COMMUNIST HISTORY
NETWORK NEWSLETTER
No 16, SPRING 2004

Introduction

Welcome to issue 16 of the Newsletter. The Newsletter continues to be made available in multiple formats — with some important amendments to our distribution methods introduced since last issue. The print-version of the Newsletter will continue to be circulated to postal subscribers. The full contents of all issues can be read and accessed on-line at the CHNN website. Copies of the current issue can now be downloaded in both Word and 'PDF' formats from the site. Electronic subscribers will in future receive notification of the publication of a new issue, together with simple instructions on how to download the issue themselves (in their preferred format) from the CHNN website — where a fuller explanation of this change, and the technical reasons behind it, is also available.

With this issue we are appealing to all readers who are able to do so to make a small financial contribution towards the running costs of the Newsletter. Our existing funds are depleted, and we lack sufficient monies to cover future postage, printing and other support costs. Both print and electronic readers who wish to support the CHNN are encouraged to send cheques (made payable to the 'University of Manchester') to Kevin Morgan at the address below, with a short covering note.

The deadline for submissions to issue 17 is 30 September 2004, and contributions are welcomed.

Kevin Morgan
Richard Cross

Editors CHNN
Department of Government
University of Manchester
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL
http://les1.man.ac.uk/chnn

Contents

Editors' introduction

Announcements

• Building the Old Bolsheviks
• A Subversive Third
• Kurt Lewin
• INCOMKA at the Library of Congress

Research Note

• A Revealing Document, Willie Thompson

Thesis Report

• 'British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939', Philip Bounds

Review Essay

• 'Recent work on French and Belgian communism', Kevin Morgan

Reviews

• Cyrille Guiat, The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture, reviewed by Stephen Hopkins
• Matthew Worley (ed), In Search of Revolution: International Communist Politics in the Third Period, reviewed by Brian Pearce
• Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, (edited by Henry Hardy), reviewed by Philip Bounds

Announcements

BUILDING THE OLD BOLSHEVIKS: Dave Harker writes: 'After I started a critique of Trotsky on "culture", the logic of my questions about the relationship of Old Bolsheviks and the working class in general (and "proletarian culture" in particular) drove me back to 1917, 1905, 1903, 1882, 1848 and, eventually, 1825, before I started coming forward again. Preparing a first draft of 'Building the Old Bolsheviks, 1882-1905' I have been struck by how little we seem to know about the original working-class pre-Bolshevik Social Democratic and early Bolshevik cadre, or why Lenin had recurrent problems with intelligenty in general, and those interested in the politics of "proletarian" culture in particular. I am therefore trying to find details of any auto/biographies of working-class pre-Bolshevik "proto-Bolsheviks" published in English (or French), at any period. I am not a Russian specialist and would appreciate any suggestions.' Email:

A SUBVERSIVE THIRD: George Barnsby, who many readers will know as a historian of working people in Birmingham and the Black Country, has published a first instalment of autobiography: Subversive: or one third of the autobiography of a communist. This describes George's experiences growing up in London between the wars and serving in the army in India and Burma. Two appendices provide an account of the Furthest East Rhythm Club in the World (George had a passion for jazz as well as politics) and a facsimile of the soliders' paper he produced in 1942, Red Front. It is fifty pages long and costs £3, include p&p, from Dr George Barnsby, 141 Henwood Rd., Wolverhampton WV6 8PJ.

KURT LEWIN: Bill Cooke writes: 'I am researching the influential German-American social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, who died in 1947. Lewin worked for the OSS in the war, but had extensive German-left connections: for example, Karl Korsch was a very close friend and Lewin also appears to have been a friend of Sergei Eisenstein. Lewin travelled in the USSR in the early 1930s, and also had students from the Soviet Union. I have received copies of some FOIA archive material from the FBI which shows that the CIA investigated him in the mid-1950s, but I am anxious to identify whether there is any information about Lewin in Russian or German archives.' Anybody able to assist with contacts, suggestions or information, please contact: Bill Cooke, Manchester School of Management, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester UK. Email:

INCOMKA AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: John Earl Haynes writes: 'The International Computerization of the Comintern Archive (Incomka) project has opened up at workstation at the Library of Congress which allows researchers to search and view scanned images of 1,059,354 pages of Communist International records held at the Russian State Archives of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. This is approximately 5% of the total volume of Comintern records. A committee of historians of the Incomka project picked the fond/opisi to be scanned. In addition to digitized scanned images, Incomka includes a digitized comprehensive electronically searchable database of Comintern collections at RGASPI. The database is an edited electronic version of the printed finding aids (which total more than 20,000 pages of archival descriptions) allowing rapid computer searches using file descriptors, key words, and personal or organizational names. The database allows rapid location of file descriptions of all of the files containing more than twenty-million pages of the Communist International records at RGASPI. The Incomka database is searchable in both Cyrillic alphabet Russian and Latin alphabet English. At the Library of Congress the Incomka workstation is located in the European Reading Room. Researchers can make printed copies of documents.' For more information about Incomka contact: John Earl Haynes, in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; email:

Research Note

A Revealing Document

Willie Thompson writes: Wholly by accident I came across a document entitled 'Draft Report for Party EC of YCL EC Discussion on Twentieth Congress of the CPSU' and a record of the discussion held by the Executive Committee (subsequently it was renamed the National Committee) of the Young Communist League in the wake of the Khrushchev 'Secret Speech' of February 1956 and the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party in March of that year. The discussion, took place on April 30, attended by ten participants, of whom seven were voting members (this document does not record which were which or the full attendance list). If any women were among the ten they are not recorded as having spoken. This copy was among the records of the Scottish Committee of the Communist Party, which are now stored at Glasgow Caledonian University, and presumably it will also be filed in the CP archive in Manchester.

The proceedings were opened by John Moss, the YCL National Secretary, with a rather bland presentation (it is commented that everyone present had been at the closed session of the party congress) outlining the official narrative regarding what was generally then known of the CPSU 20th Congress. A 'new spirit' was exemplified by fact that 'the people's Democracies were putting wrongs right …' He cited the cases of Rajk, Kostov and Gomulka in support. Claiming that 'There was not the same discussion in the YCL as in the Party', Moss nevertheless asserted that his experience of discussions in YCL branches had been 'healthy'.

Monty Johnstone, who was the editor of the YCL monthly Challenge, is then recorded as making a vehement attack on this complacency by submitting a resolution which (the minute feels it necessary to note is 'drafted by himself'), demanding comprehensive changes both in attitude and practice. Johnstone's critique is wide-ranging (the text is attached to the minute). After welcoming aspects of economic and social improvement in the USSR it expresses 'deepest regret at the crimes against innocent people now revealed'. The use of the word 'crimes' is significant, for this terminology was studiously avoided in the official discourse of the CPGB and YCL, 'mistakes' and 'excesses' being the preferred terms — at most, 'grave abuses'.

The resolution goes on to express hopes for investigations into the police methods used in the show trials, sanctions against the persons responsible, serious analysis of how such things could come about, and finally demands self-criticism on the part of British communists for accepting so easily the Stalin cult and all its implications, and that the party should never again attack or defend 'controversial actions' without adequate evidence and 'careful study'.

