Surely one of the most embarrassing chapters in the modern history of the Left is the era when all the seemingly thoughtful and intelligent progressive writers were letting themselves be taken in by the dozens as dupes of the Stalinist regime. There is almost no worse genre of left-wing literature than the 1930s fellow-traveling memoir touting collective farms as a charming success (while somehow managing to avert their eyes to the purges, famine, and secret police standing stage left).
One after another, these writers visited the fatherland of the socialist revolution, and they returned to the West to offer starry-eyed accounts of the progress they had seen. There were endless paeans to tractors, from people who had survived carefully stage-managed Intourist trips that offered them a guided tour only of the various Potemkin villages that the Soviet state wanted them to see. And all too many never dared to peek behind the cardboard cutouts to see what was on the other side.
A decade or so back, one often felt like the modern Left would never manage to live this episode down. What I couldn't have predicted then is that I'd live to see the day when the Right decided to recapitulate the exact same history. More evidence emerged this week of Trump's eerie infatuation with Vladimir Putin's regime, for instance—including his willingness to hold secret phone calls with the Russian dictator after leaving office. Then, of course, there was Tucker's tour through Moscow early this year.
I don't know if these men are actual Russian assets, bought and paid for (though that would certainly explain a lot)—or if they are merely willing dupes of the old-fashioned "useful idiot" variety. But I do know that they are making sinister fools of themselves in exactly the way the 1930s left-wing fellow-travelers did. Tucker, staring wide-eyed around a Russian supermarket, was playing the part to the hilt. He might as well have said: "I have seen the future and it works."
How did the Right become so quickly besotted with Putin's regime? After all, Putin's dictatorship has institutional continuity with the Soviet police state they once claimed to abhor. The man's lifelong dream has been to restore the Soviet empire, and he is himself a KGB agent manqué. I guess he did drape the Soviet experiment in some new postmodern fascist bunting of his own—with gangsterism tinsel and a little star of homophobia on top. So that was all it took to win the GOP's heart?
I know of no better antidote to this genre of grotesque self-delusion than E.E. Cummings's EIMI—the un-fellow-traveling anti-Soviet 1930s travelogue that I just finished reading. The book had been on my shelf for a long time, but I confess that I had been daunted by it before. It is thick and written in self-consciously modernist experimental prose. And like many an avant-garde work of more than 400 pages, it could be said that it ultimately overstays its welcome. Yet, it certainly makes an impression nonetheless.
Part of what makes Cummings's account so effective is that he does not even try to convince us of anything. He does not argue. Instead, he lets his fellow-travelers make fools of themselves at his own leisure. This is no ghastly exposé of the Stalinist regime, in the conventional sense. This is not like Arthur Koestler witnessing the starving peasants in Ukraine during the Holodomor, and realizing that the stories he had been told about the bold successes of collectivization were a lie.
To be sure, Cummings does have a few sinister run-ins with secret police—the GPU. This was the predecessor agency to the KGB—which Cummings also refers to as the "Gay Pay Oo," in one of his eccentric phonetic spellings of Russian pronunciations that appear throughout the book (and which will echo in one's head long after putting it down. EIMI is eminently a book that sounds. All day long, after finishing its final chapter, I was still chanting things to myself like "Hah.Rah.Sho!")
The "Gay Pay Oo" do very little in the book however. Mostly, they serve as a foil that underlines the hypocrisy of the various fellow-travelers Cummings meets (and who try to convince him of the glorious successes and promise of the Soviet experiment). Even the Boston Brahmin Russophile whom Cummings designates "Virgil" (since he is guiding the poet, like Dante, though the depths of Hell), lowers his voice anxiously when the members of the "three letter fraternity" appear.
Cummings's vision of the Soviet Inferno—the "unworld," as he calls it—is thus not really one of purges, deliberately-engineered famine, and show trials (Cummings witnessed nothing to write home about in these regards). Rather, in his telling, Hell could be defined as a place where everyone around you insists on lying to themselves; a place where no one is willing to admit the evidence of their senses—and where they constantly try to talk you out of trusting the evidence of yours. Hell is as much gaslighting as gulag.
This, to my mind, is the more effective way to counter the propaganda of the Tucker-style fellow-travelers. You don't need to pile up statistics to convince them—you don't have to waste time pointing to the civilians murdered in Putin's aggressive wars, or the people he has assassinated, or the U.S. citizens he has wrongfully imprisoned. All those things are true, but they speak for themselves at this point. Rather, simply let Tucker and Trump make asses of themselves, and write it down.
Tucker and Trump are the ones, after all, who have to worry about the filing cabinets full of kompromat that has inevitably been accumulated against them both at this point. They are the ones who have chosen to get in bed with the FSB (the "Gay Pay Oo" of our time—that "three letter fraternity" a.k.a. the "Phi Beta Kappas," as Cummings also dubs them). They are the ones who have chosen to entangle themselves with what Cummings aptly called a "joyless experiment in force and fear."
They may try to convince themselves that this was not a dreadful mistake—that they have not in fact mortgaged their birthright of liberal democracy in order to become mental captives of a Russian autocrat. But I certainly don't think they will succeed in convincing anyone else. The absurdity of trying to portray Putin's dictatorship as a better place to live than the democratic West speaks for itself. Much like the fellow-travelers in Cummings's tale, their claims do the satirist's work for him.
So, let us not argue. Let us instead try to meet their "joyless experiment in force and fear" with joy of our own. It is noteworthy, after all, that one of the first things Cummings does to reestablish his freedom, after he escapes from Hell—from the "unworld"—is to laugh. The cure for "unlife" (a word Cummings would use again, decades later, to describe Soviet existence)—the cure for ideology and self-delusion and the spectacle of the "useful idiot"—is to guffaw to the high heavens.
May it be so. "Hah. Rah. Sho!"
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