home | 1945-21st century

COLD WAR: 1953-60 (2 of 18)

In the United States, Americans were discovered to have helped pass secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians -- which had advanced the Russian atomic bomb program perhaps two or three years. Julius Rosenberg had been involved but not his wife Ethel. Both were Communists and both were indicted for having conspired to commit espionage in 1944-45. Well dressed demonstrators with bland smiles carried signs such as "Death to Traitors" and "Burn all Reds." The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death in 1951, and both were executed on June 19, 1953, the first execution of civilians for espionage in United States history.

Julius Rosenberg must have known that in helping to pass technological knowledge to the Soviet Union he was violating U.S. federal law. He no doubt believed that he was helping the Soviet Union defend itself and that he was thereby helping to defend socialism. His espionage occurred while the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies with a common enemy. No doubt he didn't see himself as a traitor or an enemy to the United States as a nation-state.

Communists in the U.S. argued that they were not advocating the overthrow of the government by force and violence on behalf of the Soviet Union or anyone else. They held that revolution would come to the United States only when working people in the United States had acquired a revolutionary consciousness, in other words when they wanted it. They didn't see warring states as an issue except that they believed the Soviet Union had a right to defend itself. They believed that violence would be a part of their revolution in the United States only against those using instruments of violence to frustrate the will of that great majority called the working class. That is what they believed, and therefore they saw accusations of treason and efforts to curtail their liberties as persecution.

Anti-communists in the U.S., on the other hand, had a warring-states perspective. They saw the Soviet Union as an aggressive state against which the United States of America had to defend itself, and they saw U.S. Communists as traitors.