In speaking to his resolution Johnstone again referred to 'crimes' (this is capitalised in the text), repudiating the customary euphemisms; quoted Lenin to the effect that a party's seriousness is demonstrated by its analysis of its shortcomings — which had not yet been undertaken by the CPGB. He even declared that socialism and liberty were 'inextricably bound up', noting that a discussion of this sort in relation to socialist perspectives would be necessary if Labour supporters were to be won to the CP.

It was not enough to say that Socialism had been built in the Soviet Union and that the evils exposed at the 20th Congress were therefore of a relatively minor character. Socialism was not just economic successes [though]? these were vital in laying the basis for greater developments in human freedom and happiness … Personal despotism, repression, false trials, extorted confessions and executions not of class enemies but of genuine Socialist revolutionaries were a complete violation of Socialism. The Party and Daily Worker should stop talking only of 'mistakes' and 'excesses' and refer to them as the CRIMES they were.

Des Lock was if anything even more forceful, noting how the Cominform had been dissolved without 'a word of self-criticism' and mentioned the Nuremberg Trial principle that carrying out orders was no defence and yet no-one had been punished for the state crimes - all blame being shifted onto Stalin and Beria. Tony Winsloe spoke in a similar vein, arguing that the perpetrators should be brought to boot [sic — presumably a typo]. The USSR was strong enough to absorb justified criticism.

Gerry Cohen however opposed the resolution 'in its present form' while acknowledging that the British party should have known better, for, he argued, self-criticism was now being carried out and the effect of the revelations on the YCL was largely neutral neither very good nor very harmful. Moreover, he argued, the demands on the Executive Committee made in Johnstone's resolution were 'asking for the impossible' and also — a somewhat bureaucratic consideration — that it would be improper for the YCL to make its views known before the Party EC had met — though it should make its views known to the latter body.

The recorded expressions of views which followed, from Stan Levenson, Colin Sweet, John Moss and Bob Leeson all opposed the resolution and all demonstrated the continuing hold of Soviet loyalism and wish to find justification, even from individuals who were later to be on the renovating wing of the CPGB. A variety of revealing pretexts for rejecting the resolution were advanced — it was pious, it 'cut across the principles of international solidarity', 'excesses' and 'mistakes' were indeed a more appropriate formulation than 'crimes', because 'if seen historically rough justice against the bourgeoisie was necessary' — in general, lessons had been learned and things were being now put right. John Moss himself adhered to the orthodox line, laying responsibility on the cult of the individual and asserting that it would be 'irresponsible' to send resolutions to the EC or the Daily Worker. In any case 'This question was not concerned with Youth'. Once put to the vote the resolution was defeated by four votes to three and it was agreed to draw up a document for the party EC outlining the divergent views — which is presumably this document. Monty Johnstone, though he accepted his defeat and submitted to political discipline even after the Hungarian invasion, was not readily forgiven — not until decades had passed was he permitted to be elected to the party Executive, despite his impressive talents.

The anxieties, uncertainties and excuses revealed by this record in the face of the Khrushchev revelations along with Monty Johnstone's critique of Soviet behaviour and the CPGB's acquiescence in its misdeeds mirror very clearly the situation in the party expressed in the writings and recollections of numerous participants. Evidently the YCL leadership — despite John Moss's claim of less discussion there — was more divided than that of the CP even at this stage, prior to the intensification of the controversy during the summer and the Soviet military repression in Hungary in November — the switch of one vote would have carried the resolution and generated a crisis between the CP and its youth organisation; however the priority of not rocking boats proved to be the instinct of the majority, even if a bare one. Young communists as much as their seniors struggled to find their direction among political upheavals which were overthrowing the foundations of their mental universes.

Willie Thompson

Thesis Report

British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939

This PhD thesis was successfully completed at the University of Wales Swansea in 2003.

This thesis examines the work of the most important literary critics and theorists who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period between 1928 and 1939. Its main concern is to provide a systematic and critical account of the communist understanding of the politics of literature. Its wider objective is to assess the ways in which the 'Party theorists' were influenced by the CPGB's relationship with the world communist movement. The basic argument is that the work of the party theorists had its roots in (1) the political strategies imposed on the CPGB throughout this period by the Communist International, and (2) the body of cultural doctrine enunciated by Soviet intellectuals at the famous Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934. I argue that the party theorists responded creatively to these external influences, usually (though not always) by drawing on ideas from the British tradition of cultural criticism to develop Soviet doctrine in distinctive ways. Moreover, in spite of its debt to Soviet theory, much of the British work on literature and culture was noticeably unorthodox - sometimes consciously so, sometimes not. I argue that these ideas are consistent with the main principles of the so-called 'revisionist' school of CPGB historiography which has emerged over the last 15 years.

The Introduction tries to relate the argument of the thesis to recent revisionist scholarship on the history of the CPGB. It begins by suggesting that the main conclusions of such revisionist historians as Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Worley and Kevin Morgan can roughly be summarised as follows: (1) the CPGB was never entirely subordinate in its relationship with the Communist International (CI) and the Soviet government, (2) the CPGB sometimes played an important role in determining CI policy and always worked creatively to adapt CI policy to British circumstances, and (3) the CPGB was sometimes capable of openly defying the CI, on at least one occasion helping to change its policy as a consequence. I then outline the ways in which these conclusions can be applied not merely to the political history of the party but also to its cultural history. The Introduction is rounded off by a brief account of the origins of British Marxist criticism in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, specifically in the work of William Morris, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling.

Chapter One examines the period between 1928 and 1933 when the CPGB adhered to the CI's notorious 'Class Against Class' policy. It argues that the work of the most important communist critics of the time was strongly influenced by Class Against Class, which isolated communists from the wider labour movement by promulgating a sectarian attitude towards the mainstream trade unions and the 'social-fascist' Labour Party. Section One examines the work of the Anglo-Australian critic P R Stephensen, and considers the claim of his friend Jack Lindsay that he 'founded Marxist literary criticism' in the articles he wrote for The London Aphrodite between 1928 and 1929. I argue that Stephensen's eccentric blend of elitism, negationism and Nietzscheanism reflected the mood of extreme revolutionary febrility which settled on the CPGB as a consequence of Class Against Class. Section Two examines the shared concern with the idea of 'cultural crisis' in the work of John Strachey and Montagu Slater, relating it to the CPGB's attempt to justify Class Against Class by claiming that world capitalism had entered a downturn from which recovery was simply impossible. Section Three examines the communist response to the contemporary fashion for cultural conservatism, relating it to the anti-intellectualism which infected the CPGB in the five years after 1928. After surveying the famous debate between F R Leavis and A L Morton in the pages of Scrutiny (1932-1933), I examine the transitional work of the three important literary intellectuals (Edgell Rickword, Douglas Garman and Alec Brown) who converted to communism in the early 1930s after previously siding with the cultural conservatives.

