[Jan Valtin, Out of the Night, Fortress, London 1988, p. 659-677]
Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night was first published in 1941 in the United States, by the Alliance Book Corporation of New York. It immediately became a best seller, and eventually sold over a million copies. The first British edition was published in May 1941 by William Heinemann, with whose permission it is now re-issued by Fortress Books.
From the start, the book was surrounded by controversy, particularly in the United States. This was to some extent inevitable. The epic contest at the centre of Valtin’s autobiography – the struggle between defeated revolution and triumphant fascism – was an inescapable issue of the day. Moreover, Valtin’s book laid bare the cynical policies and brutal methods of Stalinism at a time when the support picked up by the Communist Parties from among progressive intellectuals during the ‘Popular Front’ period had been deeply undermined. There was a massive wave of revulsion against the Non-Aggression Pact signed between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939. This allowed the Nazis to occupy Poland, and by 1941 Hitler had also inflicted crushing military defeats on France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Even for the apologists of Stalinism, who had in many cases been prepared to justify the Moscow show trials and the purges of 1936-8, this grotesque alliance was too much to stomach. Moreover, Stalin himself took advantage of the pact to occupy eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and to wage war against Finland. Only after German forces invaded the USSR in June 1941 did Stalin abandon his opposition to the “imperialist war” in favour of supporting “the democracies against fascism”. It was not until December 1941, however, that the United States entered the war. Right up until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, public opinion remained sharply divided between the isolationists and those who believed that the United States should enter the war against the fascist powers. In such a political climate, how could Valtin’s book have failed to arouse enormous interest?
Nevertheless, the political and literary polemics generated by Out of the Night were also related to the specific circumstances of the book’s publication. Whatever Valtin’s original intention, Out of the Night was massively promoted by the leading capitalist publishers in the United States as a vehicle for ‘anti-Communist’ propaganda, directed both against Stalinist Russia and the American labour movement. Inevitably, the authenticity and accuracy of Out of theNight were questioned. Not surprisingly, the Stalinists and their literary fellow-travellers were to the forefront in questioning the book’s provenance. But while they were the most vociferous, their denunciations undoubtedly had an effect among wider circles. Today, Valtin’s story can be seen in perspective, and for Marxists his account provides detailed confirmation of the analysis made by Leon Trotsky and his supporters at the time. In 1941, however, the book’s real message was the subject of bitter dispute, both among political partisans and the wider reading public. The aim of this postscript, therefore, is to provide the background to the original publication. The British edition of Out of the Night, it should be noted, was cut. This was presumably because it was subject to wartime censorship. As this re-issue is based on the British edition (for copyright reasons), we are providing an appendix including the missing material.
The View from the Inside
Out of the Night was presented as the autobiography of Jan Valtin. The author’s real identity, as it immediately became known, was Richard Krebs, a former member of the German seamen’s union (the Deutscher Schifffahrtsbund), the Seamen’s International (IHS), and the German Communist Party (KPD). Given the character of his story, a number of questions were immediately raised: Was it an authentic autobiography? Was it all true? To what extent had Valtin embroidered or even fictionalised his story?
“Many reviewers questioned the complete authenticity of the book.”1 Some writers, a universe away from the nightmarish arena of struggle and having only the most superficial level of understanding, simply could not credit the truth of Valtin’s ‘fantastic’ adventures, The apologists of Stalinism, on the other hand, had a clear political motive for discrediting Valtin’s account. The editor of the journal PM, which investigated some of the allegations thrown at Out of the Night, summed up the charges: “It was said not merely to be a literary hoax, but a political plot as well – a plot of the anti-Communists against their old enemies, Stalin and the Stalinists.”2 In fact, it was the literary journal of the Communist Party, the New Masses, which denounced the book as a “hoax”, referring venomously to “incredibilities on every page”.3 (3) Not even the Stalinists, however, could sustain the charge that the book was a literary forgery. Apart from anything else, Valtin (or Krebs) himself was very much around to give interviews and talk about his experiences. Outright forgeries, like the alleged diaries of Maxim Litvinov, published as Notes for a Journal in 1955, depended entirely on the absence of their ‘author’ (Litvinov had died in 1951).4 With Out of the Night, therefore, an allegation of outright forgery would have carried no credibility.
Referring to the American Communists “campaign against its authenticity”, an anonymous reviewer in the British journal, The Listener, commented that “the author certainly provides an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence which can easy be checked.”5 There was no doubt that Valtin (or Krebs) existed; his narrative corresponded to the historical record; and it was related with a compelling consistency. Faced with this powerful literary testimony, the representatives of the Communist Party concentrated on discrediting Valtin politically and dismissing his book as vile anti-Communist propaganda, unworthy of serious attention.
Nevertheless, readers today may still ask: how accurate is Valtin’s narrative? The broad picture is unassailable. But as the TimesLiterary Supplement commented, “he sets everything down in specific terms – names, dates, places, details of underground Organisation, and methods of conspiratorial procedure…”6 How true are the specific details? Clearly, it would be very difficult to check and verify all the events, incidents, and conversations. In some cases it would probably be impossible. Many of the people concerned perished even before Valtin wrote his story, and underground activity of the kind he was involved in does not leave piles of documents behind. If there is documentary evidence, not much of it is likely to be open to public inspection.
