Charles Malamuth


Charles Malamuth was an American journalist, writer, and translator known as an "expert in Slavic languages," "Russian expert," and "anticommunist. His best known over the years as translator is Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence by Leon Trotsky for which Soviet communists attacked him as a Trotskyite in the 1940s and Trotskyites attacked him as an anticommunist in the 2010s.

Background

Charles Leo Malamuth was born on November 9, 1899, in Lodz, Poland. His father was Leo Goodman and mother Cipa Broder.

Career

Linguist

In the 1920s, Malamuth was a professor in the Slavonic Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Malamuth served as assistant to Eugene Lyons during the latter's stay there as Moscow bureau chief for United Press. On November 22, 1930, he accompanied Lyons to their historic interview with Joseph Stalin.

Humanitarian

In 1947, he was director of European Public Relations in Paris for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Around 1950, he left Paris to join Radio Free Europe in Frankfurt, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty.
In 1953, the Communist Party of France attacked him in its newspaper :fr:Ce Soir by calling him "un fidéle de Trotsky" and citing the support from Lyons and him for Victor Kravchenko during the latter's trial in France for his book I Chose Freedom, which exposed the GULAG system in the USSR. Ce Soir "accused" Malamuth of translating the first 500 pages of Kravchenko's famous book. Further, the newspaper accused Malamuth of close association with the "Trotskyite Max Eastman" and of Isaac Don Levine. Further, his visitors in Paris included ex-CP members Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow. Further, he was known to have visited the US Embassy in Paris weekly. Lastly, he had worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee, which the CP USSR had accused of "engineering" the "Doctors Plot."

Life

On December 20, 1925, in Sacramento, California, Malamuth married Joan London, daughter of American novelist and socialist Jack London. It was her second marriage. They divorced in 1930, moved to Moscow remarried, separated in 1934, and divorced finally in 1935. By 1950, he had married again to Renee Malamuth.
He corresponded with Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Adolphe Menjou, and Lev Trotsky as well as Ilya Ehrenburg, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Aleksei Tolstoi, and Evgeny Zamyatin. Other friends and acquaintances included Isaac Don Levine.
He died in Los Angeles on July 14, 1965.

Legacy: Trotsky's ''Stalin'' (2016)

While Stalinist communist parties called Malamuth a Trotskyist, Trotskyists considered him an Anti-Communist–and still do to this day.
Case in point – In 2016, Wellred Books published a new translation of Trotsky's biography Stalin by Alan Woods. For this new translation, Woods consulted not only Harvard University library archives but also French and Russian translations. It contains 100,000 words more than the 1940 translation. Also, the new translated presents "Malamuth's political distortions removed."
Robert Sewell of In Defense of Marxism has criticized Malamuth strongly. He has written, "Whatever Malamuth's talents, this was a political task for which he was completely unsuited." Trotsky was unhappy with Malamuth because he had shown his unfinished translations to others. For this indiscretion, Trotsky was soon blaming him further: "He does not know Russian; he does not know English; and he is tremendously pretentious."
In video, he explained about Malamuth:
Clearly, he wasn't in the political state in order the carry out his particular task. He wasn't qualified enough to carry out this particular task. Therefore, he introduced into this later edited version a lot of material that he had decided to supplement to Trotsky's work. These supplements, these additions clearly went against the general thrust of Trotsky's political thought... Natalia Trotsky... wanted to take out the material that had been put in by Malamuth, that should be replaced by Trotsky's own writing... Malamuth had given the excuse that a lot of it was repetition... The main thing also he said that the transcripts had been damaged in the assassination attack in 1940, and some of the material was in disrepair... There wasn't any damage whatsoever... and files deliberately left out of the book... A vast number of words had been left out... an extra 100,000 words. Malamuth's text of about 10,000 were taken out.
Ultimately, Sewell concedes a simpler explanation: "Following Trotsky's death, the American publishers, who owned the rights to the book, placed Malamuth in charge, not only of the translation, but of 'editing' the final book. For them, this was simply a commercial calculation to salvage the book following the author's death." In other words, "Trotsky's views did not enter into their calculations."
Given Malamuth's career, it seems clear that Sewell's assessment – that translation of Trotksy's Stalin was "a political task for which he was completely unsuited" – signal to fellow Trotskyists to Malamuth's career as anti-communist.

Translations