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Some Sidelights on Canadian Communist History

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Some Sidelights on Canadian Communist History Some Sidelights on Canadian Communist History On Karen Levine’s 1977 Interviews During the summer of 2020 I happened to mention the Kenny oral history project to my friend Russell Hann, a labour historian with an encyclopedic memory and a well-organized personal archive. He immediately recalled a 1977 essay by a UofT undergraduate, Karen Levine, on the impact of the 1956 Khrushchev revelations on Canada’s Communists. He also recollected that she cited interviews she conducted with some important figures in the movement, including Robert Kenny. Russell promptly forwarded a copy of “The Labour Progressive Party in Crisis: 1956-57”i to me and after reading it, I contacted Karen, to find out if the recordings she made 43 years earlier still existed. Luckily, Karen kept them (with the unfortunate exception of J.B. Salsberg, a pivotal figure in the 1956 events) and generously agreed to add them to the other interviews in the Kenny oral archive. In her essay Karen also cited information gleaned from earlier recordings done by David Chud, one of several students who, in the early 1970s, recorded over 100 “interviews with individuals involved with [Canada’s] labour and socialist movements.” Don Lake, at that point associated with the left-nationalist Waffle wing of the New Democratic Party, was one of the graduate students who did these interviews. Today Don and his partner Elaine operate “D&E Books,” one of Toronto’s premier antiquarian bookstores. Their business was originally launched in 1977 as “October Books” after they purchased a stock of radical (and other) books and pamphlets from Peter Weinrich who was then in the process of winding up his partnership in Blue Heron Books. * The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in February 1956, and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year, sent shockwaves throughout the world Communist movement, including Canada’s Labour Progressive Party (LPP). (The Communist Party of Canada [CPC] founded in 1921, was declared illegal in 1940 at the outset of World War II. After operating underground for a few years, the party resurfaced in 1943 as the LPP, a name it operated with until 1960 when it reverted to its original name.) Karen’s parents were among thousands of people who left the LPP and its “mass organizations” in 1956- 57. But unlike many others, they did not entirely repudiate their pasts and stayed friends with people who remained in the party, including Stanley and Millie Ryerson. Some of these connections were useful to Karen two decades later when she set out to investigate the 1956 events (although she noted that Stanley Ryerson, the party’s leading intellectual, indicated that he was not prepared to talk to her). The interviews she did conduct, however, are interesting both as insider accounts of the LPP’s 1956 trauma and as more general commentaries by participants in the Canadian Communist movement from the 1920s to the 1970s. Karen’s interviews spanned the entire spectrum of LPP opinion at the time. Robert Laxer was among those who concluded that it was necessary to entirely write off the party as a political “corpse.” Karen’s 1 parents, like Ben Shek and Norman Penner, occupied a sort of middle ground at the time—they were critical of aspects of the party’s record and its operational methods but still identified with the socialist project and would have liked to have seen the LPP undergo major reform without abandoning its central mission. Robert Kenny and Phyllis Clarke articulated the view of the “pro-party” majority in 1956: while willing to admit there was room for improvement, their chief concern was fighting those they saw as “revisionists” and “liquidationists.” Canadian Communism & the Jewish Experience With the exception of Bert Kenny, everyone Karen interviewed had a Jewish background. Her parents, like Phyllis Clarke and Ben Shek, joined the party in the 1940s at U of T. Bob Laxer and Norman Penner had been Communist youth leaders in the 1930s. Max Dolgoy and Joe (Joshua) Gershman, two old- timers from the 1920s with whom Karen also spoke, both grew up in territories ruled by the Tsar before emigrating to Canada. Many of the points touched on in Karen’s interview with Joe Gershman are explored in more depth in an article Irving Abella published in Labour/LeTravail [L/LT]: “Portrait of a Jewish Professional Revolutionary: The Recollections of Joshua Gershman” 1977, http://www.lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/article/download/2343/2751/ The Canadian party was initially overwhelmingly composed of immigrants from the Tsarist “prison house of peoples,” as Macleans magazine reported in 1931: “Of the 6,000 members of the Communist Party of Canada probably not more than ten per cent are English speaking. Forty per cent are Ukrainians and Russians, forty per cent Finns, and ten per cent foreign-language Jews. A sprinkling of other nationalities merges with these