But one example where there is some other evidence gives an indication of the difficulties involved. At the end of chapter seventeen, for example, Valtin says that in 1931 he spoke at a mass meeting in Hamburg with Ernst Thälmann, protesting at the murder of Karl Henning by the fascist brownshirts (page 231). As it happens, there is a report from a police spy of Valtin speaking at a meeting on Henning’s death. “The sailor Krebs opened the event and said a few brief words about the National Socialist murder of Comrade Henning in Hamburg.” Police agent Schmidt reported that Krebs then asked everyone to rise to show their respects to Henning, and exhorted them: “We swear revenge against the brown murder-plague and the destruction of the capitalist order of society.”7 The event covered by policeman Schmidt, however, was not a meeting in Hamburg, but a political-satiric evening held by the Red Journalists in Bremen (on 27 March 1931). Did Valtin speak at two different meetings? Or did he only address one in Bremen which he later confused with a meeting in Hamburg? Did he unconsciously conflate his recollections of two different meetings? Or was he, by placing himself alongside Thälmann on a platform in Hamburg, trying retrospectively to enhance his own role? It is clearly impossible to say.
It would hardly be surprising if, writing without notes about ten years after the events, Valtin forgot or confused some of the circumstantial details. In fact, Valtin himself admits that he even went a little further than this. He was quoted in an interview as saying that he “put into the story some things that happened to other people, not in order to make them appear my life, but as typical of the totalitarian way.”8 Valtin’s account. despite the Stalinists’ accusations and the critics’ doubts, carried enormous conviction. The author’s personal style was undoubtedly an important factor in the book’s success. Out of the Night is quite a long book, but the narrative is terse, and written with passion. The descriptions of events and conversational exchanges are extremely vivid, making a memorable impression on the reader. It is evidently not the work of a literary hack. “Whether wholly authentic or not,” said TheListener, “merely as a narrative the book is enthralling, and both in its presentation of characters and vivid dramatic power, it shows a literary skill of an altogether exceptional kind.”9
Ultimately, it is not this or that detail which is important. The real significance of Valtin’s book – which had such an impact in 1941 – is the cumulative picture which emerges from the detail: the view from the inside of the Stalinisation of the Comintern and Moscow’s ruthless manipulation of the international apparatus built up by Russia’s ruling bureaucracy.
The immediate impact of Out of the Night on politically conscious readers not prejudiced by Stalinist views was well expressed by Karl Korsch, himself a former member of the German Communist Party:
“It has probably never happened before that a man of 36 years…has told such a gruesome story, dealing not with his individual adventures but with an important part of world history, not with events long past but with things that happened just the other day and that may still be going on in a very similar way right now.
Korsch had been expelled from the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1926 for opposing the line of the Thälmann leadership, who slavishly followed every twist of the Moscow line. He formed an ultra-left ‘Intransigent Left’ group, but later moved to the right. An exile in the United States, he reviewed Out of the Night in 1941,10 Korsch had been purged at an early stage of the Stalinist degeneration of the German Communist Party, but he was well qualified to assess the authenticity of Valtin’s “weird story of intrigue and conspiracy, of spying and counter-spying, of treason, torture, and murder.”
“It is a true story, a reliable record of tangible facts, albeit of facts that remind one of the “stranger than fiction” columns. Yet there is the difference that they are not isolated facts which seem unbelievable only because they do not fit into the common assumptions derived from everyday experience. Valtin’s book reveals a whole world of well-connected facts that retain that intrinsic quality of unreality, even after their non-fictitious character has been established. It is a veritable underworld that lies below the surface of present-day society; yet unlike the various disconnected underworlds of crime, it is a coherent world with its own type of human actions and sufferings, situations and personalities, allegiances and apostasies, upheavals and cataclysms.”
Commenting on Valtin’s style, Korsch says that “He has presented the facts without reserve, with no perceptible sparing of other persons and very little sparing of himself. He has recorded the characteristic features of persons, events, and localities, with a rare gift both of memory and of accurate detailed description.”
However, the bold narrative style, Valtin’s great strength as a writer, flows from his down-to-earth, at times seemingly naive, approach to events. The other side to this is the almost complete lack of analysis and explanation. Caught between the hammer blows inflicted by the Stalinist leaders and the anvil of fascism, Valtin eventually draws practical conclusions which lead him to break with the Kremlin’s apparatus. It is possible that the circumstances under which he wrote the book (which we will come to later) limited his freedom to draw conclusions. But because the author expresses only a very limited understanding of the general processes involved, Out of the Night can have a very different effect on different readers. Some, with little or no understanding of the period, may well be left with a very negative impression, seeing it as an “interminable recital…of plotting, intrigue, agitation and violence… a world of lunatic infamy.”11 Those with some real understanding, on the other hand, are able to supply a wider theoretical context as they follow Valtin from event to event, and from one defeat to another. There is no doubt that anyone who wants a clear Marxist analysis of the German Revolution and the rise of fascism, written as events unfolded, must turn to the writings of Leon Trotsky. Following each decisive turn, Trotsky explained the real menace of fascism and warned of the fatal consequences of the Comintern’s policies. At the same time, there are now many well-documented books to which the reader can turn for the historical and political background to Valtin’s account.12
Attention was particularly focussed, when Out of the Night first appeared, on Valtin’s “ugly revelation of the tricks of the professional revolutionist’s trade.”13 “The story deals at length,” said the Times Literary Supplement, “with…the methods of Comintern agents and of the foreign sections of the G.P.U., with the apparatus of espionage and counter-espionage by which Party discipline is maintained.”14 This undoubtedly reflected the eagerness of many commentators to utilise Valtin’s revelations for reactionary purposes. The emphasis, however, also reflected the actual bias of his autobiography.
