The following testimony is derived from an interview recorded for the CPGB Biographical Project in March 2001 [ESRC award no R000 237924], supplemented by material deriving from a shorter interview for the Guardian newspaper in October 2006. With the permission of Peter Cadogan, we are also including the official CPGB autobiography which he provided the party in January 1951 and which - as was usually the case with British communists in the post-Comintern period - appears to have been the only such document he was required to submit. Readers will be able to compare both the detail and general treatment of accounts separated by some fifty years, all but five of which were spent active in other political movements. It should be noted that at the time of the original interview, neither interviewer nor interviewee had seen this document, and when informed of its existence in 2006 Peter had no recollection of having written it. Though he has since remained politically active throughout, Peter's account here concludes with his final break with marxism in 1960. He has himself written about the Committee of 100 in a series of papers.
The interview has been freely edited for continuity and one or two small errors of detail have been corrected in consultation with Peter. Only one of these dates from the pre-1956 period: in the original interview the episode with the conference arrangements committee was dated to 1949-50, as was the CPGB's support for the Labour government. In fact, the CPGB's nineteenth congress was held in February 1947. These dates have been omitted from the following text, which for the period to 1951 may otherwise be compared directly with Peter's party autobiography. One other detail may be noted. In recalling his reactions to the Hungarian events Peter appears to have fused the memory of the meeting in the university church with the letter to the News Chronicle which led to his suspension from the CPGB. His account has here been left as it stands.
Kevin Morgan
I was born in Whitley Bay in January 1921. My father was a businessman from Cardiff who had left school at the age of thirteen and met my mother in Newcastle. He was in shipping and ended up as managing director of his company but he was very regretful of the fact that he'd never had any formal education; this bugged him all his life. So I grew up in a home with loving parents who were rather given to fighting each other, but no culture: no reading, no writing, no music, no conversation. My parents were determined that the children should have a better chance than they did, so we all went to fee-paying schools, though my father had no idea about higher education or university and I left school at sixteen. He said I couldn't go into shipping because that was bust. I remember he collapsed at the telephone in 1931, I think it was. The firm had come to the verge of bankruptcy, and he just fell unconscious. It turned out, it survived. The other option was insurance. I had an uncle who was manager of one of the big companies and he helped me to get a job at the Atlas Insurance Company. So I went there for three years and learnt a lot about how to run an office, which has been of great service to me ever since. One of the reasons why I'm quite an efficient organiser is because I had this three years' office experience.
I joined up in 1940 with a great sigh of relief because the war got me out of an office that I didn't like. The war had a big effect on me, because I'd been brought up to be a middle-class prig. My parents were lower middle-class and very conscious of class, and initially I was too, but when you spend six years in the ranks you really get hell. So I emerged as a classless individual, which was very important. My first twitch of conscience came because I lived on Tyneside. My friends and I used to cycle through Northumberland which was full of unemployed miners standing at the street corners, or squatting at the street corners, and I just took this as part of the landscape. Then it dawned on me this was a horror. The whole of Tyneside was desolate under the depression in the thirties. So it was the depression that made a profound mark on me, but slowly. I don't know why, I also became conscious of the belief that war was the great horror besetting mankind. It may have been H G Wells's film, or it may have been All Quiet on the Western Front, which made a very powerful effect on me. I got it into my head that war was the great evil affecting humankind and I still believe this. This was before I became a marxist.
I spent the whole war in the Air-Sea Rescue Service. This is rather like the ambulance brigade: it waits for emergencies and you spend hours and weeks and days doing nothing - except that I had time to read. So I read a whole universe of books during the war. Critically important among them were Wells and Shaw and John MacMurray. I was a MacMurrayite during the war, but I left him behind because I had this extarordinary encounter with Lenin. Lenin was a bloody menace in my life. I was one of Churchill's mistakes. He decided to take the Faroe Islands, of all God-forsaken places, like the Falklands only worse. I was on a motor boat servicing flying boats and nothing happened, the Germans left us alone. It was metereologically impossible; storms all the year round, wind and rain and five days sunshine a year. We couldn't take any property because that would offend the locals. They all carried knives to kill whales, so watch out mate - we had to do with bell-tents. My idea of hell is the Faroe Islands. It should have been left to the birds.
