Denis MacShane: The Browder Family and Russia's Leaders
[MacShane is a British M.P. and a former minister for Europe.]
Had you asked Stalin about Earl Browder, he would have snorted in derision. Ask Putin about Bill Browder, and the reaction will be the same. The Browder family’s tortured relationship with Russian leaders is worthy of a Ken Follett novel.
Earl Browder was the leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and during World War II. A Stalin worshiper, he wielded immense influence in the trade-union movement, which grew in power as America’s war machine sucked in millions of industrial workers. During the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Browder was a class warrior opposing the “imperialist” war between Britain and Germany. With the Soviet and American entry into the war in 1941, he used his communist machine to lash U.S. workers into heroic feats of output. But as the wartime love-in between Stalin and Roosevelt turned into U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Cold War, Browder was dismissed by Stalin for not understanding quickly enough the change in line. Instead he and his son, Felix, a brilliant mathematician, fell victim to McCarthyism, living shrunken lives in the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.
Earl Browder’s grandson Bill grew up as an all-American boy with a head for figures and a fascination for the Russia of his grandmother’s birth.... What happened to Bill Browder is a cautionary tale for European leaders like President Nicolas Sarkozy, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who have decided to embrace Russia despite its human-rights record, and to President Obama, whose reset strategy is meant to inspire Russia to cooperate with the West on Iran and Afghanistan....
Read entire article at Newsweek
Had you asked Stalin about Earl Browder, he would have snorted in derision. Ask Putin about Bill Browder, and the reaction will be the same. The Browder family’s tortured relationship with Russian leaders is worthy of a Ken Follett novel.
Earl Browder was the leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and during World War II. A Stalin worshiper, he wielded immense influence in the trade-union movement, which grew in power as America’s war machine sucked in millions of industrial workers. During the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Browder was a class warrior opposing the “imperialist” war between Britain and Germany. With the Soviet and American entry into the war in 1941, he used his communist machine to lash U.S. workers into heroic feats of output. But as the wartime love-in between Stalin and Roosevelt turned into U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Cold War, Browder was dismissed by Stalin for not understanding quickly enough the change in line. Instead he and his son, Felix, a brilliant mathematician, fell victim to McCarthyism, living shrunken lives in the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.
Earl Browder’s grandson Bill grew up as an all-American boy with a head for figures and a fascination for the Russia of his grandmother’s birth.... What happened to Bill Browder is a cautionary tale for European leaders like President Nicolas Sarkozy, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who have decided to embrace Russia despite its human-rights record, and to President Obama, whose reset strategy is meant to inspire Russia to cooperate with the West on Iran and Afghanistan....