Biography
George Blake Charney was a New York labor lawyer and a leading Communist Party USA figure in the postwar period. Born in Russia in 1905 and brought to New York as a child, he organized for the National Maritime Union and the New York State CIO before joining the partys national board. He was indicted in the Foley Square Second String in June 1951 and convicted alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the rest of the second string in January 1953. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison and served at Lewisburg.
After his release Charney became one of the leading dissident voices inside the CPUSA over Khrushchevs 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin. He left the party in 1958 and in 1968 published A Long Journey, one of the canonical first-person accounts of the American communist experience and its disintegration after 1956.
