Free Republic

With her pioneering work in Feminist Studies over the last 40 years, and her role as a Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCSC, Bettina Aptheker is a famed academic. The title of her latest book, Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s, might make you think of academia, too, and its focus on institutional analysis and the surveying of eras.

How a “post-Stalin Stalinist” suppressed slave revolt history. Anthony Flood, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, 91 pages, 2019. After U.S. recognition of the USSR in 1933, the Communist Party USA made significant gains in America. Many left the Party after Stalin’s show-trials and purges of the mid-1930s, and many others after the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. By contrast, the American Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party “virtually because of it,” explains his former research assistant, friend, and comrade Anthony Flood. Four years before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Aptheker approved when Stalin shipped oil to Mussolini to aid the fascist dictator’s...

In recent times the newspapers have rarely mentioned Herbert Aptheker, but half a century ago he was among the most articulate American defenders of Stalinist terror. An academic historian from Brooklyn, he was a leading theorist of American communism and an editor of Masses & Mainstream, the magazine equivalent of the Daily Worker. He considered Lenin, "the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders." Anyone acquainted with his work knew all of this and much more. No one denied it, least of all Aptheker. But when he died last week at the age of 87, the obituaries...