[In the following essay, originally published in The Nation in 1952, Howe explores the role of religion and Chambers's approach to Stalinism in Witness, and deems the autobiography disjointed, historically inaccurate, and often hypocritical.]

That Whittaker Chambers told the truth and Alger Hiss did not seems to me highly probable. Personal tragedy though their confrontation was, it had another, almost abstract, quality: the political course of the thirties made it inevitable that, quite apart from this well-groomed man and that unkempt one, there be a clash between two men, one a former Communist who repudiated his past and then, as his Witness testifies, swung to the politics of the far right, the other a “liberal” recruited from the idealistic wing of public service. If not these two, then two others; if not their shapes and accents, other shapes and accents. And that is why most of the journalistic speculation on their personalities proved so ephemeral: for what did it finally matter whether Hiss was a likable man or Chambers an overwrought one? what did it matter when at stake was the commitment of those popular-front liberals who had persisted in treating Stalinism as an accepted part of “the left”? and why should serious people have puzzled for long over the private motives of Chambers or Hiss when Stalinism itself remained to be studied and analyzed?

Chambers has told his story and put down his ideas. Witness is a fascinating grab bag: autobiography, account of underground work, religious tract, attempt at an explanation of Stalinism. As confession, it has an almost classical stature: whatever opinions Chambers may now superimpose on his memory, the narrative itself demands the attention of anyone interested in modern politics. As autobiography, the book is embarrassing: Chambers' memoir of his family seems a needless act of masochism, while the portrait of his adult self suggests a man whose total sincerity is uncomplicated by humor, irony, or persuasive humility.

The most remarkable fact about Witness is that as a work of ideas it should be so ragged and patchy. In all its eight hundred pages there is hardly a sustained passage of, say, five thousand words devoted to a serious development of thought; everything breaks down into sermon, reminiscence, self-mortification, and self-justification. Service in the GPU is not, to be sure, the best training for the life of the mind; but there is something in Chambers' flair for intellectual melodrama that seems particular to our time and to the kind of personality always hungry for absolutes of faith. Writes Chambers: “I was not seeking ethics; I was seeking God. My need was to be a practising Christian in the same sense that I had been a practising Communist.” A little time spent in “seeking ethics,” or even a breather from “seeking” anything, might seem to have been in order.

The world, as Chambers sees it, is split between those who acknowledge the primacy of God and those who assert the primacy of man; from this fundamental division follows a struggle between morality and murder, with Communism merely the final version of the rationalist heresy; and the one hope for the world is a return to Christian virtue, the ethic of mercy. These views Chambers announces with an air of abject righteousness. Indifferent to the caution that the sin of pride takes no more extreme form than a belief in God as one's personal deus ex machina, he several times acknowledges a Mover at his elbow and declares the appointment of Thomas Murphy as government prosecutor in the Hiss case to be evidence that “it pleased God to have in readiness a man.” From Witness an unsympathetic reader might, in fact, conclude that God spent several years as a special aide to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

In reading this book one is nonplussed by the way its polemics violate its declared values. A few illustrations may suggest the quality of Chambers' thought:

Again and again he declares himself interested in presenting the facts. Without questioning his personal story, I must doubt his capacity as historian and social observer. It is not true that Trotsky “led in person” the Bolshevik troops that suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion. It is not true that “Lenin gave up listening to music because of the emotional havoc it played with him”; the man merely said, if Gorky's report of a casual remark be credited, that music made him want to stroke heads at a time when he felt it necessary to make revolutions. It is not true that “Communists are invariably as prurient as gutter urchins.” It is an exaggeration to say that in the 1927 faction fight in the United States Communist Party, dirty as it was, each side “prompted scandalous whispering campaigns, in which embezzlement of party money, homosexuality, and stool pigeon were the preferred whispers.” And it is a wild exaggeration to assert that the Communist agents in Washington, dangerous as they were, “if only in prompting the triumph of Communism in China, have decisively changed the history of Asia, of the United States, and therefore, of the entire world” (italics mine). Mao recruited his armies in the valley of Yenan, not the bars of Washington.

