J. Peters

50

J. Peters : biography

August 11, 1894 – 1990

Activism

Europe

With the war coming to a close, Sándor returned to his hometown of Csap, where he came into contact with radicalized friends espousing Marxist ideas about the imperialist nature of the war and touting the new social system in the process of being established in the wake of the Russian Revolution.Sakmyster, Red Conspirator, p. 6. Sándor was won over to the Bolshevik cause and, together with four former prisoners of war released from Russian captivity in 1918, became one of the founders of the first local group of the Communist Party of Hungary in Csap.

During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic headed by Béla Kun in 1919, Sándor served briefly on the governing council of Ung County.Sakmyster, Red Conspirator, p. 7. He managed to escape repression during the so-called "White Terror" which followed the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet regime, apparently benefiting from the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which made Ruthenia (Subcarpathian Rus) part of Czechoslovakia, then democratic country less inhospitable to radical political activists than the Hungary of Miklós Horthy.

America

Peters emigrated to the United States in 1924 and became an organizer for the Communist Party USA, concentrating his efforts in the party’s Hungarian language section. Peters was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1928 and was appointed head of the party’s National Minorities Department in 1929.Sakmyster, Red Conspirator, pp. 1–24.

By 1929 Peters (using the name "Joseph Peter" with no "s" at the end) was living in New York City and the Secretary of the Communist Party’s Hungarian Bureau.Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI), fond 515, opis 1, delo 1600, list 36. Published as commercial microfilm as "Files of the Communist Party of the USA in the Comintern Archives," IDC Publishers, reel 122. He attended the CPUSA’s 6th National Convention in March 1929 as the official representative of the party’s Hungarian Bureau. He was also an alternate member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the party.

Espionage

As organizational secretary for the Communist Party in New York state in 1930, Peters was put in charge of building an illegal apparatus, or network designed to support Soviet foreign policy. CPUSA and Comintern documents at the RGASPI archive in Moscow show that he headed the CPUSA underground apparatus from the early 1930s until Whittaker Chambers’ defection in 1938. Peters was sent to Moscow for training with the Comintern in 1931 and was made a senior intern in the Anglo-American Secretariat. Returning to the United States in 1932, the Central Committee assigned him to work in the secret apparatus where he remained until June 1938.

Around 1933 or 1934, Peters took over from Whittaker Chambers’ previous rezident handler. Chambers ascribed central importance to Peters’ role: The Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington also maintained constant contact with the national underground of the American Communist Party in the person of its chief. He was a Hungarian Communist who had been a minor official in the Hungarian Soviet Government of Bela Kun. He was in the United States illegally and was known variously as J . Peters, Alexander Stevens, Isidore Boorstein, Mr. Silver, etc. His real name was Alexander Goldberger and he had studied law at the university of Debrecen in Hungary. In addition, I had myself, during my entire six years in the Soviet underground, been the official secret contact man between a succession of Soviet apparatuses and the Communist Party, U .S.A. Both the open and the underground sections of the party were under orders to carry out, so far as they were able, any instructions I might give them in the name of the Soviet apparatuses. Although he refers generally to "J. Peters" in his memoir, it appears that he knew him as "Steve" while serving in the underground.

In 1935, he penned The Communist Party: A Manual on Organization, which includes the following: The Communist Party puts the interest of the working class and the Party above everything. The Party subordinates all forms of Party organization to these interests. From this it follows that one form of organization is suitable for legal existence of the Party, and another for the conditions of underground, illegal existence