Chapter Two outlines the main principles of Soviet cultural policy in the 1930s. Its particular focus is the ideas enunciated at the Soviet Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934, since these provided the intellectual framework within which the British communists had to operate for the rest of the 1930s. I suggest that Soviet doctrine at this time contained a 'prescriptive' element (ie. a description and defence of 'Socialist Realism' in the arts), an 'aesthetic' element (ie. a reflectionist, anti-Kantian and anti-Formalist account of art which aimed to justify a political conception of literature), a 'historical' element (ie. an attempt to justify Socialist Realism by pointing to prestigious cultural precedents) and a 'comparative' element (ie. an attempt to argue that the culture of the USSR was infinitely superior to that of the capitalist nations, which had long since descended into 'decadence'). The chapter concludes with an account of published British responses to the Writers' Congress, specifically those of Amabel Williams-Ellis and Montagu Slater.

Chapters Three, Four and Five examine the work of Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell, the three men who are usually regarded as the founders of marxist literary theory in Britain. Chapter Three describes West as a communist of semi-dissident instincts who believed that the world communist movement had tragically lost sight of the cultural aspirations (particularly a yearning for community) which draw people towards revolutionary politics in the first place. The chapter opens with a reading of West's great autobiography One Man in his Time (1969) in which he traces his preoccupation with the idea of community to the experiences of his childhood. I then provide an account of West's seminal work Crisis and Criticism (1937), focusing on the innovative ways in which it responded to Soviet ideas about the nature of cultural crisis and the relationship between form and content. A related section suggests that West's briefer writings of the 1930s can be seen as a veiled expression of opposition to the CI's 'Popular Front' strategy. The chapter concludes with a brief account of West's work in the post-war period, arguing that much of it deepened the dissident perspective of the earlier writings. Chapter Four examines the literary writings of Ralph Fox, especially the posthumously published The Novel and the People (1937). My argument is that Fox's account of the novel can only be understood in relation to the Soviet demand for the portrayal of 'positive heroes' in socialist art. The chapter therefore provides an overview of (1) Fox's attempt to define the novel as an 'epic' form, (2) his attempt to trace the history of the individual hero in the bourgeois novel, and (3) his influential remarks about the aesthetic strategies which socialist writers ought to employ. I argue throughout the chapter that Fox should basically be regarded as a sort of unconscious dissident, in the sense that he often invoked ideas from the liberal tradition which were incompatible with the main principles of marxism. Since the work of Christopher Caudwell has been exhaustively analysed in a number of distinguished essays and monographs, Chapter Five is a brief inter-chapter which sketches a new interpretation of Caudwell's writings. My argument is that Caudwell took his lead from the main principles of Soviet theory (something which has not always been acknowledged in the past) but that he processed them in a way that throws considerable light on the nature of the autodidactic mind. I focus in particular on Caudwell's theory of poetry and his theory of cultural crisis.

Chapter Six explores the consequences for British cultural marxism of the CI's 'Popular Front' strategy against fascism. Its particular focus is the attempt of British communists to combat the influence of fascism by tracing the history of the 'English radical tradition' — a project which had its roots in a famous speech by Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the CI in 1935. After identifying the general principles which informed the communist understanding of English radicalism, I provide a broadly chronological account of the development of the radical tradition at the levels of both politics and culture. There are separate sections on (1) the outbreak of peasants' revolts at the end of the Middle Ages, (2) popular responses to enclosure in the sixteenth century, (3) plebeian radicalism during the English Revolution, (4) the 'Swiftian subversions' of the eighteenth century, and (5) the emergence of modern socialism in the nineteenth century. Each section shows how a range of writers, including Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan and Blake, tried to express the outlook of the radical movement in some of their most important works. The final section of the chapter asks whether the investigation of English radicalism was conducted along orthodox lines (that is, whether it conformed to the principles outlined by Dimitrov in 1935), and examines two theoretical initiatives which grew out of it — one by Edgell Rickword, the other by Jack Lindsay.

The Conclusion of the thesis argues that the communist criticism of the 1930s has exercised an unacknowledged influence on many subsequent developments in British radical criticism, including (1) the emergence of the New Left and the birth of Cultural Studies, (2) the attack on the category of 'literature' in the work of such writers as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, and (3) the emergence of Althusserian and Gramscian strains in literary studies. I finish with a brief attempt to evoke the ethos of the world communist movement's internal culture.

Philip Bounds

Review Essay

Recent work on French and Belgian communism

With the ending of the first flurry of interest that followed the opening up of communist archives in the 1990s, some of the most interesting developments in the literature have been those showing a willingness to engage with wider historiographical concerns and methodologies. In a sense, this has always been the case, and some of the most durable accounts of communist politics have been those successively attesting the influence of the study of political parties, academic sociology and the new social history of the 1970s. In place of the simplified dichotomies that have occasionally featured in the centre-periphery debate, the relations between centre and periphery are increasingly being explored at a number of different levels (social, cultural, institutional and prosopographical), shifting over time and acknowledging specificities of context. Issues of language, memory, subjectivity and the construction of communist identities are seen to play a crucial role in the culture of stalinism, as do representations of the leader, the activist, the worker, and of gender, class and nation. The old debate around the party as transmission belt, centring on the execution or lack of it of instructions from above, is giving way to more complex narratives in which linear cause and effect have to be reconciled with the constantly shifting composition of communist parties themselves and of their relations with their host societies. Established periodisations interact with national chronologies involving existential issues such as whether or not a communist party could legally function, whether its leadership was located at home or in Moscow and how far it was subjected to the formative disciplines and physical threat associated with the latter. In a period of extreme ambivalence like that of the Popular Front, the combination of tightening controls at the centre and loosening ones at the periphery produced experiences ranging from virtual obliteration, as in the case of the Polish party, to the reputed 'heyday' of communism in a country like the USA. While by common consent the character of the centre-periphery debate has, at least in Britain, become somewhat 'esoteric', it is in the exploration of the complexities underlying the old bipolar model that future lines of enquiry are likely to develop.

There is not better place to start than with these texts published over the past four years in France and, in one case, Belgium. Precisely because the international dimension of communism is so important, the cross-fertilisation of its historiography across national boundaries provides particular opportunities for the opening up of more critical perspectives. Not only can the subject-matter of different communist parties provide a stimulus to comparison, but different historiographies provide an insight into alternative methodologies and intellectual traditions and their particular applications for the historian of communism. In relation to the literature under review, the development of a rich intellectual tradition in the field of prosopography and political sociology is particularly evident. Though debate over the PCF's policy at key moments like 1939-40 has naturally been intense, the party's sheer social presence also imposed itself on the historian of twentieth-century France, raising questions and demanding explanation at some level going beyond the simple party-line approach. Historians came to these questions from a variety of angles. If in one aspect the work of Annie Kriegel represented the work of the disillusioned former communist, the 'ethnographic' approach she adopted opened up wide-ranging questions concerning the cultural values and institutional disciplines holding together what she saw as a communist counter-society. Something of Kriegel's approach was taken forward by the journal Communisme, which she founded in 1982, but there was also a good deal of common ground with what Bernard Pudal describes as the 'axe "Institut Maurice Thorez-Sciences Po"' — younger communist historians exploring a less mythologised version of their own party's past, and inter-disciplinary studies emanating from the academic community and particularly the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris.[1] Among these academic studies, probably the best known to English-speaking readers is Georges Lavau's conception of the tribune party, while Pudal's own Prendre parti, published in 1989 and described as a 'historical sociology', was another major achievement.[2] At the same time, communists formed a significant population for the editors of the Maitron, the biographical dictionary of the French working-class movement, and with access to the party's 'cadre' files a flourishing literature on and around the issue of communist biography was quickly established. Beyond the burgeoning historiography of the PCF, contributions by international specialists like José Gotovitch in Belgium and Brigitte Studer in Switzerland opened up further opportunities for a comparative perspective.

