Witness: Cold War Classics

Chapter 10, “The Tranquil Years,” returns to Chambers’s work as an editor at Time magazine. It opens in 1939, as Hitler and Stalin sign their non-aggression pact. The agreement amplifies American fears about the destructive consequences of collaboration between Communists and Nazis, both for the direction of World War II and for the US itself: The American government was well aware of the Communist and Nazi sleeper cells scattered across its soil. As a result of these tensions, Chambers decides to become an informer. Chambers understands the moral problems of acting as an informant, but he believes that anyone who leaves Communism has an ethical obligation to inform on their past colleagues, both to protect themselves against possible acts of retaliation and to warn the world of the Communist menace.

Although he has left the Communist movement, Chambers remains tormented by his past support for Communism as well as he did to break free from it. Chambers meets with the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, who tells Chambers that every Communist must either come to grips with or ignore Communism’s fundamentally tyrannical nature. Krivitsky reveals that Stalin’s pact with Hitler was part of a plot to turn the Western powers against one another; the hope is that infighting will leave them too weak to withstand a Soviet assault.