COMMUNIST HISTORY NETWORK

N E W S L E T T E R
I S E2 A T M 2 0 S U 0 UU N 0 6

elcome to Issue 20 of the Communist History Network Newsletter. The twenty-issue milestone is marked by a (very modest) refresh of the Newletters design. The Newsletter also has a new website address: http://www.socialsciences.man.ac.uk/chnn. Requests to the homepage of the old website address (http://les1.man.ac.uk/chnn) will be automatically redirected to the new site until the old server is withdrawn. It will take longer for the new article level web addresses to filter through to the indexes of search engines such as Google, but this process will work itself through over the coming weeks. The search facility on the CHNN website, which enables full-text searches of all twenty issues in the archive, will be reinstated before the end of the year. The deadline for submissions for the Spring 2007 edition of the Newsletter is March 30 2007, and contributions are welcomed. Richard Cross [richard.cross@ntlworld.com] Norman La Porte [nlaporte@glam.ac.uk] Kevin Morgan [kevin.morgan@man.ac.uk; tel 00-44-161-275-4907] Politics section, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester M13 9PL CHNN on-line: http://www.socialsciences.man.ac.uk/chnn AMIEL MELBURN TRUST INTERNET ARCHIVE: On 11 October 2006, the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust launched the new Amiel Melburn Trust Internet Archive (AMTIA). The Trust explains: The archive has been created to provide information and learning resources for people who are interested in the world today and the history of socialism. It features a searchable full-text archive of four titles produced by, or in the orbit of, the Communist Party of Great Britain: Universities and Left Review (1957-59); New Reasoner (1957-59); Marxism Today (1980-1991); and Our History; alongside miscellaneous pamphlets, articles and Reading Guides. IDENTITY AND SELF-REPRESENTATION IN EUROPEAN COMMUNIST LIFE HISTORIES: Under this heading a series of three day seminars will be held at the universities of Manchester, Glamorgan and Leicester over the period March 2007-March 2008. The seminars aim to reflect on the growing body of research on communist life history and collective memory, adopting a comparative approach across both national and political dividing lines. The first of the seminars will take place at the University of Manchester on 23 March 2007, when the speakers will include Marie-Claire Lavabre, Stephen Hopkins and Emmet OConnor. For details of the seminars, or if you would be interested in giving a paper, please contact the organisers: Stephen Hopkins (sh15@leicester.ac.uk) Norman LaPorte (nlaporte@glam.ac.uk) or Kevin Morgan (kevin.morgan@manchester.ac.uk). Details will also be posted at the CPGB Biographical Project website. TOM WINTRINGHAMS POEMS: Andy Croft writes: Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a man of action, a revolutionary, a soldier and a poet. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps; in the Spanish Civil War he commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade; in the Second World War he was the driving force and inspiration behind the establishment of the Home Guard. He was a founder member of
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the British communist party, and one of the twelve communist leaders gaoled for sedition in 1925. He edited the Workers Weekly, helped launch the Daily Worker and was one of the first editors of Left Review. Expelled in 1938 from the communist party, Wintringham co-founded the Commonwealth Party and almost won a famous war-time by-election. His poetry was published in many magazines, and his numerous books included The Coming World War, Mutiny, English Captain, The Politics of Victory, Peoples War and the bestselling Your MP. Edited by Hugh Purcell, Were Going On!: The Collected Poems of Tom Wintringham is published by Smokestack Books, PO Box 408, Middlesbrough TS5 6WA, price 6.99. Drawing on the newly opened Wintringham archive, it contains nearly all of Wintringhams poems, many published for the first time. RAPHAEL SAMUEL AND THE LOST WORLDS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLITICS. A seminar on the above theme will be held at the University of Durham, on 26 April 2007. Speakers will include Lawrence Black, Alison Light and Kevin Morgan. For further details, contact lawrence.black@durham.ac.uk or gidon.cohen@durham.ac.uk or visit the universitys Modern British Studies Seminar Series website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/events/other/mobss. LINZ 2005 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS: Proceedings of the 2005 Linz conference (reported in CHNN 19) have now been published: Bruno Groppo and Berthold Unfried (eds.), Gesichter in der Menge. Kollektivbiographische Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung. Mouvement ouvrier, biographie collective, prosopographie, (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt) 2006. pp221, ISBN 3-931982-49-1. Contributors are Klaus Tenfelde, Jrgen Mittag, Bernard Pudal, Kevin Morgan, Patricia Toucas-Truyen, Claudie Weill, Ulla Plener, Ottokar Luban, Hermann Weber, Feliks Tych, Claude Pennetier, Jos Gotovitch, Michael Buckmiller, Klaus Meschkat, Horacio Tarcus. Contents are in German (8 contributions), French (6) and English (1). A review will follow in CHNN 21. In the meantime copies can be obtained from AVA, Akademische Verlagsanstalt, Oststr. 41, D04317 Leipzig, Germany, Fax: 0049-341-9900440, email: info@univerlag-leipzig.de. The price is 22 plus postage.

Contents

THESIS REPORT Muzaffar Ahmad, Calcutta, and Socialist Politics, 1913-1929, Suchetana Chattopadhyay. . . . . . 4

FEATURES: THE CRISES OF 1956, FIFTY YEARS ON The ultimate sanction of democracy: Peter Cadogan, marxism, the CPGB and the crisis of 1956. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The SF was conceived by the uprising in Hungary, Gert Petersen interviewed by Steve Parsons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 French Memories Of 1956, edited interviews by Gavin Bowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Budapests House of Terror, Archie Potts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

FEATURES Revisionist Bernstein in Hindsight, Jrn Janssen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Short Course of Stalinism: Finns at the International Lenin School, Moscow, 1926-1938, Joni Krekola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 REVIEWS New works in the study of stalinism, reviewed by Kevin Morgan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 CORRESPONDENCE Der Thlmann Skandal [I], Mike Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Der Thlmann Skandal [II], Norman La Porte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 OBITUARY Dr Neil Rafeek, 17 November 1960 - 8 April 2006, Arthur McIvor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Thesis Report

Muzaffar Ahmad, Calcutta, and Socialist Politics, 1913-1929

This PhD thesis was successfully completed at the University of London in 2005.