None of this amounts to an orthodoxy, and it is explicitly intended not to. However, to the extent that this literature is informed by an overall theoretical framework it is to be found in the collection Le siècle des communismes, and the deliberate plural emphasis of its title. Edited by a group of scholars including Pudal, the collection is presented as an antidote to the style of indiscriminate polemic which Stéphane Courtois brought to the famous Livre noir, and like the Black Book itself it ranges beyond the Comintern and its European preoccupations to take in Soviet communism, China, Latin America and the Arab world. Of special interest to the comparative historian are the opening and closing sections on interpretations of communism and its political sociology respectively. The first of them includes an interesting essay in comparative historiography by Pudal and Bruno Groppo, suggesting how the well-worn contrast/comparison between the French and Italian communist parties can also be developed instructively in relation to their respective historiographies. There are also two worthwhile contributions by Brigitte Studer, one on the 'new communist woman', and the other providing a cogent evaluation of the development of traditional, revisionist and post-revisionist historiographies of communism. Here as elsewhere Studer argues for the increasingly 'transnational' character of communist historiography, which could cover a multitude of sins. If however it means not the sweeping application of general rules, but a sensitivity to both variations and commonalities running across national boundaries, then Le siècle des communismes may be taken as an impressive validation of the transnational approach.

The volume also contains contributions by Pudal and Claude Pennetier, the editor of the Maitron, on cadre formation and the role of leadership cults. Of considerable interest in themselves, these provide an introduction to an extraordinarily productive seam of biography and prosopography which several of the works under review draw upon in different forms. Probably the most conventional is the biographical dictionary Komintern: l'histoire et les hommes. This is a meticulous work of collective scholarship produced under the auspices of the Maitron and provides nearly five hundred biographical profiles relating to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxemburg. As well as covering communists from these countries exercising Comintern functions the dictionary also includes international leaders and functionaries from the perspective of their relations with and impact upon the French-speaking countries. As the editors point out, the dictionary is to some extent complementary to existing biographical dictionaries in emphasising those aspects of its subjects' lives most directly touching upon relations with the Comintern. On the other hand, access to information from Comintern personal files means that a vast amount of new biographical data is made available. Certain major figures like Jacques Duclos, who has not yet found a biographer (except, at inordinate length, himself), are the subject of essays comparable with a Dictionary of Labour Biography entry in this country. Though essentially a work of reference rather than analysis, the volume also includes a substantial introduction to the principal themes and issues of Comintern history by Serge Wolikow, who also provides a shorter literature review in Le siècle des communismes. Covering historiography, institutional structures, political cultures and the development of ideology and strategy, Wolikow provides a more discursive account which can usefully be read alongside the excellent short Comintern history of Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew.[3]

Also relatively conventional in format is Jean Vigreux' carefully documented biography of Waldeck Rochet. Successor to the longstanding PCF general secretary Maurice Thorez, after the latter's death in 1964 Rochet offered the prospect of a Khrushchev or even Dubcek-like modernisation of the PCF and its opening out to the changing social and political realities of post-war France and the particular challenge of alliance-building. As Vigreux demonstrates, Rochet won a good deal of respect for this approach from figures like Mitterand and it remains an open question how much further the process might have been taken had he not retired on grounds of health at the end of 1969. That, however, is a story in itself. The previous year Rochet had led the PCF in its first ever condemnation of the Russians over the suppression of the Prague Spring, and both the timing of his retirement and the fact that he was operated upon in Moscow shortly beforehand has naturally given rise to a good deal of speculation. Vigreux on the whole is somewhat dismissive of what are so far unproven theories regarding the state of Rochet's health, and he makes some telling points about the tendentious use of historical evidence that has sometimes characterised them. Nevertheless, on no evidence whatsoever except the weight of transnational expectations, this reviewer for one would be more surprised if the archives turned out to exonerate the Soviets from any role involvement than the reverse.

Vigreux is one of the few established authorities on the Krestintern, the Profintern's peasant equivalent, and has contributions on these themes in both Le siècle des communismes and Cultures communistes. From a British perspective one of the most striking aspects of Rochet's biography is the extent to which he bore with him the hallmark of his rural upbringing, for the CPGB of course had no Krestintern presence and no leader describable like Rochet as a 'man of the soil'. Perhaps the nearest equivalent was (and is) George Matthews, the son of a Bedfordshire farmer and the party's sometime assistant general secretary and editor of the Daily Worker. However, that only underlines the differences, for Matthews's university education and middle-class status again suggest by default the absence in Britain of any significant tradition of plebeian rural radicalism.[4] Rochet and Matthews might also suggest a further possible distinction, for whereas Rochet represented an older, 'Leninist' generation, sifted out on the basis of social class and in Rochet's case educated at the Lenin School, Matthews belonged to the Popular Front cohort of the 1930s' youth and student movement. By the time of Rochet's brief ascendancy, so too did a number of the CPGB's leading functionaries including Klugmann, Alexander, Ramelson and even - rather stretching the point - the general secretary Gollan.[5] One of the interesting questions for the historian of the CPGB is why the generational cohort represented by Rochet, and more specifically those trained at the Lenin School, should have played a far less prominent role in the post-war party leadership than it did in several other countries.[6]

One of Vigreux' most interesting chapters offers an account of the contested versions of Rochet and his political legacy not only within the PCF but across the political spectrum. Stéphane Sirot's book on Maurice Thorez provides a series of essays on similar themes from a number of different perspectives. In Thorez's case, the functions of the conventional biographer had to some extent already been met by Philippe Robrieux, though with the opening of the archives there is surely now scope for a more definitive study. Sirot's object here, however, is rather different, and to some exent builds on Pudal's work in exploring the diverse constructions and representations of Thorez's life, whether by the PCF, its detractors, its historians or - after a fashion - Thorez himself. He has a fascinating chapter revisiting the controversy over Thorez's vaunted identification with the coalfields, which was so important to his credibility as a self-proclaimed 'son of the people'. Refuting claims advanced by Robrieux, Sirot records that Thorez spent some three hundred working days in the mines and politically locates him within the tradition of the miners' deputy as well as the political rupture identified with bolshevism. This seems a significant but still rather limited qualification, at least if one compares Thorez with his British analogue Pollitt. Pollitt, after all, had accumulated a decade and a half of industrial experience before the Communist Party was even formed and continued working at his trade until he was thirty-seven. Similarly, while the significance of Thorez's participation in the 1923 and 1925 CGTU congresses is rightly pointed out by Sirot, the CGTU's close identification with the PCF means that politically speaking this was a rather different sort of grounding in union work from that provided by the TUC and its affiliates in Britain. Born a decade after Pollitt in 1900, Thorez appears from this perspective as part of a younger 'Leninist' generation politically formed with, and as a part of, the Communist Party.

