Authors: Preston Paul
Because of the range of activities that he undertook on behalf of the Republican cause, the extraordinary energy that he devoted to that cause, and the remarkable and highly unusual level of influence that he seemed to wield in the highest levels of government in both Spain and the United States, Fischer was unique. His influence was actually based on the fact that politicians trusted him because he brought as much information as he took away. He was opinionated and hard-faced, devoid of embarrassment, but trusted because, if he was asked to keep something to himself, he did. Yet, the consequent level of understanding with statesmen and diplomats has been given a sinister spin in some quarters. The furiously anti-Communist cultural critic Stephen Koch portrays Fischer as one of the many tools of Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz, the men whom he sees as the masterminds of what he calls ‘the secret Soviet war of ideas against the West’.
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The most extreme, not to say deranged, version of this view of Fischer as a Soviet agent emanated from the one-time Socialist civil governor of Albacete, Justo Martínez Amutio, a fervent follower of Francisco Largo Caballero. Deeply embittered by the Communist campaign to remove Largo, which interrupted his own political career, Martínez Amutio wrote memoirs in which he vented his spleen and wildly exaggerated his own importance and knowledge.
Of Fischer, Martínez Amutio wrote with a characteristic mix of ignorance, invention and malice:
He was thought to be a German writer fleeing from the Nazis, but other reports presented him as Austrian or Hungarian and also as Czech. The only thing proved for certain was that he acted as a Soviet agent, although he would say that he was not a
Communist and that no one had sent him to Spain from Moscow. He got much support from Álvarez del Vayo, who claimed to be an old friend, but Luis Araquistain, who knew him during the period that he was the Republic’s Ambassador in Berlin, warned us of what he really was, a covert Communist and the direct agent of Stalin.
Martínez Amutio claimed that the political orientation of the entire Communist press and propaganda operation during the Spanish Civil War was in the hands of Fischer. He went even further, making the ludicrous allegation that, together with Artur Stashevsky, the Soviet commercial attaché, and Palmiro Togliatti, the Comintern representative, Fischer cultivated Juan Negrín and, by dint of organizing banquets and orgies for him, turned him into a ‘docile and adaptable’ instrument of Kremlin policy. Martínez Amutio also claimed absurdly that Fischer was one of the Soviet agents who orchestrated the crisis of May 1937, a crisis whose long-term origins in the subsistence problems of Catalonia were beyond any form of orchestration.
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Somewhat more restrained is the version of the historian Stanley G. Payne, who refers to Fischer as ‘an important American correspondent who served as a sort of Soviet agent or source of information in the Republican zone’.
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The truth about Fischer’s nationality and importance to Soviet policy was rather different. He was born on 29 February 1896 in the Jewish ghetto of Philadelphia, the son of Russian immigrants, although he was not to learn the language of his parents until a quarter of a century later. In 1917, he volunteered to serve in the British Army and served from 8 April 1918 to 14 June 1920 in the 38th Royal Fusiliers, principally as part of the Jewish Legion, spending fifteen months in Palestine. He saw no fighting against the Germans, since the war was over, although he did help defend Jewish settlers from Arab attack. In consequence, he had numerous conflicts with his British officers and was once confined to a brutal punishment camp in the desert for two weeks for going absent without leave. Despite this, the time in Palestine ‘dimmed my Zionism, and Soviet Russia later extinguished it’. He claimed never to have felt deeply Jewish: ‘Palestine and the Jews never stirred me as much as the Spanish Republicans in their struggle against Fascism.’
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On his return to the USA, he worked in a news agency in New York, where he met the Russian-born pianist Bertha ‘Markoosha’ Mark, with whom he fell in love, following her in 1921 to Berlin. He learned German and began contributing occasional articles to the
New York Evening Post.
In 1922, he and Markoosha moved to Moscow, where they married and remained for the next nine months. Although both travelled widely, they eventually settled back in Moscow in 1928, where they had two sons, George and Victor. Markoosha was seven years older than Louis and there was always an element of maternal tolerance in her attitude towards him, reflected in the fact that she referred to him in letters as ‘Louinka my dear boy’. There was also a strong element of friendship and mutual support, although their correspondence makes it clear that their way of life – he constantly absent, she carrying the burden of care of the family – was his choice, not hers. Louis was not a monogamous man and on his endless travels he had relationships with many women who, despite his egoism, found him irresistibly attractive.
