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Autumn 2004 cover

National Observer Home > No. 60 - Autumn 2004 > Articles

Manning Clark and Judah Waten

Dr. Hal G.P. Colebatch

Manning Clark House, devoted to perpetuating the memory of Manning Clark, Professor of History at the A.N.U., holder of the Companionship of the Order of Australia and the Lenin Jubilee Medal, has published on the Internet an extract from an address by Clark's son Andrew on the occasion of the Judah Waten National Story Writing Competition.1

Judah Waten was an Australian author. He was also a brutal literary Stalinist. Ex-Communist writer Dorothy Hewett, at one time deeply involved in Communist literary politics, told me that when writers from the Soviet Bloc toured Australia, it was Waten who called on them and their Australian contacts and told them that if they said anything out of line he would be on the phone to report it to Moscow that night.

Waten also told them that their lives were at stake. This was probably not true after Stalin's death, but certainly their careers and freedom were, as the fate of Solzhentizyn, Sinyavski, Daniel and innumerable others showed. (Waten probably saved the K.G.B. the expense of having to send a minder from the Soviet Union to accompany touring writers.)

The two friends Waten and Clark toured the Soviet Union and Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia together in 1958, a few months after the Soviet Union had crushed the Hungarian Nationalist uprising and murdered thousands of people in the process. Czechoslovakia at the time was, with East Germany, probably the most hard-line Soviet State in Europe, with a huge prison-camp population and the very recent memory of the large-scale show-trials followed by judicial murders of political dissidents.

Czech pilots who had fought in the Battle of Britain with the R.A.F. were in some cases still in prison-camps for this crime. Waten doubtless found this hard-line oppression very pleasing, but the sensitive Professor Clark seems to have stomached it very satisfactorily as well. In Prague they enjoyed a pleasant time with Clark's former teacher and academic mentor Ian Milner, the Soviet agent who had defected there a few years previously. At that time all foreign visitors to Communist states were carefully monitored and it was a criminal offence for locals to have any unauthorised contacts with foreigners, even with visiting Communists. Details of Clark's and Waten's Czech sojourn have been uncovered recently in Czech archives by Professor Petr Hruby.2 Hruby has written3:

"Writers were not the only ones who were - in the interest of future Sovietisation of Australia - assiduously cultivated, treated at parties at the Consulate General in Sydney and at meals at the best restaurants, invited to all-expenses-paid visits to Czechoslovakia (and other Communist countries). Such special treatment was often offered to leaders of the Communist Party of Australia and especially to trade union bosses. However, writers' lectures, radio talks, articles and books enriched the Australian polity and literature by a lot - in the words of Dymphna Cusack - of Communist-paid propaganda."

One result of the Soviet part of this trip was Clark's book, Meeting Soviet Man, in which he claimed that Lenin was: "Christ-like . . . in his compassion." However, the book led to a temporary strain between the two friends as Waten, who had highest standards in such matters, judged it to be insufficiently sychophantic towards the Socialist Paradise. Still, things were patched up, for Manning Clark was to be the principal speaker at Judah Waten's funeral, and here are Manning Clark House and Manning Clark's son publishing what it plainly intended to be laudatory material about him.

Andrew Clark poses this question about Waten:

"The question is this: how can a man who was so charming, intelligent, urbane, canny and capable, and a great writer,4 be a life-long Communist when the scales were being pared back from communism's edifice, exposing the gulags, liquidations and show-trials?

How could a man of such courage, who passionately espoused the cause of peace, cling to the Soviet Union in the hope of humanity?

To find an answer to this question I spoke to a writer friend [who] compared Judah Waten to Egon Kisch . . . According to my friend, Kisch was a man who had gone so far with his pro-Soviet line, even when he knew the terrible truth, that there was no way back."

There are several points to be made about this comment: Kisch was a professional Soviet agent of a very dangerous and destructive sort. He had visited Australia in the 1930s as part of the Soviet-controlled "peace" movements attacking the very modest measures of re-armament which the government of the day was trying to put into effect mainly as a result of the increasingly menacing policies of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.5 It is hard to say how much effect these "peace" movements and demonstrations had, but by increasing the political pressures against rearmament they probably played some part in the fact that when World War II came Australia was quite unprepared and inadequately equipped. Many died as a result, and the whole war against Nazism and against Japan was made that much more difficult and costly.

Further, what do the words "no way back" mean exactly? They seem to be an almost meaningless mantra, a kind of verbal cloud put up to make the indefensible seem somehow fuzzy. Could it be that Waten, like Kisch, clung to communism in full knowledge of what it meant simply because he was a revolting and evil human being?