engals first communists emerged from the ranks of the regions Muslim intelligentsia in the early 1920s. Their transformation involved a rejection of mainstream politics based on identities of nation and community. This process has been little investigated. This research aims to treat this neglected area by studying the early life and times (1913-1929) of Muzaffar Ahmad (1889-1973), the founder of the communist movement in Bengal and one of the earliest leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Though the left was minute during the 1920s, the shaping of socialist politics in Bengal during 1922-29 marked the beginning of a political tendency which was to leave its imprint on post-partition West Bengal and the struggle for Bangladesh in East Pakistan. The origins of communism, a vital component of the organised socialist movement which emerged for the first time in Calcutta in the 1920s, was rooted in the appearance of Muslim intellectuals who tried to give shape to a new form of anti-imperialism by stepping out of the confines of mainstream nationalism dominated by the Bengali Hindu property-owning classes; of political movements based on perceptions of Muslim exclusivity; and of secular or ethno-linguistic identities. For these intellectuals, class ideology represented freedom from forms of exploitation and alienation: the other political options refused to address these adequately. Class itself was perceived as an identity, which would disappear when communist society was attained. Its emancipatory promise and transitory nature could be pitted against the non-emancipatory structure and the transcendental, essentialist claims of the dominant identities. This section regarded class-consciousness as a space beyond the politics of identities. A social, and contextually grounded, interpretation of Bengal politics is developed by looking at the critical transitions Muzaffar Ahmad underwent in a period of momentous changes. Why was he alienated by dominant identity politics? What were the forms that he learnt to reject? What were the social components, which were subsumed and marginalised by these dominant forms, and which then introduced a critical rupture with his past? To seek answers to these and other related questions this thesis takes Muzaffar Ahmads early career (1913-1929) as its chronological frame. 1913 was the year of his migration to Calcutta. 1929 marked the end of the first phase in his political career as a pioneer of the communist movement as it had emerged in Bengal and India of the 1920s. This was the year when leading communists were arrested and tried in the Meerut Communist Conspiracy Case (1929-31), where Muzaffar Ahmad was chief among those accused. The biographical details of Muzaffar Ahmad between 1913 and 1929 coincided with a significant phase in the social and political history of India and the world. These years can also be read as two crisis-points in the history of imperialism and capitalism: 1913, the eve of the First World War, and 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash which set off the great depression. They enclose a period within which socialist ideas and communist activity became politically familiar in different parts of the globe. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the formation of the Third Communist International directly boosted these currents. Socialism came to be perceived by many in the colonising and colonised countries as a viable alternative and a solution to the problems posed by capitalism and imperialism in the midst of economic crisis and war. A radicalisation of political culture could be felt among the intelligentsia in various urban centres of the world, Calcutta being no exception. Many socially alienated, economically distressed and politically dissatisfied urban intellectuals stood at the crossroads of established and radical identity-formations. Among them there was a small fraction informed by social radicalism from below and the leftward turn in literary and cultural fields. They were disaffiliating themselves from the more established political routes open to those from their social background to combat colonialism and affiliating themselves with a more radical vision of decolonisation. The radicalism of the period was not devoid of contradictions. The ideas and aspirations of those with radical potential were often intertwined with social institutions, political movements and cultural norms that could lead to reversal and
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retreat from left radicalism. Nevertheless, they bore the imprint of the desire for a redefinition of state and society. It is in this climate, which found reflection in the unionisation of workers and the socialistic wavering of middle-class intellectuals touched by left currents, that Muzaffar Ahmad could be located. The reshuffling and mutations of self that gave rise to his new political identity were rooted in this context. It was related to a complex process of disaffiliation from existing structures of anti-colonial politics and linked to a radical conjuncture created by the post-war mass upsurge, by material hardship and by growing contact with the world of labour. It was underlined by a break with the outlook of mainstream leaders and the dominant ideologies they represented. This thesis sets out to examine both the setting and the changes, as represented by Muzaffar. It analyses the context and significance of Muzaffar's migration to the city (1913-1919). His rural background in the remote East Bengal island of Sandwip, and the kind of identity-thinking such a milieu encouraged, are discussed. Next treated are his arrival in Calcutta, the only metropolis in Bengal, on the eve of the First World War, and the conditions in the city that contributed to his future radicalisation. Examined in particular are his experiences as an impoverished intellectual and Bengali Muslim cultural activist in a city undergoing wartime privations. The next chapter (1919-21) deals with Muzaffar's political transformation along leftist lines, in the context of the working-class upsurge in Calcutta and the impact, on Muzaffar and some of his contemporaries, of socialist ideas following the success of the Russian Revolution. Muzaffar's fully-fledged entry into political journalism and his growing sensitivity to the labour question are shown to have played a vital role. The following chapter (1922-24) deals with the first socialist nucleus in Calcutta, with Muzaffar as the principal organiser. During this period, his links with the Communist Third International, distribution of banned socialist literature, and communications with other anticolonial radicals led to his arrest and trial in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case (1924). The next two chapters examine the growth and activities of the first socialist organisation in Bengal (1926-29), including Muzaffar's role and the attendant constraints, contradictions and ideological occlusions. The following two chapters analyse the changing politics of Muzaffar's prose and the emergence of a language of class and treats his autobiographical writings as a prism through which his early career can be read. The conclusion explains the transformation of Muzaffar Ahmad's political identity as an example of the emergence of communist dominated socialist politics in a colonised Indian urban milieu. By investigating the roots of early communism and socialist politics in Bengal, through the personality of Muzaffar Ahmad, this research aims to locate the social significance of a political space, which attempted to transcend dominant notions of identity. At a time when spectres of Hindu majoritarianism and communal holocaust are revisiting India and history is being harnessed to erect new enclosures based on identities of nation and community in a global climate of violent late-imperialist assertions, this is a way of recording not just the amply documented strength but also the ever-present contradictions, which beset identity-formations. Suchetana Chattopadhyay Department of History, Jadavpur University, Calcutta-32, India; suchetana.chattopadhyay@gmail.com

Features: The Crises of 1956, 5o Years On

The ultimate sanction of democracy: Peter Cadogan, marxism, the CPGB and the crisis of 1956
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, Peters 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 CPGBs support for the Labour government. In fact, the CPGBs 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 Peters 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

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 hed 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 couldnt 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 Im 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 didnt like. The war had a big effect on me, because Id 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 dont know why, I also became conscious of the belief that war was the great horror besetting mankind. It may have
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been H G Wellss 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 Churchills 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 couldnt 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 belltents. 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 Laskis Grammar of Politics as a textbook and had to write an essay a week. Id 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 Laskis Grammar of Politics, and in a fatal footnote Laski says, To learn more about communism, read Lenins State and Revolution. That footnote changed the course of my life. I dont know if youve read The State and Revolution, its 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 hadnt written a bloody theory and he was about to take power. So he sat out and wrote The State and Revolution. Theres no question there of terror and firing squads and the Gulag. Theres no mention there of Lenins 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 couldnt wait to join the Communist Party. I went to join during the war but they told me that serving members didnt 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 theres 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 doctors 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 Id 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 youve been in politics as long as I have youll know better than to interfere with big business. Here was me, the idealistic socialist and I thought, My God, I cant join the Labour Party. There were other things too. The Labour Party took no interest in ideas, and Id been on this extensive reading programme during the war and was sold on ideas. Id have joined the Communist Party anyway but this appalling revelation about the Labour Party just confirmed it.
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Almost immediately I became secretary of the student CP branch at Kings College, Newcastle. There were free grants at that time for servicemen and we were all encouraged to go to university. Because I hadnt 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 havent got a brilliant memory and wasnt 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 didnt 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 Bacons 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 partys 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 hadnt 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 Id 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 Dobbs rooms in Trinity. The student party had disappeared. I was beginning to feel the pressure of the partys 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 wont 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 cant have a party line at two hours notice. I was fed up of being in a party in inexorable decline, but Id never questioned the Soviet Union or Stalin and I hadnt 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 Id leave the party. We had an expression in those days called the hundred-percenter, 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 hed 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 hadnt 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 Parkers 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 whod 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
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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. Theres not much point in recriminating about the Communist Party; Im 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 cant really break with marxism just by scrapping your party card, youve 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 didnt 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 wasnt a democrat. Nevertheless, he didnt 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 couldnt 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. Hed been twenty10

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 couldnt 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 Stones son-in-law the eyebrows went up a bit. But it didnt 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 Healys row with Pablo, the leader of the trotskyist movement in Paris, and Healys attempt to witch-hunt and expel anybody who didnt 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 summers 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. Its so irrational, its 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 didnt see the New Left as keeping the Cauldwell tradition going; it didnt 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 Halls 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; Id 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 couldnt 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, thats Martin Grainger. Theyd 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 Cliffs brother-in-law, rang me afterwards and in a very oily voice said, Weve just expelled you, Peter. I wasnt asked to put a case or defend myself, I was simply expelled.

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By now Id been expelled or suspended by the Labour Party, the Communist Party and both trotskyist organisations. For two days I thought Id 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 theres 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 Ive never joined one since although Ive never stopped being active.

