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PARTISAN REVIEW
We did a little research and discovered the origins of the con–
ference in the organization of the Cominform- the Communist In–
formation Bureau- which replaced the Communist International
that had nominally been dissolved in 1943. The Cominform had
been set up to further the foreign policy goals of the Kremlin as soon
as Western resistance to post-war Soviet aggression developed. In
September 1947 at the first formal meeting of the Cominform in
Poland under the leadership of Zhdanov, the directives and strategy
of the world campaign against the democratic West were laid down.
Soon in various countries of the West, committees approved ostensi–
bly in defense of peace against the machinations of American impe–
rialism, in actuality in furtherance of the aggressions of the Soviet
Union. The distinctive feature of this round of "nonpartisan" peace
front activities was the concentration of their appeals to the intellec–
tuals of the West-"to men ofletters, men of art, culture and science,"
to rally to the defense of peace and to the exposure of the American
warmongers.
Among the first steps in this campaign was an Open Letter to
Writers and Men of Culture in the United States by a group of So–
viet writers calling upon American intellectuals to raise their voices
against "the new threat of Fascism," equated with the threat of re–
cently defeated Nazism, and "against the instigators of war" in the
West. Signed by some of the leading standbys of official Soviet liter–
ature like Fadayev, Sholokhov, Fedin, Katayev, and others, it elic–
ited a response only from functionaries and members of the American
Communist Party in
Masses and Mainstream,
May 1948, the official
organ of the Party in the field of culture. Shortly after this a World
Congress oflntellectuals was convened at Wroclaw (formerly Breslau)
in Poland, August 25 to 28, 1948. Its keynote speaker was Fadayev,
the Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. He directed a furious
attack against American imperialists and monopolists, and ··the
beasts [who were] indispensable for their plans for world dominion."
These beasts were literary men characterized as "jackals who learned
to use the typewriter" and "hyenas who mastered the fountain pen"–
the writers and intellectuals who were in any way critical of the So–
viet Union. They had lost their human estate since the days when
Stalin called them "gangsters of the pen." They were contrasted with
the heroic American writers who were resisting "the cold terror" be–
ing waged by the United States government against dissenters. "A
writer who writes anything dissenting from the official policy of the
Government of the United States," he declared, "is threatened with
ten years in prison." Neither he nor anyone else present at that Con-