Furthermore, "explanations" like this contain a myth that the murderous nature of Soviet communism was secret until some "milestone" date, such as Khruschev's "secret speech" or the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, with the implication that support for Soviet communism before whatever particular milestone is selected was a more-or-less innocent mistake or excess of idealism. In fact the literature of the time makes it obvious that Soviet atrocities had been common knowledge practically from the beginning. I have a children's encyclopaedia, Richardsons Topical Encyclopaedia, published in 1945, a decade before the "secret speech", and incidentally quite left-wing in its politics, which details some of the Soviet regimes mass-murders as well-known and taken for granted, as do innumerable works published as far back at the 1930s or even the 1920s.

However, many critics put their minds at rest as to the nature of Manning Clark's commitment. Manning Clark, when secretly awarded a Lenin Jubilee Medal as an "active worker" for Soviet interests at a ceremony before an audience of International Communist Party Apparachiki in Moscow in 1970, claimed in words even Waten could hardly have disapproved of:6

"Let others tell you about Lenin the statesman. I would like to tell you a few more things about Lenin as one of the greatest teachers of humanity. I am not touching upon how his passion for freeing humanity from its physical and spiritual jailers arose.

When he first walked out on the stage of public life, it was clear that he was on the side of those who affirmed life . . . He not only rejected the religious version of the creation of the universe and man but, more importantly, of man's creation in the image of God and man's fall, or to use the words of Lenin's opponents, of human sin.

Lenin rejected this not only as an insult to the human race, but also in accordance with his personal optimistic estimation that man could attain the best.

For his opponents man's perfection concluded in the other world created by God. For Lenin perfection could be attained here and now, and it was attained by man himself.

Man was not only the measure of everything, he was the instrument of his personal salvation. That is why he adopted two of Marx's tenets - that religion is the means by which people are kept in spiritual darkness and that religious belief, in being the result of certain economic and social conditions, will disappear only when the creation of the new material foundations of life destroys the necessity for such consolation. And only then will people stop crawling on their knees.

He called people who beat their chests and affirmed their insignificance God's martyrs. He wanted people to believe in their ability to create their own way of life, characteristic of master-creators rather than humble slaves.

As a future enlightener he believed that culture, as a means of freeing people's minds from all prejudices, would give them a good life in the future. As you know, he was the author of such slogans as 'Bread and Peace' and 'Socialism is electrification.' But his most outstanding slogan was 'Learn and learn and learn, and learn not only until illiteracy is destroyed, but until people will be able to master the great achievements of the human spirit' - the music of Bach and Mozart, the canvasses of Rembrandt and Goya, the novels of Tolstoy and Dickens [note he did not include Dostoyevsky here7], the plays of Shakespeare and Chekov - just to mention a few.

Now, it is possible that you will understand my difficulty. I can only convey Lenin's version of man's future by borrowing an idea or image from another great teacher of humanity.

Lenin wanted people not only to make do in life but be fulfilled. Lenin differed from his religious predecessors because at a time when they were preoccupied with the drama between man and God and the existence of life after death he, belonging to the post-Copernican and post-Darwinian world, tried to tell people about life without God - there was no God.

As I understand it, Lenin said: 'Don't be sad, don't despair. Give to each other and to nature that love and goodwill that you used to give to God.' And this, by the way, was possibly the most important moment - I have in mind his universal acceptance.

He wanted a good life for everyone, as much, if you will allow me to give an example from my own country, for the Australian Aborigine as for the political commissar. It is possible that is why he felt an affinity with Beethoven's heroism and belief that all man can be brothers.

Lenin was convinced that this could only be attained when communism conquered the world. We are lucky to live in a time when this tenet is being verified by life.

Even those who don't share his belief feel that he was one of those mighty and great people, one of those giants, who are leading the world to creation and well-being."8

Normally, the award of a medal to the Professor of History at the Australian National University and his acceptance speech to an audience of international dignitaries would have been the subject of publicity and press releases, especially to as ardent a self-promoter as Clark.9 However, Soviet security obviously decided that it should be kept secret lest Clark's position in Australia be compromised, and it was not discovered until the Soviet archives were opened following the fall of communism.

The late Professor Patrick O'Brien has commented of this speech:10

"This is one of the most extraordinary and significant documents so far gained from former secret Soviet archives concerning Manning Clark's beliefs and true allegiances. It is so for several important reasons. Whilst it contains Clark's well-worn themes about Marxism-Leninism, et cetera, they are presented in a much more intense and telling form than elsewhere.

