Joseph Starobin

Joseph Robert Starobin (December 19, 1913 – November 6, 1976) was an American journalist and Communist Party member.

Starobin c. 1939

Biography

Starobin attended City College of New York.^[1] He was politically active while at the College, serving as a vice president of the Social Problems Club and advocating for the removal of President Frederick B. Robinson.^[2]

Starobin c. 1938

Starobin began his career as a chemist before becoming more involved in Communist activism.^[3] During the Moscow Trials, Starobin collaborated with James Wechsler on a pamphlet explaining the Party's position on the trials but it was never finished since the Party urged them to write an attack on Trotsky instead.^[4] Eventually, Starobin rose to become the foreign editor of the Daily Worker, before being replaced by Joseph Clark.^[5] In 1953, Starobin spent 30 days in China, as the first American journalist to travel past the so-called "bamboo curtain".^[6] He described this trip in his 1956 book Paris to Peking.^[7] His passport was revoked in August 1953 by the State Department.^[8]

That same year, Starobin began advocating for the Communist Party to distance itself from the Soviet Union.^[9] He eventually broke with the Communist Party, though the reasons for his departure were covered up by the Party because of his prominence as a writer and editor of Party publications.^[10] On August 24, 1956, Starobin published an editorial in The Nation, arguing that the Communist Party was no longer a viable party and arguing for a new socialist movement.^[11] Due to these views, he was criticized, along with John Gates, by William Z. Foster.^[12] Earlier in the 1950s, Foster had tried to expel Starobin and Gates from the Party because they disagreed with his assessment that a war between capitalist and Communist countries was inevitable.^[13] In December 1956, Starobin was one of eighty members of the Left invited by A.J. Muste to discuss the future of the contemporary socialist movement.^[5] These meetings eventually led to the creation of the American Forum for Socialist Education, which Starobin sponsored.^[14]

During the 1960s, Starobin became a senior fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia University.^[15] Starobin and his wife moved from New York City in 1964 to Hancock, New York, where they lived in a converted 19th century barn that the couple operated as a skiing lodge.^[16]

Starobin continued to be politically active through the 1970s. He advocated for a negotiated peace settlement to the Vietnam War, sending a memorandum to J. William Fulbright about his discussions with North Vietnamese contacts.^[17] He met twice with Xuan Thuy, who he had first met during his 1953 visit to Hanoi.^[18] Starobin also met with Henry Kissinger, who was not responsive to Starobin's attempts at negotiation.^[19]

Starobin's son, Robert Starobin, became a historian of American slavery.^[20] Like his father, Robert Starobin was involved in left-wing politics and was a supporter of the Black Panthers.^[21] Joseph and Robert Starobin's papers are held together at Stanford University's Green Library.^[22]

Bibliography

• Paris to Peking (1955)
• American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (1975)