The Cold War and the Mystery of an Anti-Stalinist Intellectual: Josef Guttmann's Two Lives

Jacques Rupnik's new book delves into the mystery of Josef Guttmann, a Marxist intellectual and a leading figure in the Czechoslolvak Communist Party in the early 1930s, who split with the party over the Soviet Union's strategy that helped bring Hitler to power in Germany in 1933. A sharp critic of Stalin’s domestic dictatorship and foreign policy, Guttmann became a prominent Leftwing “dissident” from Communism. After leaving Czechoslovakia at the end of 1938, he arrived in 1941 in New York, where he became under different pen names a leading analyst of Soviet-bloc affairs and an uncompromising critic of Communist totalitarianism. The Czech historians who in 1968 helped rehabilitate Guttmann's name had no idea of what had happened to him after he left the country at the end of 1938 for Sweden. Nor did exiled historians from Czechoslovakia know anything about his fate when they were asked about him in the late 1970’s and early 1980s. Conversely, U.S. scholars of Soviet affairs and Guttmann’s former colleagues at the Library of Jewish Information of the American Jewish Committee in New York, where Guttmann worked as a researcher during most of his life in the United States, had no idea about Guttmann's role as a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership in the early 1930’s.