Eugene Lyons (July 1, 1898 – January 7, 1985), born Yevgeny Natanovich Privin (Russian: Евгений Натанович Привин), was a Russian-born American journalist and writer.
[3] Lyons worked for the Workers Defense Union for some time and composed news releases for the Socialist daily newspaper New York Call and other left-wing publications.
[6] In the fall of 1920, with revolution in the wind in Italy and dreaming of becoming the next John Reed, Lyons made his way to Naples and bore credentials of the Federated Press news service and the monthly magazine The Liberator.
[7] En route, he met another aspiring correspondent bearing identical credentials, Norman H. Matson, and the pair decided to spend the next six months sharing expenses in pursuit of their common goal.
[11] The UP thought that Lyons' political background and the close contacts it implied would give him and it an edge over its competition in delivering news from the Soviet Union.
Lyons remained the UP's man in Moscow from 1928 to 1934, which gradually transformed him from a friend of the Soviet state and communism to a tireless and fierce critic of both.
On November 22, he was summoned to the Kremlin for a surprise interview with Joseph Stalin, a move to eliminate rumors circulating in the West about the Soviet leader's demise.
"[12] Lyons later recounted his meeting with the Soviet leader, a conversation that was conducted in Russian with the occasional help of a translator: One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin's legend without coming under its spell.
His every gesture was a rebuke to the thousand little bureaucrats who had inflicted their puny greatness upon me in these Russian years.. 'Comrade Stalin,' I began the interview, 'may I quote you to the effect that you have not been assassinated?'
The shaggy mustache, framing a sensual mouth and a smile nearly as full of teeth as Teddy Roosevelt's, gave his swarthy face a friendly, almost benignant look.
"[17] On the heels of his journalistic coup, Lyons returned to the United States for a brief visit in March 1931, making a lecture tour to 20 Northeastern cities organized by UP.
He found the GPU imposing ever-increasing terror against recalcitrant peasants, anyone suspected of secretly holding gold or foreign currency, and those accused of economic crimes such as sabotage: The newspapers were filled with the same braggadocio and threats.
Lyons was among the earliest writers to criticize The New York Times Moscow reporter Walter Duranty for journalistic dishonesty attempting to downplay the 1932 famine.
[24] Leon Trotsky gave credit to Assignment in Utopia for revealing the Stalin administration's systematic use of antisemitism for political legitimacy; he judged the book "interesting, though not profound".
[26] After two books on his Moscow experiences and a biography of Stalin, Lyons set to work on a full-length study of CPUSA influence on American cultural life in the 1930s, The Red Decade.
The book was not popular when first published in 1941, however, as very soon after it saw print, the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany and joined a military alliance with the Western Allies during World War II.
The book's fame came only later, during the era of McCarthyism, when its title became a byword for the popular front alliance between Communists, social democrats, and liberals during the Great Depression.
[27] In the early 1940s and the Second Red Scare that followed World War II, Lyons was a frequent contributor to the popular press on anticommunist themes and criticized leftists whose he deemed inadequate in their refusal to denounce Stalinism.
[28] In 1947, Lyons attacked former Vice President Henry A. Wallace as a former appeaser of the Soviet police state, who still refused to face up to the truly genocidal nature of the regime.
[29] Writing for the American Legion in 1950, Lyons, as a former Soviet spy himself, expressed support for allegations that the KGB and the GRU had recruited highly placed moles within the United States Federal Government.
Lyons returned to the topic of why the Russian Revolution produced a genocidal police state rather than parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in his final book, Workers' Paradise Lost, published in 1967.