Double lives: three Australian fellow-travellers in the Cold War.(Brian Fitzpatrick, Manning Clark, Clement Byrne Christesen)

• Author: Campbell, Andrew
• Position: 160220526
• Pages: 42(15)

This article examines the role of three pro-Soviet fellow-travellers during the Cold War: journalist, historian and civil libertarian activist Brian Fitzpatrick; the controversial historian Professor Manning Clark; and Clement B. Christesen, editor of the literary journal Meanjin, much favoured by fellow-travellers, from the perspective of their relationship with the Soviet Union.

Fellow-travellers claimed progressive beliefs and were active in communist front organisations, but were not members of the Communist Party. They were masters of qualified support: "I am not a communist, but ...." (1) From his perspective as former head of counter-intelligence in the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet security and intelligence agency, the KGB, Oleg Kalugin, described fellow-travellers as "dupes who would support any Soviet action in the face of even obvious criminality". (2)

The Russian "experiment" in the 1930s attracted a wide spectrum of fellow-travellers: utopian idealists who believed that Stalin had solved the world's problems; scientists who believed that, in the USSR, their profession enjoyed greater prestige and government support; trade unionists who regarded the Soviet Union as the first "workers' state"; the so-called peace parsons who were collectively deluded in their belief that the Soviet Union was "unmaterialistic", tolerant of religious freedom and "peace-loving"; economists who favoured centralised planning, as opposite to "anarchical" capitalism; peace-lovers who echoed Soviet disinformation depicting the Soviet Union as the sole source of world peace and encircled by hostile capitalist warmongering countries. To the alienated intellectual, painter, writer manque, with free-floating aggression and subject to anomie, the Soviet experiment provided "meaning" and "purpose" to otherwise mundane lives.

In the early stages of the regime, the Soviets assessed that they needed supporters in the West. Trained in conspiratorial traditions, the Bolsheviks developed a "legal" covert apparatus and specialised forms of information and influence: Disinformation (dezinformatsia) and Active Measures (aktivinyye meropriatia), both of which were designed to influence and manipulate Western media, public opinion and policy, and the favoured target group--Western intellectuals. Fellow-travellers played a vital role as disinformation channels. Disinformation and Active Measures were defined by the KGB as follows: (3)

"Disinformation is regarded as one of the instruments of CPSU policy; it is an integral, indispensable and secret element of intelligence work.... KGB disinformation operations are progressive ... they promote peace and social progress .... "The main value of all Active Measures lies in the fact that it is difficult to check the veracity of information conveyed and to identify the real source. Their effectiveness is expressed as a coefficient of utility, when minimum expenditure and effort achieves maximum end results. Forms of disinformation basically fall into three groups--documentary (written), non-documentary (oral), and demonstrative." The Soviet leadership treated the fellow-travellers as "friends" and as a means of ensuring the foreign legitimacy of the Soviet "experiment". Above all, they could be influenced by a guided tour by trained interpreters who dutifully reported to the Soviet intelligence service. Fellow-traveller visits seldom exceeded three weeks.

As early as 1922, G. V. Chicherin, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, submitted a series of proposals to the Genoa conference for immediate and general disarmament. "Peace" was the critical Soviet disinformation and active measures project which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

WILLI MUNZENBERG: THE PATRON SAINT OF FELLOW-TRAVELLERS

In the early 1920s, Willi Munzenberg (1889-1940), accurately described by his wife Babette Gross as "the patron saint of fellow-travellers", (4) wrote: (5)

"We must penetrate every conceivable milieu, get hold of artists, professors, make use of culture and theatres, and spread abroad the doctrine that Russia is prepared to sacrifice everything to keep the world at peace". Munzenberg stressed to a Comintern meeting: "We must organise the intellectuals.... We must avoid being a purely communist organisation.... We must bring in other names, other groups."

Influential "independents" were not only sought as an operational ideal--for cover purposes--but were targeted for manipulation by the Munzenberg apparatus. Munzenberg-inspired "Innocents' Clubs", or front organisations--including so-called friendship societies, supported by prominent Western personalities--pioneered the mass petition demanding Western governments support pro-Soviet initiatives.

