The ACLU’s untold Stalinist heritage

Lamont, who coincidentally was 2006 Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont’s uncle, clashed with Baldwin over his effort to purge the ACLU’s National Committee of known communists because he believed it was a betrayal of civil. He remained on the ACLU’s National Committee until 1951 when he resigned to protest being asked to take an anti-communist oath.

Although Lamont never formally joined the Communist Party, he was active in numerous pro-Stalin fronts throughout his ACLU tenure, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union, according to Kengor.

Lamont never acknowledged the truth behind Stalin’s atrocities, and his 1933 book, “Russia: Day By Day,” which details his 1932 trip to the Soviet Union, Lamont praises Stalin’s destruction of churches and glosses over the atrocities being committed against Ukraine’s peasants at the time of his trip.

His book also claims the communists had brought an era of “happiness” and  that “the new world of the twentieth century is the Soviet Union.”

Lamont later defended Stalin’s show trials during the Great Purge of 1938-39 and his installation of communist governments in Eastern Europe.

Kengor considers Lamont one of the worst among the ACLU’s early leaders because he never repented of his support for Stalin even after the extent of his crimes became apparent.

“The narrative today is that they were all noble liberals and progressives, but it’s never considered that they were actually pro-Soviet or pro-communist,” Kengor said. “These guys were terrible because they gave support to a totalitarian regime that arguably was the greatest mass murderer in all of human history.”