Valtin’s involvement in mass activity of the workers was limited to several brief episodes. As a very young man, he was drawn into the maelstrom of the German Revolution in 1918. After the defeat of the Spartacus uprising, he went to sea, returning to Germany in May 1923. This was when Valtin joined the German Communist Party (KPD), at a critical turning point of the German revolution. Valtin participated in the turbulent events which unfolded between May 1923 and the debacle of the isolated and abortive Hamburg uprising in October. This was, in fact, the only period of his activity in which Valtin was involved in mass struggle alongside the rank and file of workers. Even at that stage, as a young and capable militant, he was picked out as a member of one of the activist brigades in Hamburg’s harbour, and acted as a special courier. After the 1923 defeat, Valtin went to sea again, undertaking various assignments for the Comintern leadership. The Seamen’s International (IHS) was, in reality, a “masked continuation” of the Comintern and ultimately an instrument of the G.P.U.15 When Valtin was ordered in Los Angeles to carry out the execution of a traitor it was made clear that G.P.U. business was unavoidably his business. It was his deliberately botched assault (described in Chapter 12) that resulted in Valtin spending three years in San Quentin prison, between 1926 and 1929.
When he returned to Germany in 1930, this time for a longer period, Valtin entered the service of the Comintern apparatus as one of their trusted agents. By that time, the German Communist Party and the trade union organisations under Comintern control had been totally transformed from genuine workers’ organisations into instruments of the national bureaucracy which ruled under Stalin in the USSR. The defeat of the KPD and the rise of fascism completed the transformation of the Comintern and its organisations into an apparatus of terror. Valtin, according to his own account, became an obedient cog in this murderous machine.
Eventually, Valtin could stomach no more. He admits that when he was attempting, on the orders of his G.P.U. superiors, to convince the Gestapo that he really had turned against the Comintern, “many of the things I said were not lies; they were conclusions I had arrived at in the self-searching and digging which many thousands of lonely hours had invited.” (page 576). When he clashed with his G.P.U. masters, after his escape from Germany, he broke decisively with the Stalinist apparatus. Valtin was not unique. He gives examples himself of agents who were no longer trusted by Moscow, and were ominously recalled or kidnapped, or simply ‘liquidated’. A whole layer attempted to get out, to ‘defect’ to the West. This was the direct result of Stalin’s purge being turned, in the spring and summer of 1937, against the G.P.U./Comintern apparatus itself. Yagoda was replaced by Yezhov as chief of the secret police, and brought in a new cohort of purgers. Stalin was determined to destroy the apparatus which he had used to consolidate his power, to silence all those who had witnessed the terror from the inside and to rule out any possibility of the G.P.U. developing praetorian ambitions of its own. Dealing first with the apparatus at home, Stalin then turned to the foreign network, and Valtin gives a glimpse of the internecine struggle. What distinguished Valtin was that he was one of the relatively small number of agents to escape, and was one of the few to publish his memoirs. Most of those who got away, moreover, had occupied top positions. Among the defectors who survived long enough to ‘reveal all’, Valtin was unusual in coming from the lower echelons of the apparatus.
But how reliable is Valtin’s account of the Comintern/G.P.U. apparatus? Predictably, the ‘friends of the Soviet Union’ vociferously denounced Out of the Night as so much ‘anti-Soviet slander’, the false testimony of “a man convicted of attempted murder, and a spy and a traitor.”16 It is true that there were few people around in 1941 who could verify the details of Valtin’s experience in the Stalinist underground. Nevertheless, his book merely confirmed the analysis already made by Trotsky of the inter-dependence of the Comintern and the G.P.U. police apparatus, with Valtin’s book supplying exceptional concrete detail. In turn, Valtin’s account was subsequently confirmed by books published by several high-ranking defectors from the G.P.U. As well as explaining the process of bureaucratisation in the USSR, Trotsky, with good reason, also charted the development of the police apparatus. The Left Opposition was the prime target of the G.P.U., and even in exile Trotsky, his family, and his supporters faced systematic harassment and threats, with not a few adherents being murdered. In May 1940, a number of leading members of the Mexican Communist Party, in collaboration with G.P.U. agents, carried out an assassination attempt on Trotsky. Following this, Trotsky wrote a lengthy article, “The Comintern and the G.P.U.”17, exposing their complete inter-dependence. He gave examples of how “through interminable expulsions, economic pressure, direct bribery, purges, and executions the totalitarian Kremlin clique has transformed the Comintern completely into an obedient tool.” The G.P.U. and the Comintern were still separate organisations, but they were ‘indissoluble’. However, “…it is not the Comintern that gives orders to the G.P.U. but on the contrary, it is the G.P.U. that completely dominates the Comintern.” Unfortunately, the systematic exposure of the deadly G.P.U./Comintern alliance by Trotsky, who approached the question from a principled Marxist position, did not receive the same mass publicity as Valtin’s personal story, which was unencumbered by revolutionary conclusions. Among the evidence cited by Trotsky were two books which also bear out Valtin’s testimony. One was by Benjamin Gitlow, a founder member of the American Communist Party. In his I Confess he laid bare the dependence of the Communist Party on the G.P.U..
