Paul Bass Photo
Al Marder at WNHH radio.
At 94, Al Marder hasn’t slowed down in promoting social causes — and remains steadfast in his devotion to Communism in the wake of a century’s worth of controversies that saw innumerable New Haven comrades leave the faith and international regimes collapse.
He acknowledged that along the march to an ideal society, “mistakes were made.”
Lured to the Communist Party as a teenager at Hillhouse High School, Marder thought: “Monday would be the revolution. Tuesday, everyone would change.” Eight decades later, it’s looking more like Friday — and even Friday might not arrive so soon.
Marder, New Haven’s longest-standing active Communist Party member and leader and defender of the late Soviet Union, traced his journey and placed it in the context of today’s struggles during an interview on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.”
He revisited the turning points when so many on the left ditched “the god that failed” — the Soviet Union-directed Communist Party — wrenching apart friendships and families in the process. Marder remained steadfast in the faith amid reports of purges, show trials, Siberian exile and executions of political dissidents or ethnic minorities. Marder either dismissed those reports as fabricated propaganda or viewed them as errors committed in the context of a noble larger cause.
He stuck with the cause after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, and the old Soviet bloc along with it. He takes heart in the continuity of Communism in Cuba, at least for now.
At WNHH this week, Marder willingly and consciously walked into, if not a lion’s den, an interview he knew would press him on how he maintained his commitment in the face of those “mistakes that were made.”
Without losing either his good cheer or his candor. He agreed to be interviewed by a New Havener whose view of the historical events through which Marder lived was shaped by books by authors like Arthur Koestler, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Alexander Solzhenitsyn —defectors or lifelong opponents of a regime and international cause they equated with dictatorship, intellectual dishonesty and mass-murderous tyranny perpetrated in the name of a “worker’s paradise.” Marder said he continues to see Communism as the best route to a just society.
Growing up the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who struggled to keep the debt collector away from their small grocery story on New Haven’s since-bulldozed Oak Street, Marder as a boy saw sheriffs clear out his parents’ receipts during the Great Depression. He saw young Communists pick up furniture deposited on the sidewalk and return to the homes of evicted tenants. At Hillhouse High School he met other Communists, became a leader of the party’s local youth wing at 15, and never looked back.
He remembered as a teen swiping his dad’s keys while his dad slept in the family’s cramped Davenport Avenue home, then rolling the car down the street with a fellow organizer. They didn’t want Marder’s dad to hear the car start before they set off on organizing rounds. Marder’s father didn’t favor the “Reds.”
Marder helped found the People’s Center on Howe Street after Communists broke off from the Jewish socialist Workmen’s Circle group in 1937 over the group’s opposition to developments in the Soviet Union. Marder continues to run the not-for-profit that owns the People’s Center and used his political pull to keep it in business amid a funding-cut threat in 2012.
In 1954 he was one of seven New Haveners arrested under the Smith Act, which prohibited not necessarily advocating the overthrow of the government, but conspiring to advocate the government’s overthrow. Marder was the only one acquitted at trial, for reasons he still can’t fully understand.
Along the way, Marder has immersed himself in groups fighting for civil rights and against U.S. foreign policy. He has been a moving force behind New Haven’s Peace Commission. He won a 2011 governor’s award for his work on creating a Connecticut Freedom Trail. And he was a moving force behind March 9th’s bash celebrating the 17th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision freeing New Haven’s Amistad captives; he still serves as the Amistad Committee’s president. He helped raise money from New Haven to help Liberia tackle Ebola.
He has no plans to retire: He’s active in planning an upcoming a peace-activist trip to Syria.
And on Thursday April 14, the New Haven Museum will host an event entitled “The Right to Speak One’s Mind: A Conversation with Al Marder.” (It starts at 5:30 p.m.)
The quest to change history, Marder said, is a slow, steady march. It takes far longer than he thought as a teen swept up in the cause.