Chambers' extreme political turn has dizzied his historical sense. By noting that Alger Hiss was counsel for the Nye committee during the thirties, he tries to discredit its exposure of the munitions industry. “The penetration of the United States government by the Communist Party,” adds Chambers, “coincided with a mood in the nation which light-heartedly baited the men who manufactured the armaments indispensable to its defense as ‘Merchants of Death.’” But surely more was involved: the Nye committee revealed that some arms manufacturers had not hesitated to sell in bulk to Hitler, that their profits had been unconscionably high, that some had pressured both sides in the Chaco to buy their products and thus to prolong a war. The truth of these disclosures does not depend on whether Hiss was counsel for the committee that made them.

Chambers complains bitterly, and with justice, about the smears he has suffered from many Hiss supporters. Unfortunately, he is not himself above the use of similar methods. One of Hiss's attorneys was Harold Rosenwald, about whose face Chambers darkly pronounces: “I had seen dozens much like it in my time.” The notion that people can be “placed” politically by the shape of their faces is both preposterous and, at least in this century, sinister.

In the course of breaking away from Stalinism, Chambers came to feel that “it is just as evil to kill the Czar and his family … as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death.” What, if anything, does this highly charged statement mean? Coming from a pacifist, it would be perfectly clear, for it would suggest that killing is forbidden under any circumstances. We might then hope to hear as a sequel, “It is just as evil to kill 60,000 civilians in Hiroshima as it was to kill the Czar and his family.” But Chambers is not a pacifist; he is willing to “struggle against [Communism] by all means, including arms.” So the evil of killing the czar cannot for him be simply that it was a killing, but must be that it was an unjustified killing—which leaves him with the moral enormity “Several unjustified killings are just as evil as two million unjustified killings.”

Throughout the book Chambers praises the Christian virtues of humility and meekness. Unfortunately, this credo does not prevent him from declaring “the left-wing intellectuals of almost every feather” to have been Hiss supporters and then from calling them “puffins, skimmers, skuas, and boobies.” These delicate designations prompt one to remind Chambers that a good many “left-wing intellectuals” of one or another feather fought a minority battle against Stalinism at a time when both he and Hiss were at the service of Messrs. Yagoda and Yezhov.

Stalinism is evil, declares Chambers, a proposition neither disputable nor enlightening. Nowhere in his eight hundred pages does he attempt sustained definition or description, nowhere does he bound the shape of the evil. He seems unconcerned to examine the workings of Russian society, the social role of the Western Stalinist parties, the relation of the Asian parties to native nationalism. And with good reason. If you believe that the two great camps of the world prepare for battle under the banners Faith in Man and Faith in God, what is the point of close study and fine distinctions? You need only sound the trumpets.

Almost unwittingly, Chambers moves toward the view that the source of our troubles is the Enlightenment: “The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.” The French Revolution becomes the villain of history, its progeny every godless society of our time. Chambers accepts, of course, the common, crude identification of Stalin's totalitarianism with Lenin's revolutionary state; both seem to him forms of fascism; the New Deal was a social revolution which crippled “the power of business”; and the motto of “the welfare state” is best expressed by his former associate Colonel Bykov: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money must also give something.” Everyone might thus be lumped together: Voltaire, Jefferson, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin; not all equally evil, but all, apparently, “indifferent to God.” A man who thinks in such patterns can hardly be expected to notice—or have much reason to care—that Stalinism and fascism, while symmetrical in their political devices, have different historical origins, class structures, political ideologies and social rationales. Or that the Keynesian measures of the New Deal, far from constituting a revolution, proved a crutch for a stumbling capitalism.

Chambers' approach to history rests, finally, on no social theory at all; it is a return to Manichean demonology. Since for him everything depends on whether one takes God or man to be primary, he can write that “as Communists, Stalin and the Stalinists were absolutely justified in making the Purge. From a Communist point of view, Stalin could have taken no other course. … In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not evil, it was the sad consequence of evil.” The first two of these sentences are historically false; various Communists opposed the purges and proposed other courses of action, among them the removal of Stalin from power. The last sentence is shocking in its moral callousness. In effect, Chambers is saying that those of us who attack Stalinism for its inhumanity are sentimental, lacking in his austere disdain for what he calls “formless good will.” Is it, however, more important to attack Stalin for disbelieving in the primacy of God than for killing millions of men? If the killing is to be regarded as a mere “consequence” of first principles, specific moral criticism of it can only seem superficial. But, in fact, the purges were the result of a decision by men in power, a decision for which they must be held responsible. A society is to be judged less by its philosophical premise about God and man, if it has any, than by its actual treatment of men; “the human horror” of the purges was evil, not merely “sad.” What matters is not the devil's metaphysics, but his morals.

