Eastman, Max

Max Eastman's parents, Samuel Eastman and Annis Berta Ford, were Congregationalists ; his mother was even among the first women ordained clergy in 1889 . A family friend was Mark Twain . Max's sister, Crystal Eastman, also became an activist in the feminist, socialist, and anti-war movements.

Eastman received his education at Williams College in Williamstown ( Massachusetts ), which he graduated in 1905 . He was a student of John Dewey . Then for four years he taught logic and philosophy at Columbia University . In parallel with teaching at the university, he is actively involved in the socialist movement ; in 1910 he participated in the creation of the first men's league in support of the suffrage movement , which demanded equal rights for women. Eastman then considered marrying the suffragist Ines Milholland, but in the end they remained friends. In 1911-1922 he was married to another radical activist, Ide Rau.

Having successfully proved himself in journalism, he soon began publishing the radical journal The Masses , a recognized political and cultural tribune of leftist forces. Among others, the magazine included Bourdman Robinson , John French Sloan , George Wesley Bellows and Arthur Henry Young , whose satirical cartoons made him one of the most famous political publications in the United States. The editors of the magazine, including Max Eastman, were twice brought to trial in 1918 for exposing the imperialist character of World War I in light of the entry of the United States of America on the Entente's side. Subsequently, Eastman edited and published a journal of a similar nature, The Liberator . It is known that he actively promoted the “ Letter to American Workers ” by Lenin ^[5] .

In 1922, Max Eastman went to Soviet Russia to get to know the building of socialism more closely. During his stay in the Soviet Union, he married Elena Krylenko, sister of a member of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko . Watching the struggle for power in recent years and immediately after the death of V.I. Lenin , Eastman became a supporter of Leon Trotsky and an opponent of Joseph Stalin . In 1924 it was to him that Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya handed over a copy of Lenin’s “ Letter to the Congress ” in order to publish it in the West . Trotsky was also suspected of transmitting Eastman Lenin documents. In abbreviated form, it was published by Eastman in the essay “ Since Lenin Died ” ( Since Lenin Died , 1925 ). Considering that the purpose of the October Revolution was perverted by the bureaucracy and apparatchiks in the Soviet leadership, Eastman refused to stay in the USSR and returned to the United States .

In a number of books and publications published in the 1920s and 1930s, Eastman spoke out from Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist positions, critically assessing the socio-political and socio-economic development of the Soviet Union. The following works belong to them: “Since Lenin died” ( Since Lenin Died , 1925), “Artists in Uniform” ( Artists in Uniform , 1934 ), “The End of Socialism in Russia” ( The End of Socialism in Russia , 1937 ), “Stalin's Russia and the crisis of socialism” ( Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism , 1939 ). Being one of the recognized representatives in the United States of the leftist opposition to Stalinism , Eastman translated the History of the Russian Revolution by L. D. Trotsky into English in 1932 . However, even then, Trotsky criticized his American follower for trends that would lead him to break with the left idea, in particular, for the “systematic struggle against materialist dialectics” and the translation of the latter “into the language of vulgar empiricism” ^[6] .

Since 1941, Max Eastman has been the editor of The Reader's Digest , where he wrote articles on literally all topics of interest to him. However, by this moment he had departed from the communist movement , and in the 1950s even took an active part in the McCarthy campaign, becoming one of the main witnesses against the American Communists, for which he was criticized by his former associates.

In addition to books on political topics, Eastman also left a number of works of art, including The Joy of Laughter ( Enjoyment of Laughter ; 1936 ) and The Joy of Poetry , which survived 23 editions from 1913 to 1948 , as well as two autobiographical books - “Joy of Life” ( Enjoyment of Living , 1948) and “ Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch ” ( Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch , 1965 ).

• Enjoyment of Poetry , 1913
• Child of the Amazons , 1913
• Journalism Versus Art , 1916
• Color of Life , 1918
• The Sense of Humor , 1921
• Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth , 1925
• Since Lenin Died , 1925
• Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution , 1926
• The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science , 1931
• Artists in Uniform , 1934
• Art and the Life of Action , 1934
• Enjoyment of Laughter , 1936
• Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism , 1939
• Marxism: Is It a Science? , 1940
• Heroes I Have Known , 1942
• Enjoyment of Living , 1948
• Reflections on the Failure of Socialism , 1955
• Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends , 1959
• Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch , 1964
• Seven Kinds of Goodness , 1967

• Reds (film)

• O'Neill, William L., The Last Romantic: a Life of Max Eastman. New Brunswick, USA: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
• Eastman Max Forrester // Ivanyan E.A. Encyclopedia of Russian-American Relations. XVIII-XX centuries. - Moscow: International Relations, 2001. - 696 p. - ISBN 5-7133-1045-0 .