I love the TCM cable channel, but it has a glaring blind spot for Communism. Last week it put that glaring blind spot on display in its broadcast of Saul Turrell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist. Introducing the film, host Dave Karger referred to difficulties in Robeson’s career as a result of his devotion to “civil rights.”
The documentary is posted here. I haven’t double checked to confirm that it covers Robeson’s trips to the Soviet Union. However, it shows Robseson going to Spain to sing for the Republican forces. Toward the end it shows him singing a Chinese Red Army marching song that became the regime’s first national anthem.
An awake viewer might begin to get the idea that Robeson was an ardent believer in the Communist cause whether or not he ever formally joined the CPUSA. The documentary — like Karger — never expressly addresses the matter of Robeson’s long devotion to Stalin’s cause.
Harvey Klehr is our foremost historian of American Communism. For the rest of the story, interested readers can turn to his Commentary review of Martin Duberman’s massive biography of Robeson. Professor Klehr deems Robeson a fellow traveler who faithfully followed every twist and turn in the Communist Party line. Robeson’s devotion dated to his first trip to the Soviet Union:
in 1934 Robeson angrily announced that the “modern white American” was a “member of the lowest form of civilization in the world today,” and in the same year he accepted an invitation to the Soviet Union. Once there, he was smitten: “Nights at the theater and opera, long talks with [the director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories . . . all in the context of a warm embrace.” Convinced that the Soviet Union had abolished racial prejudice, Robeson felt, he said, “like a human being for the first time since I grew up.” It was the start of a lifelong romance.
Nothing in subsequent years ever shook Robeson’s faith that the Soviets were on the road to creating a wonderful new society. In the late 30’s and beyond he justified the Stalinist purges even though they swallowed up some of his own friends; it was right, he said, for the Soviets to “destroy anybody who seeks to harm that great country.” In 1939 he defended the Nazi-Soviet pact, then dutifully changed his tune two years later when Hitler turned on his Soviet ally. His name graced the letterheads of numerous Communist fronts, and he gave benefit concerts for a host of left-wing causes.
And so on.
Sidney Poitier narrates the documentary. Film of Robeson speaking shows him to be a magnetic character. He tragically misapplied his celebrity to the cause of Communism. Professor Klehr casts a gimlet eye on Robeson’s life:
The émigré Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky, quoted by Duberman, has recalled how bitterly he and his friends hated Robeson for singing at concerts in Prague while the Soviet-backed regime was killing and persecuting its “enemies.” Skvorecky charitably concludes: “May God rest his—one hopes—innocent soul.” From this biography it becomes apparent that any such hope in Robeson’s innocence was and is misplaced.
Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: After watching my recording of the documentary yesterday, I wrote Professor Klehr to ask if he had seen it and to express my regard for his book review. He responded this morning: “I have not seen the Turrell documentary – have no desire to subject myself to it. Robeson was a sad figure. So talented and politically stupid. His voice was just extraordinary. Listening to him sing spirituals is an extraordinary treat.” The documentary is worth seeing if only to hear Robeson speak and sing.
