Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 5: Addiction
In 1972, after years of moving from grade to grade and then going to work, I’m on my own—but I feel purposeless and unloved. In writing about poverty, I’ve interviewed many former drug addicts or alcoholics and heard them explain how, in the depths of woe, addictions seem sensible. That’s me then, but I don’t start drinking or drugging. Instead, I move from philosophical cocaine to ideological fentanyl.
The route to addiction is clear in retrospect. I vape the Vietnam War. My gateway drug is reading Lenin in 1968 to prep for my WGBH-TV series. I then drug myself into seeing history and contemporary poverty through Marxist lenses. I think my reasoning is inductive, but the political journal I keep is one grand abstraction after another: “Around the world revolutionary societies are developing. The power of the American empire is holding them back. We need to neutralize that power so revolutionary societies will spring up without hindrance.”
In 1972 I absorb The New Radicalism, a book aimed at people my age by Communist Party USA leader Gil Green. He writes, “Without disciplined organization [we] are helpless in any fight with the highly organized and centralized power of capital and its governmental machine.” Who has “disciplined organization”? Benton Pride and Isaac of Philadelphia say the Communist Party does. Yes, the Soviet Union is a dictatorship, but sometimes we need to fight terror with terror, don’t we?
Then comes the worst decision of my life. In July I sign a Communist Party USA membership statement and show my commitment by carrying “Peace and Jobs” signs at Saturday afternoon demonstrations in a Portland park. I meet the CPUSA leader, Gus Hall, who says, “We can use someone like you,” and the CP’s vice presidential candidate, Jarvis Tyner, who tells me to recruit churchgoers by praising Jesus as a working class hero: “His daddy was a carpenter.” Then I hitchhike six hundred miles to San Francisco, distribute Party material at a Hiroshima bombing anniversary and union meetings, play chess in bars, and sleep in homeless shelters or in the apartment of a Party member.
One of the veteran writers at People’s World, then the Communist West Coast newspaper, explains to me the difference between “ordinary bourgeois journalism” and “political movement” journalism. In ordinary journalism, reporters describe what they see. In movement journalism, they describe what will be. It’s right to describe a feeble collective farm in the Soviet Union as a mighty engine of progress because that’s what it will be in a few years. In the United States, I can rightly inflate attendance at a demonstration because, if I do a good job of showing that protest is important, many more people will show up next time.
In my addiction, such loopy thinking makes sense. After all, a brilliant baseball center fielder does not need to watch a long fly ball. He runs to the place where the ball will be. A quarterback does not throw the ball to a receiver. He throws to the place the receiver will be. As a Communist, I don’t see myself as addicted to a lie. I could prophesy truth.
San Francisco Communists then give me a wonderful plan for my life. Get an introduction to Russian by studying for a month. Then head to Japan on a Soviet freighter. Then check in at the Soviet embassy in Tokyo and jump on a boat to Nakhodka, just east of Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast. Then cross the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railroad so as to be in Moscow three weeks before November 7, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. A Soviet official will contact me. The Party will arrange for me to interview Soviet officials and get human interest that will be the basis for publishable stories in the American press. That will jump-start my career as a foreign correspondent.
Sounds good, but miserable as my marriage has become, I want some company—so I ask my wife to come along, without revealing the deeper plan. We share a berth on a freighter, the Alexandr Serafimovich. Typhoons in the Pacific force the captain to head to protected waters north of Japan and wait out the storms. I’m not upset about the delay—I have twenty-eight rather than ten days of shipboard Russian—but wonder about its effect on my mission to Moscow. Still, that’s out of my control, so I’ll follow orders and wait to be contacted.
November 7 is also election day in the United States. As Richard Nixon wins a landslide reelection, I’m rocking through Russia in a green railroad car with horizontal yellow stripes. A corridor runs down one side, with four-person compartments on the other. Each has two facing couches and two top bunks that pull down from the wall. A coal-fired samovar at the end of the carriage provides a constant supply of hot water for tea served in glasses.
Dining-car delights like solyanka, a thick meat soup, are pricey. Cabbage soup is cheap but awful. At brief stops elderly women wearing headscarves, yellow plastic coats, and black skirts sell Red Front candy bars and bags of nuts. Some offer metal souvenir pins depicting Lenin. Twice, men slip into my hands scraps of paper with their names on them. Are they internal exiles, hoping an American will get word of their plight or continued existence to relatives or Westerners? An interesting story, maybe, but I throw away the scraps, since I’m on the Soviet side.
