Introduction
Thanks to all who sent in e-mail addresses and who should hopefully receive this Newsletter electronically. The deadline for the next issue is March 1999.
Editor CHNN
Department of Government
University of Manchester
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL
Contents
Editor's introductionAnnouncements
- Utopias Conference Papers Call
- A Weapon in the Struggle
- CPGB Bibliography
- The Communist Party of Great Britain, Imperialism and War, 1935-45, Neil Redfern
- A British Communist MP in Canada: WIllie Gallacher Builds the Popular Front, 1936, John Manley
- History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-1951, Noreen Branson, reviewed by Kate Hudson
- De communistische erfenis, Margreet Schrevel and Gerrit Voerman (eds), reviewed by Bert Hogenkamp
- Le Livre Noir du Communisme, Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin, reviewed by Alison Macleod
Announcements
UTOPIAS CONFERENCE PAPERS CALL: 'Nowhere — A Place of Our Own: Exploring the uses of Utopia' A one-day postgraduate conference to be held at The University of Warwick, Saturday 8 May 1999. Call for Papers — this conference will host theoretically and empirically informed contributions to the debate about the nature of utopianism, where it can be found, and the part which the utopian imagination plays in motivating action, and thus its role in social, cultural and political practices and history. The Humanities Research Centre invites postgraduate students working in history, politics, sociology, English and other interested disciplines to present short papers of approximately 20 minutes. Possible topics might include: The place and function of utopianism in feminist, 'green', anarchist, socialist, fascist, liberal, conservative (etc) politics and ideology; The rhetoric of utopianism; The utopian imagination in literature and film; Dreams of Cockaigne and popular utopianism; The concept of utopia as an analytical device; The uses of utopia for cultural criticism; The future of utopianism after 'The End of History'. Closing date for abstracts (150-300 words) 20 November 1998. Please enclose an outline CV with your abstract. Contact Philip Coupland, Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL; coupland@mcmail.com
A WEAPON IN THE STRUGGLE: An event is being organised in London to launch A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, a book of essays edited by Andy Croft and published by Pluto Press. Anybody wanting to receive details of this event should contact Andy at 11 Limes Rd, Middlesbrough TS5 6RQ.
CPGB BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dave Cope writes: 'I am reaching the final stages of work on a bibliography of the Communist Party of Great Britain and I wonder if any of your readers could help me trace items I may have missed. The bibliography will list all items published for sale by the CP nationally and locally (pamphlets, papers etc) plus the Daily Worker and Morning Star, and the Young Communist League, together with theses and unpublished biographies/ autobiographies. It will also include a comprehensive list of books, pamphlets and articles (except from daily and weekly papers) about the party.'
'If any reader is aware of any private collection or lesser-known library collections that may contain such items I would be grateful if they could contact me. I am particularly keen to trace newsletters, journals and pamphlets produced by local branches and districts as these are harder to find than national ones.' Contact: Dave Cope, 7 Hambledon House, Cricketfield Road, London E5 8NT; Tel: 0181 985 2090, Fax: 020 8533 5821.
Work in Progress
The Communist Party
of Great Britain, Imperialism and War, 1935-45
This PhD thesis was successfully completed at the Manchester Metropolitan University in January 1998.
The four chapters of my thesis correspond to four more or less clearly demarcated periods in the years 1935-45. Chapter One considers the CP's line and practice in the period 1935-41, from the Seventh Congress of the Comintern to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Though there is a considerable body of literature on the Party in this period, it was considered necessary to hoe the ground again in order to elaborate the conceptual framework deployed. However, given that there is such a substantial body of literature, this is a highly condensed account which concentrates on the Party's view of the international imperialist rivalries which were to erupt into war in 1939. Chapter Two is a discussion of the Party's work from Operation Barbarossa to the allied invasion of north Africa and the lifting of the siege of Stalingrad at the end of 1942, generally regarded at the time as a turning point of the war. In this period the Party's single-minded aim was the opening of a Second Front in Europe. Chapter Three looks at the Party's activities in 1943 and 1944, a time when it became increasingly confident of eventual Allied victory and began to consider the shape of the post-war world. Chapter Four examines the Party's line and practice from the Yalta Conference of early 1945 to the Party Congress of November 1945, a period in which it was mainly concerned with the post-war national and international settlements.
The period covered was crucial in the CPGB's development. Historians are generally agreed that in this period it underwent a transformation from a revolutionary to a reformist party. There has however been little attempt to analyse how this transformation took place. This thesis seeks to help to rectify this gap in our historical knowledge. I argue that whilst due acknowledgement must be given to the role played by Soviet foreign policy — I show that even after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 the CP continued closely to follow the contours indicated by this policy — it is the CP's internal dynamics which mainly explain its transformation.
