Anna Louise Strong-- such a nice, Anglo-Saxon name for such a complicated and ultimately deluded human being. Strong was born in Nebraska on November 24, 1885 to Sydney Dix Strong, a Social Gospel minister in the Congregational Church. She was born with the wind beneath her wings, the glory of God never far from her home.
After getting her education, Strong ran for school board and won. But the school board was not a comfortable fit for a pacifist. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Strong spoke out against the draft. The PTA and women's clubs joined her in opposing military training in the schools, but the men's clubs, including the Seattle Minute Men, many of whom were veterans of the Spanish-American War, castigated her lack of patriotism. Strong was an American leftist when Left meant support for labor unions, economic equality, socialism, communes, communism, pacificism, and violent protest.
When Louise Olivereau, a typist who mailed circulars to draftees urging them to be conscientious objectors, was arrested, Strong was horrified. She stood by Olivereau's side in the 1918 courtroom, as the typist was tried for sedition, found guilty, and sent to prison. When school board elections rolled around again, Strong was replaced by a more patriotic, country-club lassie.
In 1921, Strong
travelled to Poland and Russia as a correspondent for the American Friends Service Committee, ostensibly to provide the first foreign relief to the Volga famine victims.
She spent a year there before being named Moscow correspondent for the International News Service. Strong was inspired by what she saw in the USSR, so she started writing. Among her many works are included The First Time in History (preface by Leon Trotsky), Children of Revolution, .Inside North Korea: First Eyewitness Report, When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet, Letters From China: 1-10, and Peoples of the USSR (which
I discovered in hard copy at an estate sale a few years ago).
After remaining in the area for several years, Strong grew to become an enthusiastic supporter of socialism in the Soviet Union. In 1925, during the era of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, she returned to the United States to arouse interest among businessmen in industrial investment and development in the Soviet Union. In 1932, Strong married married Soviet official and fellow socialist Joel Shubin. The two were often separated due to work commitments, and spent little together before Shubin's death in 1942.
Given her political socialism and her constant travels to communist countries, Strong was suspected of being a spy for the Soviets. In the Venona files, Strong might have been designated under the Soviet codename "Lira." While Strong probably discussed what she had seen in the US with the Soviets, neither her papers nor her FBI files provide evidence that she was an Soviet "agent". If she was an "agent", then the fact of her 1949 arrest in the USSR for being an American spy requires explanation. Most scholars agree that her openly pro-Chinese Communist sympathies led to her arrest in the Soviet Union, as the Soviet-Sino split reared its ideological head.
Strong settled in China until her death in 1970, partly from fear of losing her passport should she return to the USA. She built a close relationship with Zhou Enlai and was on familiar terms with Mao Zedong. According to the communist-sympathizer who penned the wikipedia entry:
Reading Anna Louise Strong's writings offers a wonderful glimpse into the horrible human carnival which often results from the legislation of "good intentions". Strong does not succeed in "disproving" any lies about Soviet or Chinese communsim-- she succeeds in demonstrating the twisted, all-consuming power of ideological conviction in distorting reality and individual moral conscience.
In this friendly August 1946 chat with Mao Zedong, Strong is starstruck. When Mao calls nuclear weapons "paper tigers" that do not pose a threat to the Chinese, Strong, who comes from a country in which the nuclear threat hit the papers almost daily, doesn't even think to challenge this assertion. For one who excelled at critical thinking when it came to the US government, Strong proved completely inept at locating the truth behind the propaganda of communist governments.
In Peoples of the USSR, her paean to Stalin's internationalism and ethnic tolerance is emblematic of this blindness. In a simple, uncritical manner, Strong merely reports the propaganda without bothering to verify its truth:
What rights has a nation? Some people claimed that nations are not subject to moral law but may expand at others' expense. Stalin wrote that a nation "has the right to arrange its life as it sees fit without stamping on the rights of other nations." It has the right to join with other nations to secure the benefits of a joint military strength and economic wealth. It has also the right to secede from such a union.... Stalin wrote that no union made by force is permanent. A union is stable only if the nations join voluntarily and are free to leave, and if all, whether large or small nations, are equal in rights".
