STEPHEN KOCH
29
Young radicals of the early thirties clutched the fantasy that communism
meant sexual freedom - and in the privileged West, in some sense it
partly did. Certainly, radicalism and Bohemianism were intertwined,
joined in that angry righteous perspective of the intellect that seeks com–
pensation for feeling at once set apart, different and shunned.
But inside the
apparat,
communist puritanism and the almost incredi–
ble bigotry of Stalin's entourage meant that most homosexuals and bisex–
uals lived if anything with more furtiveness and self-contempt than their
non-communist brothers and sisters. One thinks ofWhittaker Chambers's
agonies over his homosexual yearnings, or Louis Aragon, poet of sexual
freedom, suppressing his desires while Elsa Triolet was alive, only to
emerge as a flamboyant embarrassment to the Party once she was dead.
Naturally, none of this meant anything to homosexuals who had the
misfortune actually to live in Utopia. At the very time that Amabel
Williams-Ellis, Lytton Strachey's cousin once removed and sister ofJohn
Strachey, was singing the praises of the White Sea Canal, Stalin had dis–
patched three thousand homosexuals to the agonies of slave labor and
early death in that project. Visiting fellow travellers were often manipu–
lated sexually. Andre Gide was surrounded by attractive sexual partners
and seduced into compromising situations. These were used first to ma–
nipulate him, and later for the invective against him when he produced
Return to the U.S.S.R.
Yet Countess Karolyi records with what whoops of laughter the
appa–
rat
heard of Gide's plan to plead for homosexual liberty during his ludi–
crous (and, for Gide's honor, mercifully never held) audience with Stalin.
Miinzenberg made the universities a center of his interest in order to
touch the adversary culture in the place where it was shaped. In
Cambridge, he and Gibarti were represented by the League Against
Imperialism and by the two dons closest to it: Roy Pascal and Maurice
Dobb. These two teachers had a profound effect on all the Cambridge
conspirators. But after 1932, Otto Katz also made England one of the
bases ofhis power.
In fact, in the summer of 1933, Otto's English was strangely profi–
cient as he set foot in London for what seems to have been the first time.
I can find no evidence that Otto had ever lived before in any English–
speaking country before then; yet from the moment he set foot in Dover,
probably incognito, his English was at least workable and wisecracking. It
was imperfect, to be sure; filled with all kinds ofTeutonic errors, but flu–
ent. Where did he pick it up? As a schoolboy in Prague? Perhaps some
sort of training in Moscow? Wherever he learned it, Otto could say pretty
much what he wanted to say in English. And he wanted to say a great
