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Assignment in Utopia

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Eugene Lyons was a clever and amusing fellow. Assigned to be a reporter in Moscow during Stalin's rule he broke the mold: he, unlike Walter Duranty of the Times, would tell the truth. Initially attracted to the Great Experiment, Lyons soon learned the misery and death suffered by the eggs broken in Lenin's omelet: the NEP men slaughtered when the New Economic Policy fell from favor, the kulaks liquidated as a class, the Ukraine nearly exterminated. Though tragic, Lyons recounts the times with wit and pathos, and with a grasp of English not unlike a cross between Conrad and Nabakov.

This 1937 publication is an invaluable eye-witness account of the realities of Communism in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s as Stalin was directing the Soviet Union into a dark period of collectivization, state-engineered famine, show trials, and terror (Lyons also just happened to be in Berlin on the way through just as Hitler was taking power in Germany in January 1933, no doubt a frightening experience for a young leftist Jewish intellectual). Lyons wrote this book to expose the realities of what was happening in the USSR to leftist and liberal readers in the United States who, while not Communists, were inclined to be sympathetic to a "progressive" workers' state at a time when the American economy remained mired in the depths of the Great Depression.

Lyons himself had been born to a Jewish family in the old Russian Empire but grew up in the tenement slums of the Lower East Side of New York City. Like many young people of that background and generation, he gravitated to socialism and welcomed not only the collapse of the autocratic and anti-semitic tsarist regime in 1917 but also the emergence of a new radical alternative with the Bolshevik October Revolution. By the early 1920s young Lyons was a journalist and vigorous fellow-travelling propagandist for the Bolsheviks. In 1928, on assignment for United Press International, Lyons had the opportunity to come to the USSR for himself, and from 1928 to 1934 Lyons would not only cover Soviet affairs but would even have the opportunity to meet the great dictator Stalin himself.

The account that Lyons gives of this experience is eye-opening. No one today who pays attention can be unaware of Stalin's crimes or the nature of the Communist regime as it evolved in the USSR, and yet even today, more than 70 years after the book's publication, this book still provides a gripping insight into the nature of the regime and the horrors of Stalinist Communism. Lyons is honest enough to acknowledge his own role early on in concealing the extent of these horrors to his readers, mentioning for example his role in dismissing journalist Gareth Jones' accounts of famine in the Ukraine. He tries to explain why journalists in the USSR closed their eyes to these facts and why he eventually felt he had to be open with his readers, and why he could not accept the rationalizations of people like radical Anna Louis Strong and New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who continued to lie to their readers.

Lyons was too honest -- and too horrified by the terror -- to close his eyes for long, and eventually he is compelled to leave the country. His accounts of the horrors of what were happening in the USSR are still shocking, but perhaps even more disturbing are the accounts of western political "tourists" -- often literary and intellectual celebrities like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Romain Rolland -- who seemed to be stubbornly, almost willfully, blind to the realities of Soviet existence. Such apologists for Stalinism appalled him, and even more depressing was the unwillingness of liberal or fellow-travelling audiences to hear or understand what he had to say once he came home. While most Socialists and the anti-Stalinist left had come to understand the meaning of Stalinism (and it was the Socialist movement, not the political right, that was the principle target of Communist hostility during the Comintern Third Period, 1928-1934), too many others on the left, especially among well-meaning liberals, simply did not want to have their illusions about the workers' paradise shattered. Nor did Lyons have any patience with those on the American Right who tried to compare the mild liberal democratic reforms of the New Deal to the brutalities, paranoia and terror of Stalinism.

Lyons's book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what was happening in the Soviet Union in the 1930s -- especially for those on the left who still in some dark corner of their mind wish to hold on to the notion of the Soviet Union as a "progressive force." During the 1930s the pressures of economic depression and the menace of rising fascism and rightist militarism made the need for unity on the left imperative and this created an entirely justified Popular Front impulse that sought to overlook differences on the Left in favor of common resistance to Nazism and Fascism. Lyons demonstrated that this unity might come at too high a price. In his controversial 1941 book, "The Red Decade", Lyons goes further in attacking a Popular Front ethos that ended up making excuses and apologies for Stalinist crimes in the name of anti-fascist unity, although the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact demonstrated the bankruptcy of this "unity." But even if one feels the need to qualify some of the claims Lyons makes in his 1941 book (as author Frank Warren would do in his 1966 book "Liberals and Communism: The Red Decade Revisited"), Lyons in "Assignment to Utopia" makes a valuable contribution to understanding not only the meaning and nature of Stalinism, but also offers valuable insight into the struggle by those on the non-Communist Left to make sense of the Soviet experiment.

Lyons himself would later turn politically to the right, rejecting not only Communism but those efforts to minimize or downplay the insidious influence of Communism in American life. By the 1960s he was an editor with Reader's Digest and contributed to other conservative journals. One does not have to accept his later political evolution to appreciate the value of his contribution to our understanding of Stalinism through "Assignment to Utopia." Nor does one have to fully accept his growing anxiety about Communist influence in liberal and fellow-travelling circles during the 1930s and 1940s -- although I suspect he had more reason for this anxiety than is sometimes appreciated today -- to appreciate the importance of his descriptions of life in the USSR. "Assignment to Utopia" is a very good book, a very important book, and one that still deserves reading now that the Soviet Union has collapsed into the metaphorical historical trash bin.