I had twelve months of this, and to relieve the boredom I took a politics correspondence course. I was sent Laski's Grammar of Politics as a textbook and had to write an essay a week. I'd found a little house that was unoccupied in a valley near the camp and there was a little chair and a desk in there upstairs So there was me sitting in an abandoned house in the Faroes reading Laski's Grammar of Politics, and in a fatal footnote Laski says, 'To learn more about communism, read Lenin's State and Revolution.' That footnote changed the course of my life. I don't know if you've read The State and Revolution, it's the biggest confidence trick ever written. The trouble with Karl Marx, amongst other things, is he never wrote a political theory, he wrote an economic theory. So Lenin found himself living outside Petrograd in April 1917, hunted by the police, and found that Marx hadn't written a bloody theory and he was about to take power. So he sat out and wrote The State and Revolution. There's no question there of terror and firing squads and the Gulag. There's no mention there of Lenin's real philosophy, which was the leadership of the party, usurping the historic role of the working class. You got this utopian view of the socialist revolution, a con job really, and I was completely swept aside by it. The State and Revolution made me a marxist and I couldn't wait to join the Communist Party. I went to join during the war but they told me that serving members didn't carry party cards on principle. I joined as soon as I was demobilised.
Towards the end of the war I was stationed in the Bahamas. The apartheid there was extreme. There was no income tax so millionaires came from all over the place to live in great luxury and pay no taxes, while the poor paid taxes on food - extraordinary. So I became very conscious of this appalling class division based on the tradition of slavery and in the winter of 1944-5 I took my first action of civil disobedience. Behind Nassau there's a hill and the blacks live over the hill, away from Bay Street where the whites lived. They had a newspaper called the Voice edited by a doctor. It was pathetic newspaper, almost entirely adverts, but it was at least a black newspaper. One day I walked over the hill, got the doctor's address from the paper and we had tea together, a very English sort of tea. I offered to write an article called 'The coming Bahamian revolution' and he published it verbatim in the Voice. The police got onto it because I'd already written in the local forces newspaper. So I was separated from my flatmate, a London transport worker, and watched by a sergeant. When the general election took place in 1945 I put to sea flying the red flag, but nobody said a word. I was only of the rank of corporal but I had my own command.
In the Bahamas I heard a story that oil had been discovered on one of the outer islands and that the Americans had bought the thing up and stopped it. When I came back at the end of the war I wrote about this to the Fabian Society, whose secretary was then Shirley Williams, and she said to go and see Dr Hyacinth Morgan MP, medical adviser to the TUC, who was a West Indian. I went to see him in the lobby of the House of Commons and he told me, 'My dear boy, when you've been in politics as long as I have you'll know better than to interfere with big business.' Here was me, the idealistic socialist and I thought, 'My God, I can't join the Labour Party.' There were other things too. The Labour Party took no interest in ideas, and I'd been on this extensive reading programme during the war and was sold on ideas. I'd have joined the Communist Party anyway but this appalling revelation about the Labour Party just confirmed it.
Almost immediately I became secretary of the student CP branch at King's College, Newcastle. There were free grants at that time for servicemen and we were all encouraged to go to university. Because I hadn't done higher certificate I had to do a first year intermediate studies, and then I entered the honours school in history at Newcastle, which was then a college of Durham. We were all ex-service people, and we were told we had to write a full-length thesis. I haven't got a brilliant memory and wasn't good at exams, but I wrote a thesis on early radical Newcastle which would have got me a First and which was published in 1973, over twenty years later. Although I was a convinced marxist, this didn't influence my history at all, which is interesting because I was obviously living a dual life. I was determined to get at the truth and I think a lot of that came from MacMurray, who was concerned about the truth in science, art and religion. As a historian by profession I have always taken Bacon's view that the enquiry into truth is the supreme good of human nature.