Annex one: Peter Cadogans party autobiography

Peter William Cadogan January 1951 Age 30. Married July 1949 Joyce nee Stone, of Stanley, Co. Durham. Miners daughter. One child- Claire. b. May 1950. Son of a self-made capitalist late A.D. Cadogan Managing Director of T.B. Seed and Co, (Newcastle) Ship Brokers. Secondary education at Tynemouth School, Tynemouth. Matric 1936. In insurance for three years. R.A.F. for five years. Air-Sea Rescue Service, and Marine Section. EVT instructor after end of war. Left as Sergeant. Entered Kings College, Newcastle, with F.E. & T. Grant. Took Honours Degree in History (2.2) Joseph Cowen Memoiral Prize Winner 1950. (Joint Award.) Education Diploma Year. Intend to start teaching in Sept. 1951. Associate Member of N.U.T. N.U.T. Correspondent for King College Education Dept. Chairman of House Committee, Education Dept. 1950/1. Ex-officio Member of Kings College Students Representative Council for two years. Delegate and Observer to N.U.S. Council. Member of the drafting Committee of the Students Charter. Coop Society Newcastle, Chillingham Road. Formerly Stanley, Co. Durham, P.P.P.S. Cultural interests. Local History. Written political history of newcastle 1809-39. Also literature more generally. Member of Editorial Committee of the Northerner (Kings College) for two years. Frequent contributor. Letters to the Press. Debating. Leader of the Communist Benches I Tyneside Youth Parliament, since its inception. Chairman of Executive Committee for a year. Lecturing. Leading discussions. Joined the Party just before being demobbed in 1946. At Andover. Had worked with Party members for about three years before that. Was in touch with the Party Centre. Reasons for joining. Started to think politically whilst working in insurance office, particularly over politics of war. Then five years in the ranks purged me of most bourgeois illusions. Met Party Members in R.A.F. who had big influence (especially Freddy Styles and Peter Chambers). Decisive effect of seeing real meaning of Imperialism in Bahamas for a year during war service. Read a great deal during whole period of transition. Graduated through Wells, Shaw, Laski to Lenin and Palme Dutt. First active in East Newcastle Branch. On local election committee for Dick Warren in winter 1946. Elected to D.P.C. on strength of work in election campaign. Came up to
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College. Secretary of Students Branch for one year, Chairman for two years, again secretary for 1950/1. Three years on D.P.C. Chairman for P.P.P.S. for one year. Treasurer of B.S.S. for over a year. Party Cultural Committee. District Youth Advisory Committee. Founder Member of Tyneside Workers Theatre. District Delegate to two Battle of Idea Conferences in London. Branch Delegate to 19th Party Congress. Never been in any other Party. Passing adolescent interest in Federal Union. Party Education. Week School for demobbed comrades in 1946. Netherwood in 1946. Two History Schools. One English School. One cadre school, in London. Two week end schools in Newcastle. Fairly consistent self study for eight years. Special attention to historical materialism. Secretary of Stanley Peace Committee (500 signatures). Acting Chairman of Stanley Branch of the Party whilst living there for nine months in 1950. Delegate to British Peace Conference of 1950. Sold 40 D.W.s every Sat. morning in Burnhope for nine months. No serious difference about Party policy. At the time of the 19th Congress I was convinced that the line at the time Implement Let us Face the Future was behind the times and took a resolution to that effect to the Congress from the Student Branch. It called for an independent policy for more Socialism. In the Standing Orders Committee Bill Rust persuaded me that I was wrong ad the resolution was withdrawn. In the light of what happened subsequently (Pollitts statement to the Feb. Executive) it may be that there was more to say for the resolution than I realised. In the D.P.C. I was critical about the absence of industrial committees in the North. Never have been fined or imprisoned on political grounds. Was watched in the R.A.F. Estimation of past and present work. As an ex-bourgeois it took me many years to get out of one class skin and into another. Bulk of past work indicated above. The present is a continuation and development of it. Future aspiration to do what is necessary. The teaching profession is my immediate perspective.

Annex two: composition of CPGB Commission on Inner Party Democracy

The CPGBs 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 Kevin Halpin EC EC 33 6 full-time-writer & editor vehicle inspector
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Christopher Hill Nora Jeffrey James Klugmann William Lauchlan Malcolm MacEwen John Mahon (chairman) Betty Reid (secretary) Joan Bellamy Harry Bourne Peter Cadogan Joe Cheek Alex Clark Charles Miles

EC EC EC EC EC EC EC Dist Dist Dist Dist Dist Dist

20 21 23 21 16 35 20 11 21 10 5 13 17

university lecturer full-time national womens organiser full-time national propaganda education full-time national organiser Daily Worker journalist full-time London district secretary full-time central organisation department full time [area secretary, Yorkshire] full time [district secretary, Midlands] teacher teacher full time [district organiser, Scotland] full time [district organiser, Surrey]

Annex three: correspondence of Peter Cadogan in relation to the adjournment of the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy November 1956
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 heartsearching 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.
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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.

Letter to John Gollan from Peter Cadogan enclosing circular letter as Cambridge CP secretary announcing meeting to discuss Hungary and justifying the sending of his letter to the News Chronicle and Cambridge Daily News 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 cant 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, Communisms position in the world & the very existence of our Party that drastic change must be made. Yrs Peter

Letter to Gollan from Peter Cadogan following adjournment of Commission on Inner-Party Democracy, 9 November 1956 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
15

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 Wednesdays 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 Peters disciplinary file in the CPGB archives, Manchester

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Features: The Crises of 1956, 5o Years On

The SF was conceived by the uprising in Hungary

he Hungarian Uprising created chaos on the extreme left in Denmark. The grand old man of the Socialist Peoples Party [Socialistik Folkepartie (SF)], Gert Petersen, experienced the dramatic showdown from a central position in the DKP and was later a founding member of the SF. The following interview has been translated for the CHNN by Steve Parsons, to whom many thanks. Gert Petersen, in October 1956 you were 29 years old and a member of the DKP. How was the news of the Soviet Unions invasion of Hungary received amongst Danish communists? It was received rather differently and in reality in two different phases. The first phase started on 23 October 1956, when the uprising itself began with the big demonstrations in Budapest and the Soviet troops were used. Already these events created a strong protest movement within the Danish Communist Party, and there was, amongst other things, a group of discontented communists who formulated a protest against the Soviet intervention. As a joint editor of the journal Dialog, I was one of those who signed a protest against the invasion. This resulted in the immediate expulsion of those who were responsible for the initiative, while those of us who had merely signed it got away with a warning. It was not as if the Soviet interference was accepted from the start. There was a great deal of difference of opinion within the party. Between 23 October and 4 November those of us who were sceptical about the Soviets motives pressed more and more for the DKP to officially distance itself from the military intervention. It caused an enormous amount of trouble. In the meantime on 30 October when the Soviet leadership announced that it would withdraw its troops from Hungary, I was of the opinion that there were again grounds for optimism. I perceived the current tensions in the international communist movement as being a fight between the forces that wanted to get rid of the stalinist system and its dictatorial practice and other groupings which wished to maintain them. That conflict also existed in the DKP to a high degree. I saw, however, the decision to withdraw as a sign that the reform movement with Nikita Khrushchev in the lead had won the power struggle in the Kremlin and therefore it was an added shock for me when the Soviet Union, on the morning of 4 November, set the major invasion underway and advance towards Budapest. This became the second phase of the crisis. Was it not nave at have such great confidence in the reform friendly forces? The whole thing has to be seen with respect to the background in the development after the 20th Congress in the Soviet Union half a year earlier, when Khrushchev brought the crimes of stalinism to account. It was, though, not at all everyone in the DKP who was in agreement with this course. Many were of the opinion that in reality it was a load of shit what Khrushchev had said at the Congress. I continued to hope that the Khrushchev line would be victorious. In the Russian 4 November proclamation it was promised that the troops would be withdrawn from Hungary as soon as order was restored. This was revealed to be simply a lie but in those days we still had a hope, also because Poland in the same period had in actual fact been allowed to develop in a rather liberal direction. In addition on 30 October, England, France and Israel attacked Egypt as a reaction to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by President Nasser. It didnt cause a great stir there werent any demonstrations against it. Yet still we could not help thinking that the Soviet Unions objective in Hungary had a connection to the other worldwide events. Was a third world war in the brewing, and was that why the Soviet Union had acted in the way it had? How did the functioning chairman, Aksel Larsen, react to the Soviet Unions invasion?

