WALTER LAQUEUR
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and that the findings would undennine most of their cherished assump–
tions about the Cold War, the aims and character of Soviet policy. Soviet
documents would not just confirm most of what the Congress publica–
tions had asserted in their time but would go well beyond that. In fact,
many opponents of the Congress, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien and
Christopher Lasch, later changed their views.
The New York Review of
Books
has not published diagrams of Molotov cocktails for many years.
Persistent allegations arose that Alexander Werth had been a Soviet agent
of influence; he made damaging confessions and eventually committed
suicide. Seldom in history has an organization been vindicated by subse–
quent events as fully as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
One could conclude the story here, but there are still a number of
loose ends. Mistakes were committed by the Congress, but they were not
those most frequently adduced in later years. The Congress was estab–
lished hastily, and the choice of some officials was far from ideal. There
was a heavy concentration on well-known names and great reputations,
some of them bogus. Some of the conferences were mainly for show, and
the attendees sometimes reminded one of the smart set commuting be–
tween St. Tropez in summer and St. Moritz or Gstaad in winter. There
was snobbism, particularly in Britain; the outward appearance of refine–
ment, wit and sophistication combined with a lack of substance; college
high-table talk and Cafe Royal gossip. A figure like Labedz was kept at a
distance. He was too uncouth, his English too heavily accented to fit into
the company of polished but inconsequential tea and cocktail parties.
Such flippancy and lack of seriousness was very much in contrast to the
traditional European-Russian image of intellectuals and the intelligentsia.
Yet there were mitigating circumstances: an organization aiming for po–
litical impact could not rely solely on young but unknown geniuses; it
needed big names. There was a tendency to overdo this, and the efforts to
attract certain literary figures were out of proportion, except in the case of
a Camus or a Malraux, but in the overall balance such flaws were not
dominant. I have never enountered such a concentration of gifted,
stimulating, and interesting individuals as there were in the workshops of
the Congress during its best years.
The Congress was right in its basic political choices, opting for the
cause of freedom or at least relative freedom. But how influential was it
really in affecting the politics of the intelligentsia, and politics in general,
in Europe and elsewhere? It is hard to assess the impact of ideas on poli–
tics, and subsequent developments have not been unequivocal. If in the
late fifties many French intellectuals were turning away from Leninism, as
did the Italians in later years, in the following decades the Gennans dis–
covered Marxism and transformed it into a new nationalism.