One of them, Tatiana Lestchenko, a Russian singer and translator, had an affair with him in the early 1930s and bore him a son called Vanya. Her letters to him reveal an intelligent and independent woman who, as many others would be, was captivated by his sheer energy: ‘And near you I always feel so warm and silently joyous – as if I were lying in the sunshine.’ She wrote later to a friend: ‘I feel that I am only grateful to LF for giving me the happiness of such a son. All my resentment to LF for his caddish, scoundrely behaviour toward me because I became pregnant – melts. I did love him. And the best of him I kept. I have.’
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Whether it was politics or love, Louis Fischer would always be driven on by a voracious appetite and numerous women would suffer in consequence.
During his stint in Moscow, Fischer worked on a piece-rate basis for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and, even more sporadically, for the
New York Evening Post.
He wrote later of how he divided his time between Moscow and the provinces, and lamented that, during his first period in Soviet Russia, ‘I learned much less than I should have’. The reason was, paradoxically, because he spent so much time with his professional colleagues: ‘We correspondents were one big, almost permanent poker party.’’ When they weren’t playing cards, his colleagues generally
expressed anti-Soviet attitudes, which seemed to Fischer to be ‘based less on knowledge than on prejudice’. In reaction to this, he developed deep sympathy for the Soviet experiment. At first, while working as a freelancer, he would not start a new article until he knew that the previous one had been published and that he would be paid for it. Because he needed ‘the encouragement of publication’, he wrote less but did much more research than the average correspondent. As he wrote later:
I think my strongest instinct is curiosity. When aroused, I suffer if I do not know what I want to know, and Moscow aroused me powerfully. Under the bombardment of its kaleidoscopically changing events, there could be no intellectual laziness or complacency. I read a lot, travelled, and talked with those foreign correspondents who felt Moscow’s excitement.
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In the summer of 1923, he returned to Germany and wrote five substantial articles on Soviet Russia. He then took them to New York, where he hoped to use them to get an assignment from the left-wing weekly magazine
The Nation.
He had first contributed to the magazine in 1920 with an article about Palestine.
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His Russian articles made a favourable impression on one of the magazine’s principal editors, Freda Kirchwey, who decided to publish all five of them, and this led to him being appointed as
The Nation’s
special European correspondent. Returning to Europe, he wrote articles on Russia and Germany for both
The Nation
and other newspapers. Eventually, his articles would be syndicated to several papers including the
Baltimore Sun, Reynolds News
in London and others in Prague, Oslo, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This would provide him with sufficient income to travel widely. On 3 June 1925, he published an article commenting on the fact that Hitler got six months for his part in the beer hall putsch whereas Communists who planned an insurrection got ten to fifteen years’ hard labour. Hitler wrote a letter of complaint, pointing out that he had actually served thirteen months in jail. In fact, it was partly Fischer’s observations of the rise of Nazism in Germany that intensified his sympathy for the Soviet Union: ‘Each time I got disgusted with Russia I had only to return to central and western Europe. The disgust dwindled.’ In
the summer of 1927, along with a delegation of prominent American labour leaders and intellectuals, Fischer spent over six hours in Stalin’s company. He noted that he had ‘crafty eyes’, a ‘low forehead’ and ‘ugly, short black and gold teeth’, but was impressed by his slow, methodical method of argument. Fischer left convinced that Stalin was ‘unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous, and irresistible’.