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As it later became increasingly apparent Aksel Larsen was in fact our ally. This was something we were completely unaware of, and in the parliament he followed the party line and defended the Soviet invasion. It was common practice in the communist party that if a decision was made by the leadership, one backed it up. If he was to have any hope whatsoever of fighting his corner in the party he had to abide by the decision. Otherwise he would have been expelled right away. Aksel Larsen later told me, that during the showdown in the party in 1958 he believed he had won a little victory as he had succeeded in clarifying the partys independence. He had an opportunity to test this independence in 1958 when he put forward a proposal, outside of the party leadership, that the Soviet Union call off the nuclear test explosions it was carrying out. This led to all hell breaking out in the party, where some felt it was stabbing socialism in the back and that Aksel should [not?] have presented such a proposal to the central committee where without doubt it would have been voted down. Here Aksel established it was so with independence. It was pure hot air. From that point in time he began to seriously take up the fight. Yet despite everything this did not happen until two years after the Hungarian Uprising. Why did it take so long before the conflict led to a split in the DKP? In the course of 1957, virtually the whole of the old guard in the Russian leadership amongst others Molotov and Kaganovitch were removed. There was a whole new anti-stalinist offensive, which once again gave some hope that there were changes on the way in the communist world. However, the execution of Hungarys former Prime Minister Imre Nagy in 1958 was yet another slap in the face for these hopes, and I know that it was particularly shocking for Aksel Larsen, whose memorandum for a new political course was made public at the same time. We believed that the reform line was stronger in the Soviet Union than it actually was and gradually it became more and more difficult to see any hope in the communist world movement. Belief in international reforms faded and eventually also led Aksel Larsen to recognise the necessity of a split in the DKP. A further 30 years was to pass before the reform wing, that we had hopes in, won the power struggle in the Kremlin. On the other hand the dictatorship was dismantled without striking a blow. So the conflict in the DKP ended with Aksel Larsen losing the power struggle in the party, which led to the formation of the SF in February 1959. Did it result in a new view of parliamentary democracy in the SF? Yes, it does have a new view without doubt. Although it wasnt really new, because if one seriously researches the primary sources, one will not find after 1945 examples in the DKPs official publications of the party rejecting parliamentary democracy. But support for democracy was more firmly established in the SF and when we later looked more critically at it, we could well see that the communist party publications were also characterised by a lot of wordplay with respect to democracy. When you look back fifty years on the Hungarian Uprising what did it come to mean for the development of the Danish left? It came to mean that a current grew up in the Danish leftwing, that felt itself to be much more left orientated than the Social Democratic Party which at the same time, in contrast to the DKP, maintained the basic principles of democracy, a current which continued to criticise the USAs imperialism but also took up a critical attitude to the Soviet Union and its position in the cold war. It was the events in Hungary that created this current in Denmark which with time achieved the support of 8-10 percent, in periods as much as 15 percent, of the electorate. We would not have had this current with SF in the lead if it had not been for Hungary. Without Hungary we would have continued to fight within the DKP and would have had greater difficulty in defining a Moscowcritical line. Steve Parsons
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Features: The Crises of 1956, 50 Years On

French Memories of 1956

During research undertaken in 1995, Gavin Bowd gathered recollections of French communists of the events of 1956. These recollections were used in Gavins study lInterminable Enterrement: Le communisme et les intellectuels francais depuis 1956 (Paris: Digraphe) 1999, reviewed by Stephen Hopkins in CHNN 11. The context: In January 1956 at the French legislative elections support for the PCF stays at 25%, and the party calls unsuccessfully for the establishment of a new Popular Front. In the interest of unity on the left, the PCF votes for special powers in Algeria, but soon is in opposition to the policies of socialist Guy Mollet. The PCF recognises the existence of an Algerian nation, but does not ally itself with the FLN. The Khrushchev revelations are heard by Thorez and other French leaders, but, on their return to Paris, they will speak only of a report attributed to Khruschev: in fact, the PCF will only recognise its existence in the mid-1980s. Over events in Budapest, the PCF supports the Soviet intervention while intellectuals such as Roger Vailland and Pablo Picasso will join Sartre and Beauvoir in publicly protesting against it. On 7 November a large demonstration against the intervention, including Franois Mitterrand, leaves the Arc de Triomphe. A small group detaches itself from the procession and converges on the building of the Central Committee then that of LHumanit, besieging the premises and trying to burn them down. The night ends in rioting between police, demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, leaving 3 dead and hundreds wounded. The poet Guillevic (1907-1997) [joins PCF in 1942]: I was surprised by the Khrushchev report, and in particular by what it revealed about Stalin, on whom I was 100 percent misled. Misled by what was said about him in the Communist Party and I could not believe what anti-communists, trotskyists and the right in general said about him. For me, Stalin had won the war against nazism and the PCF attributed him all sorts of qualities. In 1956, it was a terrible blow for me given the strength of my trust. A trust which blinded me to the crimes and errors of what is called stalinism. [] I remembered the Fascist Hungary of Horthy. It was barely seven years since the revolution had installed a communist regime and I believed in the existence of a counter-revolutionary movement created by the Americans. The philosopher Lucien Sve: I lived the events of Hungary as an attempt at counter-revolution, certainly made possible by the strong working-class discontent resulting from the errors of the Rakosi regime, but essentially fomented by still-powerful internal reactionary forces and, to say the least, supported by the ruling bourgeoisie of the FRG and NATO forces keen to open a breach in the socialist camp. I was therefore greatly relieved by the Soviet military intervention, even if I felt the situation distressing. I should add that the deliberate fomenting of anti-communist riots in France it was not only in Paris that the building of the PCF was partially burned down: in Bordeaux too, where I was, a similar attack was made against the federation offices was not going to make me doubt the deep significance of the events. Although my retrospective view of the Rakosi regime makes me see infinitely better the disastrous mark of stalinism, I must say in all honesty that I continue to consider that the responsibility of the Western bourgeoisies and of NATO was considerable. The Cold War was not completely cold. Franois Hincker, historian (1937-1998): I joined the PCF towards the end of 1956, at the age of 19. I was a student. I joined for French, and absolutely not international, reasons. It was the start of the Algerian War. I joined just at the end of
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the period of pure stalinism, but I cannot say that was a reason for me joining. At my age, I was neither stalinist nor anti-stalinist. For a young person, progress and equality meant the PCF. There were no other political forces: you were a communist or a conservative. Georges Labica, philosopher: I joined at the beginning of 1956. It was quite simply the culmination of a long path as a militant. I said to myself: why should I not be in the PCF? At the end of 1956, I was nominated to a teaching post in Algeria, where I would stay till the late sixties. I did not know this country at all, but I immediately became involved in the Algerian War, alongside friends in the FLN, rather than the Algerian Communist Party. So I very soon had a critical position vis--vis the PCF, but the PCF was, in 1956, the only subversive force around. Jean Thibaudeau, playwright: I began to become politicised during the Algerian War, towards the end of 1955. I was a student opposed to it. In January 1956, I voted for the first time, and chose the PCF, which was the only party opposed to the war. I was 21 and voted for the PCF against the poujadist candidate JeanMarie Le Pen. That summer, I went to the seaside on holiday with my wife. Pierre Poujade was making a tour of the beaches, speaking to fascistic rallies. I was inspired to write an anti-poujadist farce, greatly influenced by Eugene Ionesco. As for Budapest, I was so struck and fascinated by the wave of anti-communist hatred in France that I did not pay attention to what was happening in Hungary. Jacques Chambaz, historian and communist MP (1923-2004) [joins PCF in 1944]: I lived the events of 56 through the contradictions of the time and the violence of the anticommunist attacks. I did not take part in the defence of the CC building, because I was in the crowd of demonstrators outside, informing on their activities. I was involved in a struggle, and therefore did not attribute so much importance to what was happening in Budapest. There were problems here: Algeria, Suez. There were the Rosenbergs and McCarthy, the war in Korea, the interventionist foreign policy of the US. Why are communists never asked about that? Maurice Goldring, professor of Irish Studies [of Jewish communist parents, joins 1950]: Yes, I was steeped in the cult of Stalin. I was stalinist and thorezist. The death of Stalin and the events of 1956 did not shake my convictions, not at all. There was the Khrushchev report, which raised a lot of discussion, and then the fact that all this was masterminded by the right-wing parties as a campaign against the PCF. I took all this as the continuation of a battle. It was the time of the Algerian War, the Suez affair, the conflict between imperialism and the colonised peoples, between socialism and capitalism. What was firstly at stake was resisting this offensive, and in a concrete fashion, since in Paris an emblematic event was the attack on the CC building, the fire, the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. It was another stage in the struggle I was waging. I believe that, at the time, the right in France made an enormous error. It prolonged the life of the party by at least ten years. If they hadnt allowed the CC fire to happen, it would have made it much more difficult for the party to mobilise its militants. Gavin Bowd, University of St Andrews

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Features: The Crises of 1956, 50 Years On

