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Party People, Communist Lives
John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives Explorations in Biography (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2001) 256pp, ISBN 0-85315-936-X, pbk.
Party People is a collection of 10 biographical essays examining the lives of a very disparate group of British communists, written by a number of different writers and based, for the most part, on original research. Extensive use has been made of the CPGB Archive in Manchester and Comintern material from the Moscow archives the latter is important given the enormous amount of specific information on individual cadres of all the world's CPs held in the CPSU's file. The writing of socio-political autobiographies was a requirement for those involved in the world of the Comintern and this was often done by the same individual a number of times over the years. Another important element has been the use of oral history reminiscences of friends, colleagues, family and in one case the subject himself. The fact that it has now been over a decade since the end of 'Soviet Communism' has undoubtedly made it easier to broach various matters and establish personal details; on the other hand the passage of years now means there are few living contemporaries and colleagues of the particular party members in question. Quite clearly in a number of cases the essay offers a preliminary exploration of the particular communist life under scrutiny, and presumably book length biographies will appear in due course.
More specifically the book can be seen as an early product of the formidable project initiated under the auspices of Manchester University: a prosophology of British communism. Prosophology derives from the Greek and has the dictionary definition of being: a study that identifies and relates a group of persons or characters within a particular historical or literary context. This has involved, in the case of the British party, conducting numerous interviews with former CP members. However, as some of those involved in the project believe and the editors of the book comment in the preface:
the quantitative depended on the qualitative: there was a need to explore the complexities of individual life histories and their construction, since aggregation and broader analysis depend on such work for their consistency and richness. (p6)
In an incisive opening chapter, which sets the ground for the biographical studies Kevin Morgan discusses the relevance of the writing on communist lives for the historiography of communism.[1] Inevitably individual biographies from party leaders but even more so the general membership highlight the different routes to (and exits from) communism, which were determined by the historical context and the specific individual's situation, experiences and psychological make-up. This in turn would influence how they went on to accommodate themselves to party discipline and interpret their communism. Soviet financing and moral and political leadership and its increasing control over the world's communist parties is obviously of fundamental importance in any historical work on communism but Morgan argues that:
in explaining why people became, remained and defined themselves as Communists, we need to be exploring realities and mentalities indigenous to them and not simply offloading the problem to an exteriority described as Bolshevism, Stalinism and 'orders from Moscow'. (p24)
Although in this respect there has been criticism that there may be a danger of pushing the Soviet link too much into the background in an effort to emphasise the 'diffusion and dilution of British Communism' and that communists were 'not a species apart' from the non-communist left:. As co-editors Mcllroy and Campbell have argued elsewhere: 'This is reductionism which dissolves important differences and antagonisms between different kinds of "socialists" over democracy and despotism, reform and revolution, and Russia '.[2]
The focus of the book is on the period which saw the foundation of the CP and its first two decades or so of existence from 1920-40: communists of the Comintern period. Communists whose lives are dealt with range from William Rust, a lifelong party official, editor of the Daily Worker and someone who can be described as a 'party person' par excellence; to Arthur Reade, the first nationally-known student communist and 'Britain's first Trotskyist', who by all accounts was no longer a member of the CP after 1927. The lives of two prominent communist women are explored in separate chapters: Dora Montefiore, who was a long time campaigner for women's political and social rights and who was 70 years old when elected to the fledgling CP Executive Committee; and Rose Smith, who came from much lower social origins than Montefiore, and who entered the party as a young woman, later to become the CP National Women's Organiser. There are explorations of the lives of four communist miners: Arthur Horner (the Welsh and later national miners' leader) and (in a collective biography of three Fife communist miners) David Proudfoot, and Abe and Alex Moffat. Addtionally, there are studies of the lives of the communist lawyer Jack Gaster (of Jewish extraction), and the communist poet: Randall Swingler (a comparatively late recruit to the party amongst this cohort, who joined during the time of the Popular Front and was to become perhaps the most prominent cultural spokesman of the CP). Finally, there is also a fascinating contribution, in a previously under-researched area, dealing with a number of named 'British Communists in Russia between the Wars', which documents their experiences and reactions to the reality of Soviet life.