Perhaps the comparison can be traced at the level of the two leaders' published autobiographies. Here in particular, Sirot draws on the work of Pennetier and Pudal, who in Le siècle des communismes and elsewhere have stressed the peculiar anonymity of Thorez's Fils du peuple as an 'apprenticeship manual of the 'perfect leader"' lacking any distinctive trait or experience setting him apart from the party. Indeed, not only does Fils du peuple itself lack any sort of individualisation, but it appears from a list compiled by Pennetier and Pudal in one of the other works under review that this was the only autobiography of a living French communist published until 1967.[7] Again, a comparison of the PCF and the CPGB in this regard raises some interesting questions. In grouping Fils du peuple with a series of lives embodying the depersonalised leadership cults of the Stalin era, Sirot cites William Gallacher's Revolt on the Clyde (1936) as an early prototype. Reasonable as that seems, it is not entirely clear that Gallacher's volume will bear this construction. For a start, it is no less individualised than many other British labour movement memoirs. Just as significantly, it deals almost exclusively with the somewhat mythologised pre-bolshevik past that set Gallacher apart from his younger contemporaries - the very reverse of Fils du peuple. The same was even more true of Pollitt's Serving My Time 1940), the nearest British equivalent to Fils du peuple, explicitly intended for the same exemplary functions and yet unmistakeably conveying a sense of something lost as well as gained since the appearance of communism. This is an issue I have explored more fully elsewhere, and to the extent that the construction of these exemplary lives played a defining role in the political culture of communist parties, then differences in their frequency, tone, scope, language, content and market will bear more detailed examination as a line of comparative enquiry.[8]

Further comparative reflections are stimulated by two very fine collections of essays broadly coming under the rubric 'political sociology'. The first of them, Militantisme et militants is not specifically concerned with communist activism[9] but gives a taste of the wider literature on which the more specialised accounts of communism draw, and to which they contribute their own distinct perspective. The nineteen essays cover themes ranging from the psychology of activism and the gendered construction of the activist to the role of the militant in a wide variety of movements, from the Christian trade unions to the Red Brigades. There is also an interesting contribution on the 'traitor' by Guy Desolré, confirming the renewed interest in the 'renegade' or the 'rat' which has naturally accompanied the interest in less teleological narratives of the left. Of more specific interest to historians of communism are the chapters by Rémi Skoutelsky on volunteers in the International Brigades and Henri Wehenkel on communist activism in Luxemburg. Skoutelsky's chapter contains the interesting information that Spanish veterans were marginalised within the PCF almost as they were in Eastern Europe - witness the purging of André Marty, discussed by Pennetier and Pudal in the same volume - and this again raises an interesting question: why, if one thinks of cases like Peter Kerrigan and the aforementioned Alexander and Ramelson, does this not appear to have been the case in Britain? Pennetier and Pudal again have two of the most interesting contributions, one discussing the mimetic phenomenon of purges within the PCF, the other describing the working-class militant as a sort of archetype of the activist, just as in some respect the communist cadre in turn embodied in an extreme form many of the generic characteristics of the working-class activist.

If a single volume can be recommended as an introduction to this body of literature, it is Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux. The book is divided into three sections, and the highlight of the first of these, on the USSR in the 1930s, is a powerful commentary by Berthold Unfried on the role of self-criticism in the Comintern, particularly the Lenin School. Unfried shows the crucial role of self-criticism, both as an affirmation of identity with the party and a purging of all that was pernicious in the communist's 'former personality'. He also describes how communists formed in a western cultural environment had difficulty in assimilating these requirements - the French-speaking sector of the school were accused of practising 'l'autocritique à la française' - and how with the mounting terror of the 1930s they became identified as a threat to socialist construction almost by their very existence. Like so many of the contributions, based extensively on materials in the Moscow archives, the chapter makes for sombre reading. A second section is devoted to the communist institutional biographies, on which Pennetier and Pudal themselves are established as leading authorities. Here their analysis is supplemented by contributions on the use of biographical controls at the district or federal level and within the Italian communist party. The book's final section is devoted to communist memory and autobiography particularly in the post-war period, and includes contributions on Italy and Czechoslovakia as well as France. Pennetier and Pudal again contribute, here analysing the published autobiographies of the PCF's 'sons of the people', and they also provide a substantial introduction discussing the role of the biographical 'tryptich' of 'party autobiography, self-criticism, confession' in the political culture of stalinism. This is a theme that would bear fuller exploration in the case of the CPGB. Though collected in line with international practices, in Britain the autobiographies were compiled less frequently, by fewer communists, and in many cases none can be found at all. That their number peaked sharply at the time of the show trials of the late 1930s and again during the Cold War suggests the importance of the external impetus, but at the same time there were criticisms from within the CPGB concerning the largely formalistic way it promoted self-criticism.[10] Precisely those themes traced by Unfried in a Moscow context would also repay study at a national level.

The final collection, Cultures communistes, is the latest in a series of volumes emerging from international conferences held at the University of Dijon. Loosely organised around the twin themes of war and modernity, the collection again bears out the claim of an emerging transnational historiography, taking in the mainly oppositional communist movements of the west as well as communism in power in Russia and China. The specific topics addressed range widely, from communist attitudes to commercial sport and the 'exaltation' of modernity in L'Humanité, to the role which the culture and/or organisation of war played in both stalinism - and in Gilles Vergnon's contribution - trotskyism, as well as the bolshevism in which they had their common root. A number of the contributions enter into fields of recent controversy, notably Nicolas Werth's very lucid discussion of violence in the Russian revolution and Bruno Groppo's rebuttal of the reduction of 'anti-fascism' to a simple tool of communism, as found in the work of François Furet and others.

The themes provide an effective focus for most of the contributions, and yet there are sufficient hints in some of them that communism also needs to be understood in terms including resistance to war and the rejection of many forms of modernity.[11] Perhaps that would make the subject of another volume. At the crudest level, it was the capitalists' wars and conceptions of modernity that communists rejected, and their own versions of the same that functioned as a sort of ideological glue. 'Battling' for peace while celebrating the might of the Red Army, or defending forms of industrial rationalisation in the USSR that were the focus of resistance in the west, it might be said that these were only seeming tensions and ambiguities: the basic underlying consistency was 'which side were you on?' However, if we are to think in terms of communisms plural, and not the now untenable concept of a simple monolith, then the coexistence of these different communisms even at the level of individual helps explain the countless personal movements in relation to the party that were so marked a feature of communism, at least in countries and periods where its formal disciplines were relatively weak. Some of these communisms contained an implicit critique of some of the others, and if that could be suppressed indefinitely by a process of doublethink, it also explains why those breaking with orthodox communism so often did so in the name of communism or its founding precepts. Part of the reality of anti-fascism, as an ex-communist like Furet might have realised, was that recruits of this period provided such a very high proportion of the anti-stalinists leaving the party in 1956.

As a sample of work published over the past four years, these contributions on the whole are of an extraordinarily high quality and open up fruitful lines of enquiry that will bear a good deal of further exploration. For those committed to a communist historiography that is rigorous, critical and transnational in scope, while retaining the plural form which is commensurate with the subject's complexity and longevity, these volumes will provide an indispensable point of reference and comparison.