I attempt to demonstrate that the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union dovetailed neatly with ideological baggage which the Communist parties of western Europe had inherited from the native labour movements from which they had sprung. As Marx said of quite different circumstances, 'the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living'. In the case of the CPGB, the most important parts of this baggage were an indifference to the colonial question, a Hobsonian understanding of imperialism and a Euro-centric nationalism. In the 1920s and early '30s the influence of the Comintern was such as to keep this baggage in check. But, I contend, Comintern policy after 1935 allowed it to flourish: the CP essentially reverted to the ideology and politics of the Second International and in the war of 1939-45 reprised the experience of 1914-18.
I find that the most striking feature of the existing literature on the CP is how little the question of imperialism - using this term in the Leninist sense of monopoly capitalism rather than in the sense, usual in Britain, of colonialism - is addressed. It was the crisis of imperialism of 1914-18 which created the conditions for the Party's formation and the subsequent crisis of the 1930s and '40s which was crucial in its transformation from a revolutionary to a reformist party. Quite apart from this 'objective' factor, the question of imperialism was so central to the Party's view of the world, though less so to its actual practice, that it should surely be central to any analysis of it. But in, for instance, Walter Kendall's study of the CP, virtually the only reference to the matter is in a footnote on the importance attached to the question of colonialism by the Comintern in its early dealings with the British Party. Kendall seems to think that the Comintern had been tiresomely pedantic [1].
Most labour historians would endorse Henry Pelling's verdict on the CP, that 'all the absurdities of the history of the Party spring from this one face, that it has been a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation' [2]. Tragic, rather than 'absurd' seems to me a better epithet to apply to the CP. Granted, the Party had throughout its existence been confronted with a non-revolutionary situation in Britain. But what Pelling called the 'absurdities' of the Party's history surely stemmed not so much form being a revolutionary party in a 'non-revolutionary situation' but from being part of a movement with a mistaken assessment of the balance of national and international class forces. I argue that a crucial part of the Comintern's ideological and political outlook was a great overestimation of the revolutionary inclinations of the working class of the imperialist countries and a corresponding underestimation of that of the people in the periphery of Europe and in what is now called the 'third world'. I attempt to show that the practical consequence of this, when combined with the other elements of the CPGB's Euro-centric outlook and with Popular Front politics, was that the CP entered into a social-chauvinist alliance with British imperialism.
For most of the CP historians, the Second World War saw the Party's finest hour, a time of unparalleled growth and influence. It is of course generally regarded as Britain's finest hour too, an attitude manifested in the recent celebrations of D-Day and VE-Day and in the ugly nationalism paraded by football hooligans, most of the British Press and by Euro-sceptics at Conservative Party Conferences. A radical version of this narrative is the received wisdom in the Labour Movement and among left and liberal academics. In this version, the British working class and people stood up to defend against fascist tyranny cherished rights and liberties, won through hundreds of years of struggle, and, through that struggle, in alliance with other 'progressive' forces, won new victories in the shape of the post-war settlement.
Is this not a rather one-sided view of history? Were the British working class and people really fighting in defence of democratic liberties? If we look at Britain in isolation, perhaps. But on a world scale? The vast majority of the people of the British Empire had no democratic rights whatsoever. Not surprisingly then, vast numbers of people were involved in the civil disobedience campaigns led by the Congress Party of India and a significant number of Indian people unwisely fought in or supported Subhas Cahndra Bose's India National Army, formed to fight with the Japanese against the British [3]. What then was really going on in World War Two? What were the British people really fighting for? A fundamental part of the conceptual framework deployed in my thesis is that whatever the British people thought, the principal content of World War Two was a battle between two rival imperialist blocs for world hegemony. The members of the CPGB thought quite clearly believed that they were fighting during the war in the best interest of the working class and people. I argue that they did so because their Party shared in no small measure the ideology and values of the British bourgeoisie.
Reiner Tosstorff, University of Mainz
rtosstorff@hotmail.com
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1. |
W Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1920-1921: The Origins of British Communism (London, 1969), p.399.
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2. |
H Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1975), p.182
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3. |
See P W Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-45 (Michigan, 1994), for an account of Bose's ill-fated enterprise.
