Icelandic Communists

Óvæntir endurfundir urðu í sextugsafmæli Brynjólfs Bjarnasonar 1958: gyðingakona, Henný Goldsmith, sem orðið hafði Íslendingur, kannaðist við þýskan nasista, dr. Bruno Kress, sem hafði búið eins og hún á Íslandi fyrir stríð, en var nú orðinn kommúnisti.

Halldór Laxness’s political involvement in the thirties brought him twice to the Soviet Union. In 1932 Laxness travelled in the Ukraïne and in Southern-Russia witnessing the consequences of Stalin’s collectivization and the great social turmoil brough about by governmental policies. In 1937-38 Laxness again spent several months in the Soviet Union writing and travelling, ending his stay as as an invited guest to the third of the infamous show trials, the trial of Nikolai Bukharin and others.
Laxness’s journeys to the Soviet Union resulted in two books about his experiences On Eastern Roads (Í austurvegi) and the Russian Fairy Tale (Gerska ævintýrið). These works fit squarely into an emerging genre at the time – the Soviet travel book – and show Laxness in a complicated dialogue with other authors of books about the Soviet Union, with perceived opponents of Soviet Communism as well as its defenders.
The theme of the Soviet Union kept appearing and reappearing in Laxness’s essays as well as through political involvement for decades. He was president of the Soviet-Icelandic friendship society from 1950 to 1968 and went to the Soviet Union on numerous occasion during that period. In 1963, however, he published a book of biographical essays entitled Time of Poets (Skáldatími) where he criticized the Soviet government openly and re-evaluated his earlier encounters in the Soviet Union.
The paper deals with Laxness’s journey’s to the Soviet Union and his views and reasoning about Soviet reality. I argue that Laxness was keenly aware of having a role as a propagandist and exploited his literary skill quite masterfully in an effort to explain what he thought was the essence of the Soviet experiment. I examine his two books carefully as well as subsequent work dealing with the Soviet Union. I supply this research with archival material from former Soviet archives, which shed considerable light on what Laxness intended to do in his books about the Soviet Union.
The Soviet side of Halldór Laxness is a fascinating part of his authorship, which, unfortunately the tendency has been to downplay or even trivialize by scholars as well by Laxness himself in his later years. Instead of portraying Laxness as a politically naïve or creduluous idealist who for many years was fooled by the Eastern empire, I show that he was an active and willing participant in the political game, far from unaware of the intricacies of Communist power and propaganda. His writings about the Soviet Union are among the most interesting examples of Soviet travel writing and deserve to be discussed in that context.

""Jon Olafsson: Oranges from Abkhazia. Vera Hertzsch, Halldor Laxness, and the Great Purge.

The name Vera Hertzsch is known to many Icelanders and intricately associated with Halldor Laxness and his reckoning with Soviet Communism. In the thirties Laxness was an ardent supporter of Joseph Stalin and wrote two books based on his experiences of traveling in the Soviet Union.

At the height of Stalin's purge in 1937-1938, Laxness spent most of the winter in the Moscow, where he attended the last of the Moscow trials. Vera Hertzsch, who had immigrated to the Soviet Union from Germany a decade earlier, was among his acquaintances there. One night in March Vera Hertzsch was arrested by Stalin's security police, the NKVD, along with her one-year-old, half-Icelandic daughter, Erla Solveig. Laxness, who had been invited to dinner that night, witnessed the arrest.

A quarter of a century passed before he would tell the story in a memoir he published in 1963 and the fate of the mother and child remained an unsolved mystery. Vera and her little daughter shared their fate with millions of Soviet citizens: a horrendous life in prison camps, sickness and disease, slavery and hunger. They never made it back and their relatives and friends received no information about them for decades.

This powerful and strange story has now been pieced together from beginning to end. Jon Olafsson has researched Vera Hertzsch's life in the camps by chasing down facts and sources in central and local archives, visiting former camp sites and studying published and unpublished recollections of women who were held in the same camps at the same time as Vera, but unlike her, lived to tell their tale.
The book is therefore not only the story of Vera Hertzsch. It is also an exploration of life in the Gulag during and after the Great Purge, especially of the little researched special camps for women which existed between 1937 and 1939.

Jon Olafsson worked for the Icelandic Broadcasting Company, RUV, in Moscow when access was granted to Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR. He has been a regular guest there ever since. He is author of Dear Comrades. Icelandic Socialists and the Soviet Union (1999) and has also written numerous articles on Icelandic relations with Comintern and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Olafsson received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 2000, and has since then worked for the University of Iceland, the Reykjavik Academy, and Bifröst University, where he is currently professor of philosophy and provost. He lives in Reykjavik.""

Í bók sinni, Í köldu stríði, lýsir Styrmir Gunnarsson kynslóð sinni og þeim átökum, sem hún lenti í, eftir að kalda stríðið skall á. Þar barðist Styrmir með þeim, sem vildu verja frelsi og lýðræði á Vesturlöndum, en dylur ekki, að báðir aðilar gripu til ýmissa ráða.