Counter-Revolutionary

ARTISTS IN UNIFORM--Max Eastman-- Knopf ($2.50). Like some religious sects, Communism is intolerant of criticism, quick to anathematize and excommunicate heretics. U. S. Communists, provincial to Moscow, are even more rigid than their Mother Church. For defending Exile Trotsky against Dictator Stalin, Max Forrester Eastman was sent away from the Party. Consequently hard-shell Communists will disregard one-time-Communist Eastman's Artists in Uniform as the disgruntled diatribe of a known dissenter. A pamphleteer of gusty eloquence (both his parents were Congregational ministers), Author Eastman gives his tongue and lung free rein in this fat (261 pp.) pamphlet-philippic. His accusation: For eight years (1924-32) the Stalin dictatorship exercised such a stifling censorship over Russian authors that no independent creative writer now dares raise his voice in Russia. Eastman sees Russian letters now as "a mirthless desert waste inhabited by a few sincere fanatics and a horde of unexampled experts in bootlick, blackmail and blatherskite." As victims of this Inquisition he cites the late Sergei Yessenin and Vladimir Maiakovsky (both suicides) ; the conversion of "the mirthful satirist, Valentine Kataev . . . into a faithful Sunday School moralist of the five-year plan"; the groveling recantation of Panteleimon Romanov; the humiliation of Boris Pilnyak, president of the Russian Authors' League, who was forced to save his skin by rewriting a "harmful" book into a "harmless" one; the refusal of Isaac Babyel to publish anything at all under present conditions. A scornful disbeliever in the Communist theory that Art must be Propaganda, Author Eastman is a Communist first but a literary man all the time. He says Lenin also thought it nonsense that bureaucrats should interfere with art. After listing the slogans ("Art is to be wielded as a weapon" et al.} of the [Communist] Artists' International, Eastman explodes: "Could any set of ideas more neatly summarize the attitude of the vicariously infantile and office-holding bigot who calls himself the proletariat, not because he feels with or for the members of the working class, but because it swells his importance and accords with his intimate knowledge of the nature and purposes of the universe to do so?"

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