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Article
A British Communist MP in Canada: Willie Gallacher Builds the Popular Front, 1936
Historians of Canadian Communism have been handed some massive research gifts in recent years. The National Archives (NA) in Ottawa now receives from the revamped Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) all the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) surveillance files released to individual researchers under new Access to Information legislation.This material includes extensive personal, city and trade union files. In addition, the NA has recently created two collections of microfilmed materials bought from the Comintern archives; one is a general collection on the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and its relations with the Comintern, the other deals specifically with Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and International Brigades [1]. Distance will probably limit overseas interest in these collections, but a third major source is easily accessible. The recent publication of Gregory S Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part V, 1938-1939 (St John's, Newfoundland, Canadian Committee on Labour History [CCLH], 1997) concluded an almost decade-long commitment by the CCLH to obtain and publish every available issue of the RCMP's 'Weekly Summary: Report on Revolutionary Organizations and Agitation in Canada'. Edited throughout by Kealey and Whitaker, distinguished Canadian scholars, publication began with RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's, Newfoundland, CCLH, 1989). Collectively, the eight volumes (the others cover 1919-29, 1933-34, 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1942-45) contain over 4000 pages [2]. Although they can be frustrating to use — many are quite heavily censored — handled with care, they provide masses of data on the Canadian party (on which the RCMP was fixated) and a substantial amount on the wider international scene. British historians, for example, would learn something about a little-studied phenomenon: the British radical diaspora of the interwar years. That diaspora ensured a warm welcome for William Gallacher, MP, when he made a coast-to-coast tour of the Dominion in 1936.
The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was a sociological oddity. Although at least 75% of its 1937 membership of 15,000 were European immigrants, mainly Ukrainians, Finns and, in the key central Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal, Jews, its leadership came disproportionately from the culturally and politically dominant Anglo-celtic communities. General Secretary Tim Buck was English, as was the editor of the party paper The Worker/Daily Clarion (and, much later, Buck's successor), Leslie Morris. Scots played an even more disproportionate role [3]. When recently elected British Com- munist MP Willie Gallacher — another Scot — visited Canada in 1936, three compatriots were provincial secretaries: Bill Findlay in Nova Scotia, Tom Ewan in British Columbia and James Litterick in Manitoba; that year, moreover, Litterick, a former Red Clydesider, gained a Winnipeg seat in the provincial legislature and thus became the first North American Communist elected above the municipal level [4]. Many others were prominent at all levels of the party, the Young Communist League (Peter Hunter), Friends of the Soviet Union (James Cowan, Sam Scarlett), Workers' Unity League (Ewan, J B McLachlan) and in union organising (Scarlett, Harry Hunter, Fred Collins, Alex Gauld) [5]. Several of these individuals appeared beside Gallacher in 1936.
Throughout its life (it was formed in 1921), the CPC was widely perceived as a party of 'dangerous foreigners'. The promotion of Anglo-celtic spokespersons (its three leading women comrades in the interwar years were English) helped challenge the stereotype [6]. The ability to project a 'naturalised' identity was especially useful during the Popular Front years (1935-39), when, like all its sister parties in the west, it was seeking to reinvent itself as the latest and fullest manifestation of a national heritage of radical democracy. 'Communism', one slogan proclaimed (rather less snappily than the CPUSA's 'Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism'), 'Stands for All That is Best in Canadian Tradition'. The CPC sought not only to assert its 'Canadian-ness' in terms of established 'British' notions of national identity, but also to expand Canadian nationalism by honouring both bi-nationalism and the reality of what today would be termed multiculturalism; at the same time as it encouraged leading 'ethnic' cadres to Canadianize their names, it invited the ethnic sections to express pride in their national cultures and enter confidently into national life. Ideally, it wanted to build a distinctively 'New World' sense of Canada's future, in which the standard of Canadian life would move increasingly towards the higher level of civilisation prevailing in the Soviet Union. Progress towards this destination, however, would depend on a positive response from Canadian 'progressives' to the Comintern's and CPC's appeal for unity against the imminent threat to humanity represented by international fascism.
Willie Gallacher's coast-to-coast tour — recorded in some detail in the Security Bulletins — was clearly designed to help the CPC achieve its cultural and political goals. Gallacher was not the first British Communist to visit Canada in 1936. The 80 year-old Tom Mann was the keynote speaker at Toronto's May Day celebrations, the biggest in the city's history. At least 20,000 representatives of every section of the working class movement marched past the reviewing platform, which Mann shared with Buck, the Reverend Ben Spence of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and leading 'reformist' Toronto District Labour Council leader George Watson. That evening, 8,500 filled the Arena Gardens to hear Mann. His 'daring remarks', calling for a united working class front for the 'complete destruction of Capitalism ...evoked tremendous cheers and applause'. RCMP informants underlined the militancy of the meeting by noting that only the Reverend Spence remained standing when the evening commenced with the mandatory playing of The King [7].