It is a personal manifesto which reveals that Clark was in the most precise meaning of the term a true believer. He expresses the essence of his true beliefs in the clearest terms before a gathering of fellow participants in the cause which he espouses and, moreover, in the purity of the language of the founders and guardians of that cause. For instance, the two references from Gorky were the standardised references used in official Soviet hagiography to demonstrate Lenin's alleged 'humanity,' despite his well-documented and self-proclaimed-and-publicised brutality. In standard Sovietese, Clark also identifies reason, enlightenment and the highest degree of human progress with Leninist-Stalinist principles, forms and actions. He denounces and renounces religion and God before his Soviet benefactors, confessing his atheism fully in accordance with the official Soviet version; and endorses murder, terror and torture as the principal means for cleansing the world of obstacles to the triumph of world communism, once again as defined in standardised versions by the founders and rulers of the U.S.S.R. ...

Clark's reference to the Comintern in his guest speech, when placed in the contexts of his political activities, writings and speeches and the manner in which he was honoured by his Soviet hosts, indicates he had long been associated with its and its successors' organisations and activities, and consciously so. Picture it. Here he is being honoured by the President of the U.S.S.R. and the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, before a highly-select audience of top international Communist agents and operatives of various Soviet front organisations (originally founded by the Comintern and revamped by the Cominform and its successors after World War II), confessing his true beliefs, his innermost and most treasured commitments to Leninism-Stalinism at the very time, 1970, when the Soviet Union is at its most repressive since the death of Stalin. As he speaks and is being honoured for his work on behalf of the Soviet Union11 fellow-writers and historians are being subject to psychiatric torture and condemned to the harshest Soviet concentration camps. It is the period when arrests and trials are taking place throughout the U.S.S.R. so as to crush independent thinking. Sakharov, Brodsky, Solzhenitzyn, Fainberg, Bukovsky, Daniel, Sinvaysky, Moroz, Galanskov, were only the tip of the iceberg of those being persecuted during this formative period of Brezhnev's 'real socialism.' It is the time when the infamous Nomenklatura claims ownership of everybody and everything in the U.S.S.R. It is only two years after the military invasion by Warsaw Pact forces of Czechoslovakia and is the time when, in the wake of that event, the Soviet Union is re-establishing Stalinist institutional forms and controls throughout Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. and is undoing the remnant of Khrushchev's reforms. It is the time when the Soviet Union is undergoing one of the greatest peace-time build-ups of military might in human history and when the natural environment is being destroyed by chemical pollution in wanton attempts to increase agricultural production regardless of the cost to human life, health and prosperity. In brief, it is the time when the spectre of Stalin is once more being used to enforce conformity and to discipline and terrorise the people.12

Placed in proper context, Clark's speech was that of a true believing and committed participant in the various internationals created by Lenin and Stalin to advance the global interests of the U.S.S.R. under the mantle of 'world communism.' For what other realistically conceivable reason, one must ask, was Clark honoured both with a medal and as a guest speaker for being an 'active worker' on behalf of the Soviet Union at a special meeting of leading international 'active workers' who were also being especially honoured for their contributions to the cause? In brief, and whilst others may honestly disagree, I can only conclude that his politically-experienced benefactors knew best what they were doing; and that the words of the politically-experienced Clark are the words of a man whose true patria, in his heart of hearts, was, as with many intellectuals of his generation and ideological orientation, the Soviet union as fashioned by Lenin and refined by Stalin. That is what the evidence of his own writings and political activity indicates he truly believed in."

Clark remained a good Leninist manqué, and his former publisher Peter Ryan has pointed out that when Clark was attacking Menzies he did so as a conscious liar. Clark told Ryan this after the manuscript of Volume VI of Clark's History was in the printer's hands.13

There is another obvious point to be made here, and I cannot claim it to be an original one. Suppose Waten, the "life-long" Communist - and that life-long commitment included not only the dark, repressive period of Brezhnev and his successors but also the psychopathic hell of Stalinism - had been instead a life-long Nazi, even after the abominations of Nazism had been exposed. Would words suggesting that he had gone so far with his pro-Hitler line, even when he knew the terrible truth, that there was no way back, be put forward as if they somehow constituted a mitigating circumstance?

The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to Manning Clark himself. A number of his defenders have written as if his non-totalitarian credentials had been completely established when it was found he had received not the Order of Lenin, as had been claimed, but rather the Lenin Jubilee Medal. If it had been revealed that, rather than the Iron Cross First Class, he had received a Hitler Medal in Berlin before a gathering of Nazi Party Obersturm-bannfuhrers and spoken rapturously to them of the great man's love of freedom, the promise he held out to all mankind, and the glories of the coming Millennium Reich - all this after the death-toll of the Holocaust was undisputed public knowledge - would it be accepted as a mitigating circumstance, or indeed a complete alibi, that the medal was of a lesser rank than some of his critics had claimed?

