[Marxism] Pete Seeger on Stalin

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, September 1, 2007
This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

A front-page article in The New York Sun yesterday trumpeted what seemed 
to be a striking fact: Pete Seeger, the quintessential leftist balladeer 
and a former Communist, had denounced Stalinism.

The article centered on a letter from Mr. Seeger to the writer, Ron 
Radosh, a historian and adjunct senior fellow at the conservative Hudson 
Institute. “I think you’re right I should have asked to see the gulags 
when I was in U.S.S.R.,” Mr. Seeger wrote.

He also included the lyrics to a song he wrote several months ago called 
the “Big Joe Blues”:

He ruled with an iron hand.

He put an end to the dreams

Of so many in every land.

He had a chance to make

A brand new start for the human race.

Instead he set it back

Right in the same nasty place.

Mr. Radosh, who once studied banjo with Mr. Seeger, said in an interview 
that he had idolized him, but he has become a dogged critic of Mr. 
Seeger’s politics. Mr. Radosh wrote that he was “deeply moved” that the 
singer, “now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been 
his major blind spot opposing social injustice in America while 
supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.”

But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at least as 
early as his 1993 book, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the book, 
he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had 
apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing 
that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”

But Mr. Radosh said that Mr. Seeger’s comments before had been little 
noticed and had never gone as far. And Mr. Seeger had never written a 
song condemning Stalin until now, Mr. Radosh said.

Mr. Radosh said that a public renunciation of Stalin was important 
because Mr. Seeger had made a powerful impact on the culture. “He’s a 
cultural figure who’s so identified with that, and is breaking with 
tradition,” Mr. Radosh added.

If anything, the interest in Mr. Seeger’s views on the Soviet Union 
shows the durability of cold war ideological debates. But Mr. Seeger, 
speaking by telephone from his home in Beacon, N.Y., seemed mildly 
amused by the matter.

“I certainly should apologize for saying that Stalin was a hard driver 
rather than a very cruel leader,” he said. “I don’t speak out about a 
lot of things. I don’t talk about slavery. A lot of white people in 
America could apologize for stealing land from the Indians and enslaving 
Africans. Europe could apologize for worldwide conquest. Mongolia could 
apologize for Genghis Khan. But I think the thing to do is look ahead.”

When a documentary filmmaker asked Mr. Seeger to suggest a critic of his 
views, he suggested Mr. Radosh. But the critical comments were not 
included in the movie. Mr. Radosh took note of that in his June review 
of the documentary in The Sun. The film, he wrote, had whitewashed Mr. 
Seeger’s silence on Communist crimes.

Mr. Seeger said he wrote Mr. Radosh after that to apologize for the 
exclusion of the critical remarks.

In the letter, which Mr. Radosh provided along with the lyrics, Mr. 
Seeger gives more insight into his cold war thinking. Mr. Seeger said he 
had concentrated on showing what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had 
accomplished “without using guns.”

“But I still hoped that someone like Khrushchev or Gorbachev could open 
things up,” he writes. “But I underestimated (and probably still do) how 
the majority of the human race has faith in violence.” The “basic 
mistake,” he adds, was “Lenin’s faith in discipline.” He closes warmly: 
“Well, you stay well. Keep on.”

In the interview Mr. Seeger said Mr. Radosh had made a career out of 
exposing the crimes of Soviet Communism. He said the focus on his own 
past was “kind of funny.”

“I’m sure,” he added, “there are more constructive things he could do 
with his life.”