The welcome accorded Mann and Gallacher (and Aneurin Bevan two years earlier) showed that there was an audience in the British working-class diaspora for 'stars' of the old country left [8]. The CPC announced Gallacher's impending arrival during Mann's visit, but waited until July to announce his itinerary — and an exhausting one it was! The first stage lasted three weeks (8-29 August), during which he spoke, sometimes more than once, in 14 different centres. Beginning in Montreal, he travelled via stops at Hamilton, Toronto, St Catharine's, Sudbury, Timmins, Fort William, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Blairmore and Vancouver, to the Vancouver Island coal-mining town of Nanaimo. The second stage began with a short stay in Chicago, from where he travelled to Nova Scotia for meetings (10-11 September) in Halifax and Glace Bay, another coal-mining town. He returned home from New York on 17 September [p 302]. In the course of his tour, Gallacher addressed at least 22,000 warmly enthusiastic — and, indeed, plain warm — Canadians (the tour took place amidst heat and humidity Gallacher would rarely have encountered in Paisley or Fife), usually at indoor meetings. He twice spoke before audiences of 3,500 in Montreal's Mount Royal Arena; 2,500 turned out at Massey Hall in Toronto, and when Vancouver's biggest theatre was damaged by fire, the British Columbia party attracted 3,500 to two meetings at a smaller venue. Crowds of over 1000 assembled in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and in smaller towns meetings were 'well-attended' or 'filled to capacity' [pp 350-51, 354, 362-64, 381-84, 408].
Gallacher's purpose can be inferred from an examination of the themes he expounded: the central one was the vital necessity of building the anti-fascist united front. He arrived at a pregnant moment in the evolution of the Comintern's post-Class Against Class line. A number of cautious initiatives in 1933-34 prepared the ground for the Seventh (and final) Congress of the Comintern in July 1935 to set each national Communist Party the task of constructing a 'People's' or (as it came to be more commonly known) 'Popular Front'. By 1936, a section of the CPC, leaders and rank and file, had become suspicious of the shift from a clear politics of class, and some were even willing to contest it. Only weeks before Gallacher arrived, J B McLachlan left the Party, maintaining that, while he remained a supporter of Dimitrov's Leninist conception of the Popular Front, the party was involved in a 'sad march to the right'. Although McLachlan was the only leading member to take such a step, there are strong indications that the departure of A E Smith, head of the Canadian section of the International Red Aid, for an extended stay in Europe that spring stemmed from Smith's difficulties in accommodating himself to the 'popularizing' of his Canadian Labour Defence League [9]. One of Gallacher's main tasks was to stiffen party unity by selling the People's Front.
Gallacher's prestige as a member of the Mother of Parliaments undoubtedly made his job easier. Audiences wanted to hear about his parliamentary experiences. Gallacher signalled that participation in the electoral system did not inevitably mean a loss of revolutionary purpose (precisely the opposite of what the CPC had told its members throughout the 1920s and early 1930s). He invariably displayed his hostility towards the National Government, and accused unnamed British statesmen of 'dragging Britain into a new war for the preservation of capitalism' [p 364]. He suggested to his Vancouver audiences that if Canadian workers drew inspiration from the solidarity and unity of the Fife miners they could elect their own parliamentary tribunes. The sight at his Winnipeg meeting of a 'unique feature ... the presence on one platform of the only two Communist Members of Parliament in the British Empire today' underscored these possibilities [p 364].
Gallacher was obviously well-briefed on national and local concerns. At his first meeting in Montreal, he drew together the themes of Zionism, anti-semitism, the united front and the virtues of the Soviet Union, in an appeal to the Jewish community, whose members made up a majority of the audience. Gallacher urged the Jews as a national group to resist the appeal of Zionism and 'align themselves with the working class and the progressive movement, as the solution of the Jewish problem cannot be found under the imperialist[s'] control'. The USSR, he argued, by setting up the Jewish autonomous region of Biro-bidjan had shown how the best interests of Jewish people lay with the working class [p 351]. He modified the theme of anti-capitalist unity to suit different audiences. In the ethnically diverse town of Fort William in north-western Ontario, his appeal was aimed at dissolving ethnic divisions. He called on Anglo-Saxons, French Canadians and the foreign-born 'to forget national differences and ... unite for the struggle against Capitalism' [p 364]. At Regina in the heart of the prairies, he appealed to workers and farmers to unite against their common exploitation [p 382].
Gallacher's speeches reflected the growing tendency to elide the struggle against capitalism into the struggle against fascism (which Georgi Dimitov had equated with the most imperialist elements of finance capital). He referred frequently to the spectre of international fascism, whether in Spain (where the Civil War had recently erupted), Britain or Canada, his views gaining concreteness from the victory, during the tour, of Maurice Duplessis' right-wing, anti-semitic Union Nationale party in the Quebec provincial election. Gallacher observed in Regina that this result proved that Canada was 'already confronted with Fascism', which, he predicted, would 'spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific'. At the same time, he insisted that fascism would certainly be defeated in Spain and could be in Canada. 'Canada's possibilities', he argued, were boundless. The Dominion could be a 'great force in building up a new world' if it rejected 'the clammy, dying hand of decaying British capital' [p 382]. Here (the RCMP did not elaborate), he was probably referring to Mosleyite influences on Canadian fascism; even some French Canadian fascists identified with the British Empire.