parties. It is clear that if the support of these foreigners, this unassimilated lump in the body politic, were to be withdrawn from the Communists tomorrow, the Communist Party of Canada would automatically collapse.” https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1931/5/15/communism-in-canada There is no question that the vast majority of CPC members at that time were Ukrainian, Finnish or Jewish. Many of the Jewish workers who joined the CPC in its infancy, like Max Dolgoy and Joe Gershman, were deeply affected by personal experiences with anti-Semitic pogroms sponsored and encouraged by Russia’s Tsarist regime. Those who joined in the 1930s and 40s generally had parents who had immigrated relatively recently from Poland and Ukraine. The pogroms began ostensibly as “reprisals” for the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II by leftist militants. The fact that the assassins were all atheists and only one of them was ethnically Jewish was a matter of indifference to the pogromists and their imperial backers. In the initial attack, hundreds of Jews were killed and many more were seriously injured while thousands were left homeless. The next year, in 1882, the “May Laws” restricted where Jews could live, where they could own real estate and how they could conduct business. Subsequent legislation limited Jewish access to higher education and some professions. In 1891 the Tsarist regime followed this up by expelling most of Moscow’s Jewish population, estimated at some 30,000 people. The unsuccessful 1905 Revolution saw another massive wave of pogroms—this time thousands were murdered. During the three years of civil war following the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as many 2 as 60,000 Jews were slaughtered by the counterrevolutionary opponents of the new regime. Between the 1880s and the 1920s some two million Jews fled Eastern Europe; many of them found their way to North America. Most of those who settled in Canada clustered in three urban centres – Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg – where they found work in “needle trade” sweatshops. Virtually all Jewish workers in the garment trade identified as socialists, but there was a bitter division between social-democrats and Communists. In introducing Joe Gershman’s L/LT memoir, Irving Abella commented: “No ethnic group dominated a single industry the way the Jews dominated the garment industry, and none expended as much energy and funds on behalf of progressive candidates and causes. This gave the Jewish labour movement an economic and political clout far beyond what its relatively small membership warranted.” Abella insightfully observed: “The Jewish labour movement was a one generation phenomenon. It has often been said that the Jewish factory worker was neither the parent nor the child of a worker. Unquestionably, the social mobility—and in fact, the deproletarianization—of the Jewish worker was astonishingly rapid. Workers scrimped, saved and sacrificed to make certain their children would never work in a factory.… “Yet, despite their new wealth and social position, many remained concerned with the interests of the worker. Although they had a new enhanced status, few severed their relationship with the movement.” That changed after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about the crimes of Stalin, particularly the anti- Semitic persecution of Jewish professionals and intellectuals in the USSR. Jewish youth who grew up in Canada during the 1930s and 40s were acutely conscious of both the pogroms of the Tsarist regime and the horrific criminality of the Third Reich. They were also well aware that Hitler’s vaunted military machine had been ground up on the Eastern Front by the Soviet military, which also ended the Holocaust by shutting down the Nazi extermination centres one by one, beginning with Majdanek in October 1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the last to be liberated, was captured by the “Tarnopol” Rifle Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Shapiro, a Ukrainian Jew. Jewish Canadians were well aware that there was plenty of anti-Semitism right at home. A 1983 book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, documented the Canadian government’s shameful record of refusing entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler—Canada admitted a mere 5,000, far fewer per capita than any other Allied power. A 1976 film, “Voyage of the Damned,” starring Faye Dunaway, depicted the plight of 900 German Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis who were refused entry to the U.S. in June 1939. The movie focussed on the American response, but Canadian authorities also turned down these desperate victims of Nazi persecution. The far left has a long history of fighting racial discrimination against Jews and other minorities. The Russian Marxists’ role in organizing workers’ defence guards against pogromists was paralleled by similar initiatives by revolutionaries to interdict fascist mobilizations in Europe and North America.
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