We had a good party group at Newcastle until the Cold War broke out into the open in 1948. I joined the district committee and was very active, the best-known student in the university. However, the party's policy was rather poor, it simply said to implement Let Us Face the Future, the Labour Party manifesto written by Michael Young in 1945. Saying that Labour should implement its own programme is not very much and seems rather dull; we had nothing to say. So I went to party congress as delegate from the student branch and took a resolution saying we should break with this and define our own policy. I went before the standing orders committee, or whatever the committee was that considered resolutions and put them together to make them presentable. Bill Rust and John Gollan persuaded me that for the time being the current policy was correct, and eventually I withdrew the resolution. I wish I hadn't because I was right of course, we were on a dead end and I could have taken it to the platform. That was my first sign of rebellion, but I took it in good part and I was very impressed by Rust and Johnnie Gollan and the others on the committee.
What impressed in the Communist Party was the ideas. We had summer schools and weekend schools and I became a sort of party tutor in marxism. We also had things called the Battle of Ideas organised by Sam Aaronovitch. At the first summer school I went to, I won the prize for the best student of the week, two volumes of Karl Marx. I was also a member of the Historians' Group where I met Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm. So it was a joy to me because the Communist Party from the middle of the war until 1948 took ideas seriously and there was a powerful tradition of liberalism within the party going back to the twenties and thirties. There was also the Modern Quarterly, set up in 1946 and edited by John Lewis, with Douglas Garman, Alick West, George Thomson and others. Their hero was Christopher Caudwell, who was probably the only first-class genius who ever was in the Communist Party and whose Studies in a Dying Culture is a brilliant piece of work even today. When Caudwell was killed in Spain it was a great loss: he might have had a profound effect upon the Communist Party because he was a brilliant scholar. Well, I was a Caudwellite.
By 1956 I was secretary of the Cambridge party branch. After getting my degree I'd taken my education diploma and become a teacher, in Kettering and then in Cambridge. Cambridge had two parties, the town party, largely composed of the wives of dons, and the senior university communist party, which met in Maurice Dobb's rooms in Trinity. The student party had disappeared. I was beginning to feel the pressure of the party's decline. It had been in decline since 1948, when the Cold War came out into the open and Attlee made this statement that the Communist Party was a menace. We had a rather phoney peace campaign around the Polish manifesto, but with the big petition in 1950 you could feel on the doorstep that people had got the Labour Party message and we were no longer welcome. There was a belief that we were in the pay of the Russians, though at the time I was in the party there was no Russian gold. We had this extraordinary contrast: if a party member in a factory did a good job he would be elected shop steward and be a leading trade unionist, but when it came to elections we got no votes at all. As secretary in Cambridge I noticed that we were losing members every December and not making recruits. It got rather depressing being party secretary. You had to renew the party card every year and people would say, 'Well, I won't bother this year, thank you very much'.
I came to the conclusion that the party was in a very bad state because we spent most of our time working for the Christmas bazaar and collecting subs every month and sending all our money to the district or party centre. Things were completely the wrong way round, the rank and file were simply being used by the centre and the district as a fund-raising agency. So in 1955 I wrote a memorandum about inner-party democracy, saying that most of our money should go into local activity, housing, health, education and the rest, and we would build up a substantial membership and be able to raise even more money for the party centre. This was my first little act of rebellion, very polite, not attacking anybody; I just thought our priorities were the wrong way round and we had to give the party a new base. I was on the South East Midlands district committee and I sent the memorandum to the district secretary, Arthur Utting, who was a good worker and a very good man. He read it and rather liked it, but nothing happened if you made a criticism. The party was dying of stalinism even before 1956.