If Gallacher's status as an MP gave him one kind of legitimacy, his membership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern gave him another. His tour operated on two levels: as a mass propaganda campaign on behalf of a CPC then in the process of reinventing itself as the guardian of democracy; and as an internal drive for Party unity behind Moscow's still evolving Popular Front line. His execution of the second role was seen most clearly during his trip to the Nova Scotia mining region of Cape Breton, where the recent departure from the CPC of James Bryson McLachlan had severely disrupted the local section. Gallacher's Glace Bay speech on fascism and the united front followed a well established pattern; the fireworks came in the discussion period afterwards, when all the audience wanted to hear was Gallacher's views on McLachlan's 'expulsion'. Gallacher's claim that the veteran Scot — a hero of the region's mining struggles since emigrating from Lanarkshire in the early 1900s — had 'left of his own accord' provoked uproar, in the course of which McLachlan himself intervened, explaining how he had been 'partly thrown out of the party because he would not support [John L] Lewis and he partly left he party so as to have greater freedom to express himself'. He went on to say, amidst hearty applause, that he 'loved the C.P. of C. and would die for it, but he would not accept orders contrary to his beliefs and feelings'. Whether out of respect for McLachlan or for the balance of opinion in the hall, Gallacher spoke gently to his compatriot, reminding him of the fundamental rule of democratic centralism: 'a Communist while disagreeing with a Party decision must loyally carry it out if the majority votes for it'. His public and private attempts at reconciliation with McLachlan failed [10].
This brief interlude speaks to several themes and issues in the history of international Communism in the 1930s. It reminds us of the personal dedication of leading cadres: a month-long summer tour of air-conditioned Canada would be a delight in 1998, but I suspect that in 1936 Willie Gallacher would have needed every hour of his return voyage on the Acquitainia to recover from the ordeal; certainly, his gift of a pipe from the hard-rock miners of Kirkland Lake was well deserved. We can glean from Gallacher's speeches hints of the transition from United to Popular Front, from a strategy based on the leading role of the working class to one increasingly reliant on 'unity from above' with the trade union bureaucracy (the issue at the heart of the J B McLachlan controversy) and on trans-class alliances with the progressive bourgeoisie. Given that the Popular Front line was not handed down with the sudden finality of Class Against Class in 1928-29, we may be seeing in Gallacher's propaganda work a cagy, hesitant Comintern or one that was genuinely seeking to operate in a more consensual (if still fundamentally manipulative) way. There is only so much insight to be derived from a single snapshot, however. The other object of this article has been to encourage historians of Communism to consider the RCMP Security Bulletins potential for research and teaching. Comparative study is always likely to enrich nationally-based research. In addition, precisely because these sources do require careful handling, they make excellent primary sources for undergraduates. They can be obtained directly from: CCLH, Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, Newfoundland, Canada, A1C 5S7.
John Manley, Department of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Central Lancashire
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Proportionately, Canada's 1200-1300 volunteers comprised one of the biggest national contingents in the International Brigades. See Norman Penner, Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto, 1988), pp135-38. Strangely Eric Hosbawm does not cite the presence of Los Canadienses in his list of leading contributors in Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London, 1994), p160.
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I should declare an interest here: I contributed introductions to Volumes II-V of The Depression Years.
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Buck's predecessor, 'Moscow Jack' MacDonald, came from Falkirk. Expelled in 1930, he later become one of the founders of Canadian Trotskyism. Several Scots, notably Alan Campbell, David Chalmers and James Houston, were deported for unemployed and union activities in the early Depression years (between 1932-36 the CPC was illegal and underground).
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See Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London, 1978), pp142-46.
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I have a work in progress on Scots and the CPC (provisional title: 'The Search for Red Haggis: Scottish Militants and Canadian Communism, 1921-1939') and would appreciate correspondence on the subject.
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The Security Bulletins routinely appended the real names of European immigrant comrades to the 'Canadianised' version. Thus: Jack Taylor (Muni Erlich), John Weir (John Wevurski), Peter Lindsay (Peter Kozak).
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Gregory S Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, part III, 1936 (St John's, CCLH, 1996), pp 194-95. The estimates of 20,000 and 8,500 are the RCMP's. Although 'the Force' at all times played up the Communist threat, it did not usually exaggerate the size of turn-outs at Party meetings. References to this volume will henceforth be placed in parentheses in the text.