Kevin Morgan

1.	Le siècle des communismes, p75. [ Back ]
2.	Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989. [ Back ]
3.	Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern. A history of international communism from Lenin to Stalin, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. [ Back ]
4.	According to his son, Pollitt ruled out Matthews for the key symbolic role of CPGB general secretary because he did not have a working-class background. [ Back ]
5.	Born into a working-class family nackground in 1911, Gollan was a communist from the age of sixteen and edited the Young Worker during the latter part of the Class Against Class period. However, he did not attend the Lenin School and made his political mark as secretary of the YCL from 1935. [ Back ]
6.	For preliminary thoughts, see Gidon Cohen and Kevin Morgan, 'Stalin's sausage machine. British students at the International Lenin School, 1926-37', Twentieth Century British History, 13, 4, 2002. [ Back ]
7.	See Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste, pp240-6. [ Back ]
8.	See Kevin Morgan, 'Sons of the people: Harry Pollitt, Maurice Thorez and the construction of exemplary communist lives' in Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds), Power, Personality and Persuasion: the Impact of the Individual in British Politics Since 1867, I.B. Tauris, forthcoming, 2005. As my knowledge is confined to works available in English or French, I should be particularly interested to hear from anybody pursuing similar questions on works in other languages. [ Back ]
9.	I have throughout used the terms 'activist' and activism as what seems the closest equivalent to the French term militantisme. [ Back ]
10.	For example by the executive member and future maoist George Thomson. [ Back ]
11.	I have throughout used the terms 'activist' and activism as what seems the closest equivalent to the French term militantisme. [ Back ]

Reviews

The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture

Cyrille Guiat, The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture, London and Portland, Or: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003; ppxix + 209. ISBN 0-7146-5332-2.

This well-researched study analyses cultural policy in two communist-run municipalities in Ivry-sur-Seine and Reggio Emilia, between the 1960s and 1980s, and attempts to use this focused comparison to shed light upon the broader contrast that is often drawn in the literature between the French (PCF) and Italian (PCI) communist parties. Essentially, the hypothesis tested by Guiat centres upon the contention that the PCF in this period remained an orthodox marxist-leninist party, sectarian in its attitudes to potential allies, and pro-Soviet in outlook. On the other hand, the PCI is often depicted as moderate and heterodox, a party that had consciously rejected the bolshevik model, and was embarked upon a 'strategy veering towards Western-style democracy and reformism.' (pxvii)

Borrowing a striking metaphor from Marc Lazar's Maisons rouges (1992), a comparative study of the two communist parties/movements, which has clearly had a strong influence upon Guiat's approach to the subject, the author proceeds by investigating these 'two satellites, which having been launched simultaneously, started to follow increasingly divergent trajectories.' (ibid) Adapted from a doctoral thesis, the book includes a useful, though not always uncontroversial, survey of the existing literature on the post-war development of the PCF and PCI, before moving on to justify the methodological choices pursued. Then, two chapters deal with the case-studies in depth, before Guiat concludes, provocatively, that the crucial explanation for the divergent trajectories were what he calls international or teleological factors, as opposed to the respective parties' national or societal implantation. Specifically, he argues that paradoxically, 'it seems that the PCI was only able to prioritise its national, societal dimension primarily because of international factors such as the geopolitics of the Soviet Union' (p173), and the key international role played by PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, during the Comintern period (up until 1943) and beyond, which is contrasted to the relative lack of autonomy enjoyed by the PCF, and its leader during the same era, Maurice Thorez.

In his introduction, and his comprehensive review of the literature, Guiat makes the claim that much of the existing material comparing these parties suffers from the fact that they are 'distorted by political motives.' (pxvii). Guiat hopes that his micro-political case-studies will offer an antidote to this ideological poison, a weakness that infected studies of west European communism, particularly during the Cold War. However, although an author's ideological stance is undoubtedly significant, and ought to be transparent, it is not clear whether Guiat's implicit claim to neutrality or objectivity can really stand up. While he is, rightly, quick to point out that 'the historical production of communist historians was closely monitored [by the party leadership], at least until the 1970s' (p4), his claim that 'history was used for reasons of political expediency', and that 'to PCF leaders history was not an independent endeavour' (ibid), requires, in my view, some balancing discussion of anti-communist, as opposed to merely non-communist or scholarly, literature. According to Guiat, there was some evolution in the approach of communist historians and sympathisers from the Eurocommunist era onwards, which permitted a historiography of the PCF and PCI that moved beyond the 'official histories', and challenged the boundaries of leadership censorship and ideological orthodoxy. This relative relaxation was still deeply problematic for Guiat, because authors like Georges Lavau and Jacques Fauvet continued to see the PCF as 'first and foremost a French political party interacting with its national environment.' (p9). Guiat is forceful in his critique of these authors, and their focus upon the 'national-societal' dimension of the study of west European communism, arguing that 'by focusing on the implantation of the PCF, its strategy, its electorate, its membership or its municipalities, they systematically underestimate the international dimension…[which was] central to every aspect of its existence.' (p11, emphasis added). Later on, Guiat appears to row back somewhat from this claim, endorsing Tony Judt's 'methodological plea to find a balance between the "interior" (domestic) and "exterior" (international) histories of these parties' (p16). One potential reason for the perception that much of the literature underplays or even ignores the international dimension, concerns the fact that a good deal of this analysis was published during the explosion of interest in the west European communist parties during the Eurocommunist era (approximately the decade from the early 1970s until the early 1980s). This was precisely the period when national and societal dimensions of these parties' activities were brought to the fore.

In his discussion of the work of Annie Kriegel, Guiat clearly sympathises with her judgment that the PCF 'is irrevocably foreign, an import or a "transplant"' (p17), and with Stéphane Courtois' claim that the French communists 'acted at the end of the Second World War as a mere tool in the Soviet geopolitical game.' (p18; emphasis added) Further on, Guiat argues that this 'strong emphasis on the international dimension of French communism did not amount to total neglect of its national/societal face.' (p21) There are a couple of relevant points to make here: first, in practice, to suggest that the international or teleological dimension of western communist parties' activity was paramount is certainly possible, but surely what is required for a genuine historical understanding of the development of these parties is a methodology that integrates these two dimensions, rather than portraying them as necessarily dichotomous; second, the Kriegelian view begs the following question: did the majority, or even a large minority, of ordinary members of west European communist parties have knowledge and understanding of their parties' secret international role as agents of the Soviet Union? If we assume that these members were duped by the party leaderships, sometimes over the course of political lifetimes, they nevertheless acted, and were treated by some within their national and local societies, as if they themselves and the parties to which they belonged were fully engaged in the political life of those societies. This activity had real consequences, helping to mould the development of these political systems, and in this sense the west European communist experience and history cannot be properly understood as inauthentic or not really genuine, which is one implication of Kriegel's formulation. As an aside, it is surely relevant that Kriegel was herself, like François Furet, an ex-member of the PCF, something that Guiat neglects to mention.