There was also In Stalin’s Secret Service (1939), the memoirs of Walter Krivitsky, formerly the head of the G.P.U. in Western Europe. Much later, after the brutal assassination of Trotsky himself, Alexander Orlov in 1953 published his Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, the most thorough and systematic exposure from the inside of the terror unleashed by Stalin against both the Opposition and his former henchmen, in Spain, within the USSR and internationally. In light of these accounts, not to mention more recent histories18, no one could seriously question the general tenor of Valtin’s revelations.
Another leading agent, Ignace Reiss, broke with the Stalinist apparatus in 1937. He too was forced to move by the purges. Unlike all the others, he made his decision on clear political grounds. Repudiating the bureaucracy, Reiss addressed a personal letter to Stalin declaring his support for the Fourth International proclaimed by Trotsky.19 This, as Reiss was himself aware, was tantamount to signing his own death warrant – and he was murdered in Switzerland in September 1937. Trotsky fully recognised the courage of Reiss’s political stand, but at the same time tried to draw out the lessons of his tragic fate. Trotsky posed an obvious question, which is not without some bearing on Valtin too. Why had it taken Reiss so long to break with the totalitarian apparatus he so profoundly hated and despised? In trying to answer this difficult question Trotsky pointed to the gradual, creeping, all-embracing character of the bureaucratic reaction in Russia.
“Slowly and imperceptibly, a revolutionist becomes drawn into the conspiracy against the revolution. Each passing year strengthens his ties with the apparatus and deepens his break with the working masses. The bureaucracy, especially the bureaucracy of the G.P.U., lives in an artificial atmosphere, which it creates for itself. Each compromise with the revolutionary conscience prepares a graver compromise on the morrow and thereby renders it more difficult to break away. Moreover, the illusion remains that everything is being done in the service of the ‘revolution’. Men keep hoping for a miracle which will on the morrow switch the policy of the ruling clique back to the old track – and in this hope they keep on toiling.”20
Valtin too eventually came to the conclusion that he could toil no more for his G.P.U. masters, but without drawing any clear political conclusions. Unlike Reiss he did succeed in escaping to the United States. But without any kind of contact with genuine Marxists to whom he could turn for advice and help, Valtin ended up in the hands of bourgeois publicists eager to exploit his story for right-wing propaganda and financial gain.
Valtin in the United States
When Valtin (Richard Krebs) arrived in the United States in March 1938, he was denounced by the American Communist Party’s paper, the Daily Worker, as “‘one of the Gestapo’s most important agents.” This was repeating to an American audience the denunciations already made in various Stalinist papers, as Valtin says (page 656). One example, later used by the Communist Party literary journal, the New Masses, as its ‘authority’, was Paa Torn (Stand Watch) for January 1938, the journal of the Scandinavian Seamen’s Club.
The Daily Worker of 15 March 1938 referred to Valtin in the course of a lengthy article carried under the front-page headline, *‘Four more Nazi spies will arrive today’, with his passport photograph printed alongside. The article gave names and descriptions of four seamen on the Red Star liner Westernland, claiming they were Nazi spies. This was one of a series of articles, ““A contribution to the defence of American democracy through the expose of these Gestapo agents.”’ The information, they said, had been supplied by members of the German Seamen’s union, and the Daily Worker called on the Department of Justice to take the appropriate action. Some way into the article, which named other alleged spies, this paragraph appeared:
“Accompanying this article is the passport picture of one of the Gestapo’s most important agents. He is Richard Krebs, 30-year old, medium build, speaks English fluently. Three months ago he was discovered in Paris posing as an émigré, connected with the Nazi spy circle in France and spying on Germans now living in Paris. He is at present operating on a ship of British registry.”
Some of those named by the Daily Worker may have been Nazi spies. Valtin, however, agreed to work for the Gestapo on the orders of his G.P.U. masters – in order to escape from their clutches. His real crime was that he had broken with the G.P.U. apparatus. The treatment of Valtin in the Daily Worker and other journals had all the hallmarks of the Stalinists’ vilification of militants and functionaries who were no longer prepared blindly to serve the bureaucracy. After all, Trotsky and his supporters, as well as Stalin’s own former henchmen who were arraigned in the Moscow show trials, were all accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Only a few days before its attack on Valtin, for instance, the Daily Worker carried a report of the ‘testimony’ of Chernov at the show-trial of Bukharin and others, now admitted by the Gorbachev leadership to have been a grotesque travesty. This particular up-date on the trial reported Chernov’s confession that he had become a German spy – and his ‘revelation’ that Leon Trotsky had received $1 million from Hitler’s Reich.
In the very article which names Valtin, the paper throws in a reference to the “secret agent Amter, last heard of connected with Trotskyite circles in Copenhagen.” Far more persuasive than the Stalinists’ allegations is Valtin’s own explanation of the denunciation (p. 656-7). First, their allegation blackened his name within the ranks of the labour movement, providing justification in advance for any moves by the G.P.U. to settle accounts with him. Then publication of the identity photograph from the Passport issued to him by the Gestapo made it clear to the Nazis that he had tricked them, thus inevitably sealing the fate of his wife, Firelei, who was being held as a hostage in Germany. It was also certain “to make the police departments of all countries do the work of the G.P.U. – to track me down and to deliver me to Germany, the Gestapo and death.” (page 657)
The last prediction was well founded, and very soon afterwards Valtin was facing deportation proceedings and a long fight to secure his right of residence in the United States. In the meantime, however, he had written Out of the Night. If Valtin’s arrival in the United States brought a barbed denunciation from the Daily Worker, the highly successful publication of Out of the Night provoked an hysterical tirade from the Stalinists’ New Masses, full of venomous criticism and vitriolic abuse. “Out of the Sewer” was the heading under which Isidor Schneider reviewed Valtin’s book for the Communist Party’s literary journal.21 It was stigmatised as the product of a flourishing “political-literary underworld” which, under the patronage of press tycoons like Hearst and ultra-reactionary Congressmen like Dies, specialised in the production of anti-Soviet propaganda. This school of writing, said Schneider, involved “psychopaths and political degenerates and confidence men,” as well as ““ex-convicts and perverts.” It had evolved over twenty years, but “the culmination of the genre is that complete sewer distillate, Out ofthe Night.” Valtin’s motive, declared the New Masses, was “‘to make a new American career of red-baiting and anti-soviet slander.”’ It denounced his “‘slanders against anti-Nazi heroes and martyrs like Dimitrov,” which revealed “a dangerous drift towards the Nazi spirit.” But the review made no attempt to take up and refute Valtin’s allegations, studiously refraining from giving even an outline of his life story or any details of his role as a Comintern agent. Instead, Schneider concentrated her fire on the massive effort of “the whole of the publishing apparatus” in promoting Out of the Night and the sinister role of the journalist Isaac Don Levine in the production of the book. At one point she crudely describes the book as the “night product of Krebs-Valtin and Isaac Don Levine.”
The line of the Stalinists, then, was clear enough. Their attack was based on abuse and denunciation, not on facts, evidence, or analysis. The real questions which would be asked by any critical reader were left unanswered: How did Out of the Night come to be written? Why were massive publishing resources devoted to its promotion? And what was Valtin’s position during the period in which his autobiography was written and published? Valtin had escaped to North America as a sailor on a British ship (as the Daily Worker reported), and in March 1938 he jumped ship in Norfolk, Virginia. Destitute, he worked for a time in various menial jobs. It was then, according to his own account22, that he began to write the story of his life at sea and in the service of the Comintern. According to an old friend from Hamburg, Robert Bek-Gran, who was at that time living in New York, Valtin got in touch with him. Bek-Gran claimed that he “helped feed him, and when in the fall of 1939 Krebs contracted pleurisy, Bek-Gran arranged for his hospitalisation. Later, Bek-Gran says, he took him to his Connecticut home, where Krebs stayed until 1940 while working on the first draft of his novel, originally a novel of the sea, with neither an anti-fascist nor an anti-Communist aim.”23 Valtin, however, in his own sketch of this period, merely says: “In 1940 I moved into a tent, and then into a garage in a New England wood, and there I finished my first book.”24 In another interview, Valtin admitted that Isaac Don Levine had „staked me to ten dollars a week while I worked.”25
Out of the Night appeared in January 1941. Launched with a massive publicity campaign, with extracts in Life and Reader’s Digest and a (shortened) ‘Book of the Month’ edition, sales reached over 300,000 within a month. Amid this success, however, the Immigration Department began deportation proceedings against him on the grounds that he had entered the country illegally in 1938. Valtin was arrested on 28 March 1941, taken into custody on Ellis Island and questioned, later being released on $5000 bail. He began a legal battle against deportation, but on 22 May the presentation of his defence was suspended when he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.), at that time commonly known as the Dies Committee, after its chairman. Valtin’s appearance effectively postponed the deportation proceedings, at least for the time being. This turn in his fortunes immediately gave rise to accusations, undoubtedly fuelled by the Stalinists, that Valtin enjoyed the approval, if not the active support, of the State Department and/or the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.
The New York paper PM carried a lengthy investigation into Out ofthe Night’s publication. “I am convinced,” reported Ken Stewart, “that at least some representatives of the U.S. government have played an active role.” The ‘Book of the Month’ Club, he believed would not have included the book in its list without the ‘go ahead’ from the State Department. It was suggested that a top official, A. A. Berle, had read Valtin’s book and indicated his approval. “Moreover, in times like these I don’t believe Richard Krebs, alias Jan Valtin, an alien revolutionary with a criminal record, could get where he has in this country without the co-operation of the F.B.I.”26 In a letter to PM Valtin denied Stuart’s allegations, and the journalist himself had already admitted that “as for being able to give you an authenticated expose – it is not on the cards.” In the New York Post’s gossip column, however, it was reported that “Krebs, now being guarded by Federal men, has received permission to remain in this country in return for the assistance he is rendering the government.” PM claimed that Valtin “mentioned the F.B.I. frequently…[and] made it clear that he had powerful friends here now.”27
The “assistance rendered to the government” evidently referred to the testimony of Valtin to the Dies Committee, which was energetically trying to build up a picture of massive ‘“Communist espionage and subversion” in the United States. It was in this connection that the Communist Party and their sympathisers pointed the finger at Isaac Don Levine, whom they identified as the instigator of Valtin’s autobiographical project and a crucial intermediary between Valtin and the Government. Valtin admitted that Levine had been involved. “It is true, as the Communists say, that Isaac Don Levine had a hand in my book. He did the cutting. It was much too long and he cut thousands of words from the first half. The second half is just about as I wrote it first draft. Many parts of the first half were condensed on Levine’s advice…”28 This is consistent with the content and the style of the book, which clearly belongs to Valtin. Levine supported Valtin financially while he was writing, “helped translate and edit the manuscript,” and, as was later revealed, “shares in the book’s profits.”29 This not insignificant financial involvement suggests that Levine played a bigger part than Valtin indicated publicly.
It was frequently said that Isaac Don Levine ‘discovered’ Valtin when he had already started writing. But how did this come about? In 1939 Eugene Lyons of the American Mercury accepted an article from Valtin called ““Communist Agent”.30 Lyons had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution in the early period, but had later moved to the right and become a fervent ‘anti-Communist’. Levine moved in the same circle as Lyons, and it is not hard to guess his route to Valtin. Emigrating to the United States in his youth, before the Russian revolution, Levine reported on the USSR as a foreign correspondent for leading American newspapers. He too was a professional ‘anti-Communist’, rejecting genuine socialism together with its Stalinist perversion.
Valtin was not the first G.P.U. defector to be discovered by Levine. Early in 1939 Levine had worked with Walter Krivitsky on a Series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post, and the subsequent publication of his memoirs, In Stalin’s Secret Service31. Levine knew A. A. Berle, one of the assistant secretaries at the State Department, and in return for further secret information from the former head of the G.P.U.’s West European organisation, negotiated a resident’s permit for Krivitsky. He did not live to enjoy this for long: Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington hotel room in February 1941, with what appeared to be a faked ‘suicide’ to cover his murder. The F.B.I., it may be noted, had no knowledge of Krivitsky, indicating that the different arms of the state did not always work in perfect unison.
The leaders of the American Communist Party, however, had a more particular reason for detesting Levine. He had acted as an intermediary between the Dies Committee and Whitaker Chambers, one of the most controversial ‘Un-American Activities’ informers of them all. Whitaker Chambers had once been editor of the NewMasses but had dropped out of public activity in order to work for the G.P.U.’s American espionage network. Disillusioned by the purges, he contacted Levine in September 1939. Levine negotiated with the State Department for Chamber’s immunity in exchange for information, and later worked with Congressional researchers preparing his testimony for the Un-American Activities Committee.32 Once again, the F.B.I. was kept in the dark about Chambers for several years, much to the chagrin of the director, Edgar Hoover.33
Receiving the summons from the H.U.A.C., Valtin “immediately took a plane for Washington.”34 Over two hundred spectators crowded into the committee room on the first day to hear the testimony of the best-selling author – celebrated in some circles but a sinister figure in the eyes of others. The H.U.A.C. was then known as the Dies Committee, after its chairman, Martin Dies, a right-wing Democratic representative from Texas.
Set up in 1938, the H.U.A.C. subsequently became the most notorious Congressional committee in the history: of American politics. After Dies’s chairmanship, it fell into abeyance during the war, but with the development of the ‘Cold War’ it was revived and became the vehicle of Senator Joe McCarthy’s infamous witch-hunts. In 1938, backed by reactionary bankers an industrialists, the Dies Committee was aimed against the social reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and opposed any diplomatic accommodation or trade deals with Russia. Above all, it set out to undermine the growing strength of the labour movement.
New Dealism was equated with Bolshevism, and H.U.A.C.’s method was to link ‘subversion’ at home with Moscow. The Federal bureaucracy, complained Dies, was saturated with “hundreds of left-wingers and radicals who do not believe in our system of private enterprise.” In his book, The Trojan Horse, Dies claimed that “there are not less than 2,000 outright Communists and Party-liners still holding jobs in the government in Washington.”35 The attraction for Dies of testimony from figures like Krivitsky and Valtin was obvious. Surprisingly, however, the H.U.A.C. also invited Trotsky, then exiled in Mexico, to appear before the Committee. Trotsky announced that he was prepared to give evidence, not to “support America against Un-American activities” but to explain the history of Stalinism and expose its anti-working class methods. Trotsky made it clear that he was totally opposed to any undemocratic, repressive measures against any section of the labour movement, including the Stalinists, who would only be given a fillip by persecution.36 The policies of the bureaucracy, however, had a deeply demoralising effect on the working class internationally and their gangster methods in the United States provided Dies and similar reactionaries with all the ammunition they could wish for. When it became clear to the Committee that they would not be able to utilise Trotsky’s testimony for their own ends, Dies withdrew the invitation. Valtin, however, was in a different position. Unlike Trotsky, he did not retain a Marxist outlook. At the same time, the evidence which his experience within the Comintern/G.P.U. apparatus qualified him to give was precisely the kind of material Dies was eager to use.
Formally, the H.U.A.C. investigated Nazi as well as Communist activities, though this was not taken very seriously. On the first day he appeared (22 May), however, Valtin gave evidence that the Gestapo “was conducting a campaign to ‘tear up’ the United States by ‘civil strife’.” The “foreign action headquarters’ in Hamburg kept elaborate files on Americans, labelled as ‘enemies’ or ‘friends’. They used, he said, German-American refugees and German businesses in order to gain key positions in the U.S. economy and society.37
This testimony on Gestapo activity was only the prelude to the real business, ‘Communist subversion’. On the second day Valtin gave evidence relating to Harry Bridges, the West Coast Director of the C.I.O. (Congress of Industrial Organisations), and other Stalinist trade union leaders. He also told the Committee that when he had been working for the Comintern in Germany he had “sent considerable sums of Communist funds to George Mink, former Philadelphia taxi driver, to help in organising seamen’s clubs in this country.”38 In Out of the Night (page 278) Valtin relates an incident in which he accosted Mink at the International Seamen’s conference in Hamburg. He challenged Mink about the ‘liquidation’ of Wissinger: “Perhaps you have made a mistake?” Mink made the archetypal, chilling G.P.U. reply: “We never make mistakes!”
Subsequently, Mink left the marine union and became a G.P.U. Official. One of his assignments was in Spain, in 1938, purging the international brigades of ‘anti-party‘ elements. After that he worked in the United States, where he was involved in kidnapping and ‘liquidating’ oppositionists and ‘traitors’. In a mass of evidence, given both before the H.U.A.C. and in a number of trials in the U.S. courts, Mink was linked with the kidnapping and disappearance of Juliet Poyntz, a Communist Party member and agent who reacted against the purges and expressed her sympathy for Trotsky and his supporters.39 This was just one example of the gangster methods which not only discredited the Communist Party but provided reactionary politicians with muck which could be used to smear genuine Marxism and socialism in general. The witch-hunting atmosphere created by the Dies Committee was used to justify ‘investigations’ of genuine strike movements, including those led by the Socialist Workers’ Party, which at that time based itself on the perspective and policies of Trotsky. Many of its leading militants, including James Cannon, were jailed under the notorious Smith Act and other repressive laws. Some of Valtin’s evidence to the H.U.A.C., said to be on issues relating to ‘national defence’, was given in closed ‚executive sessions’. Inevitably, because of the nature of his evidence and his lack of a principled position from which to criticise Stalinism and defend the rights of the labour movement, Valtin’s testimony served the purpose of the right-wing representatives of American capitalism.
Neither Valtin’s Congressional testimony, however, nor the success of his book secured his United States residency. If promises had been made to him, official or unofficial, they were not made good. Perhaps there were conflicting views of his case between different government departments. Without access to official records, it is impossible to say. After the original claims that Valtin had been granted immunity from deportation, PM’s Washington correspondent, Kenneth Crawford, announced “with complete assurance” that no branch of the government had given him immunity and “he will be dealt with under the law the same as any other alien suspected of being in the USA illegally”40.
He was deportable on five counts, the most important of which was his 1926 conviction for assault in California. There was, of course, the problem of which country the German ex-Communist would be sent – either Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia would have offered him only a grave. The proceedings against him, begun on 28 March 1941, were interrupted by his appearance in Washington, but not terminated. This was in spite of Valtin’s successful application to the governor of California for a pardon. “The applicant is fully rehabilitated,” pronounced governor Olson at the end of November, and has “the sincere purpose of becoming a loyal American citizen.”’41
During this time Valtin gave lectures on his experiences throughout the United States. But “In November 1942, through a Communist trick, I was arrested and placed on Ellis Island among captured Nazis and Japanese – and it took me six months to bring the matter to the attention of the Attorney General of the U.S., who then ordered my release.”42 What Valtin meant by “a Communist trick” is not explained, but he may well have been implying that Stalinist sympathisers within the government service had exerted pressure to have him detained.
At this point Valtin volunteered for the U.S. Army, and it seems that military service was accepted by the authorities as an alternative to internment or deportation. He finally gained US citizenship in 1947, “after an incessant nine-year struggle, on the basis of my war record”.
After Out Of The Night
With appropriate irony, Valtin said that he volunteered for the Army “at the ripe old age of thirty-eight.” From 1943 to 1945 he served as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, taking part in campaigns in New Guinea and the Philippines. He was made a war reporter, awarded military honours, and he wrote a combat diary, published in 1946 under the title Children of Yesterday.
After his arrival in the United States, Valtin married a young American, and their son was born in July 1941. At the end of the war Valtin “‘conducted a search all over defeated Germany for my lost son…and found him, skinny, ragged but in good spirits; I brought him to the U.S. for a very personal job of ‘re-education’.” Subsequently Valtin married another American and they also had children. They lived on a farm in Maryland, and it was there that he died, from pneumonia, on New Year’s Day, 1951, just two weeks after his 46th birthday on 17 December.
In 1942 he published a collection of stories, Bend in the River, based on his experiences at sea, in America, and inside San Quentin. His first novel, Castle in the Sand, was published in 1947 and another, Wintertime in 1950. None of these gained the success of Out of the Night, Valtin’s proudest achievement:
“It was published [he reflected] in Yiddish and it was published in China. It was fought over, acclaimed, attacked, and it was outlawed in Germany, Italy and Russia. Goebbels broadcast against it over Radio Berlin, and Moscow campaigned against it viciously.”
Lynn Walsh, with research by Jim Brookshaw, Liz Floyd and Kevin Ramage. August 1988.
We would especially like to thank Jim Brookshaw, who began the research into Valtin’s life and the publication of Out of the Night.
1 Kunitz and Haycraft (eds): Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement 1955, New York (NY), reprinted 1986, entry on “Jan Valtin’”’ pp. 1021-3.
2 PM quoted in “Out of the Night arouses newspaper controversy,’’ ThePublishers’ Weekly, 8 March 1941, p. 1124.
3 New Masses, New York, 4 March 1941.
4 Bertram D Wolf, “The Strange case of Litvinov’s Diary” in his book StrangeCommunists | Have Known, London, 1965. Wolf shows that “‘Litvinov’s” diary was based on the previously published Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (1931) by Gregory Bessedovsky, who was himself involved in this, and at least one other similar, forgery.
5 The Listener, 29 May 1941, p. 776.
6 ‘Professional Revolutionist,” The Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1941, p. 259.
7 Hartmut Müller (ed): Bremer Arbeiterbewegung 1918-1945: Trotz Alledem, Elefanten Press, Berlin, 1983, p. 56.
8 See note (1).
9 See note (5).
10 “L.H.” (pseudonymous initials for Karl Korsch): “Revolution For What? A critical comment on Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night’, in the US journal LivingMarxism: International Council Correspondence, Series 1940-41, no. 4, pp. 21-29.
11 see note (6).
12 Leon Trotsky: The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder, New York, 1971. Ben Fowkes: Communism in Germany Under the Weimar Republic, London, 1984.
13 see note (6).
14 see note (6).
15 Historical account in David Dallin: Soviet Espionage, 1956. The GPU was originally an internal security organisation, with the military organisation GRU responsible for international intelligence work. But with the growth of Stalinism, the GPU and its international section increasingly became an instrument for controlling the Comintern and its sections. The GPU went through many reorganisations and has been known at various times as OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, and currently KGB.
16 New Masses, 4 March 1941.
17 Leon Trotsky: “The Comintern and the GPU” (17 August 1940), Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, second ed, Pathfinder, NY, 1973, pp. 384-391.
18 David Dallin: Soviet Espionage, 1956; Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B MacDonald: On a Field of Red, The Communist International and the Coming ofWorld War II, NY 1981. The devastating effects of the purges on the renowned “Red Orchestra,” a Soviet intelligence network in Nazi-occupied Europe respected by even by its most bitter enemies, is told by its former chief, Leopold Trepper in his magnificent memoirs The Great Game, London, 1977. Only Trotsky and his Supporters, says Trepper (p. 55-6), can claim the honour of fighting the Stalinist machine to the death, but “they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism.”
19 Reiss’s defiant letter to Stalin of July 1937, together with the story of his underground work for the GRU, can be found in the memoir written by his widow, Elizabeth Poretsky: Our Own People, London, 1969.
20 Leon Trotsky: “A Tragic Lesson” (20 September 1937), “Letter to Elsa Reiss” (13 October 1937), and “‘Swiss Police Arrest Assassins,”” (19 October 1937) in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936-37, second ed, Pathfinder NY, 1978.
21 New Masses, 4 March 1941.
22 Twentieth Century Authors, as in note (1), quotes extensively from a sketch of his life written by Valtin.
23 p. 880.
24 Sketch referred to in note (22).
25 Robert van Gelder: „A Talk with the Author of Out of the Night’, The NewYork Times Book Review, 9 February 1941, p. 2 and p. 20.
26 The PM reports, to which we have not been able to gain access, are quoted extensively in The Publisher’s Weekly for 8 March 1941 and in CurrentBiography 1941 as in note (23). PM carried stories on Valtin in its issues of 3rd (p. 12-15), 5th (p. 7), 7th (p. 10), and 30th (p. 15-16) March, 1941.
27 Current Biography 1941, as in note (23).
28 New York Times Book Review, 9 February 1941.
29 Newsweek, 29 February 1941. This article also reported that ‘Government officials who keep tabs on Communist agents believe that Jan Valtin, anonymous author of the best-selling book Out of the Night, is high on the OGPU assassination list.”
30 Current Biography 1941.
31 See Gordon Brook-Shepherd: The Storm Petrels, The first Soviet Defectors, 1928-38, London 1977, for the stories of Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov; also recounted in A Cave Brown; On A Field Of Red, as in note (18).
32 In his own autobiography, Eyewitness To History, Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century, Hawthorn Books, NY 1974, Isaac Don Levine recounts his involvement in the Whitaker Chambers case, but strangely makes no mention of Valtin or Out of the Night.
33 Hoover and the FBI, however, were involved up to the hilt in the post-war trial of Alger Hiss and others, which made Chambers the most notorious “Un-American Activities’ informer of them all. Rivalries between different government departments may account for the apparent inconsistencies in the authorities’ attitude towards Valtin’s immigration status.
34 New York Times, 23 May 1941.
35 See Earl Latham: The Communist Controversy in Washington, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, who refers to Valtin’s HUAC testimony p. 86; and for the history of HUAC, David Caute: The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Campaignunder Truman and Eisenhower, NY 1978, especially p. 88 ff.
36 Leon Trotsky: “The Dies Committee” (7 December 1939), “Why | Consented to Appear Before the Dies Committee” (11 December 1939), ‘On Dies Backing Down” (12 December 1939), and “More Slanders Around the Dies Committee” (12 January 1940) in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, second ed, Pathfinder NY, 1973.
37 New York Times, 27 May 1941.
38 New York Times, 28 May 1941.
39 A Cave Brown: On A Field Of Red, as in note (18), pp. 343-5 and 356-7.
40 The Publishers’ Weekly, 8 March 1941. The New York Times, 29 March 1941, reported that Valtin’s “technical ‘arrest’ yesterday dissipated the theory of protection by the very bureau that took him into custody, and his lawyers declared emphatically that he was not being protected by Federal agents. They inferred, however, that Mr Valtin had much to offer Federal agents on behalf of the country’s interests.”
41 Publishers’ Weekly, 13 December 1941.
42 This and subsequent quotations are from Valtin’s autobiographical sketch, quoted in Twentieth Century Authors, as in note (1).
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