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The Labour MP visited the United States and Canada in summer 1934, under the auspices of the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, which was probably a 'front' for the American League Against War and Fascism, formed late in 1933. Originally intending a short visit to New York, 'he found himself travelling from coast to coast'. The Welsh spellbinder, was particularly good at getting his American and Canadian (though Michael Foot's biography does not mention this part of his tour) audiences to open their pockets. He seems to have helped crystallise Canada's anti-fascist forces. Only weeks after his departure, these came together as the Canadian League Against War and Fascism. See Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 1897-1945 (St Alban's, Paladin edn, 1975), p175; Gregory S Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins: the Depression Years, Part I, 1933-1934 (St John's, CCLH, 1993), pp216-18, 235, 266.
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David Frank and John Manley, 'The Sad March to the Right: J B McLachlan's Resignation from the Communist Party of Canada, 1936', Labour/Le Travail, 30 (Fall 1992), pp113-34; John Manley, 'Introduction' to Kealey and Whitaker, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins [...] 1936, pp4-6.
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These quotes are taken from the original RCMP file on McLachlan, as cited in Frank and Manley, 'The Sad March to the Right', p 129. The briefer RCMP Security Bulletins [...] 1936 report is on p408
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Some Recent Books
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-1951
Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-1951, Lawrence and Wishart, ISBN 0-85315-862-2, pp.262
The period 1941-51 saw the emergence of the CPGB into the basic political, programmatic and organisational shape that it retained until its demise in 1991. It is a period that highlights the contradictions in the CPGB's policies and activities, and emphasises the inseparability of the party's national role from its destiny as part of the international communist movement. Undaunted by the scope of the project, Noreen Branson has thoroughly and systematically dissected the work of the party during these ten years and provided a comprehensive account covering international, national and local dimensions, combining both the big picture and a mass of fascinating detail, all in her clear and accessible style.
The period opened with the party experiencing an unprecedented wave of popularity, as the Soviet Union halted the German advance by November 1941 and launched a counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2. The impact of this on the British population was shown very clearly by the party's membership: more than doubling in a four month period from 22,000 in December 1941 to 53,000 in May 1942. Shortly afterwards the Daily Worker was unbanned, and the party spared no efforts in its campaign to support the war effort through increased industrial production. The party also campaigned for the opening of the second front to relieve the pressure on the Red Army; for women's equality, playing a leading role in the Women's Parliament; in support of anti-colonial struggles and against 'colour prejudice' and anti-semitism; and for political education for the forces, and in the development of the 'forces' parliaments'.
This astonishing range of campaigning work continued after the end of the war with the squatters movement, the development of the peace movement, trade union campaigns, campaigns for colonial liberation — amongst many others. The record of the CPGB in the campaigning field was outstanding as this book clearly demonstrates — through empirical evidence not phrase-mongering. But during this period the party also faced two increasingly complex problems, which set the overall framework for the book: the development of the Cold War, and the relationship of the CPGB to the Labour Party, and after 1945 to the Labour government.
The origins of the Cold War are clearly charted, through the Truman Doctrine, HUAC, and the Marshall Plan to the creation of the two Germanies, the Cominform, NATO and the Korean War. The increasing hostility of the Labour government towards the Communist Party was clearly partly a result of this, with the CPGB opposed to the Atlanticism of the Labour government, opposed to Bevin's rabid anti-communism in Greece and so on. The Cold War tensions were also partly an explanation for the purges and witch-hunts of communists in the trade unions and civil service and for the proscribing of organisations by the Labour Party — and Branson's detailed description of these events is both shocking and moving. The other part of the explanation which Branson draws out well is that the attempts to smash communist power in the labour movement coincided with the Labour government's desire to impose wage restraint, and with the CPGB's deprioritisation at its 20th Congress in February 1948 of the drive to increased production.
Less clear is the extent to which the CPGB took its line from Moscow. Branson observes early on in the book, after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, that the party 'emerged as a party solely responsible for its own actions'. This is an overestimation of the party's autonomy, for while formally it may have been free to make its own decisions, in reality this was not the case. The example of Yugoslavia in 1948 shows this clearly: it illustrated not only what happened to a party which tried to choose its own path to socialism, but also how the CPGB accepted the Cominform line — there was no real alternative course of action in the framework in which it existed.
There is a further area where the extent of Soviet influence is debatable: changes in the party's programmes and changes of line. In 1941 'For Soviet Britain' was still the party programme, based on the approach of Lenin's State and Revolution. By 1944, 'Britain for the People' had fundamentally shifted to the position that the Party maintained until 1991 — that Parliament could be changed rather than abolished, that the state machine could be democratised rather than destroyed. This approach was more fully expanded and consolidated in the first 'British Road to Socialism' in 1951. 'Britain for the People' also underlined the importance of co-operation between the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union and for this continuing after the war. There would appear to be a correlation between the dissolution of the Comintern, the new line of 'Britain for the People', and indeed with 'Browderism' in the USA - which was this type of approach carried to the extreme — and clearly the correlation was the needs of Soviet foreign policy. It is also apparent that the CPGB, perhaps belatedly, changed its approach from critical support of the Labour government, after the change of line of the Soviet Union in 1948 and Zhdanov's 'two hostile camps' speech.
