Керри Болтон - Stalin - The Enduring Legacy

Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World (London: Victor Gollanncz, 1939), Book IV, ‘New Horizons’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/johnson-hewlett/socialistsixth/ch04.htm

R Overy, op. cit., 255-256.

Ibid.

Ibid., 257.

Ibid., 258.

Ibid., 352.

Ibid., 353.

Ibid.

K R Bolton, Revolution from Above, op. cit., 134-143.

Overy, op. cit., 361.

Ibid., 366-367.

Ibid., 366.

Ibid., 371.

Ibid., 376.

T S Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).

Zhdanov, op. cit., 6.

Encyclopaedia of Soviet Writers, http://www.sovlit.net/bios/proletkult.html

Zhdanov, op. cit., 6-7.

Ibid., 7

Ibid.

The Big Five◦– a group of Russian composers during the 1860’s: Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui.

Zhdanov, op. cit., 7-8.

Ibid., 12.

Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 256.

Breton was the founding father of Surrealism. Joining the Communist Party in 1927 he was expelled in 1933 because of his association with Trotsky. Breton wrote of Surrealism in 1952: ‘It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself’.

In Mexico Trotsky lived with Diego Rivera and then with Diego’s wife the artist Frida Kahlo, having reached Mexico in 1937, where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940.

It is of interest that Rivera was commissioned personally by John D Rockefeller Jr to paint the mural for the RCA lobby of the prestigious Rockefeller Center, which was being constructed in 1931 as a showplace for Rockefeller power. Abby, John D Rockefeller Jr’s wife, had bought Rivera’s paintings for her personal collection, had Rivera’s art exhibited at the Rockefeller controlled Museum of Modern Art, and had socialised with Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Nelson Rockefeller negotiated the commission with Rivera. The theme was to be: ‘Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future’. With such a theme it should be obvious as to how it would be interpreted by an enthusiastic communist, whose sketch depicted a falling capitalism with the bright future of fluttering red flags and a saintly visage of Lenin. Because of press ridicule over a capitalist subsiding a piece of revolutionary art, the mural was reluctantly dismantled. Ron Chernow, Titan: the Life of John D Rockefeller Sr (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1998), 669-670.

Leon Trotsky, André Breton, Diego Rivera, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 25 July 1938.

Ibid.

The Saatchi Gallery, London.

Wilmot Robertson, op. cit.

Leon Trotsky, Breton, Rivera, 1938, op. cit.

‘Motherwell was a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom’, the US branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; as was Jackson Pollock. Frances Stonor Saunders, op. cit., 276. Both Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips became members of the American committee of the CCF. Saunders, ibid., 158.

Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 1939, 6:5 pp. 34-49. The essay can be read at: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html

Clement Greenberg, ‘American Type Painting’, Partisan Review, Spring 1955.

John O’Brien, ‘Introduction’, The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) vol.3, xxvii.

Ibid., xxviii.

Ibid.

Sidney Hook, 1949, quoted on the CIA website: ‘Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50’; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1

Hook also served as a ‘contract consultant’ for the CIA. Saunders, op. cit., p. 157.

Described by Carleton Beals, one of the Dewey Commission members who went to Mexico, ostensibly to cross-examine Trotsky as to the Stalinist allegations against him, as ‘Trotsky’s pink tea party’, and a contrivance to exonerate Trotsky. Beals resigned amidst much acrimony from the venerable Prof. Dewey et al, but the Dewey findings exonerating Trotsky continue to be cited as the final answer to Stalin’s accusations. Carleton Beals, “The Fewer Outsiders the Better: The Master Comes to Judgement,” Saturday Evening Post, 12 June 1937. http://www.revleft.com/vb/fewer-outsiders-better-t124508/index.htmlSee: Chapter III, ‘The Moscow Trials’.

Meyer co-founded the United World Federalists with James Warburg,scion of the famous banking family, with the aim of promoting a World Government.

Chapter VI, ‘Origins of the Cold War’.

‘Gloria Steinem and the CIA: C.I.A. Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings’, The New York Times, 21 February 1967. http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html

CIA, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/95unclass/Warner.html

Myron Kolatch, ‘Who We Are and Where We Came From’, The New Leader, http://www.thenewleader.com/pdf/who-we-are.pdf(accessed 27 January 2010). The New Leader stopped publication as a print edition and became online in 2006.

Saunders, op. cit., 163.

Trotsky himself began as a Menshevik, the chief rival to Bolshevism after the two factions split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Trotsky then straddled both factions for much of his career, only definitively becoming a Bolshevik with the triumph of the Leninist party in November 1917.

Saunders, op. cit., 163.

Saunders describes Partisan Review as having been founded in the 1930s by ‘a group of Trotskyites from City College, originating in the Communist Party front group, the John Reed Club’. Saunders, ibid., p. 160. When Partisan Review was on the verge of bankruptcy Sidney Hook appealed for assistance, and Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, gave a grant of $10,000, while donating Time Inc. shares to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. (Saunders, ibid. 162). Partisan Review, whose editor William Phillips was cultural secretary of the American Committee of Cultural Freedom, continued to received CIA funding as did The New Leader. Saunders, ibid., 163.