best friend to the political right in terms of the aid it gave to the political right.

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