Budapests House of Terror

he House of Terror sounds like the title of a Hammer horror movie. Unfortunately, the building 60 Andrassy Street in Budapest is no fiction but a real location where thousands of people suffered death and torture between the years 1944-56. Andrassy Street is a boulevard of impressive buildings connecting the city centre of Budapest to Heroes Square and its art galleries and museums. It is named after Count Andrassy, one of the Hapbsburg Empires most eminent Hungarian statesmen. During the early years of communist power it was renamed Stalin Avenue but in 1956 its names was changed to the Avenue of the Peoples Republic, and in 1989 it reverted to its original name. Number 60 was designed as a block of luxury apartments by Adolf Feszty in 1880, and was privately owned until 1944 when it was taken over by the Arrow Cross Party. Admiral Horthy ruled Hungary as a right-wing dictator after the crushing of Bela Kuns brief revolutionary government in 1919. Horthy became a loyal ally of nazi Germany and Hungarian forces took part in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Hungarian army suffered heavy casualties on the Eastern Front and in 1944 Horthy sought to withdraw from the war. Consequently he was overthrown by local fascists of the Arrow Cross Party. After their takeover the Arrow Cross requisitioned 60 Andrassy Street for use as a party headquarters with its own cells and torture chambers. When the Red Army entered the Budapest in 1945 the Hungarian Communist Partys security section took over the former Arrow Cross premises in Andrassy Street. Normal policing collapsed in Hungary in the aftermath of defeat and the Hungarian partys security group with the support of Soviet personnel established itself as a semi-official force, spearheading the hunting down of Hungarian fascists and collaborators. When a Hungarian coalition government was formed in 1945 a communist became Minister of the Interior with control over the Hungarian police, including the security section in Andrassy Street. A year later the section gained official recognition as the State Security Department in Hungarian the Allamvedelmi Osztaly (usually abbreviated to ATO), and although the name changed to the State Security Authority or Allamvedelmi Hatosag (AVH) in 1949, the old name stuck. The Hungarian security police in their smart, khaki uniforms with blue facings and blue-banded peaked caps were usually known as AVO men. The AVO was largely the creation of Gabor Peter, whose real name was Benjamin Auspitz. He was born in 1911 of Jewish parents and became a tailor. He joined the banned Communist Party as a young man, attended training courses in Moscow and returned to Hungary to become head of the underground partys security organs. Peter was an intelligent man and a good organiser who spoke fluent German and Russian in addition to his native Magya tongue. With the help of Soviet advisers he was responsible for building up the AVO into a much-feared state within a state. He recruited widely for the right sort of people to join the ranks of the security police, which numbered 35,000 uniformed members at its peak plus several thousand plain-clothes staff and a wide network of informers. Under his command the AVO became an arm of the Communist Party, sometimes described in communist publications as the first of the Party. AVO personnel were highly paid, well housed and enjoyed access to special shops and holiday resorts. Its recruits were trained by Soviet instructors to regard the class enemy with the same level of hatred that SS men had been conditioned to regard Jews. In appearance Gabor Peter was of medium height and stocky build, and sported a toothbrush moustache. He was by all accounts not a raving monster but a modest and well-mannered individual. Hannah Arendts phrase the banality of evil could be applied to Gabor Peter as aptly as she applied it to Adolf Eichmann. He was steadily promoted as the security police grew in size and power, until he reached the rank of general. There is no reason to doubt that he joined the Communist Party out of conviction, however the evidence clearly shows that he developed into a cynical careerist, prepared to do any dirty work in order to advance his career and so enjoy the fruits of power. In 1953 he was himself arrested when Stalin ordered a purge of Zionists, and the Hungarian Communist Party boss, Matya Rakosi, himself the son of a Jewish poultry merchant,
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was prepared to oblige by ordering the arrest of several Jewish communists. It was also politically convenient to blame the police chief for the AVOs excesses: a role later played by Beria in the Soviet Union. Gabor Peters life was saved by the death of Stalin and the consequent change of line. He served several years in prison and was released during an amnesty, after which he worked as a librarian. After the anti-communist uprising of 1956 the hated AVO was wound up as part of the Kadars regimes milder line, offering the Hungarian people goulash communism. The underground cells at 60 Andrassy Street were filled in and the above-ground rooms converted into offices. After the ending of communist rule in the 1990s the new government decided to turn 60 Andrassy Street into a museum covering the years of terror and it was intended that the refurbished building would also serve as a memorial to those who suffered and died within its walls. No attempt has been made to transform the building into an exact replica of what it was like during the AVO years. The walls of the entrance hall are covered with photographs of the 5,000 victims who died in the building, and a Soviet T52 tank, used to suppress the 1956 uprising, stands guard in the hallway. There are several rooms devoted to the history of the communist regime, including art and artefacts, such as posters, portraits and busts of Stalin and Rakosi. A courtroom has been reconstructed in another room and its walls have been papered with copies of forced confessions extracted by AVO interrogators. In the same room there is a monitor showing old newsreels of the show trials of Cardinal Mindszenty, Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy. Gabor Peters office has been restored to its appearance during the years of power, and the cells, torture chambers and execution room have been rebuilt in the cellars of the building. The museum was opened in 2002 and has become a major tourist attraction, but it is not for the squeamish. To be fair it is not like the medieval dungeons and black museums to be found on the tourist trail in Britain. The years of terror in Hungary are too recent for them to be treated lightly: the museum aims to instruct, not amuse. I emerged from the building pondering how communism, described by John Strachey as possessing the most glorious aspirations of any political movement in history (The Strangled Cry, [New York: W. Sloane Associates], 1962, p41) should degenerate into a system underpinned by secret police, torture chambers, show trials and gulags. Archie Potts