The Khrushchev speech to me was like a blinding flash. My spirits leapt up because here was freedom of speech coming from the top. David Astor cancelled the whole of the Observer except the sports section and published the speech in full. This was the morning that the district committee was meeting in Luton, and we were baffled by it, we had no party line - you can't have a party line at two hours' notice. I was fed up of being in a party in inexorable decline, but I'd never questioned the Soviet Union or Stalin and I hadn't seen any disillusionment in stalinism in the Soviet Union. However, I was greatly excited by the speech, because it seemed to me to be a liberation: here was freedom of speech, open criticism - we can have a decent party. There was this very important liberal tradition in the British Communist Party which I mentioned, Caudwell, Cornford, the Spanish Civil War and the whole of the revival of interest from 1941 to 1956. So with the Khrushchev speech I felt a sense of liberation and the excitement of feeling liberal again. This was like Caudwellism, only from Khrushchev of all people. There were a lot of us around and it never occurred to me that I'd leave the party. We had an expression in those days called the hundred-per-center, that was a party member who lived for the cause. I was a hundred-per-center and I lived for the cause.
Following the Khrushchev secret speech there was a hell of a row inside the party and a commission on inner-party democracy was set up to investigate the implications of the speech for us in Britain. Arthur Utting had to nominate somebody from the district committee and as he'd read my memorandum he recommended me. I was one of five rebels including Christopher Hill, Malcolm MacEwen, a steward from Fords whose name I always forget, and a teacher. However, the commission was sixteen strong, and of the sixteen about nine were full-time party employees. The atmosphere until Hungary was amicable, but of course it was all fixed. Nobody was allowed to appear in person; all evidence has to be submitted in writing. I had a hundred documents which very stupidly I gave back later when I was asked for them. But we had quite a good atmosphere until the Hungarian revolution.
There were two Russian interventions in Hungary. The first was called off because the Russian troops fraternised with the Hungarians. So they brought in Siberian troops who had no connection with Hungary or anybody and they would kill relentlessly on orders. I remember, I was in the staffroom at school when a friend of mine remarked that he was shocked at what the Russians were doing. I thought, 'am I shocked?', and decided that I was. That sparked it: for the first time I appreciated what stalinism was really about and I went into overdrive. I was fairly close to the Labour Party, because over Suez the Labour Party and Communist Party came together in Cambridge. They hadn't got any public address equipment and we had in the CP, so I lent it to the Labour Party and sat on this horse-driven cart which we used as a platform. We had a huge meeting on Parker's Piece, between a thousand and two thousand people were there.
At a critical stage over Hungary, a friend of mine in the university called a giant meeting in the university church. This was Mervyn Stockwood, who was chaplain to the university and later became Bishop of Southwark. Malcolm Muggeridge was the main speaker at the meeting, and three students who'd been to Budapest to see for themselves what was going on. The church was packed to the walls and I went to the vestry where Mervyn Stockwood was preparing to conduct the meeting. I said, 'Can I speak tonight - share the platform with Malcolm Muggeridge?' So there was me, secretary of the Cambridge Communist Party, fulminating against Moscow from the university church. There was a kind of unspoken rule in the Communist Party: you could say whatever you liked in the local press, because it got no further, but if you appeared in the national press, that was being monitored by the KGB, and they had people in the embassy here who reported back to Moscow. Well, a report appeared as the headline in the News Chronicle: 'Communist Denounces Hungarian Revolution Crushed By Moscow'. Oh dear me, I was national news.
