Spooked By His Sci Fi, FBI Looked Into Asimov As Possible Communist Tipster

v3rgEz writes "By September 14, 1960, Isaac Asimov had been a professor of biochemistry at Boston University for 11 years, and his acclaimed "I, Robot" collection of short stories was on its seventh reprint. This was also the day someone not-so-subtly accused him of communist sympathies in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. They ominously concluded that "Asimov may be quite all right. On the other hand . . . . ." The "tip off" wasn't given much credit, but it didn't matter since Asimov's science fiction writing alone was enough to warrant FBI monitoring, particularly as the FBI hunted for the mysterious ROBPROF, a communist informant embedded in American academia. MuckRock has Isaac Asimov's FBI files in full, and a write up of the more interesting bits."

Comments

Re:Used to this yet?

[mi]

Quite a few of those send to gulags have also died - which is also recorded in the 1 million total figure that is the consensus at the time.

Compared to mere hundreds of Hover's and McCarthy's intimidated Americans, even the 2 million of dead Soviets remain, as I said, incomparable.

Of course, this does not count famines like Holodomor, and various other policies which resulted in deaths. But those were not witch hunts for "enemies of the proletariat", which is the Soviet analog to the activities of Hoover and McCarthy.

Oh, but Holodomor was deliberate. Russia's modern denials of that ring just as hollow as Turkey's denials of deliberate murder of Armenians at the end of the First World War. Ukrainian peasants — as well as those of the Russian ones, who lived in the fertile regions along Volga — were fairly well off and, unlike the proletariat, did have something to "lose besides their chains". Lenin was warning comrades about Ukrainian peasants in the early 1920-ies — in the next decade Stalin implemented his own "final solution".

It remains rather puzzling (and offensive) to me, that while no one would ever think of using swastika to promote anything German today, the red flag, red star, and hammer-and-sickle are considered "chic" and routinely used to promote vodkas (Russia has little else to offer for export).