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Emmy Lou Packard 2/6/79 page one of section 4

From my childhood I was surrounded by conversations between my parents, my father's brother John and his wife Rose Marie, and friends who were socialists or communists. I always had a positive feeling about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.

I had not read Marxism (not until I was 25). But my father0s explanation that "capitalism (feeds on, need) fosters war, socialism suffers as a result of war" stuck with me as a kind of guiding principle. I understood that the socialist economic system was a better, more logical, more democratic and humane system than capitalism.

My father called himself a socialist, but did not belong to any organization so named. He could be called a liberal democrat, and always voted Democratic. He admired FDR intensely, was given a citation by Roosevelt for his work in the Farm Security Administration. I think his main objection to socialism as the Communist Party (he thoufht) described it, was that t was a "worker-owned" set of farms and industries. He equated it with Syndacalism, the worker-owned entities within a capatalist framework. These never work out, are self-destructive because some work harder than oters and there is no way to keep jealousy from developing. He advocated the "consumer society" which, I told him, was after all, simply total public ownerhip, since everyone was a worker in the entire system. And hence the same as socialism or communism in the USSR. I think he had never read Fredrich Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which clarifies the difference pretty simply. And he objected to "violent" revolution. Tough toward the end of his life he began to realize that most of the violence came from capitalism which didn't want a better competing economic system to exist. We had many long discussions of these matters.

When I worked with Rivera in 1940-41, he gve e a scathing critique of liberalism and a fairly correct view of Marxism, in spite of his temporary infatuation with Trostsky and hatred of Stalin (not of the Soviet Union - like the official Trostky documents of the time, [[crossed]] they [[crossed-out]] hr only wanted to get rid of the "leadership" in the USSR. Which, of course, during or even before the war with Hitler would have beheaded the leadership which carried the war through successfully.)
He filled me with the accounts of Stalin's executions, much as Kruschov revealed in the 20th Congress. For a short period I became anti-Stalin, but later, after learning more about what the man was u against, I could take a long view of that terrible time and realize that had Stlin not remained at the helm, the war against Hitler would probably have been lost and socialism set back a thousand years.

Colonel Raymong Robbins, in Leningrad during the Russian Revolution as representative of the Aremican Red Cross, later (many years later - in 1939 or 40) corroborated this view. In a conversation with the wife of Alexander Gumberg, secretary to Lenin and referrd to as"the most important man in Russian-American relations from 1917-33", *Frances Gumberg said to him"You knew all the potential leaders of the revolu-tion after Lenin. You knew Trostsky and Kerensky well. Did you know anyone except Stalin who could have led the revolution to succedd?"
Robbins thought a moment. "You're right", he said. "There was no one else, no one but Stalin who could have done it."
(This conversation was repeated to me by Frances (Adams)Gumberg in 196-. She said she had been going over her husband's papers with Robbins after her husband (Alexander Gumberg) had died in 1939 when Robbins made a deprecating remark about Stalin - it was after the Kruschev speech. She then asked Robbins the question I've told above)

(this is very badly written. I must do it over.)
*Alexander Gumberg
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subject, author and publisher, date.

[[left margin]]

my fatter + socialism

Rivera + socialism

Raymond Robbins,
Alex gumberg

Transcription Notes:
The arrow in the last paragraph I do not know exactly, so I have chosen not to change the scanned text.