TV Reviews : Making Sense of ‘Cold War’ Repression, Betrayal

Eric Stange’s and David Dugan’s documentary for “The American Experience” series, “Love in the Cold War” (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, at 8 on KVCR Channel 24), is a kind of mirror to the viewer.

The hard leftist (of the Marxist variety) will find the ordeals of American Communists Eugene and Peggy Dennis and their sons as tragic confirmation of both American repression and Stalinist betrayal of the Communist faithful. The hard rightist will view the Dennises as fools duped into a futile project infected with intellectual lies and ill-conceived idealism. The hard centrist will probably see them as a tragic family trapped between Soviet anti-humanism and American paranoia.

The Dennises’ youngest, Eugene Jr., the native son searching for meaning in his progenitors’ often absurd lives, narrates (with Cynthia Adler’s fine voice-overs from Peggy’s “Autobiography of an American Communist”). Falling in love at a Marxist youth camp, his parents then fall into full-time work for the growing American Communist Party, as they organize in Southern California.

Eugene soon must hide from authorities, and his rise through Communist ranks leads him to Moscow, the absolute center of the international movement. Peggy and son Tim soon follow Eugene to “Mecca,” as Peggy terms Moscow with inadvertent but revealing religiosity. Tim becomes a Russified toddler, and when the party orders the couple to return to the United States to organize, they’re also ordered to leave Tim--too obviously Russian--behind.

It’s hard to judge which is crueler: This order, which tore the family apart, or the apparent mock-trial and imprisonment in 1949 of Eugene after he became General Secretary of the then-outlawed Communist Party U.S.A. Eugene Jr., caught in the middle of the traumas, can only make sense of it all by telling the story honestly, aided by family friends and others who knew the Dennises.