A Century of Russian Disinformation: Part One

The Little Known Story of Russia's First Efforts to Provoke Revolution in America

In June of 1921, a man traveling by steamship under the alias “Arthur Staley” landed in New York. He walked into a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the United States, no doubt looking over his shoulder as he did so. The leadership of the party had been meeting in secret—to avoid the now frequent raids conducted by agents of zealous Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer— but Staley had been told the location. He handed the committee a document marked with the seal of the Communist International or “Comintern,” the governing body of all the world’s communist parties which met in the Kremlin. “This is to certify that Comrade A. Staley is duly sent by the Executive Committee of the Comintern to American Agency for Party work,” it read. A further document in Yiddish explained Staley would establish a Yiddish newspaper for communist propaganda purposes targeted at America’s thriving Jewish labor movement.

Staley’s 1921 visit should have a greater place in the history books. It marked the launch of Russia’s first disinformation campaign against America.

Yes, Russia has been in America’s business for over 100 years. And we are in denial about it. We acknowledge, of course, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of the Trump campaign, but we think of that as an unfortunate blip, something due simply to Trump’s spectacular capacity for corruption. Most often, commentators liken Trump’s appeal for foreign interference in our elections to Nixon’s cover up of Watergate. But its true analogue is far older—as far back as 1921 when the Kremlin began funding agents and newspapers through the Communist Party of the United States with the goal of provoking a Proletarian revolution on our soil.

Moscow’s plan was very simple: Infiltrate the unions with its agents and spur dissatisfaction with union leadership. Try to pull as many unionists away from the Socialist Party and into the Communist Party. Then, install loyalists in positions of power in union locals, and slowly, encourage the powerful American labor movement to overthrow the nation’s capitalist government.

Sounds paranoid? Remember January 6^th? Now just sub the 1920s American Communist Party for the current GOP. And the receipts on Russia’s efforts in the 1920s is voluminous. Some decades ago under Gorbachev, the ComIntern archives were made available to the public for the first time. They have been slowly digitized and are available on microfilm and microfiche in select libraries. The records are in several languages, but the English language documents alone are more than enough to see Russia’s ambitions.

These archives make plain that the Communist Party of the United States in the 1920s acted as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. They took Moscow’s direction, and they provided Moscow with reports on their progress. Some correspondence was encoded cryptographically. For example:

The author of the above directive was “John Carr,” otherwise known as Ludwig Erwin Alfred Katterfeld, Communist Party of the United States’ representative in Moscow whose job it was to act as liaison between the ComIntern and his American comrades.

Carr acted much like a middle manager, in the very corporate sense of the term. Often in his correspondence, he concealed the communist elements by pretending he was just a happy capitalist running an international firm. Instead of mentioning “spies” or “party members” in his missives, he talked of “salesmen” and “customers”; the hierarchy of one system substituted for the hierarchy of the other with remarkable ease. Carr’s December 1921 memo from Moscow that confirming the funds for Arthur Staley’s Yiddish propaganda paper read, “I have the orders of the Gorney and Staley Co.’s and expect to be able to fill both of them within a few weeks.”

Arthur Staley’s real name was Shakne Epstein. I have come to call him “the man who wasn’t there” because his presence in the English language record is so scant. I had to track him through ComIntern sources on the one hand, and American Yiddish sources on the other. Why Epstein was anointed by Lenin to turn American socialist needle workers into Communist agitators loyal only to Moscow will be the subject of a future stack.