I pay little attention to my wife and talk more with others. In one compartment an old man in a white shirt pulls a huge loaf of black bread out of his cardboard suitcase held together by rope. We take turns ripping pieces away with our teeth as he teaches me some Russian words including khoroshaya zhizn, “good life,” which is what he says he has in Siberia.
The next day I happen to meet a Jewish woman who introduces herself in excellent English. We see cobalt-blue Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and largest freshwater lake by volume. A furious wind bends trees as lightning strikes faraway hills, with sunset spreading a yellow light over the landscape. We drink some kvass as she asks for opinions about political developments around the world. I show my skepticism about American government pronouncements but don’t ask probing questions about Soviet life.
We power through a misty valley with tall deciduous trees on both slopes. Rivers and wooden bridges break up dense forests of pine and larch, with permafrost and powdery snow stretching in the distance. In towns men repair tractors in front of fires. Near the Volga River, factories shoot dark smoke into a dark sky. Picket fences surround individual vegetable plots. Every day I happen to run across a person who engages me with surprisingly good English.
Is the KGB studying me? If so, it has lots of time. The Trans-Siberia railroad trip overall is six thousand miles, twice as long as my bicycle journey. That’s reassuring, since I think stopping US imperialism requires a power twice America’s size.
In November 1972, only two Moscow buildings sport neon signs. Both proclaim “slava Lenina” (Glory to Lenin). Good. Lenin’s Tomb shows appropriate reverence for the great leader.
The Bolshoi Ballet shows how the arts flourish under Communism. The Museum of Atheism (formerly St. Basil’s Cathedral) has on the outside its longstanding candy-colored onion domes, but inside are torture devices formerly used by church tyrants.
The bad news is that a week in Moscow goes by with no contact. Communication mix-up? Some comment on the train displaying bourgeois sensibility? Since I come from Yale, once a CIA recruiting spot for William F. Buckley Jr. and others, does some cautious Soviet official think this is some kind of intelligence provocation? Looking back half a century later, I’m thankful to God for Pacific storms, poor communication, Soviet caution, or whatever went wrong in the deal that would have made me a traitor.
At the time, though, I’m depressed. My wife and I leave the Soviet Union and enter Finland, then bum through Europe, sleeping on trains and stopping in Yugoslavia at the Zagreb Zoo. At Communist Party headquarters in Rome, I prove my good faith by identifying all four poster boys looming over rows of desks: not only Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but Italian communist leaders Palmiro Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci.
We sleep in a Christian-run shelter in Amsterdam and speak with scorn about Bible verses on one of its walls. My London highlights are joining a Communist Party demonstration and sitting in the British Museum where Marx did his research. Then we fly back to Boston and I go to work as a Globe correspondent, intent on using that position to educate the masses about the dark side of capitalism.
My front-page feature about Portuguese immigrants becomes a saga of misery in “an industrial capitalistic society.” Stories about the bicentennials of pre-Revolution town meetings in 1773 are opportunities to applaud patriots who painted with excrement the houses of British officials, poisoned their cattle, stole their property, and saluted them with tar and feathers.
A front-page story about agriculture in western Massachusetts is a tale of small farmers ruthlessly deprived of their land by big capitalists. My lead reads, “The Massachusetts farmer is fighting for his life [and demanding] drastic change.” I run the most radical quotations I have, starting with dairy farmer Steve Verrill saying, “An ideal system would be to produce what everyone needed,” but the current system “makes prices unnecessarily higher . . . something’s holding us back.” I relish cranberry grower Dave Mann’s statement that flower growers are doing well, but “vegetable and dairy farmers face the irony of producing the necessities of life and starving” while sellers of a luxury thrive.
I feel purpose-driven, but the Globe can’t keep me down on the farm after I’ve seen Moscow and dreamed of being a foreign correspondent there. Still not knowing what went wrong in Moscow, I retain some American individualism and decide to make my own way there. Yale gives me a summer 1973 scholarship to its intensive language school. After receiving a C in my last year of high-school French, I get an A in this Russian class. That’s how motivated I am to go back, and it doesn’t bother me that the teacher, born in Russia, speaks of how millions starved when the Soviet collective farm system began in the 1930s.
Well, maybe I’m bothered a little by the teacher’s conclusion that “if Communists ever come into power in the US, I’ll cut my own throat.” One afternoon, hanging out at the Angela Davis bookstore in New Haven, I relay that comment to the young Communist store manager.
“That old fool,” she says. “When Communism comes to this country, he won’t have to cut his throat. We’ll do it for him.”