Stephen Koch has shown how "Munzenberg organised and ran the great network of fronts and fellow-travellers ... the claim to political 'independence' was the sine qua non of all fellow-travelling, all fronts". (6) Munzenberg's work was co-ordinated, with Stalin's watchful approval, by the Comintern's secret service, the OMS (Otdel Mezhdunarodnykh Svyazey, or "International Liaison Department"). (7) Munzenberg's fronts, manipulating "innocents", provided operational cover for parallel secret work: espionage, covert action and agents of influence. (8)

Czech journalist and agent Egon Kisch joined the Munzenberg network in 1925 and was assigned the Australian mission as part of Stalin's new popular front strategy (9) to strengthen the Soviet Union's "peace credentials" and forge links with progressives. (10) Kisch was a case-hardened Comintern agent who boasted, "I do not think; Stalin does my thinking for me." (11)

SOVIET METHODS OF RECRUITMENT

In the 1930s, Soviet intelligence recruiters cultivated prospective agents by claiming they would be "working for peace". Many agents were recruited through Soviet "friendship organisations".

Ian George Milner--the so-called Rhodes Scholar spy, and a long-time friend and correspondent of Professor Manning Clark--emerged from the "New Zealand Friends of the Soviet Union" and was a fellow-traveller to the Soviet Union in 1934 where he witnessed "that most people were happy and saw their place in it". In 1941, he was prominently involved in the Australian-Soviet Friendship League and was elected a member of the league at a conference on 24 April 1941. (12)

Professor Manning Clark travelled to the Soviet Union four times and, most controversially, in 1970 under the auspices of the Australia-USSR Friendship Society.

The British-educated H.A.R "Kim" Philby--a communist and spy for the Soviet Union's NKVD and KGB who became a senior officer in the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)--was originally guided to Paris by Maurice Dobb, a Cambridge economist and advisor to the Munzenberg-created "League against Colonialism". Philby also travelled to Vienna where he established contact with the Munzenberg-created "World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism", demonstrating his potential for later work with Soviet Intelligence. (13)

German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed British atomic secrets to the Soviets, was a member of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union in Germany prior to his recruitment. There were many other such agents.

The "All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad" (VOKS) was the principal organising mechanism for fellow-travellers. VOKS managed "societies of friends" of the Soviet Union in Western target states and organised and managed visits of fellow-travellers as well as more trivial matters such as book exchanges. (14)

The favoured "specialists" were given access to high-ranking members of the political elite. In 1927 VOKS established a training course for guides' rehearsed answers: A critical theme was that any Soviet weakness should be blamed on the "tsarist legacy and heritage from the past". (15)

After 1930 the VOKS guide was re-written and Intourist guides were to become more active as 'helpers'. Surveillance and information-gathering increased. The VOKS mission focused on the "intelligentsia", as a VOKS report noted in 1928, since "the intelligentsia in bourgeois societies plays a dominant role". (16) In 1929 the head of VOKS emphasized that "the left intelligentsia can be useful in our work". In the early 1930s VOKS officials referred to "reception and reworking of foreign travelers" and "methods of influence". (17) The guided tour offered to fellow-travellers was a journey into an "imagined community", guided by VOKS. (18)

BRIAN FITZPATRICK: THE MYTH OF THE INDEPENDENT RADICAL

Brian Fitzpatrick (1905-1965), journalist, historian and civil libertarian, is described by his sympathetic biographer Don Watson as an "independent radical". However, even Watson cannot deny that "in many ways he was a fellow-traveller". (19)

Watson fails to understand Fitzpatrick's value as a propaganda asset. Watson redefines fellow-travelling "as part of a humanist tradition" and somehow justified by "the logical and compelling circumstances of the era", (20) a definition which would have delighted many fellow-travellers. Watson claims Fitzpatrick believed that the Soviet Union was "an experiment worth supporting" and was...