The international dimension of these parties' experience is often rendered here as merely faithful compliance by the PCF and (to a lesser extent) the PCI to the directives of the Comintern or Stalin or the Soviet geopolitical interest, but Guiat's own argument regarding the role of Togliatti in the Comintern and afterwards, and his capacity to 'understand and negotiate with Stalin' (p170), suggests that this power relationship, while certainly asymmetrical, may be more complex than the two-dimensional model allows. Is Togliatti primarily to be understood as an actor for the 'centre', helping to impose 'homogeneity, cohesion and unity on all communist parties' (as Courtois and Lazar put it, cited by Guiat, p22), or as leader of a national communist movement, seeking to influence and adapt the practice of communist ideology at both national and international levels? In the end, this debate has been a long-standing one in communist historiography, and Guiat cannot be expected to resolve it. His focused comparative methodology and his detailed case-studies are original and significant contributions to our understanding of the PCF and PCI in the post-war period, even if they don't necessarily make his broader perspective concerning rival interpretations of communist history absolutely compelling.

Stephen Hopkins
Department of Politics, University of Leicester

This review will also appear in a future issue of Perspectives on European Politics and Society.

In Search of Revolution

Matthew Worley (ed), In Search of Revolution — International Communist Politics in the Third Period, I.B. London: I B Tauris, 2004, ppxii & 379, ISBN 1-85043-407-7.

With two introductory essays, one by the editor and the other by John Callaghan, this book assembles articles by several specialists on the history of the following communist parties: German, British, Italian, French, Yugoslavian, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Chinese, Indian, South African and Brazilian - during the Comintern's so-called Third Period, between the Sixth (1928) and Seventh (1935) World Congresses. The contributors are Norman LaPorte, Aldo Agosti, Stephen Hopkins, Geoffrey Swain, Carlos Cunha, Tim Rees, James Ryan, John Manley, Stuart Macintyre, Kerry Taylor, Patrician Stranahan, Allison Drew and Marco Santana.

For those who approach the history of communism in a spirit of mockery, the Third Period has presented an easy target, with its way-out sectarianism and over-the-top wishful thinking. This reviewer once heard a lecturer speaking of the 'folly' of the communists in those years, and getting a rebuke from Gerry Healy, who interjected that 'some heroic things' were done at that time. As a trotskyist, Healy was no apologist for the Third Period policies, but he resented such a dismissal of actions like 'Bloody May Day' in Berlin in 1929, when communists asserted the workers' right to demonstrate in the streets, challenging the ban imposed by the social-democratic police chief Zörgiebel. Heroism and folly can, of course, coincide, as in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and neither rules out the other.

It is well-known that the ending of the Third Period in 1934-5 was welcomed by many communists, but not so well-known that its inception had also been welcomed by many. A British communist is quoted here (p65) on how the turn to the left 'accorded completely with our mood of frustration and despair… our desire for something short, sharp and spectacular to end the hopeless stalemate of our existence'. The policies of the 'Second Period', such as the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, had got the party nowhere, fast, and had left some workers wondering what a communist party was actually for. When the old leadership was evicted in 1929, a group of YCLers, singing the Internationale, put special gusto into the line: 'And at last ends the age of Cant.' Cant was also the name of one of the ousted 'right-opportunist' members of the central committee.

Among the merits of these articles is their testimony to how widespread this mood was at the end of the 1920s. They also show that, if this mood among sections of the rank and file was encouraged rather than restrained by the Comintern leadership, the reason was that a sharp leftward turn in the international movement, shipwrecking right-wing elements, corresponded to the political needs of the dominant faction in Moscow at that time. The fight against the 'Right' in the Russian Communist Party was being 'internationalised'. The articles show how Moscow utilised for this purpose the impatient and ambitious leaders of the communist youth, especially by training them in the new spirit at the International Lenin School.

Some historians of the revisionist tendency, keen to play down the role of Moscow in the world movement, have emphasised the occasions when a particular communist party modified its ultra-left line, and have presented them as proofs of that party's independence. However, we are reminded here that it was 'not by accident' (p11) that the centre's warning in 1930 to the parties to keep a focus on workers' partial demands coincided with Stalin's 'Dizzy with Success' letter. The British CP's Harry Pollitt deserves credit not for a non-existent defiance of Moscow but for adroitly taking advantage of the opportunities offered by modifications in Moscow's outlook and divisions among what the Germans called the 'High Comrades'. These articles will give little comfort to anyone trying to create an image of the CPGB which will appeal to 'democratic socialists' (social-democrats?), an almost cuddly image of a party essentially engaged in exemplary trade-union work, for its own sake, and ignoring the noises-off that came from some place abroad — about which the less said the better.

Despite some local and momentary successes, the effect of the Third Period policies was, on balance, to cripple the movement on the world scale. Even where, as in Germany, the party gained members in those years, this progress was accompanied by sharpening hostility between them and the majority of the organised and politically conscious workers. Did the Third Period have any positive results for the communists? In one way, perhaps. Its 'sectarianism… by promoting an outrageous sense of political and moral superiority, stiffened Communists' will to tackle unfavourable circumstances' (p239). What were left of the communists by 1934 were 'highly disciplined, hard and driving, prepared by their formative experiences for the hostility they would encounter when shifts of policy would require them to endure it (p266) — as was to happen, notably, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939-41.

When, at the Seventh World Congress in 1935, the communists in certain imperialist countries (France and Great Britain) were given permission - encouraged, even - to play the patriotic card, this seemed to the less well-informed to be something new in principle. In fact, however, the communists in Germany (an imperialist country, in Lenin's sense, if ever there was one) had been incited to 'go nationalist' already in the Third Period. The article on the German Communist Party by Norman LaPorte is one of the best in this collection, and it describes well the KPD's fatal striving to compete with the Nazis in the propaganda of revanchisme.

As part of the process of conditioning the USSR for full-scale stalinism, a war scare had been whooped up there from 1927 onward, with France presented as the immediate threat to the workers' fatherland, and so a key feature of the Third Period was activity to bring down 'the Versailles system'. The German social democrats, with their policy of 'fulfilment' of the peace treaty, were therefore the 'social-fascists' par excellence. However, connected features of the Third Period, not mentioned in this book, were alliance with Croat separatists and intensified support for Bulgarian irredentism, both aimed at destabilising Yugoslavia, a main pillar of the 'Versailles system'.

Among my personal relics of the Third Period is a speech by Thorez in the French Chamber of Deputies in 4 April 1933, published by the French CP as a pamphlet and purchased by me at the party's Paris bookshop in the summer of that year. It bore the title Alsace-Lorraine under the Yoke. Making his contribution to the fight against 'Versailles', and speaking two months after Hitler had come to power in Germany, Thorez called for the Alsatians and Lorrainers (a nation, he claimed, according to Stalin's criteria) to be given the right to separate from France. The demand for autonomy within France which had been raised by a section of the population of 'the three départements' was 'not sufficient'.

Perhaps history's principal verdict on the Third Period must be that its most important consequence was the disarmament, and worse, of Europe's working class before the onset of German imperialism in its fascist form. The Third Period was initiated in Moscow, and Moscow itself paid dear in June 1941 for what had seemed to its decision-makers a good idea at the time.

Brian Pearce

The Soviet Mind

Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, (edited by Henry Hardy, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004, £20, hardback, ISBN 0-8157-0904-8.

