Russian Immigrant Leadership in the Foreign Language Federations of the American Socialist and Communist Parties, 1917-1922
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RUSSIAN IMMIGRANT LEADERSHIP IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEDERATIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST PARTIES, 1917-1922 Nicholas J. Berejan A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of North Carolina Wilmington 2012 Approved by Advisory Committee _____ ___Candice Bredbenner _____ ___________ Jarrod Tanny__________ __________Susan McCaffray__________ Chair Accepted by _________________________________ Dean, Graduate School TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... iv DEDICATION ..................................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER II: FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEDERATIONS AND THE SOCIALIST PARTY ............................. 19 CHAPTER III: INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, THE ZIMMERWALD LEFT, AND THE SOCIALIST ......... 34 CHAPTER IV: RUSSIN EXILES AND ÉMIGRÉS IN THE UNITED STATES ............................................ 49 CHAPTER V: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS, BOLSHEVISM, AND THE CONSOLIDATION ................ 67 CHAPTER VI: THE 1919 SPLIT AND THE TWO COMMUNIST PARTIES ........................................... 82 CHAPTER VII: RUSSIAN AMERICANS, THE FEDERATIONS, AND FACTIONAL WARFARE.............. 115 CHAPTER VIII: CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 151 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................ 159 ii ABSTRACT Historians have studied the American Communist movement in depth over the last sixty years. The generation of historians that emerged from the New Left of the 1960s delved into the history of specific subgroups, such as women, African Americans, and specific industrial and labor unions, within the larger party. However, historians have largely failed to adequately document the role of Russian immigrants within the early Communist Party of America. Russian immigrants in the United States contributed greatly to the American Communist movement. Russian-born Socialists and Communists residing in the United States commanded considerable authority in the early years of the American Communist Party. Their pretensions to leadership of the entire movement have been remembered as arrogance due to their shared heritage with the Russian Bolsheviks who orchestrated the November, 1917 Revolution. Their unwillingness to cooperate fully with American-born leaders within the movement has similarly been ascribed to their desire to control and dominate the development of an American Communist movement. This understanding of the role of Russian Americans in the early days of the Communist Party of America leaves much to be desired. This thesis will demonstrate that Russian immigrants in the Socialist and Communist movements did indeed contribute greatly to the fractious and disunited character of the early Communist Party of America. However, were it not for their contributions to organizing the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of America from which the Communist movement developed, there would likely have been no Communist Party of America such as historically existed. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks go to Drs. Susan McCaffray, William Fain, Robert Spaulding, and Michael Seidman for the accumulated courses, independent studies, and term paper assignments which led me to this thesis topic and encouraged me to explore a topic in history that I had little knowledge of. Were it not for their guidance and input I would have never come to understand the joy of researching the confusing, chaotic, and profoundly interesting history of the early American Communist movement. I would further like to thank Tim Davenport. His tireless work transcribing and digitizing Communist Party documents, newspapers, and literature, and making these files easily accessible and available online, greatly facilitated my research process. Special thanks go to my parents, particularly my father for fostering my curiosity in history; my mother, for putting up with regular detours to museums, historic sites, and monuments during ostensibly relaxing vacations; and my sister, for her continual support and encouragement through this process. I would also like to acknowledge all of the friends I have made in this program, who were always supportive, provided insight and constructive criticism, and regularly reminded me that there was a light at the end of the Graduate School tunnel. I would also like to thank the History Department, the Graduate School, all of the Professors who taught me and all of the support staff who facilitated my learning. Finally, I would like to thank my committee specifically for their guidance and assistance throughout this process. iv DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my grandmothers, Anna Trojan and Olga Berejan, who left everything they’d ever known in Europe in search of a better life in the United States. v I. INTRODUCTION The writings on American Communism are many. As a historian of the subject once said, “never have so many studied so much about so few.”1 Indeed, many historians have written about the American Communist movement. However, owing to its historically contentious nature in American political discourse, and the relatively recent addition of previously unavailable sources and documents in the Russian archives, the field of American Communist history is still a fertile ground for scholarship and enquiry. Although extensive research has been conducted on the roles of specific populations within the American Communist movement, one often neglected subgroup remains to be examined in-depth. Russian immigrants in the United States contributed greatly to the American Communist movement. Indeed, Russian-born Socialists and Communists residing in the United States commanded considerable authority in the early years of the American Communist Party. Their pretensions to leadership of the entire movement have been remembered as arrogance owing to their shared heritage with the Russian Bolsheviks who orchestrated the November, 1917 Revolution. Their unwillingness to cooperate fully with American-born leaders within the movement has similarly been ascribed to their desire to control and dominate the development of an American Communist movement. This understanding of the role of Russian Americans in the early days of the Communist Party of America (CPA) is faulty. It will be demonstrated here that Russian immigrants in the Socialist and Communist movements did indeed contribute greatly to the fractious and disunited character of the early Communist Party of America. However, were it not for their contributions 1 Harvey Klehr, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 1. to organizing the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of America from which the Communist movement developed, there would likely have been no Communist Party of America such as historically existed. Russian immigrant claims to leadership of the early Communist movement rested upon more than a simple shared nationality or ethnicity to the Bolsheviks in Moscow. A shared language granted them access to Leninist theory and principles which were not easily accessible, or understood, by their American-born comrades. Russian immigrants and émigrés in the United States translated and disseminated these ideas through the Left Wing of the Socialist Party of America, and provided the impetus for the formation of a Communist Party in the United States. Their rigid, inflexible adherence to these same ideas, however, led to their preference to keep the Communist movement divided. This same unyielding dedication to the Bolshevik program of 1917, in the face of changing international circumstances and shifting policies of the Third International in Moscow, ultimately resulted in their marginalization within the movement they helped to forge. The historiography of American Communism, like the historiography of any topic, has undergone shifts in popular scholarly opinions and leading paradigms over the past ninety years. In his book The End of Ideology Daniel Bell characterized these shifts in terms of generations, which he labeled the “once-born,” “twice-born,” and “after-born.” The “once- born” historians of American Communism were contemporaries of and actively involved in the early years of that movement. The “second-born” consisted of historians active within the movement but who reevaluated their beliefs and the history of the Party following their own disillusionment of the movement after the political events of the late 1930s, particularly the 2 Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The “after-born” was the term used by Bell to describe the new generation of historians active in the 1960s and 1970s, who were not involved in the old Communist Party, and sought to reexamine American Communist History through the lens of the New Left paradigm. The earliest histories of the American Communist movement were written by the “first-born,” members of that movement and