Useful idiots

     On Dec. 27, 1929, 12 years before Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews, Joseph Stalin -- Hitler's mentor -- ordered the "liquidation" of the kulaks or "wealthy peasants." By the time that pogrom was over, scholars estimate that Stalin had murdered, starved to death or sent to wither in the gulag at least 11 million people.
      Some of those eventually caught in Stalin's terror were Americans, and their fate is just now being revealed.
      By the early 1930s, Stalin had built a massive system of slave camps -- some 10 million people labored without pay under horrific conditions to build the wondrous creations of Stalinism, including dams, factories, canals, gold mines, forestry projects, railways and roads.
      "The arrests, the prisons, the camps, the scope, the brutality and violence of social engineering -- nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined before," writes historian Paul Johnson.
      But that was only the beginning. No one was safe in Stalin's Russia. Even the Communist Party faithful and the officer corps of the Red Army were decimated by Stalin's scythe. In the end, Stalin murdered upwards of 20 million of his fellow citizens -- more than Hitler -- and was engaged in another round of bloody purges when he died in 1953.
      But the long reign of terror never silenced Stalin's admirers abroad. Leftist intellectuals in the United States and Great Britain swooned over Stalin and the communist utopia he was building. Even in the midst of state-ordered famine, mass executions and show trials, New York Times correspondent Will Duranty wrote glowing accounts of Soviet life in the 1930s. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. H.G. Wells called Stalin "fair, candid and honest ... nobody is afraid of him and everybody trusts him" at a time when even Stalin's closest associates and family cowered in fear of imminent execution.
      Some Americans were so enthralled with the great Stalinist experiment that they traveled to Russia to take part. Many of these ex-patriot Americans flourished for a time under Stalin, who employed them as "useful idiots" -- tools of his crude propaganda machine -- in high-profile professions.
      Until now, little was known about the fate of these Americans, many of whom simply disappeared into thin air. But now, The Associated Press, using the newly opened secret police archives, has managed to track the fate of 15 Americans who took up residence in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s. Of the 15 -- which included artists, teachers, engineers and factory workers -- eight were executed, two were worked to death in Soviet labor camps, and the other five spent long years in prison.
      Their crime was having seen the West. Stalin, apparently, could not tolerate the presence of people who had first-hand knowledge of conditions in the United States which, bad as they were during the Great Depression, could not help but compare favorably to life within the terroristic slave state Stalin was building.
      Stalin treated with the same murderous callousness his own victorious soldiers who returned from World War II with first-hand knowledge of Western Europe.
      It is difficult to muster much sympathy for these misguided Americans who served to reinforce Stalin's regime and lend it credibility abroad. They wanted to experience the essence of communism, and they succeeded in that.