The mistaken position of the party towards the 1945 election — of campaigning for a government of 'national unity' rather than an outright Labour victory — is also a manifestation of this line, an example of British 'Browderism'. Yet this approach can be seen not solely as the product of the desire to perpetuate the war-time alliance: it was a continuation of the approach pursued by the Comintern since the 1920s. In 1927, the Chinese Communist Party was smashed after subordinating itself, on Soviet orders, to the bourgeois nationalist forces of the Kuomintang. This was followed in the 1930s by the subordination of working class forces to bourgeois forces in the popular fronts and their failure to prevent the rise of fascism. In other words, the Comintern consistently misapplied the united front tactic developed in the early years of the Comintern: that working class forces should ally with other class forces where common goals are identified, but should not subordinate working class interests to other class interests. This is not a view that Branson puts forward in the book, but it does seem to be a pattern in Soviet theory and policy in the periods before and after the decade covered by this book — from the pursuance of alliances by communists in the post-war national liberation struggles with national bourgeoisies, allowing bourgeois forces to predominate, right up to the 1990s, where the Communist Party of the Russian Federation effectively sustained Chernomyrdin's premiership for a considerable period. It is difficult, however, to arrive at a comprehensive overview and understanding of these issues, and of the flaws of Soviet policy and their implications for the movement as a whole, and the CPGB in particular, when the written history is divided into a number of volumes covering relatively small periods. This is a problem, perhaps, with the structure of the series.
Nevertheless, Branson's book is a significant contribution to our understanding of this period. It is a sympathetic interpretation of the activities of a small party which strove to have a big and positive impact, and it is an interpretation with which I largely concur. The party and its dedicated activists touched the lives of many, and it was overwhelmingly a force for progress in British society. Its problems were largely the result of the mistaken policies and crimes of the Soviet leadership — a framework it could not realistically break out of.
Kate Hudson, South Bank University
De communistische erfenis
Margreet Schrevel and Gerrit Voerman (eds), De communistische erfenis: Bibliografie en bronnen betreffende de CPN, 188p., Stichting beheer IISG and Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen, 1997, Hfl. 34,50, ISBN 90 6861 130 5
Although the Communist Party of the Netherlands was officially disbanded before the eyes of the television cameras in 1991 (it had merged with three other left-wing parties to form the Green Left party), it has hardly been out of the news since then. Did the Party receive Moscow gold (or to be more precise diamonds) before the Second World War? Should the records on the activities of Party members held by the Dutch intelligence services be destroyed without the permission of those concerned? Should communists in leading social and political positions been made to reconsider because they had been fundamentally 'wrong', like Dutch national socialists who had been purged after the German occupation? These and other questions continually made the headlines. It was the debate resulting from this last suggestion, made by liberal politician Frits Bolkestein, that coincided with the publication of De communistische erfenis (The Communist Heritage) late last year. Instead of tackling these questions head-on, this reference guide helps historians and others to find their way to the original sources.
De communistische erfenis is a companion volume to Van bron tot boek (From source to book), a guide that was published in 1986 listing the sources on the Dutch Communist Party that were accessible at the time. Apart from entries on pamphlets, periodicals, posters, photographs and an extensive and therefore very useful bibliography, the 1986 guide was remarkable for providing outsiders for the first time with a glimpse into the contents of the Party's own archive. That the regulations drawn up by the committee responsible for the running of the archive took up two full pages could be characterised as another example of typical East European-style bureaucracy, but at least now the access procedure was no longer dependent on the whims of one or the other Party full-timer. Van bron tot boek also listed the contents of a series of microfilms of material from the period 1918-1941 that the Party had received from Moscow in the early 1980s. When the Communist Party folded great care was taken to safeguard the future of its archives. These were eventually deposited with the renowned International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. A more detailed inventory of its contents was published in 1994. What De communistische erfenis adds is on the one hand information about written sources that have come to light recently and on the other audiovisual material produced by the Dutch Party or related to it. The entries include an updated list of material relating to the Dutch CP found in the Comintern archives. Interesting too are contributions on the archives of the Dutch intelligence service and on the holdings of the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation, dating from the German occupation and including records from the Sicherheitspolizei, the justice departments and the Gestapo. The entries on the audiovisual heritage of the Dutch CP deal with sound records, films and television programmes. The oldest sound record, a speech by the Communist MP Louis de Visser, recorded in Berlin on a disk and then transmitted as election broadcast by Dutch radio, dates from 1929. After the Cold War ban on party political broadcasts was lifted in 1965, the Party made extensive use of both radio and television
Bert Hogenkamp
Netherlands Audiovisual Archive
University of Utrecht
Le Livre Noir du Communisme
Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin, Le Livre Noir du Communisme, Paris: Robert Laffont
It may be too soon to make a reckoning of all the crimes that we old Communists defended or denied. Even the great archive now available in Russia is incomplete. For China we have no archives, though there are eye-witnesses to tell us that Mao's dragooning of the peasants brought about the greatest famine in history.