The next Friday I had to go down to King Street for the commission on inner-party democracy. I was a few minutes late, and when I got to the table Betty Lewis, secretary of the commission, said 'I will not sit at the same table as a traitor'. So the meeting adjourned, never took place and the matter was referred back to my district committee. Christopher, Malcolm and myself adjourned to the pub and wrote a letter to Johnny Gollan saying, 'Johnny, please do something. This situation is critical, this is going to lead to the disintegration of the party'. It was a last desperate throw, which meant nothing because Gollan had become a complete stalinist. It was a pity because he was a good guy, very popular; I liked him a lot. So we then dispersed, and the district committee suspended me for three months. Malcolm wrote the minority report. Christopher added a paragraph or two and I added my signature. Nothing was decided until the emergency congress at Easter 1957 when the minority report was simply dismissed and the majority report accepted. At that point I went along to the secretary of the party and formally resigned. Two streets away from him lived the secretary of the Labour Party and ten minutes after I left the Communist Party I applied to join the Labour Party. Since I was the secretary of the Communist Party they had to have a discussion about this but they accepted me because they knew me pretty well from the Suez campaign. I became ward secretary within three weeks, and [was] on the general committee and [a] delegate to conference within twelve months. In 1958 I was delegate to conference and spoke twice, over education and the bomb.
There's not much point in recriminating about the Communist Party; I'm responsible for what I did. I was taken in by Lenin. I was taken in by the party leadership. When I was in the Bahamas I wrote to Harry Pollitt and he wrote back personally; I found it quite moving. I made lots of good friends - I felt they were friends. But come the debacle, they had to choose between me and the church and they chose the church. I was a pariah in Cambridge. When I went back to the party after my three-month suspension had expired I was not welcome. They didn't exactly send me to Coventry but it was pretty close to that. So I realised in a matter of days that I was out.
The next stage was trotskyism. As a result of the expulsions, desertions and lapsing from the Communist Party of ten thousand members, there were ten thousand marxists on the loose. Of course, the trotskyists went round to pick them up. Gerry Healy along with Peter Fryer and somebody else, came to see me. It was quite a compliment to have a whole carload of top trots come specially to see me! I thought, 'Well, why not?' Being disillusioned with the Communist Party or with Moscow didn't mean that I was disillusioned with marxism. I thought the party and Moscow were wrong and that marxism ought to be democratic and open. I found that you can't really break with marxism just by scrapping your party card, you've got to put something else in its place and this takes years. It took me four or five years to dismantle marxism and replace it with something else and the first stage in that was trotskyism.
Healy thought I was going to be very big. 'Peter', he said, 'I want you to take charge of the education of the British working class.' I kept a straight face. What a stupid man! He was an Irish unfrocked priest type and he had this charisma that fascinated people. Anyway, I joined. At first it was underground; in order not to get proscribed by the Labour Party they didn't officially exist, but they had the Newsletter with Peter Fryer and the membership rallied round the Newsletter. Then at Whitsun 1959 Healy came out in the open and founded the Socialist Labour League. I was present at the foundation meeting and moved several resolutions against Healy because he clearly wasn't a democrat. Nevertheless, he didn't seem to mind, we got on, we organised and it was very promising. Later in the year the Labour Party caught onto the Socialist Labour League and put it on its proscribed list. That meant that I couldn't be a member of the Labour Party and this was brought to the attention of the local party by Transport House. Regretfully they had to expel me, but hated doing it and within a few weeks readmitted me; they were all my friends, you see. I was called to the House of Commons where a special committee met and considered my case. They were a bit worried because my father-in-law was the MP for Consett in Durham. He'd been twenty-six years at the coalface: in those days the Labour Party gave jobs to people as rewards for work, not because they were any good, and there were 32 miners in the House of Commons who couldn't stand the Crossman types, they even used to drink in the House of Lords bar to get away from them. So when they found out I was Billy Stone's son-in-law the eyebrows went up a bit. But it didn't stop them and I was formally and finally expelled for the second time.
