Charles Malamuth

Charles Malamuth (9 November 1899 – 14 July 1965) was an American journalist, writer, translator from Russian and anticommunist. He is best known over the years as translator of Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence by Leon Trotsky for which Soviet communists attacked him as a Trotskyite in the 1940s and Trotskyists attacked him as an anticommunist in the 2010s.

Life Charles Leo Malamuth (or Goodman) was born on 9 November 1899, in Łódź, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). His father was Leo Goodman and his mother Cipa (also Celia) Broder.

On 20 December 1925, in Sacramento, California, Malamuth married Joan London, daughter of American novelist and socialist Jack London. It was her second marriage. They divorced in 1930, moved to Moscow, remarried, separated in 1934, and divorced for good in 1935.

In 1947, he was director of European Public Relations in Paris for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Around 1950, he left Paris to join Radio Free Europe in Frankfurt, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty.

Robert Sewell of In Defense of Marxism has strongly criticized Malamuth. He has written, "Whatever Malamuth's talents, this was a political task for which he was completely unsuited." Trotsky was unhappy with Malamuth because he had shown his unfinished translations to others (specifically Max Shachtman and James Burnham). For this indiscretion, Trotsky blamed him further: "He does not know Russian; he does not know English; and he is tremendously pretentious."

In video, Sewell explained about Malamuth: Clearly, he wasn't in the political state in order the carry out his particular task. He wasn't qualified enough to carry out this particular task. Therefore, he introduced into this later edited version a lot of material that he had decided to supplement to Trotsky's work. These supplements, these additions clearly went against the general thrust of Trotsky's political thought... Natalia Trotsky... wanted to take out the material that had been put in by Malamuth, that should be replaced by Trotsky's own writing... Malamuth had given the excuse that a lot of it was repetition... The main thing also he said that the transcripts had been damaged in the assassination attack in 1940, and some of the material was in disrepair... There wasn't any damage whatsoever... and files deliberately left out of the book... A vast number of words had been left out... an extra 100,000 words. Malamuth's text of about 10,000 were taken out.

Ultimately, Sewell conceded a simpler explanation: "Following Trotsky's death, the American publishers (Harper and Brothers), who owned the rights to the book, placed Malamuth in charge, not only of the translation, but of 'editing' the final book. For them, this was simply a commercial calculation to salvage the book following the author's death." In other words, "Trotsky's views did not enter into their calculations." The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea by Boris Pilnyak (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931) Forward, O Time! by Valentine Katayev (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934) Inga by Anatole Glebov (1934) Lonely White Sail, or Peace is Where the Tempests Blow by Valentine Katayev (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936)