Features

Revisionist Bernstein in Hindsight

Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution von 1918-19, Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik. (Bonn: Dietz Nachf), 1998. [Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Heinrich August Winkler und annotiert von Teresa Lwe], pp352, 12, ISBN 38012-0272-0. R eviewing this book in 2006 raises as a first question: Are we looking at either a book on the German Revolution or at Eduard Bernsteins account of this well known historical event? First, what do contemporaries know about the German Revolution 1918-19? Secondly, what do they know about Eduard Bernstein and why is it interesting to look at his account of the German Revolution? As to the first question, it seems to me that for many people, even those interested in the political history of the twentieth century, the German Revolution is not really regarded as one of the major events. It is overshadowed by the Russian October Revolution 1917 on the one hand and by the defeat of Germany at the end of World War II on the other. From this point of view it was only a secondary concomitant of the collapse of the German empire and its army as well as a failed aftershock of the October Revolution.
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As to the second question, among devoted marxists Eduard Bernstein is generally known as the revisionist, which is why they do not read his main books on The Preconditions of Socialism (Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, Bernstein 1899), on Cromwell and Communism, Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution (Kommunistische und demokratischsozialistische Strmungen whrend der englischen Revolution, Bernstein 1985), and on the German Revolution 1918-19 (Bernstein 1921). Conversely, non-marxist social democrats discard reading Bernstein, because in his theoretical approach he remains a devoted marxist. So, on both accounts, many might benefit from reading Die deutsche Revolution 1918-19 in order to learn something about the German Revolution as well as to revise their prejudice about Eduard Bernsteins interpretation of socialism. Eduard Bernstein was born in 1850. Unlike in the case of the English Revolution, which Bernstein studied as an historian, he played a part as an activist in the German Revolution and wrote his account immediately after the event. He had been a member of the Reichstag from 1902-06 and 1912-18, as a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) until 1917 when he became the cofounder of the left Unabhngige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party). Under the provisional government of the workers councils he served as a secretary of state for economy and finance. He was really in the middle of events and consequently the book is in many ways the narrative of an eyewitness. While he attempts to assess the course of events as an impartial observer, he is nevertheless compelled to take sides in the disputes about how the revolution is to be defended. From November 1918 Bernsteins great concern was the reunification of the divided Social Democrats. He rejoined the Majority SPD in December 1918 without leaving the USPD, whilst the latter decided not to tolerate double membership at its party congress in March 1919. He worked tirelessly for a common front of the Social Democrats against the German bourgeoisie until in September 1922 the SPD and the part of USPD that had declined to join the communists unified. He died on 18 December 1932, shortly before the takeover of the nazis. The trouble is that Die deutsche Revolution 1918-19 has not been translated and published in English. However, though this book is not unique as an account on the German Revolution, it is a most authentic analysis and touches upon a number of the most pertinent contemporary issues concerning the history and perspectives of socialism: What was the impact of the German Revolution on socialism in Europe? What is the role of the German Revolution in the transition of modes of production from feudalism via capitalism to socialism? Has (renegade) Kautskys critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat been vindicated by the collapse of the Comecon states? Is the revolution the only way to socialism? 1. The impact of the German Revolution on socialism in Europe can hardly be overestimated. It split revolutionary socialism in the country, which had been in the forefront of socialist development under the Second International of 1889, into social democracy and communism. As a result of this schism, which affected the whole of western Europe and isolated the Soviet Union, fascism could seize power in Germany and Italy and unleash the carnage of the Holocaust and World War II. The schism then took its really international dimension with the Cold War dividing not only Germany but the whole of Europe into two camps under capitalist markets and socialist planned economies. In a way the insurrection of 6-13 January 1919 in Berlin prefigured the struggle between capitalism with social security and socialism with central planning. Bernstein was aware of these dimensions at stake in the German Revolution. Despite his critical stance against Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in the German Revolution, he was well aware that both had become victims of the newly rising Militarism (p236) and clearly diagnosed the danger of nationalism in Germany. In a letter to Karl Kautsky he wrote on 26 July 1924: We are approaching a coup dtat of the Nationalists, this seems to me unavoidable, if we keep muddling along this way. (p22) His main concern was, therefore, to defend the achievements of the revolution against a counterrevolution. 2. As an activist in the German Revolution, Bernstein belonged to those deputies in the Reichstag who had opposed credits for the war and became a co-founder of the USPD. Based on his detailed class analysis, he regarded Germany like other west European countries by the end of the First World War as a developed capitalist industrial society, which, besides the landowners and
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capitalists, was composed of industrial workers and salaried employees but also significant layers of small traders, craftsmen and peasants. At this stage he assumed that a socialist revolution was doomed to fail. However he argued that as an administrative state it had achieved a stage of development at which already a simple democratisation of existing institutions represented a big step towards Socialism. (p237) Taking into account this assessment of the development in modes of production and social classes, the German Revolution, like the English and French revolutions, could play a role only in the transition from feudalism to capitalism or in replacing the empire by parliamentary democracy. This was the reason why he vehemently opposed the Spartakus Bund and the Communist Party, who staged the Spartakus Insurrection of 6-13 January 1919 intending to disrupt parliamentary elections prepared for 19 January. 3. It is hardly possible to study this dispute between bolshevism and social democracy in Germany 1918-19 without reference to the Soviet Revolution. Lenins dictatorship of the proletariat was the model for the German nascent communist movement and its opposition to an elected parliament including the nationalist and conservative classes. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who advocated participation of the communists at the elections were defeated by 63 against 23 votes at the founding congress of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Der Grndungsparteitag der KPD, pp99-104, 124-129 and 135). Karl Kautsky, who had studied the development of agriculture in the context of the socialist revolution knew exactly what the peasantry in particular represented in the Soviet republic and warned against setting up a socialist state in which the industrial workers were still a small minority: In a country, which is economically still so little developed, that the proletariat represents only a minority, the maturity of the proletariat must not be expected (Kautsky, 1918, p58). Kautsky argued that socialism without democracy would not have a chance to survive. Lenins response in his essay The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) is a fierce polemic which largely ignores rather than disproves Kautskys argument. Bernstein had similar reservations with regard to Germany and concluded: Even if Social Democracy had achieved a numerical majority in the elections for the National Assembly, the participation of the bourgeois-republican parties would have been imperative for the maintenance of the republic. (pp268 f.) Lenins way to establishing socialism under the single communist party and a centrally planned economy was pursued not only in the Soviet Union but, after World War II, in all Comecon states. Resistance, however, remained alive, as manifested in the 1956 revolt in Hungary and the defeated 1968 reform in Czechoslovakia and the 1980 rising of Solidarnosc in Poland. The socialist state faltered in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s and eventually collapsed with the fall of the wall in Berlin. It is often argued that the economic weakness of the socialist state was the result of the devastation of the Soviet Union in World War II and the continuing arms race waged by the capitalist states and that this was the reason for its political weakness. This was certainly a component factor, but does it explain the largely supportive reaction of the people when the former socialist states introduced multi-party elections, abolished central planning and privatised the industries? 4. Let us, finally, consider the question of whether the revolution is the only way to socialism. Bernstein implicitly almost dismissed this as a possibility: In the science of living beings called Biology the knowledge is established by experience and experimental investigation that organisms are the less adaptable the higher the level to which they are developed with regard to specialisation, education and functional coordination. With some restrictions with regard to the nature of the object this is true also for social organisms which we call states or, at an earlier stage of development, tribes or peoples. The less they are developed the more they tolerate measures aiming at a radical transformation. The more diversified however their inner structuring, the deeper their division of labour and cooperation of their organs have already progressed, the greater the danger of severe damage to their chances of survival, if one tries to transform them radically by means of force in a short time. (p237) The theoretical justification is certainly an improper transfer of findings from natural to social sciences. But it illustrates Bernsteins considerations when he opted for social democracy and against bolshevism, though he did not explicitly exclude revolution as a possible way to socialism. Given that a certain stage of capitalist and industrial development was regarded as a precondition