Yet the attempt at a world-wide summary had to be made now, while there are witnesses alive. It was fitting that it should be made in France, where the Communist Party had so much more influence than it ever had in Britain. This book is an act of expiation by old Stalinists, and has been attacked for that very reason. Has their revulsion against their past carried them too far?
In some cases, perhaps, not far enough. Nicolas Werth, author of the section on Russia, thinks Robert Conquest was exaggerating when he put the numbers executed between 1936 and 1938 at about three million, with another two million dying in the camps. Using the archives, Werth puts the total number of deaths in those two years at less than 700,000.
The figure might be right if Stalin's purges had been carried out in such an orderly way that nobody died without some record being kept. This I doubt. To cite one case from a later deportation: if Rosa Rust had not survived and protested, would any document have shown that she had been deported to Kazakhstan by mistake, with the Volga Germans? Her father was trying, for at least two years, to find her. Since her father was Bill Rust, Editor of the Daily Worker, it cannot be assumed that the Russians were deliberately obstructing his enquiries. They may really not have been able to find any record of her.
Is Werth, perhaps, leaving out the atmosphere of those days? The arrests were carried out by men who knew they would be censured if they did not round up enough people, and rewarded if they rounded up too many. Some of them could carry out their tasks only when drunk. There was a bureaucratic procedure for recording arrests and deaths, but how conscientiously was it followed?
Werth has extracted many gems from the archives. He points out that Stalin's unknown victims far outnumber the famous cases like Bukharin and Tukhachevsky. (We need shed no tears for Tukhachevsky. In 1921 he was ordering the use of poison gas against rebellious peasants.)
Among the obscure victims was Vassili Klementovich Sidorov. This 45 year-old peasant lived in a wooden house, eight metres by eight metres. He owned a cow, four sheep, two pigs and some poultry. He was alleged to have said: 'Stalin and his gang don't want to lose power. Stalin has killed a mass of people, but he doesn't want to go. The Bolsheviks hold on to their power and arrest decent people, and you aren't even allowed to say that, without getting put into a camp for twenty-five years'.
To prove him wrong, the authorities shot Sidorov on 3 August 1938 (he was posthumously rehabilitated on 24 January 1989). They seized his wooden house and his livestock, thereby leaving his wife, Anastasia, and daughter, Nina, destitute. But did these two women remain at liberty? The arrest of a whole family, if one member had been shot, was such a matter of routine that it might not have been recorded.
Some critics of this book have argued that a story like Sidorov's, however many times repeated, represents no more than an aberration in the pursuit of a noble ideal. They have protested, too, that it is unjust to lump together all the countries which ever called themselves Communist. What has a maniac like Pol Pot to do, for example, with Castro?
However, the detailed studies of each country in this book reveal a strong family resemblance. We all know what Stalin did to those he suspected of Titoism. But what did Tito do to the 16,000 people he suspected of Stalinism? Some he shot. Many he tortured. Most he put on a barren island in the Adriatic, where they broke hard stones into gravel. Then, to show that the sole aim of the work had been to humiliate them, the gravel was dumped in the sea.
Jean-Louis Margolin, author of the section on China, quotes 'Chine: l'archipel oublié', by Jean-Luc Domenach. 'The intrusion of Utopia into politics has coincided, very exactly, with the intrusion of police terror into society'. Every section of Le Livre Noir has examples to bear this out.
One Communist country after another has tried to force peasants into collective farms, a policy which always leads to hunger, and often to outright famine. Samora Machel of Mozambique, in a self-criticism long overdue, declared: "We forget the fact that our country consists, above all, of peasants. We persist in talking about the working class, and we relegate to the background the majority of the population". Nearly every Communist leader might have said that, and it is a pity that Lenin did not. None of the romantic myths about Lenin can survive a reading of the documents quoted here.
It is a scandal that this book has not been translated into English. It would then be made available to a great many people who now condemn it on hearsay.
Alison Macleod, London
Alison Macleod's memoir of 1956, The Death of Uncle Joe, is reviewed by Nina Fishman in the next Newsletter.
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