DANIEL BELL
533
Like many of the active Yipsels at the time , I was tempted by
the Communist movement. John Dos Passos at the time had re–
marked that joining the Socialist party was like drinking "near beer,"
the weak, almost nonalcoholic beer that was allowed at that time un–
der Prohibition. (In later years, Dos Passos became a "reformed
drunk," and sometimes acted like one .) The victory of Hitler, and
the quick destruction of the powerful Social Democratic movement,
gave one the sense that it was, indeed, the final conflict, and each
must stand in his place. Many of my comrades did join the Young
Communist League; a few, more sophisticated, became Trotskyites.
I was torn between the two.
I spoke of this to some Anarchist relatives, cousins of my
mother, a Russian-Jewish couple who lived in Mohegan Colony, a
radical settlement fifty miles from New York, where I would spend a
week or two in the summer after finishing my job in the garment dis–
trict, where I used to push the heavy dress trucks through the streets
and give out organizing leaflets for the International Ladies Gar–
ment Workers Union. That I had become a Socialist they did not
mind. That I should think of becoming a Communist or a Trotskyite
horrified them. They took me to see Rudolf Rocker, the venerable
Anarchist leader, an imposing and portly man with a large square
head and imposing brush of gray hair, who then lived in the Colony.
Rocker said simply that the Bolsheviks - I was struck at the time,
and recall almost a half-century later, that he never called them
Communists but Bolsheviks - had seized power in the name of the
people , using Anarchist slogans such as land to the people; that the
soviets, the workers' and soldiers' councils, were spontaneous move–
ments which proved the truth of the Anarchist judgments, but that
the Bolsheviks had taken over and destroyed the soviets.
In
parting,
he gave me a number of Anarchist pamphlets, by Malatesta, by
Kropotkin (on the Paris Commune), and in particular two pamph–
lets by Alexander Berkman,
The Russian Tragedy
and
The Kronstadt
Rebellion,
pamphlets in English but "set up and printed for
Der Syndi–
kalist,"
Berlin 1922-pamphlets that I have before me as I write (one
inscribed in a large round hand, "with fraternal greetings, A.B.")–
and he suggested that I read Berkman's
The Bolshevik Myth,
the diary
of his years in Russia, 1920-1922, a copy of which I soon found, and
still have.
Every radical generation, it is said, has its Kronstadt. For some
it was the Moscow Trials, for others the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for still
others Hungary (the Rajk Trial or 1956), Czechoslovakia (the defen-
