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Moscow Gold and the Question of Agency: the CPGB in the 1920s
With greater access to the Comintern archives, the temptation for some historians will be to trawl them for new evidences of the secret hand of Moscow. Often these are removed from any attempt at historical explanation, understanding or contextualisation. Harvey Klehr et al, The Secret World of American Communism (1995) is an obvious example. Such accounts place a strong emphasis on Comintern subsidies as an instrument of control over national communist parties. Beyond the bare assertion of dependency there is little exploration of the uses or effects of these subsidies, of the controversies to which they gave rise or of the interaction between financial and more overtly political questions.
For historians of communism as a socio-political movement (or movements) shaped by national, regional or local contexts, there may be a different temptation. So readily does 'Moscow Gold' lend itself to world-conspiratorial views of communism that some historians may prefer not to address the issue at all, or at least to deny its significance. That may be one variation of what Geoff Eley has called communist party history with the communism left out. To acknowledge the importance of trade union funding of the Labour Party does not imply any crude notion of trade union 'control'. The specific dynamics of Comintern funding raise rather different questions, but these too are far more complex than some recent interpretations would suggest.
In the CPGB's case, Comintern subsidies provided in certain periods a staggering proportion of its overall finances. According to internal calculations, the £55,000 it received in 1920-1 represented over 95% of its budget. Figures for the late 1920s/early 1930s were comparable, although thereafter the subsidy declined dramatically. The huge amounts involved gave rise at times to heated debates within the party. Hardly any communist in this period questioned the basic legitimacy of such funding. Nor, as the financial hardships of many leading communists attest, can much emphasis be placed on personal corruption. What some communists did suggest was that excessive subventions led to bureaucratisation and complacency instead of a healthy dependence on the masses through the effectiveness of communist campaigning. The issue was at the centre of the internal party debates of 1921-23, when Dutt, Pollitt and Gallacher urged the withdrawal of day-to-day subsidies whose demoralising effects they linked with the failings of the existing party leadership. Similar points were made by Pollitt on the launching (which he opposed) of the Daily Worker in 1930.
The cogent arguments of Pollitt and others suggest a provoking thought: that subsidies beyond a certain level were actually unhelpful in promoting an effective communist politics, not so much because of increased dependence on Moscow but because of diminished dependence on indigenous bases of support. That can only be a partial and tentative conclusion, but certainly it was in the period from 1932, when it was increasingly reliant on the latter, that the CP made what were arguably its most effective contributions to British left-wing politics.