Then there was this absurd business in the SLL about the split in the Fourth International. I got fed up with Healy's row with Pablo, the leader of the trotskyist movement in Paris, and Healy's attempt to witch-hunt and expel anybody who didn't conform with his line. He had told me the first time we met that his was the only organisation in which the right to have a faction was built into the constitution. Consequently I contacted Peter Fryer and John Daniels and one or two others and we met at Stamford on a beautiful summer's day, under a big tree in the grounds of Burghley House. We agreed to form a faction which was called the Stamford faction and became quite famous in the trotskyist world. Three of us wrote long papers about the condition of the SLL which Pablo republished, so that the trotskyist world all knew about the Stamford faction, it was the first real split in the trotskyist movement after 1956. It's so irrational, it's hard to describe. I accused Healy to his face of being another Stalin and he was quite flattered. He had some Ceylonese lieutenants whose reputation was that they carried knives.
I didn't see the New Left as keeping the Cauldwell tradition going; it didn't even have a policy, it was all about 'commitment'. We did form a Left Group of the University Labour Club, where there were no ideas discussed at all, it was simply used by aspiring people to get a job in the House of Commons. When the four of us, three students and myself, joined the club, we went along to meetings and took the mickey. Cambridge being Cambridge, we had a string of VIPs come along, but I was an experienced marxist who knew my stuff and I was also rather savage. So we transformed the Labour Club into a hive of ideas, which was important because the New Left had missed Cambridge. There was no Stuart Hall, like there was in Oxford, and I had to do Stuart Hall's job. That was in October 1958.
I got expelled twice by Healy to make sure I was out, then along came Tony Cliff. Cliff was about to found International Socialism and invited me to join the editorial board. I wrote the first article in the first issue, on secondary education, and then I wrote for the Labour Worker which was founded later the same year. I got on well with Cliff - I was still in the world of ideas. What attracted me in the CP and in the trotskyists was that they took ideas seriously, or seemed to; and then it became clear that ideas were really a cover for something else - a cover for Moscow or a cover for who owned the printing press. The trotskyist movement is based on printing presses, who owns and who decides about the printing press.
My last expulsion followed the scandal of the Red Pimpernel. There was a doctor at Hammersmith Hospital called Chris Pallis, but Martin Grainger was his political name - like Stalin and Trotsky, they had second names. I knew him as Martin Grainger; I'd never heard the name Pallis before. He got involved in a strike in South London and an unholy alliance was built up between the Special Branch, the Daily Mail and one of the anti-communist groups funded by big business. They saw this doctor at the factory gates but they couldn't get his name, so they traced him back to his house. Then the Daily Mail had learned that I was in this outfit and somebody came to see me specially: a very disreputable journalist as it turned out. He showed me a picture of Martin Grainger and he said, 'Do you recognise this man?' I said, 'Yes, that's Martin Grainger.' They'd taken a photograph of him coming out of his house, you see, and then they called him the Red Pimpernel to stir things up. They had the photographer there, and I said that the Socialist Labour League was now an open organisation and it was entitled to support the strike and so was Martin Grainger. The next day was the day that Gagarin did his big job, so Gagarin had the main headline and I had the second headline on the front page of the Daily Mail. It was a totally unscrupulous piece of propaganda, out to blacken the Red Pimpernel and giving the authority as myself. Later that week there was a meeting of the International Socialism editorial board in the West Country. Mike Kidron, who was Cliff's brother-in-law, rang me afterwards and in a very oily voice said, 'We've just expelled you, Peter.' I wasn't asked to put a case or defend myself, I was simply expelled.
By now I'd been expelled or suspended by the Labour Party, the Communist Party and both trotskyist organisations. For two days I thought I'd give up politics altogether and started to learn the recorder. Then Bertrand Russell appeared and announced the formation of the Committee of 100. This was for me and I got involved from the start. It had taken me four years to make the break with marxism, experimenting with what I thought might be the creation of democratic marxism; But when you find out that every organisation calling itself marxist is authoritarian, you begin to wonder if there's something wrong with marxism itself. With the Committee of 100 I at last found the way to fill the vacuum: non-violent direct action, direct democracy, civil disobedience, decentralisation. It was a new political world which had no connection with political parties and I've never joined one since - although I've never stopped being active.