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for a successful socialist revolution, and as this is hardly conceivable without a certain level of functioning state administration providing infrastructure, education, legal protection and policing, we are faced with a fundamental contradiction. Antonio Gramsci theorised in much detail the difficulty of a socialist revolution within the fabric of all the institutions of civil society and led the Italian Communist Party to adopt policies of reform as a way to socialism (Gramsci, 1948-51). On similar lines in the Spanish Civil War the United Front, an alliance between communists, socialists and liberal democrats, was an attempt to fend off fascism. It provided the model for Eurocommunism. In 1951 the British Communist Party adopted The British Road to Socialism as a way to make progress towards socialism under parliamentary democracy. The German Communist Party, re-founded after World War II, was devoted to not repeating its mistake made in the Weimar Republic to fight against social-fascism as the main enemy but to work for a popular front with the Social Democrats. All this is well known and does not need to be expounded in this framework. What may however be concluded is that Bernsteins arguments have so far been vindicated by the course of European history of the second-half of the twentieth century. The question of whether Germany had a different option in 1918 and whether social democracy is to be blamed for the restoration of capitalism and ultimately the rise of fascism remains a matter of speculation. Eduard Bernsteins great sympathy was with the mariners who sparked off the German Revolution of 28 October 1918 through their mutiny on the warships in Kiel harbour. They refused to raise anchors and to set sail to fight the British fleet. When, after the demise of the emperor, a provisional cabinet was formed Bernsteins prime concern was cooperation between the independent and majority social democrats. He had no illusions about the communists having founded their party at the turn of the year and their rejection of joining an alliance which was intended to prepare the elections for a new government including the bourgeoisie. He recounts crucial events in the disputes between the three fractions of socialists leading up to the Spartakus Revolt of January 1919 which, in his judgement, provided the military with the opportunity to reestablish themselves as a conservative patriotic power. Despite criticisms he vindicates the provisional government, arguing that they did not have any choice but to call for the help of the troops who than started acting on their own account: a tragic chain of events provoked by the communists. Bernstein in fact condemned bolshevism and was, in that respect, a typical representative of a predominantly anti-communist social democracy. On a personal note, in his view Karl Liebknecht highly overestimated himself and his power over the masses and the possibilities of a coup (p235). By contrast, he held Rosa Luxemburg in high regard as of a fundamentally poetical nature. With her socialism has lost a most talented comrade who might have provided invaluable services to the republic, if a mistaken assessment of the possibilities had not led her into the camp of illusionary politics of violence. But also those who for this reason opposed her in the parties struggle will hold the memory of this restless fighter in honour. (p236) Bernstein equally pays enthusiastic tribute to the workers and soldiers councils, whose role in the revolution he defended against allegations of incompetence and of having mishandled finances: In the first weeks of the revolution, when the waves of general excitement were rising high and Germany was in the danger of decay and anarchy, they have had a calming effect on the masses and in their majority proved themselves worthy as a power against agitation aiming at instigating the violence of the masses. (p239) This particular edition of Bernsteins Die Deutsche Revolution von 1918-19 has the great merit of being put into context through an introduction by the editor Heinrich August Winkler and the excellent annotations by Teresa Lwe. Winkler greatly acknowledges Bernsteins unwavering fight against the threat of nationalism, militarism, and fascism. That, on the other hand, Bernstein also bears responsibility for the schism between social democracy and communism does not seem to concern him too much. This however is the lasting legacy of German socialism in which Bernstein played his part. It is all too easy to put the responsibility for the split onto the communists. The majority of the German social democrats had already renounced the aim of expropriating the capitalists in 1918, though it remained in suspense whether this was a temporary tactical measure or a final decision to seek welfare and the improvement of social conditions under the auspices of the private ownership of capital. With the downfall of fascism in 1945 the same question was again on the agenda and remained unresolved until the SPD buried marxism, class struggle and the expropriation of capital for good with the Godesberg Programme of 1959. It would, however, be mistaken to accuse Bernstein of taking an anti-marxist position. He saw the need of continuing
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class struggle for the liberation of the working people and clearly perceived fascism as an expression of capitalism. Teresa Lwes annotations are invaluable. Not only has she checked all of Bernsteins quotations but she has also added many important quotes and sources which help the understanding of events where Bernstein just assumed that his contemporary readers were familiar with them. It is thanks to the annotations that this edition of the book becomes a document of extraordinary importance in that it combines the insider knowledge of a participant in the revolution with the scrutiny of the historian. The annotations (57 pages of small print) are in fact a work in their own right. Let us conclude with a reflection on whether this book contributes to historical materialism and helps in understanding contemporary history. The fundamental thesis of this theoretical approach tells us that developments in the modes of production determine the social and political shape of societies. How then does Bernsteins analytical report of the German Revolution of 1918-19 add to our understanding of the development of capitalist societies and, perhaps, their transition to socialism? This book does not tell us much about the development of the mode of production in Germany which made for the colossal expansion of production in Germany between 1870 and the First World War and which, according to an analysis based on historical materialism, was the driving force behind the decision for war. The German imperial state fought for political power and participation in colonial imperialism corresponding to its economic power in Europe. The majority of the representatives of the working class in the Reichstag initially supported this war effort. As the war went on and claimed its horrendous sacrifices support faltered both among the political representatives and the working class and lead to the revolution demanding in the first place peace and democratic rights, to a lesser extent also the expropriation of the owners of capital. The book, however, tells us a lot about the objective and subjective class situation in Germany by 1918: first, that a layer of middle income employees and intellectuals had developed as a result of capitalist development; second, that a considerable number of small traders and craftsmen were still an important component of the economy and society; and, third, that the majority of blue collar workers did not support the politics of the independent social democrats and the communists. At the time of the German Revolution, Lenin discarded such considerations as sophistries and boasted for the Soviet republic: A year after the proletarian revolution in the capitals, and under its influence and with its assistance, the proletarian revolution began in the remote rural districts, and it has finally proved there is no force in the country that can withstand it. (Lenin p444) The planned economy under the dictatorship of the party of the proletariat was established and industrialisation made a jump forward allowing for the defeat of the German war machinery and the first manned space ship to be launched in 1957. The socialist state however collapsed in the late eighties and private capital was or is being re-instated in all former socialist countries except so far Cuba. This is a lesson about the limitations of historical materialism as a doctrine and a reminder of dialectics. The working class is not automatically an agent in the transition to socialism, nor does the socialist state with a planned economy necessarily represent the working class. Eduard Bernsteins arguments should be taken serious, whether one agrees with them or not, because they shed a specific light on the failure of the socialist revolution in the twentieth century. Jrn Janssen, European Institute for Construction Labour Research Bibliography
Bernstein, Eduard. 1899. Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart. Bernstein, Eduard. 1930. Cromwell and Socialism, Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bernstein, Eduard. 1895. Kommunistische und demokratisch-sozialistische Strmungen whrend der englischen Revolution. Stuttgart: J H W Dietz. Bernstein, Eduard. 1921. Die deutsche Revolution von 1918-19, Geschichte der Entstehung und der ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik. Berlin-Fichtenau: Verlag Gesellschaft und Erziehung.