You can hear the full interview in a sound file at the bottom of this story. An edited transcript follows about those historic junctures when Marder chose not to follow comrades who gave up on the dream.
Hitler Pact
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Marder with Mayor Toni Harp announcing New Haven aid for Freetown, Liberia’s anti-ebola effort.
WNHH: In 1939 [Germany’s Adolph] Hitler and [Soviet leader Josef] Stalin made a … nonaggression pact. At that point a lot of people left the [Communist Party]. They said, “We were believing that we were anti-fascist and Communist.” Why did you stay with the party at that time?
Al Marder: Well, because I argue with the premise.
Let’s go back a little. Hitler’s aggression — first Austria, then moving into Czechoslovakia — [Maxim] Litvinov, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, offered a collective pact with Britain and France to stop Hitler in Czechoslovakia. That was turned down by [British Prime Minister] Neville Chamberlain. And at that point everyone who studies the situation realized that the aim was to continue Hitler’s [march] toward the Soviet Union. You may have thought or think that this was a pact to divide Europe. I believe it was a pact to stop Hitler wherever he was.
How does a nonaggression pact stop Hitler?
Vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.
Oh. I see it was to protect the Soviet Union. So there was a division. Some people [here in the U.S.] left the Communist Party …
Absolutely.
Then in 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. And you guys were for the war.
Yes. In between you had the breakout of war in ’39. A long period, nothing happened. Realized then this policy was continuing. While war was declared between Germany and Britain and France at that point, the intent was: How do you move Nazism against Stalin? [U.S. President Harry] Truman said, “Let them kill each other off.” That was the attitude.
As believers in socialism, we believed this [the Soviet Union] was the first experiment in history where workers and peasants took over the government of a country for their own destiny. Therefore we had the obligation — the political and moral obligation — to defend that effort.
Show Trials
Then when there were show trials of Stalin’s opponents … socialists and Jews who were sent to Siberia … That was another crisis within the Communist Party here. Some people left. They said, “This is not right. These are our allies. This is just a dictator taking power.” You did not leave. What were you thinking at that point?
Yes. First of all, you’re right. It divided further the movement at that point.
Well, Paul, in honesty, when I saw that, I also thought of the French revolution. And I came to the conclusion then that changing society, changing property ownership, in history, I found there was no Triple A to call on. You couldn’t call somebody up and say, “How do we deal with this? Send an emergency car and help me out.”
In that course of the revolution, then and later, mistakes were made. But my belief in socialism as an answer to human destiny overcomes [that].
The argument was among socialists. … [Former Soviet Communist leader Leon] Trotsky was murdered by Stalin … Do you agree with that or no?
I know the history. But I don’t know who [killed Trotsky].
Other people who believed in socialism were leaving the party at that point saying, “This is an abandonment of socialism.” Part of what I’m hearing form you, Al, is that in the real world, did you think there was no better example? That the U.S. was on an exploitative capitalist track, Europe was on that track? Did you feel that even though in your words “mistakes were made,” [the Soviet Union] was still the best example and the place where people were still trying to carry out true socialism? I read Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon; Richard Wright, American Hunger … All the people who left the party in the U.S. and felt it was a sellout and just a front for the U.S.S.R. and a totalitarian dictatorship. Clearly you heard that too.
Of course! And participated in all the discussions over the years. Absolutely. And engaged in these debates and arguments. Especially as I assumed more of a leadership role. I tried to explain the course.
Today I believe very firmly that the answer to the crisis in the United States and capitalism and Europe is a socialist society where workers, ordinary workers and peasants, will take control.
So you never wavered that faith?
No.
And now some people are embracing the socialist label with the Bernie Sanders campaign for president
I believe he is making a contribution. I don’t agree with his definition of socialism.
I don’t know if Bernie Sanders of 20 years ago would agree with [his current] definition of socialism.
I was on the debating team at Hillhouse, OK? The subject of the debate as we traveled around the state was, “Is the post office socialist?”