The CPGB's Commission on Inner-Party Democracy was set up by the executive in July 1956, 'stimulated by the proceedings of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU'. Its members were supposed to provide 'a combination of experience at different levels of the Party' including figures known to have critical views on the subject. Nine members were appointed by the executive and six by party districts. Eleven of the fifteen (including a Daily Worker journalist) were party full-timers; the others comprised two school teachers, one university lecturer and one industrial worker. 'Although it was generally agreed that the Commission would have been strengthened by more comrades from industry, the majority felt that, collectively, we had the necessary experience to proceed with our task.'
The list that follows indicates nominating body, years of party membership and occupation as described in the published report of the commission presented to the Twenty-Fifth CPGB Congress in April 1957. All other details are from the same document. Betty Lewis was the married name of Betty Reid, who continued to use the latter name for party work. The longevity of the EC nominees needs no comment.
| Emile Burns | EC | 33 | full-time-writer & editor |
| Kevin Halpin | EC | 6 | vehicle inspector |
| Christopher Hill | EC | 20 | university lecturer |
| Nora Jeffrey | EC | 21 | full-time national women's organiser |
| James Klugmann | EC | 23 | full-time national women's organiser |
| William Lauchlan | EC | 21 | full-time national organiser |
| Malcolm MacEwen | EC | 16 | Daily Worker journalist |
| John Mahon (chairman) | EC | 35 | full-time London district secretary |
| Betty Reid (secretary) | EC | 20 | full-time central organisation department |
| Joan Bellamy | Dist | 11 | full time [area secretary, Yorkshire] |
| Harry Bourne | Dist | 21 | full time [district secretary, Midlands] |
| Peter Cadogan | Dist | 10 | teacher |
| Joe Cheek | Dist | 5 | teacher |
| Alex Clark | Dist | 13 | full time [district organiser, Scotland] |
| Charles Miles | Dist | 17 | full time [district organiser, Surrey] |
Copy letter to News Chronicle and Cambridge Daily News from Peter Cadogan and Ivor Jordan, secretary and chairman of Cambridge City Communist Party, dated 6 November 1956.
We, the undersigned, feel so profoundly about the situation in Hungary, that we must say something in our personal capacities. […]
Last week the three Cambridge branches of the party issued a statement published in the C.D.N. to the effect that we opposed the decision of the Soviet Government to intervene in Hungary.
Since that time the Executive Committee of our own party has met and issued a statement on the situation in Hungary which we read with utter dismay.
Our Executive Committee has endorsed the Russian action without reservations. There is a deep division in the ranks of the Communist Party over this statement and the most intense and heart-searching discussion amongst us is now taking place.
We feel certain that arising out of this discussion the Communist Party of Great Britain will ultimately endorse the condemnation of Soviet action by world opinion. But this, however, will take some time, and we feel it essential in the interests of the principles and policies for which we have always stood that we should not be associated with this final and inexcusable endorsement of Soviet policy.
We appreciate that writing this letter is an act of revolt on our part but we do it [on] our own personal responsibilities, convinced that our action is warranted by the circumstances.
We have no intention of resigning our offices in the party and we will do our utmost to see that our belief in the condmnation of Soviet action is supported by the rank and file membership and eventually by its leadership, whatever changes that may require.
We believe that despite the gross mistakes made in the Stalin era, communism has expressed, and in most ways still does and will again, express all that is best in human values.
We further believe that the central task of the British Communist Party is the building of Socialism in Britain and that whilst it was necessary for us to place in the centre of our policy the defence of the only socialist state in the world, this is no longer necessary or correct. We believe in fraternal relations with the Soviet Union and the right to express our criticism freely on any particular question of policy.
The British Communist Party should from now on think for itself. We appreciate that it will be some time before the British people will accept our change of heart and mind, but we think that acceptance will be forthcoming when we have proved by our deeds that we deserve it.