Chambers' major insight into the problem of Stalinism is his insistence that in this era of permanent crisis it provides a faith, a challenge, even an ideal. Feeding on crisis, Stalinism offers a vision. “The vision inspires. The crisis impels. The workingman is chiefly moved by the crisis. The educated man is chiefly moved by the vision.” This is an important observation and a necessary corrective to vulgar theories which make of Stalinism mainly an atavistic drive for power. But Chambers, ignoring the fact that the vision of Stalinism is corrupt, treats it as if it were a legitimate form of socialism, and pays slight attention to the counterrevolution that occurred in Russia during the very years he was its underground agent.

Is this an academic matter? Not at all; for the essence of Stalinism, in its Russian form, is that it rests on a new kind of bureaucratic ruling class which engaged in “primitive accumulation” by destroying the revolutionary generation and appropriating to itself total economic and political power. Outside Russia, Stalinism utilizes the socialist tradition of Europe and the nationalist sentiment of Asia for its domestic class needs and international power maneuvers. Drawing on a unique blend of reactionary and pseudo-revolutionary appeals, Stalinism attracts, in this age of crisis, all those who feel the world must be changed but lack the understanding or energy to change it in a libertarian direction. Anticapitalist but not socialist, Stalinism causes, in the words of Marx, all the old crap to rise to the top; under its domination, the best impulses of modern man are directed toward the worst consequences. And the problem for the historian is to determine precisely the blend of seemingly contradictory elements that Stalinism comprises.

Chambers himself provides an anecdote which dramatically confirms these remarks. His boss in the underground, Colonel Bykov, was a perfect specimen of the new Stalinist man: coarse, obedient, unintellectual, brutal. To Bykov “the generation that had made the Revolution … seemed as alien and preposterous … as foreigners. They belonged to another species and he talked about them the way people talk about the beastly or amusing habits of cows or pigs.” So disgusting was Bykov that Chambers felt, before introducing him to Hiss, that he would have to apologize for the Russian. Yet, after a brief conversation, Hiss found Bykov “impressive.” Why? I would guess that it was the attraction of an extreme bureaucratic personality for a mild bureaucratic personality, of one man who instinctively scorned the masses of people for another who had been trained to think of them as objects for benevolent manipulation. If Hiss had possessed a trace of either revolutionary or liberal spirit, he would have been contemptuous of Bykov, he would have seen on Bykov's hands the blood of Bukharin and Tomsky and thousands upon thousands of others.

Where will Chambers go? His strength lies in a recognition that we live in an extreme situation; he agrees that “it is necessary to change the world.” No longer a radical, scornful of liberals, convinced that “in the struggle against Communism the conservative is all but helpless,” he accepts, formally, the position of those reactionaries manqués who edit William Buckley's National Review. But only formally; for unlike them, he is drenched with the consciousness of crisis, he has none of their complacence, he continues a disturbed and dissatisfied man. What remains? Only the fact that estranged personality and reactionary opinion form an explosive mixture.

In his final sentence Chambers hints that he believes a third world war both inevitable and necessary. Yet he yearns for some spiritual reformation, a turn to God. What likelihood there is that spiritual or any other desired values would survive in a worldwide atomic war, he does not discuss. Would there, in any case, be much point in reminding him that religious faith has rarely prevented despots from being despotic? that many of our most precious concepts of liberty are the work of skeptics? that Stalinism thrives in pious Rome as in worldly Paris? that it wins supporters in an Orient which has not known a loss of religious faith comparable to that of the West? that if Stalin is an atheist, Franco is a believer? that the priests in Russia pray for Stalin as in Germany they prayed for Hitler?

Very little point, I fear; little more than to have told him during the thirties that Stalinism was betraying the German workers to Hitler or by its trials and purges murdering thousands of innocent people. Those who abandon a father below are all too ready for a father above. But this shift of faith does not remove the gnawing problems which, if left unsolved, will drive still more people to Stalinism; it gives the opponents of the totalitarian state no strategy, no program with which to remake the world; it makes our situation appear even more desperate than it already is. For if Chambers is right in believing the major bulwark against Stalin to be faith in God, then it is time for men of conviction and courage to take to the hills.