The McCarthy Era And the Beat Movement Seen Through Russian Eyes

... Activities (HUAC) was outed in 1999 by authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (based on Kremlin files) that Dickstein was a paid agent of the NKVD with the codename “ Crook ” (for good reason.) But beyond all the sensationalism, what was the McCarthy era like when viewed from the perspective of a prominent Russian writer who watched it happen? After all, western media rarely examines McCarthyism from the Russian viewpoint. This can be learnt from Vassily Aksyonov's, November, 1987 essay “Beatniks and Bolsheviks, rebels with (and without) a cause” which was published by The New Republic . Aksyonov notes that the Beats (or Beatniks as he calls them) were not a target of the McCarthy era because ...