Peter Cadogan
'Plot R' Acton Way - Arbury Road Estate
Cambridge
7th Nov. 1956 (11.45 p.m.)
Dear Johnnie,
I enclose a Branch Letter that has just been sent out. I can't go into a long explanation of why Ivor & I have taken a course of action that in normal conditions would be quite indefensible. You referred in your letter to the views of other Communist Parties. It seems to me that if the policy of the Soviet Govt & Party is to be changed it will be in large part due to the expressed feelings of other Parties. The size of our Party is not relevant to the necessities of the situation. We must tell Kruschov he is wrong.
I have sent a copy of the letter to Arthur Utting. Unless I hear from him or you to the contrary I shall turn up to the Commission on Friday as usual - I realise the implications of my action. I believe that the ultimate sanction of any democracy, including inner-Party democracy, is revolt. The recent history of the European Parties gives witness to that. I am only sorry that it has had to come to that, here.
I am convinced that to save the Hungarian people, Communism's position in the world & the very existence of our Party that drastic change must be made.
Yrs
Peter
From Peter Cadogan
Dear Johnnie,
If my action in writing to the News Chronicle & its result in the adjournment of the Commission is discussed by the E.C. I hope you will read this letter to the comrades.
I feel most deeply that at this critical moment my action and the action of any other individual comrade can only be seen correctly in the context of the situation in Hungary. I believe with absolute conviction that the Soviet Union has taken the most mistaken & disastrous step in the whole history of Communism. In the light of the economic base of socialism in Hungary laid in the last ten years, in the light of the long revolutionary tradition of the country and in the light of the fact that in this crisis the Hungarian people, as a people, were on the move from the outset, it seems to me utterly unacceptable that whatever gains the Mindzenty clique might have made to start with, the Hungarian people would have 'found them out' and in a fierce struggle of unknown duration established Socialist state power and a genuinely democratic basis.
Years ago in Newcastle you told me yourself that Soviet workers were armed, & this was the expression of the mutual confidence between the workers & the State. Where is that confidence now in relation to the people of Hungary? My whole Communist political instinct tested in years of unstinted Party work forces me to condemn this present action of the Soviet government.
I firmly believe that the foundations of Socialism have in this particular instance been betrayed & that the whole future of Communism in the world is at stake.
I also believe that the resolution of the E.C. has brought the internal crisis in our own Party to a head. It seems to me to be based in the same tradition of accepting the line of the Soviet Party that has done incredible damage in the past years to our capacity for thinking for ourselves.
Our integrity is at stake & the future of the Party is at stake. I wrote the letter in question, and which Ivor Jordan signed, for two reasons. Firstly because in Wednesday's Daily Worker the treatment of Hungary was in completely in line with the E.C. resolution & no letter was published to suggest that there might be an alternative point of view. And further from the time of the E.C. resolution there was an abrupt change in the handling of the news - it now had to fit the resolution.
Secondly I wrote it because I was and remain absolutely convinced that the Resolution had dishonoured Communists in the eyes of the people. And what the people say matters.
I further thought that some fairly responsible indication ought to be made somewhere to give scores of isolated branches of the Party some idea of what was going on in other Branches. I felt the need for drastic steps to stimulate discussion before the next E.C.
The ultimate sanction of democracy, inner Party or otherwise, is revolt. I have undertaken it in an honest belief that it was necessary to save the future & the honour of the Party.
Fraternally
Peter
P.S. I ask that this be published in the Party Press.
I have written this on my own behalf in a London pub - not possible to consult
Ivor.
The DW suppressed the second half of the Suez Resolution passed at the big
demo on Sunday in Cambridge. This second part dealt with Hungary! I telephoned
it myself. What the hell am I to think?
The documents reproduced here may be found along with related correspondence in Peter's disciplinary file in the CPGB archives, Manchester
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Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 20, Autumn
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