Interesting. What was your answer?
Of course not!
Now why isn’t the post office socialist? Because the workers don’t make the decisions?
And they don’t own the means of production. It’s a government agency. …
Did workers have that say in the Soviet Union? That was pretty strong central government.
Yes.
So was that true socialism? Or was it a step toward true socialism?
They were trying to find a way.
Khrushchev Revelations
Thomas MacMillan Photo
Marder at a 2010 announcement about the new Long Wharf boathouse, a potential spot for the Amistad schooner.
Another time some of your allies left the party was 1956 … the “Khrushchev revelations,” [when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev] said that Stalin [had reigned in a brutal “cult of personality].
Yes, yes.
It has been estimated that between 20 and 50 million people were murdered by Stalin’s regime. In fact some of the people who went to jail with you under the Smith Act in New Haven did leave the party in 1956.
Yes.
They said, “This is not honest. This is what we’re hearing now was going on all these years. We were duped. We’re still socialists. But this was not socialism.” Your faith in socialism and the U.S.S.R. stayed firm. Why did you stay with the party in 1956 after the Khrushchev revelations?
I think other things entered the element of some of these people. It’s very traumatic to be a victim of the state. People don’t realize the effect of such an attack.
So you’re saying that your colleagues left not because they still believed in socialism …
I said I think it played a part. I respect them.
They continued being radical activists. They didn’t join the other side.
I respect them. I also think there was a human element. Because it’s hard to explain. I find it even today every hard to explain the atmosphere of …
Persecution.
Right. When the whole state turns against you as an individual, divides you from the community where you grew up, turns friends away from you, and limits you. That has a tremendous effect on an individual. To reexamine, how did you come to this point? How did you come to this point? I think that plays a role.
What was your reaction to the Khrushchev revelations? Why did that not turn you against the U.S.S.R.?
I think I already explained it. First of all I don’t accept completely all the propaganda. Remember we’re now in the Cold War. Everything, everything that was done — right?— was filtered through the Cold War, through U.S. foreign policy.
You have to go back just a step, Paul, since you’re dealing with the history. Truman said what I quoted: “Let them kill each other off.” We didn’t recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. We also had invaded the Soviet Union in 1917. The U.S. and Britain invaded the Soviet Union. This was a blow against the ownership of private property, against capitalism. This could not be forgiven by capitalism. Any sign of people wanting to take the property away for their own social purpose has toe be fought.
The Gulags
In a Soviet gulag.
Do you think — when Solzhenitsyn described the gulag [forced labor camps], or Sakharov and other Jews fled persecution — was that propaganda? Or do you think that was true when people talked about the camps and 20 or more million people getting killed? Do you think that was true? Or was that propaganda?
I think that some of it could very well [be true]. I’ve also learned that that in the zealousness of supporting a movement … Just like, for example, the anti-abortion folks. They may be very decent people.
But they’ll justify killing somebody [who’s] alive in the name of the unborn. …
I don’t mean that. They’ll get in front of a Planned Parenthood and they violently assault people. They may be very decent people. But they make this huge jump, right?
Does that happen? Absolutely…. What I’m trying to point out is that the change of a society, a change of humanity, from “I” to “we,” is a long process
I jokingly said when I was younger, I would say, “Monday would be the revolution. Tuesday everyone would change.” Now that I’m older, I’ll say, “Monday is the revolution. Friday everyone will change.”
What day of the week is it now, Al? What would say? Are we [at] Wednesday?
We have a long way, unfortunately. The way our country’s in danger, the world’s in danger.
Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full WNHH interview with Marder.
And click on or download the above sound file to hear Tom Breen interview UNH professor Richard Wormser about his new documentary American Reds, which offers a new history of the Communist Party USA, from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the death of Stalin and the dissolution of the American party in the mid-1950s; on the WNHH program “Deep Focus.”
Its interesting that the response to the murder and opression of 100s of millions of people is "mistakes were made".