Isaiah Berlin is still portrayed by his admirers as a sort of scholarly saint. Appalled by the communist thugs whose lies poured out from his native Russia, Berlin was quite incapable (or so the argument goes) of distorting or suppressing the truth in the service of a political cause. While deeply liberal in his instincts (and indeed more authentically 'pluralistic' than the Enlightenment thinkers whose example he wished to keep alive) he never allowed himself to become a hired gun in the Cold War - the only thing that ever mattered to him was the disinterested pursuit of the truth. It is hardly surprising that this tendentious caricature should have come under heavy fire from the left. In recent years a number of marxist and marxisant thinkers, notably Terry Eagleton in a scathing article in his recent collection Figures of Dissent (2003), have identified a series of contradictions in Berlin's work which clearly arise from a species of political hypocrisy. Berlin might have had a 'lifelong horror of violence' (the phrase is Henry Hardy's) but he never objected to US violence in the Middle East and Asia. His benign attitude towards the managers and politicians who keep the capitalist system running was hardly consistent with his loathing of communist apparatchiks. And, so far as we can tell, his suspicion of utopianism did not extend to the pie-in-the-sky maxims which underscore market ideology.[1] One of the most interesting things about The Soviet Mind, a fascinating collection of Berlin's writings on the culture of the USSR, is that it provides further evidence of precisely this talent for subordinating scholarly virtue to the demands of politics.

The core of the book is three lengthy papers on the Soviet government's attempt to shape Russian culture along 'Leninist-Stalinist' lines, each of them inspired by Berlin's brief period as an official at the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945. 'The Arts in Russia under Stalin' was one of two memoranda which Berlin submitted to the Foreign Office after returning to Britain, while 'The Artificial Dialectic' and 'Soviet Russian Culture' were published in Foreign Affairs in 1951 and 1957 respectively. There is a yawning tension between the empirical and the theoretical aspects of these writings. On the one hand, in spite of describing Soviet culture as straightforwardly totalitarian, Berlin makes it clear that the Russian government was never able to achieve complete control over literature and the arts. He accepts that the 1920s saw an extraordinary flowering of the avant-garde, not least in the work of the 'anti-liberal' modernists who formed the Left Front of Art (LEF) in 1925, and he recognises that the Soviet authorities did much to encourage it - there is no attempt to sneer at the fusion of political militancy and formal experimentation in the work of such men as Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. There is also a surprisingly balanced account of the shift towards a more authoritarian cultural policy in the 1930s. While rightly condemning the government's attempt to suppress modernism and impose an aesthetic of 'Socialist Realism' on all Soviet artists, Berlin also acknowledges that many writers were protected from the worst excesses of the new policy for at least three years after its introduction in 1934. This was in part because of the continued influence of Maxim Gorky, whose passion for literature outweighed (or at least balanced out) his loyalty to the bolshevik cause. The terrible pogrom against writers and artists which began in 1937 and consigned the likes of Mandelstam, Blok and Pilnyak to the Gulag (this assumes that they had not been shot before they got there) only really lasted for two years. What is truly surprising about Berlin's survey of the 'Ezhov terror' is his emphasis on how quickly the thaw set in. Once the USSR had been dragged into the war, Berlin argues, the Soviet government was taken completely by surprise by the demand for non-political literature which arose among ordinary soldiers. This led to a situation in which the work of Russia's most 'subjective' writers, many of whom had been murdered in the course of the previous couple of years, was suddenly allowed to circulate without restrictions. Books and manuscripts by Blok, Bely and Tsvetaeva seem to have been passed around in the trenches as eagerly as cigarettes. The new climate also enabled anti-bolshevik survivors such as Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova to emerge from hiding and hold astonishingly successful public readings, usually in front of mass audiences who could recite their poetry more fluently than they could themselves.

If Berlin had assessed his own data without prejudice, he would surely have concluded that the history of Soviet culture revealed the limits of totalitarianism - time and again, in the unlikeliest circumstances, things had happened which prevented the Soviet government from having everything its own way. Yet such a conclusion was clearly unacceptable to him. He therefore found it necessary to devise a theory which portrayed the limited freedoms of Soviet culture as a sort of Machiavellian hoax, the means by which Stalin and his entourage could reinforce their power while seeming to undermine it. At any rate, this seems to have been the motivation behind the theory of stalinist governance which Berlin outlined in his two articles in Foreign Affairs. According to Berlin, Stalin was aware that there are two things which tend to threaten the stability of revolutionary governments. The first is the sectarian anger which occurs when people start to believe that revolutionary objectives are being downgraded, and which invariably results (as in the Jacobin period in France) in the sort of frenzied purges which traumatise the entire society. The second, usually the product of the enormous gap between the revolution's objectives and its short-term achievements, is a mood of de-politicising cynicism which leads to alliances with (or at least tolerance of) all sorts of non-revolutionary forces. Berlin's argument is that Stalin tried to guard against these dangers by producing purges and thaws under controlled conditions. Employing an 'artificial dialectic' which reflected his extreme sensitivity to the moods of his fellow countrymen, Stalin's first tactic was to plunge the USSR into a series of containable purges — that is, he ensured that his attacks on 'anti-Soviet' forces were always launched before the frustrations which underscored them became too explosive. He then sought to defuse the atmosphere of terror by introducing a period of guarded liberalisation in which a rapprochement with non-communist forces was again seen as acceptable. Thaw followed purge and purge followed thaw in a consciously planned sequence. Since it was never possible to relax government control in the spheres of economics or politics, liberalisation only occurred in areas of Soviet life which Stalin regarded as relatively unimportant — notably literature, philosophy or art. The limited cultural freedoms of the Stalin period were not therefore the result of circumstances which the government had failed to control. They were actually the product (or so Berlin argues) of a brilliant strategy to manage public opinion in the interests of the elite.

This portrait of Stalin as a sort of virtuoso choreographer of the national mood is deeply unconvincing. There is evidence against it not merely in Berlin's broad surveys of cultural policy (especially the one in 'The Arts in Russia under Stalin') but also in the superb essays devoted to Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak. As much as Berlin portrays these writers as the victims of stalinist intrigue, he cannot help but illuminate the ways in which their freedom of manoeuvre (such as it was) often depended on things which exceeded government control — the willingness of foreign writers to make intercessions on their behalf, the readiness of contacts to smuggle their manuscripts out of Russia, the fact that people like Berlin himself were willing to take personal risks by visiting them in their homes. Although there is evidence of Berlin's genius on every page of The Soviet Mind, this is not a book that will enhance his reputation for intellectual integrity. In the field of Soviet studies (if nowhere else) the impression he gives is of being rather too willing to mortgage his intellect to the demands of the Cold War. His theory of stalinism is a relic from the age of anti-communist apologetics, not a living contribution to the understanding of dictatorship. None of which means that Berlin's admirers have anything to worry about. If Henry Hardy's characteristically reverent Introduction is anything to go by, we have long since passed the point at which the master's ideas are exposed to rational criticism.

Philip Bounds

1.	See Terry Eagleton, 'Isaiah Berlin and Richard Hoggart', in Figures of Dissent, London: Verso, 2003. [ Back ]