For Strong, Stalin was a hero who promised to usher in a future untainted by racism, nationalism, and Nazism. The ethnic minorities and "kulaks" murdered under Stalin magically disappear. Nor does Strong bother to look below the surface of Stalin's remarks to the clear anti-Semitism exhibited by his regime. Strong was still living when Stalin began to implement his anti-Semitic policies immediately following the end of World War II. Tyler Cowen's excellent paper, "The Socialist Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism", explains:
Soviet anti-Semitism flourished after the Second World War, as the Communist leaders were unable to resist the target that had proven so successful for Hitler. In 1953 Stalin alleged the existence of a Doctors’ Plot, masterminded by Jews, to poison the top Soviet leadership. Stalin died before a trial was called, but he had been planning to forcibly deport two million Jews to Siberia. The economic crimes executions of the early 1960s were directed largely against Jews.
Textbooks were rewritten either to remove the Jewish role in history, or to provide negative stereotypes of Jews. Government texts dealing with Germany and World War II mentioned neither the Jews nor the Holocaust. The Russian pogroms were reinterpreted as justified retribution for the capitalistic excesses of the Jews. The Soviet government attacked all forms of religion, but Judaism most of all.
Like our former President Bush when addressing the "liberation of Iraq", Strong can't be bothered with pesky details that stray from the legendary glories of the revolution. As democratic statesman extraordinaire, Stalin had no use fo silver spoons when the Spirit of Communism chose him among men to lead. Strong naively asserts:
Stalin first appeared as leader of the whole Soviet people when in 1936, as chairman of the Constitutional Commission, he presented the present Constitution of the USSR. It was drawn up by thirty-one of the country's ablest historians and political scientists, who were instructed to devise the most accurate machinery for obtaining the "will of the people" through governmental forms.
On the next page, she extols the virtues of the Soviet constitution:
Equal rights for women and for all citizens irrespective of race and nationality were declared. Six articles guaranteed freedom of conscience; of worship; of speech, press, assembly, and organization. However the Constitution may work in practice, its adoption was intended as a direct challenge to the theories and practice of Nazi fascism... Nazi Germany denounced democracy as outworn, decadent. All Soviet speakers hailed democracy; far from being decadent they said it had never been fully tried.
The Soviet democracy was an experiment in absurdity, a magnificent attempt to render language meaningless and deprive conventional meaning of actual context. Listing the ways in which the rights accorded by the Stalin Constitution were revealed as language games would take more space and time than I have to spare. What fascinates me about die-hards like Strong is her conviction against all sense, reason, and evidence, her messianic fervor, if you will. Like Ezra Pound's adulation of Mussolini's Italian fascism, Strong's reverence for the communist states could not be moved by rational argument. For Pound and Strong, this respect claimed the status of faith.
Whether Strong's fervent religious belief made the transition to faith in political theology later in her life is ripe for speculation. In 1915, Strong was still publishing religious tracts. When she began writing about communism, however, the Christian publications cease entirely. Strong could have replaced one God for another. She could have concocted an early version of prosperity gospel theology to soothe her injustice-wary conscience (socialism and prosperity theology share an ideological plane).
As a young officer in the Crimean War, Leo Tolstoy memorably wrote:
A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present stage of mankind: the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and absolutism-- a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.
Tolstoy's feel-good ethic is predominant in the American Christian community. How Christians like Tolstoy and Strong fell under the spell of political religions is easy to understand once the goal becomes happiness and fulfillment on earth.
To read more by apologists for Stalinism and their critics: "Witness to Revolution", a documentary film about Anna Louise Strong + A letter about an unpleasant experience with Strong + Strong's memories of popular enthusiasm for socialist industrialization + "Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union", a propaganda piece by Mario Sousa + "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust" by Jeff Coplon + "The NYT Missed the Wrong Missed Story" by William Anderson + "Stalin: Slander and Truth" by C. Allen + "The Stalin Era" by Anna Louise Strong + "Women in the Stalin Era" by Anna Louise Strong + "The Cult of the Individual" by Bill Bland + "To You Beloved Comrade" by Paul Robeson + WEB Du Bois on Stalin + Google timeline results for Anna Louise Strong.