Among the life stories presented in the volume there are some that throw new light (for this reader in any event) on specific aspects or episodes of Communist Party history. An example of this is Jack Gaster's role within the Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) of the ILP (Independent Labour Party) eventually culminating in 'resignation en masse' and joining the CP. In this case it is argued that 'Gaster's RPC' was not simply a CP proxy within the ILP but was an attempt to create 'a third way' between social democracy and communism drawing inspiration from older syndicalist traditions and a belief in workers' councils. It was, though, the attraction of the Soviet Union and the existence of an international communist movement that finally drew these ILPers into membership of the CPGB. This, though, should be contrasted with the more manipulative CP-organised entryism in the ILP and Labour Party described by Douglas Hyde in I Believed. Likewise, the chapters on Horner and the Scottish communist miners give a good deal of information on the impact of the Comintern instigated Class Against Class policies, in particular that of 'Revolutionary Trade Unionism' and how it affected the party's leading miners and the different regional responses to it. The chapter on Horner is mostly taken up with the conflict between him and the British Party leadership in 1931 because of his refusal to take a combative line against the South Wales Miners' Federation and condemn its 'defeatism' for ending a strike initiated by the Minority Movement to resist the threat of a wage cut for miners (the South Wales miners were isolated and any prolonged strike would have been suicidal).
An interesting aspect of several of the life stories is how they were at odds with what might have been expected of the people in question and their backgrounds, adding further to the complexity of reasons why certain people joined the party a warning against making automatic assumptions about the reasons what it was that led people into becoming Communists. Thus of Jack Gaster, Gideon Cohen writes:
Contrary to the conclusions of recent work on London Jewish communism, ethnicity provides no explanation of why Jews such as Gaster joined the CPGB. He was not an East End working-class Jew drawn to communism by anti-fascist struggles, despite his prominence as a Communist Councillor for Mile End. (p206)
It might be thought that Randall Swingler's move towards communism would have been linked to a cultural commitment to European modernism but according to Andy Croft, this was not the case here there was no link between the artistic avant-garde and the political or transmission line from cultural modernism to 'political modernism'. Swingler's communism, Croft suggests, was grounded in 'Christian Platonism, evangelical witness, the public school cult of Beauty and Nature, Wykehamist principles of service' and it 'was always partly romantic and partly puritan' (p177).
To return to the possible danger of reducing or ignoring the Soviet dimension in the lives of British communists there is little indication of this in biographical portraits in the book, but obviously its degree and intensity varied greatly from individual to individual. David Howell suggests in the 'Afterword' that the Soviet Union's 'prominence in individual Communist lives varied between individuals, and its significance fluctuated over time.' (p238) William Rust, who as young man 'hitched his star' to the stalinist power apparatus in Moscow and who thereby rose to a leadership position in the CPGB, is obviously an example of a British communist 'umbilically' linked to the Soviet State. Unlike, Pollitt for example, he had no pre-party political history, was 'a Comintern loyalist regardless of the line' (p94) and long nursed ambitions to become party general secretary. As the ultra-loyal apparatchik he bears comparison with party officials in the People's Democracies and Soviet Union and certainly the impression given of him is of someone for whom politics was primarily seen as a means to achieve personal power (although as a political party of protest this element would always have been much more limited than in a party that held power in a state). The revelations about his personal life that a daughter from his first marriage who had been placed in a boarding school for foreign Communists in the Soviet Union, nearly died when caught up in the enforced deportation of Volga Germans underlines his culpability in the crimes of stalinism. He pulled strings to ensure the daughter was eventually brought to safety in Britain but he chose to keep the details of what had happened to his daughter and what she had seen confidential.
The more compromising side of the CP leadership's link with the reality of Stalin's Russia is referred to in the chapter on British Communists in the USSR. 'Visitors and Victims' recounts the details of some those British communists (as the author writes, the whole story is yet to be told) who fell foul of the purges and political repression. The chapter makes copious use of archival sources in Moscow and although the numbers caught up in the 'stalinist meat grinder' were minuscule when set alongside other groups of foreign communists it, nevertheless, makes for sombre reading. How much was known within the leadership or the membership at large about the various figures who went missing?[3] Amongst those from Britain, it was not something restricted to members of the Communist Party.[4] Mirsky, for many years a lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies fell victim to the purges after his return to the Soviet Union. What efforts were made by his former colleagues to discover his fate?[5]
In conclusion Party People is, in this reviewer's opinion, a most thought provoking book that demonstrates how the examination of individual lives can help to illuminate the historical phenomenon of British communism. It is to be hoped that there will be further collections of similarly well-researched biographies of party members (for later periods as well) to accompany the wider synthesising work that will follow from the collection and collation of the mass of details on an increasing number of those who were members of the CPGB.
