WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

The Russians wasted decades infiltrating the left attempting to gain purchase in American political life. There was the Communist Party USA, of course. Established in 1919, the CPUSA grew through the 1930s and boasted a membership of about 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. A hundred thousand! Whoop-de-doo! 

Then there were the spinoff lefty parties like the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, the Workers World Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Progressive Labor Party -- we could go on listing one splinter group after another with "socialist" or "labor" or "workers" in its title. They were tiny groups with memberships that were sometimes less than 100, and they would all deny being infiltrated by the Russkies, naturally. So would the "New Left" groups that came later, like SDS and The Weathermen. Nobody wanted to admit they were under Russian influence. Everything they were doing, from opposing the war in Vietnam to civil rights to fighting for free speech, was being done for completely pure reasons.

The Democratic Party would deny being under Russian influence as well, of course. But every American political party on the left was jointly infiltrated by Russian agents and the FBI or other American intelligence operations. There was a joke back in the '70s that without membership by Russian infiltrators and FBI agents, the Socialist Workers Party would have gone out of existence. I covered a meeting of the SWP in a loft on lower Broadway in the early '70s for the Village Voice. It looked to me like everyone there suspected everyone else of being either a COINTELPRO agent for the FBI or a KGB agent. You could have cut the paranoia with a butter knife.

I can't even begin to tell you how boring the Socialist Workers Party meeting was. The loft on lower Broadway was dusty, cluttered with back issues of The Militant and International Socialist Review. I asked someone if there was any beer, and he gave me a stern look and said they didn't allow drinking at their meetings.

Of course, we're talking about the Soviet Union back in those days. People on the American left, and even "liberals" to some extent, had an idealized vision of the Russian Revolution and the country it spawned. Some of this idealism was born out of the grim years of the Depression, when farmers were struggling to hold onto their land, factories were closing all over, and people were going hungry and homeless in the streets. Russia, with its Communist version of "a chicken in every pot" and a job for everyone (even if it was on a collective farm) must have looked pretty good compared to the deprivation all around.

Moscow used dissension in the American political ranks to gain a foothold in the left which they would pursue until the House Un-American Activities Committee, Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Scare drove the communist-linked left even further underground than it already was.  

I knew some people on the left back in the day. I had a friend in Brooklyn who was a labor organizer in textile factories in the Deep South for "the party." If he had enough to drink, he would admit to taking his orders from some guys with "connections," and he wasn't talking about mob connections. There was a guy I knew from drinking at the Lion's Head who had been a maritime union organizer who -- again, under the influence of a little too much to drink -- would admit to knowing a few people with connections "overseas." He had spent most of the 1950s dodging the FBI. I asked him one night if he really believed he was changing the world, or was he into it for the intrigue and the action. A smile crossed his face as he answered, "Ah, my boy, that's always been the great question, hasn't it?"

I remember wondering at the time why Moscow was even bothering with the splintered, weakened left of the '60s and '70s, and yet there they were, wasting their time in Broadway lofts and on factory floors in small towns in North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. It must have seemed to the KGB and Soviet leaders that they would find allies among those working for integration and voting rights during the Civil Rights movement, and they did. The Republican Party of that era would hardly have been a fertile hunting ground.

But it would turn out that they were sniffing around the wrong end of the political spectrum. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the new batch of Russian hardliners who replaced them would find their natural-born allies about 250 miles south in the Republican National Committee in Washington -- and eventually in the current occupant of the Oval Office.

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