Retreat from Moscow

MEN AND POLITICS--Louis Fischer--Duell, Sloan and Pearce ($3.50).

For 18 years Louis Fischer was the journalistic delegate from New York's liberal Nation to the Russian revolution. When not in Moscow, Fischer dashed around Europe, interviewing political bigwigs. During the civil war, he was in & out of Spain. His two-volume The Soviets in World Affairs, still the standard work on the subject, made Fischer an authority on Russian foreign politics. It also brought him into close contact with Russian politicians. His dispatches were easy to read and suggested an unusual grasp of the forces that make history move. While other correspondents' dispatches were coldly objective or loaded with hostility to Russia, Fischer's reports were constantly favorable to Russia. Fischer became the favorite Russian author of wishful-thinking U.S. intellectuals.

This week Correspondent Fischer published Men and Politics, an autobiography. Its publishers claim that it is eight books in one: 1) the story of Germany; 2) the story of the Russian revolution from 1917 to 1941; 3) a political biography of Stalin; 4) a complete story of the Spanish civil war; 5) a survey of the events and policies that led to World War II; 6) a thorough study of the fall of France; 7) an outline of world diplomacy since World War I; 8) a guide to the ways & means by which statesmen make politics. The publishers overlook the most important point--Men and Politics is the Out of the Night of the intelligentsia. Without going in for revelations, Fischer's book reveals the extent of the intellectual and physical commutation between the U.S. and Moscow, the fondness of the ties between the Soviet Government and pro-Soviet intellectuals in New York, London, Paris, Madrid, and the tie-ups of these groups with one another.

Fischer did not speak much Russian when he went to Russia. But on the train he met Sidney Hillman. The future co-director of OPM (a native who speaks Russian) was in Russia reconditioning clothing factories, trying to teach the Bolsheviks how to run them.

Hillman was not the only American whom Fischer met in Moscow. As the years passed, they came in droves. There was Theodore Dreiser. "He resented defective Soviet plumbing and wrote anti-Soviet articles," has since repented. There were Negro singers, Roland Hays and Paul Robeson. "Because Moscow was pro-Negro, Paul felt that it could do no wrong." There was Photographer Margaret Bourke-White. "Russia made her think socially." There was Alexander Woollcott. One freezing day he stole the show from Stalin by standing without a coat through the entire Red Army parade. There was Jewish Novelist Sholom Asch (The Nazarene). He used to drive across the hot steppes, summon peasants from the scorching fields, ask: "Do you know Sholom Asch?" If they said no, he drove on. There was Novelist Josephine Herbst ( The Executioner Waits). There was Corliss Lamont, son of Morgan Partner Thomas Lamont, and his socialist wife. "They do not merely give money to radical causes, they give time, work and heart." There was Photographer Julien Bryan "who annually filmed Soviet progress." There was Johns Hopkins' Dr. Harry Sigerist, "softspoken intellectual . . . and stiff-necked friend of the Soviets." There was Mary van Kleeck, "Colonial Dame, Russell Sage economist, pro-Communist." There was Violinist Efrem Zimbalist and his wife, Singer Alma Gluck. They enrolled their daughter in the Moscow Conservatory of music, their son in a Moscow highschool. There was Playwright Elmer Rice, "who came with his whole family, and then came back again." There was Novelist Agnes Smedley whose China Fights Back has helped convince U.S. liberals that Chinese Communists are Chinese liberals, not the toughest foreign section of the Communist International. There was also Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Fischer interviewed the senator (1923) "in the Sugar King's palace in Moscow where he and Mrs. Wheeler were living as guests of the Soviet Government. ..." Often it seemed to Fischer "as though everybody I ever saw or knew in America turned up sometime or another. . . ."

Most amazing of U.S. commuters to Moscow was probably Fischer's friend, the late Alex Gumberg, U.S. representative of the Soviet Textile Syndicate. Gumberg was married to "Frances Adams of the New England Adamses," had two brothers in Russia. "In Alex, Russia and America merged in a remarkable synthesis. He had a profound loyalty to the Bolshevik revolution." Gumberg's Manhattan salon was the melting pot where fascinated U.S. intelligentsia melted under the facile charm of suave, tough Russian agents. "Senators Borah and Robert La Follette were his close friends. Philip La Follette and his fiery wife often visited the Gumberg apartment." "For many Americans, Alex was the bridge to Soviet Russia." When Fischer wanted an interview with Secretary of State Stimson, Gumberg got it for him.

Greatest triumph of these and similar circles was U.S. recognition of Soviet Russia. They were tickled pinker when it came. But Realist Stalin was composed, had instructions sent to all Soviet writers and speakers: "Ne razkhlebatsa"--"Keep your shirt on: Don't display our excessive glee."

After Russia, Fischer's biggest experience was the Spanish "holy war." "Two days after the beginning of the siege of Madrid, I enlisted in the International Brigade ... I was the first American to enroll." Fischer served as quartermaster under Commissar Andre Marty whose homicidal vagaries Ernest Hemingway described in For Whom the Bell Tolls. "The Americans in the International Brigades resented the fact that [Marty] confiscated their U.S. passports. . . . Mr. Bullitt, not without reason, suspected that they had been presented to the GPU."

Back in Moscow Litvinoff urged Fischer to talk to Uritzky, "an interesting person." "I learned later that all Soviet military affairs in Spain, including the shipping of materials and men, were directly in his charge." Correspondent Fischer did not learn, at least he never mentions the fact, that Comrade Uritzky was the supreme chief of the Soviet Military Intelligence. To Uritzky, innocent Correspondent Fischer made a three-hour verbal report on Spain, taken down by Uritzky's stenographer. One Spaniard whom Uritzky asked about was Commander Cisneros of the Loyalist Air Force, whose daughter was living in Uritzky's home. Later on in the book Fischer explains that the mother of Intelligence Chief Uritzky's ward is Constancia de la Mora, formerly head of the Loyalist Foreign Press Bureau, darling of U.S. liberals, now in Mexico.

The Soviet Government's habit of shooting Fischer's friends in the back of the neck finally disturbed his Russophilism. It also deprived Fischer of his news sources. And he did not like to think about the dead men's faces. Fischer was especially upset by the fate of a Russian agent in western Europe whom he had known for years merely as Ludwig. "His manner made me think he worked for the GPU." Ludwig-was Ignace Reiss who was widely respected for his personal probity. He was the assistant head in central Europe of the GPU's Foreign-Section. Though Fischer warned him to go slow, Reiss broke with Stalinism. "The courage he had displayed in serving the GPU, he now displayed in breaking with it." To the Kremlin, Reiss sent back his Order of the Red Banner and a letter: "Murderers of the Kremlin cellars! ... I resume my liberty." Soon the GPU ambushed Reiss in Switzerland, sub-machinegunned him.

Fischer decided to quit Moscow. He did not even wait to take his wife and two sons, all Soviet citizens. Mrs. Roosevelt got them out for him later, after Ambassador Oumansky proved unhelpful. The exact nature of Correspondent Fischer's relations with the Soviet Government has never been clear. Fischer denies he was ever a Communist. "For me the question of joining the Communist Party never arose because I would never allow another person to tell rne what to write and what to think. ... I nevertheless sympathized strongly with the Soviet regime out of a conviction that ... in time, the dictatorship would yield to a democracy. . . . That was my big mistake." Fischer was not the only one who made the mistake. When he did begin criticizing Russia openly, "I was chided by certain people . . . for not delaying longer." Among them: "A great lady who writes a syndicated column."

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