And had Waten been a Nazi instead of a Stalinist, would Manning Clark's son in such a situation speak of his father's Kameradschaft with him and of their joint pilgrimages to the Third Reich so complacently? Their little tiff over whether the Fuhrer had been merely Christ-like or something higher? Would a national writing competition be named after him?14

It is, I think appropriate, that Manning Clark House should have perpetuated the association between these two, and I applaud it for having done so. They were indeed comrades and they deserve to be remembered together in the same breath.


1. Andrew Clark, "Judah Waten National Story-writing Competition," Manning Clark House, Internet.

2. Petr Hruby, "Paddy's Initiative and Some of its Results", Amity, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003: "For instance, Judah Waten, who was with Clark in Prague in 1958, wrote from London on 5 September 1965 to Petr Pujman that he would like to come with his wife for some time to Czechoslovakia because he found it handy in connection with his official visits to East Germany and to the U.S.S.R. He openly requested financial help and suggested that he would like to publish a comparison of the situation with his impressions seven years ago. As a recommendation he mentioned that Ian Milner told him that his new novel Distant Land was being favourably considered by a Prague publisher. He was invited for a week. Milner served as his companion on touristic excursions and invited him to lecture to his students at Charles University."

3. Ibid.

4. Waten's "greatness" as a writer is problematic and such a description does not seem to be reinforced by any enduring popularity for his books. As is the case with many once-lauded Australian "leading writers" his sales and literary reputation and Communism seem to have ridden into the sunset together. A check with Amazon.com in August 2003 showed only one of his books even possibly in print.

5. One torchlight procession, organised by the Women's Committee of the Victorian Council Against War and Fascism (these groups tended to change their names), marched from Trades Hall to the Yarra Bank in Melbourne on the night of 3 August 1936, to protest against Australian defence spending being increased to a total of £7,350,000. As far as these activities had any effect on inhibiting Australian re-armament the obvious beneficiaries were the Fascist, Nazi and Japanese regimes.

6. Lenin was the creator of the massive Gulag system of slave-labour and death camps, dwarfing anything under the former Czarist prison system, though later greatly expanded further by Stalin.

7. The fact that Clark did not include Dostoyevsky among the elect who had allegedly inspired the great man was presumably connected with the fact that in works like The Devils Dostoyevsky quite correctly predicted that the type of apocalyptic metapolitics which Lenin espoused would lead to mass-murder.

8. Government Archive of the Russian Federation, Fond 9576, Opls 7, Delo 346, pages 47-53.

9. When I was editing Debrett's Handbook of Australia, Clark sent me copious information about himself, apparently hoping for inclusion in thie volume despite its allegedly snobbish and Anglophile nature.

10. Amity, Volume 2, Number 2, February 2003. This contains a translation of Clark's speech in full.

11. Among other sensitive positions he occupied in Australia in terms of patronage, and in addition to his privileged entry into decision-making circles in Canberra and the social life, high-level and confidential gossip and networking surrounding them, Clark was at one time on the board selecting entrants for the Australian Diplomatic Service.

12. The great Sovietologist Robert Conquest, writing in 1969, remarked that "[T]he Khrushchev interlude, however inadequate it appeared at the time, must now be looked back on as, comparatively speaking, a veritable Camelot" (Robert Conquest, "A Degenerate Dynasty: Michael Tatu," reprinted in his Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (Hutchinson, London, 1989), page 167.)

13. Peter Ryan, Quadrant, September 1993, reprinted in Peter Ryan, Lines of Fire, Clarion, Sydney, 1997, page 211.

14. As I have pointed out elsewhere, aspects of Clark's writing were at least anti-anti-Nazi, in a curious and oblique way. (Many of his comments on the so-called "Austro-Brits" vis-a-vis Nazi Germany in World War II could have been written by Goebbels - by mobilising Australia to join the British Empire in the fight against Nazism, Menzies had allegedly "prostituted his great talents to the service of a corrupt and doomed society". Anti-semitism and anti-semitic stereotyping are also to be found in Clark's work). However, Clark's leftist "Benefit of Clergy" has meant these unsavoury facts have been glossed over or suppressed. [Note by the Editor: It is also important that for some years Manning Clark had a mistress who was employed by the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. This could have been approved by that Embassy only on the basis that the association was useful and in the Soviet's interests.]

National Observer No. 60 - Autumn 2004