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The other motivation behind Fischer’s sympathy for the Soviet Union was what he called its ‘spectacle of creation and self-sacrifice’. Having witnessed on his many travels the degrading poverty of much of rural Russia, he was enthusiastic about the prospect of the revolution bringing better food, hygiene, education and medical care. He had been struck, as he travelled across the steppes by night train, by the hundreds of miles of unrelenting blackness: ‘Now the electric bulb was invading the bleak black village; steel and iron were vanquishing Russia’s wood civilization. I translated Five Year Plan statistics into human values.’ In the grim years of the depression in America and Western Europe, the Soviet experiment seemed to Fischer, as to many other Western observers, to be a beacon of hope. At his Moscow apartment, he welcomed streams of American, British and European liberal enthusiasts who shared his views. Among them was the Spanish journalist Julio Álvarez del Vayo. He would contact him again in Spain in 1934 and yet again in 1936, by which time del Vayo would be Foreign Minister. Thus, Fischer came to know a huge array of influential intellectuals and politicians, most of them only too eager to believe the best of the Soviet system. He claimed acquaintance with George Bernard Shaw and Theodore Dreiser, with Sydney and Beatrice Webb and Harold Laski, with Jawaharwal Nehru and Rabindrath Tagore, with Lord Lothian and Lady Astor. He would never be shy about re-establishing contact with them in the future, particularly when he began to lobby on behalf of the Spanish Republic.
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These individuals – and their reactions to the Soviet Union – fascinated Fischer. After one tour with a group, he wrote to Freda Kirchwey:
those tourists whom I bossed around the country for forty days taught me a great deal… though I showed them the good and the bad, and finally delivered a whole lecture on Soviet weaknesses,
they all went away as Soviet patriots. Indeed, towards the end, I was trying to check their enthusiasm and make them more critical because I have often noticed excitement over the USSR evaporate at the first contact with a cold wind of shortcomings unless the excitement is tempered with understanding.
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One of his colleagues who, retrospectively at least, did not share Fischer’s enthusiasms, no matter how tempered, was Malcolm Muggeridge, the correspondent of the Manchester
Guardian.
Years later, converted to Catholicism, he wrote with jaundiced hindsight of the same people whose presence had delighted Fischer. Their credulity provided only ‘comic relief’, their praise for the system ‘as though a vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism’. He mocked Fischer’s readiness to give the Soviet experiment time to deal with centuries of backwardness: ‘Fischer was a sallow, ponderous, inordinately earnest man, dear to Oumansky [Konstantin Oumansky was then head of the Press Department of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs] as one who had never once through the years veered from virtuously following the Party Line.’
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It is certainly the case that Fischer, like most other correspondents, failed to report fully the great famine of 1932, although whether the Soviet censorship would have let them do so is a moot point. How much he knew is also a consideration, although he did occasionally refer to the famine as an unfortunate consequence of a necessary restructuring of Russian agriculture. Although he always looked at the Soviet experiment with hopeful expectancy, Fischer would, of course, eventually be disillusioned by the all-pervading sense of terror and insecurity. After the murder of Kirov, when the murderously repressive nature of Stalinism intensified with the judicial murder of the Old Bolsheviks in the Moscow trials, Fischer’s faith began slowly to be undermined. At first, he made a distinction between the trials and the social progress. To Freda Kirchwey, he wrote at the beginning of 1934:
you can’t shoot 103 whites thus giving the impression of a whiteguard plot and then exile Zinoviev etc. as the inspirers of the deed… I can’t write on it yet because the matter is not clear
in my mind… I am convinced this is a regrettable and serious interruption, but only an interruption in Russia’s progress towards greater liberalism, but not much liberalism, nevertheless.
Just before leaving to cover the Spanish Civil War, he wrote in similar terms to his friend Max Lerner: ‘I believe that even the Zinoviev etc trial will not stop the growth of democracy. That growth is the product of economic improvement and social peace – the existence of both these phenomena is not subject to the slightest doubt.’
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His gradual, but unmistakable, change of heart would eventually earn him the hostility of the famous pro-Stalinist
New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty, who would later refer to him as ‘the rat who left the sinking ship that didn’t sink’.
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During these years in Russia and Germany, Fischer perfected the technique that was to give him such influence, an influence that reached its apogee during the Spanish Civil War. In order to understand the Soviet situation, he travelled widely, but he also made a concerted effort to become personally acquainted with key politicians and then demonstrate to them that he was to be trusted: