American Communism and Soviet Russia: The View from Chicago's Streets

My comments will speak to the new findings from archives in Moscow, which allow us to see American Communism as a much more complex organization than Draper's Analysis allowed. I want to deal with the ways that newly available sources make it possible for us to rethink Draper's conclusions. And Chicago serves well as a basis for such redrawing.

The Chicago materials in the previously classified local CUPUSA records in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History is rich in materials relating to the period 1928-1935, including membership statistics, disciplinary hearings, field organizers' reports, neighborhood meeting minutes, pamphlets, newsletters, shop papers and leaflets, all attesting to the activities of the rank and file as well as CP officials. These materials put a human face on American Communists and thus place the personal and political choices Communist activists made into the social and political context in which they lived.

Lacking such materials, Draper concluded that American Communists had become "Soviet puppets." Stalinism's impact cannot and should not be denied, but developments in Chicago, as evidenced by the newly available materials, challenge Draper's teleological arguments and necessitate a rethink of his conclusion that a history of the CPUSA "is chiefly a history of its top leadership."