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Gramsci, Antonio. 1982. Selections from Prison the Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart. First published in Italian, Einaudi, 1948-51. Der Grndungsparteitag der KPD, Protokoll und Materialien. Frankfurt am Main: Hg. Hermann Weber, Europische Verlagsanstalt. Kautsky, Karl. 1899. Die Agrarfrage, eine bersicht ber die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirthschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart: Dietz Nachf. Kautsky, Karl. 1918. Die Diktatur des Proletariats. Wien: Ignatz Brand. Lenin, Wladimir Iljitsch. 1959. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in Against Revisionism. Moscow: Progress Publishers. First edition Moscow: Kommunist Publishers, 1918.

Features

A Short Course of Stalinism

Joni Krekola here provides an English-language summary of his new work: A Short Course of Stalinism. Finns at the International Lenin School, Moscow, 1926-1938. Joni Krekola, Stalinismin lyhyt kurssi. Suomalaiset Moskovan Lenin-koulussa 1926-1938, (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura), 2006, ISBN 951-746-864-4, pp445.

he International Lenin School (ILS) in Moscow educated leading functionaries of communist parties from around the world between 1926 and 1938. The foundation of the ILS can be traced back to the death of Lenin in early 1924. It was followed by the introduction of the principles of Bolshevisation at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern). The world party, its members (national sections) and single individuals in the home countries were supposed to imitate the only victorious revolutionaries: the bolsheviks. The Comintern schools like the ILS became instruments of a growing Russification and stalinisation of international communism. The ILS succeeded in educating a generation of stalinist functionaries that were faithful to Moscow's party line. The totalitarian goal of an army of professional revolutionaries, however, remained uncompleted until 1938 when the ILS was finally dissolved. Besides the Russian revolution and the first communist party state, the First World War had created an unstable world order. During the 1920s and the 1930s many European democracies became authoritarian or totalitarian systems. Capitalism nearly collapsed during the great depression. The USSR tried to exploit this crisis of capitalism without success. Hitlers rise to power in Germany forced Stalin to join the anti-fascist front and to support collective security in his foreign policy. From the point of view of the Comintern, the ILS had to be adapted to reflect two great tactical developments. Above all, the ILS became the propaganda instrument in promoting intensified class struggle and the theory of social fascism that were the Comintern's slogans during the Third Period (1928-35). The next turn in tactics towards the Popular Front policy actually started the ILS's dissolution. Inside the USSR, the life span of the ILS covers the years of industrialisation and collectivisation, imposed from above by Stalin. In the second half on the 1930s, socialism was officially heralded to have been reached. The evolution of the stalinist system culminated in the years of the Great Terror, 1937-8. At the ILS, some of these changes were witnessed by no less than 3,000 foreign students. At least 140 of them were Finns. The ILS was a totalitarian institution close to the Cominterns headquarters. The students came mainly from European and American communist parties. After the schooling, they were most often sent back to their home countries. During the education period, which lasted from half a year to three years, they were supposed to internalise current bolshevik values, methods and discipline. Through them, the national communist parties were to become stalinised. The total schooling
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experience included theoretical studies in Marxism-Leninism (party history, political economics and dialectical materialism) as well as the practices of bolshevik party life in building socialism. The campaigns of stalinism also promoted new subjects such as: About fighting against counterrevolutionary Trotskyism. This study tries to find out how the Finns interpreted their schooling experiences at the ILS. Throughout the study, the ILS education is situated within the wider contexts of revolutionary vanguards, political education, the aspiration for ideological moulding and, finally, Finnish communism in two countries: Finland and the USSR. The three main chapters of the study concentrate on the ILS Finns that temporarily lived in extraordinary stalinist conditions in Moscow. The teachers of the Finnish students were leading figures of the Communist Party of Finland (SKP). The party had been illegal in Finland since its founding in Moscow in 1918. The communists in Finland could act in some organisations in the 1920s, but, from 1930 onwards, the SKP went more or less underground. The Finnish ILS teachers, too, understood their political emigration to the USSR as a temporary state of being. They did not know what to expect. Finnish communism in the USSR was almost totally destroyed in the terror years of 1937-8. During this period, the systematic party education at the ILS ceased. However, it still remained the most important ideological intermediary between Finnish and Soviet communism. The research method of this study is traditional for contemporary political history. The fates of the ILS Finns are explored by comparing archival materials from Russia (RGASPI) and Finland (National Archives, People's Archives) to literature. The Finnish ILS students and teachers mentalities, values and ideological judgements are interpreted on as basic a level as possible. The term political does not exclude questions of everyday life, family or gender that might connect this study to the latest research of the post-revisionist school. Many such studies of stalinism have one central theory or concept (like nationalism, identity or gender) that structures the whole study. If anything, my study seeks theoretical inspiration from various sources. The most central of these is Erving Goffmans concept of a total institution. The International Lenin Courses started in 1926 with a basic syllabus that lasted two years. The communist parties, the SKP included, could not fill the student quotas that were given to them. Education was given in the Cominterns four official languages that were seldom known by the Finns. To overcome this problem, the ILS established short courses for national groups in their own language. The initiative for the Finnish ILS sector was taken by the SKP leadership in Moscow because it was worried about the state of communist activities in Finland. When the first Finnish course started in late 1930, a law that prohibited the communists from acting in legal organisations was passed in Finland. After the Finnish Civil War in 1918, this was the second major defeat for the Finnish revolutionaries. The Finnish ILS sector was led by Yrj Sirola (1876-1936), an intelligent son of a priest who had made a career as a social democrat in Finnish politics already before the Civil War. He was appointed foreign minister of the Red Government in 1918. Because of this, he was forced to flee to Soviet Russia after the defeat of the reds in the Finnish Civil War. Until the end of his life, Sirola worked in the SKP leadership and in the Comintern machinery, but party education remained his favourite occupation. Before starting at the ILS, Sirola had taught in Finland, in the United States (Duluth, Work People's College for Finnish immigrants) and in Leningrad (LOKUNMZ, Communist University of the National Minorities of the West, Department for Finns and Estonians). After quitting as ILS sector leader in 1934, Sirola continued as a teacher of party history and leninism until his death of natural causes in 1936. The following sector leader was Jukka Lehtosaari (1889-1939), a former ILS student (1926-8). He was the SKPs last chairman (1937-8) before falling victim to the Great Terror. The contribution of the SKP leadership to the Finnish ILS sector was remarkable. Many other ILS sectors were taught by teachers that were neither natives nor members of the party leadership. The teachers of the Scandinavian ILS sector, for example, were often Swedish speaking Finns. The investments of the SKP leadership in the ILS may have been one of the reasons for the Finnish sectors success in the competition between the ILS sectors. On the other hand, the ILS Finns were criticized for their national isolation and their familyness in the 1930s.
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The first Finnish ILS short course lasted six months. The following school year was extended to nine months and included military training and a summer excursion (praktika) to a Soviet republic. The ILS year was completed with a vacation in some of the famous sanatoriums for the Soviet party elite. In the early 1930s, the Finnish ILS graduates were sent to Finland for illegal SKP work. If the party command was successful, the illegal functionaries were returned to the USSR for a rest. Often, the Finns were given the chance to study for another year at the ILS. The Finnish state police worked actively against the communists in Finland. In 1934 detectives managed to send an informer to the Finnish ILS course. He came back from Moscow and revealed the secrets of the ILS during a series of police interrogations. In the 1930s, there were 157 Finnish ILS graduates, out of whom 90 were sent to Finland. No less than 54 of these received a political sentence in Finland, which usually meant a spell of prison for three to four years. Consequently, the system of two full years at the ILS never went according to plan. Political imprisonment was part of the career of a SKP activist in Finland. Around 40 per cent of those Finns who became students at the ILS had spent time in prison before their education in Moscow. Their experience of repression made it easier for them to readjust to the conditions at the ILS that students from legal communist parties often complained about. The stalinist rituals (autobiographies, personal evaluations and criticism and self-criticism) that aimed at internalised self control against deviations from the Cominterns general line were usually accepted as learning the methods of bolshevik party life. The Finnish students made political mistakes and often wondered about the low standard of living in the Russian countryside. This was not a problem if the students were ready to admit their misinterpretations. They were at the ILS in order to learn. The cases were more severe if the Finnish teachers were accused of political deviations. In the spring term of 1931 the Finnish ILS students complained that their teacher of trade unionism, Hanna Malm (1887-1936), taught too much like an agitator and without a true understanding of changed conditions in Finland. Malm herself accused the students of holding social democratic opinions that had to be unmasked and purged. Although Malm was a controversial person, she belonged to the SKPs central committee and was its leading female. The quarrel in the sector was supposed to be solved in the Bolshevik manner. A pedagogic meeting was organised for the students where the rector of the ILS was ready to sweep the minor dispute under the carpet. Anyway, the SKP leadership dismissed Malm from the ILS after her students had been ordered to Finland. Hanna Malm and her husband Kullervo Manner (1880-1939), who was the SKPs chairman in the 1920s, represented an uncompromising political position that appeared Stalinist in nature. In the autumn of 1931, Stalin used an article in the journal Proletarian Revolution to launch a furious attack on the rotten liberalism that had gained ground, especially in writings on party history. Correspondingly, Malm and Manner questioned whether the SKPs official formulations of its own history were correct. The debate over party history concentrated on the years of the Finnish revolution, 1917-18. Had it been betrayed by the same party leaders, then revolutionary social democrats, that had belonged to the SKP leadership since its foundation? The SKP's Great History Debate soon developed into a power struggle between Manners supporters and the rest of the SKP led by Otto Wille Kuusinen. Manner and Malm were forced to disassociate themselves publicly from their Betrayal Theory, but they never gave it up wholeheartedly. The new official theses on the SKP's history were formulated by Kuusinen. According to their stalinist message, interpretations on party history must not harm the party of today. After the new thesis on the SKPs history, any hint of criticism led to trouble. The Finnish ILS teachers who had to explain the official truths to the students noticed that Kuusinens formulations were compromises. Interestingly, the students were eager to report the teacher's discordant notes to the higher party organs. Interpretations of the SKPs history were used as a weapon in the final overthrow of Manners party opposition in 1935. The Kirov murder in late 1934 had justified the use of terror against bolshevik leaders that Stalin imagined to be his enemies. Manner and Malm represented Finnish examples of a party opposition that had become criminal. In addition to them, labour camp punishments were given to one Finnish ILS teacher and one postgraduate student
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(aspirant). In the Scandinavian ILS sector, the Finnish leader Allan Wallenius (1890-1942) and teacher Uuno Vistbacka (1896-1939) were dismissed as Manner's sympathisers. The result of the SKP's party purge was an ideologically uniform party that was led by one man: Kuusinen. Kuusinen began to take more personal responsibility for the Finnish ILS sector that had became the model sector of the school. The Cominterns new Popular Front tactics, however, led to a reorganisation of education of international cadres. The Soviet universities for national minorities were closed down. The communist parties that were legal in their countries were ordered to establish national party schools of their own. The ILS was reserved for students from countries where communists worked underground. In addition to these changes, the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936. This marked the beginning of the end for the ILS. The graduates from the ILS were supposed to volunteer for the International Brigades of the Republicans in Spain. For various reasons, only 5 out of 19 Finnish male students went to Spain. Before departing from Moscow, they got additional military schooling for a couple of months. The Finnish ILS intake that had started in late 1935 continued their studies for another year. The next student intake, planned for early 1937, never occurred. When the last Finns completed their studies in the summer of 1937, a systematic terror against certain national minorities condemned as enemies of the people was coming into operation. The gates to the terror were opened during the spring of 1937. In February, the plenum of the central committee of the bolshevik party had paid attention to cadre policy, party education, and the need for vigilance against enemies within the party. One of the plenum slogans was party democracy from below. Higher party organs were accused of familyness that should be revealed by lower ones. In the Finnish ILS sector, the students reacted by criticizing harshly their own responsible workers, their teachers and the ILS leadership. The teachers were accused of limiting self-criticism and of neglecting their duties. The students suggested more control and the recycling of the responsible posts. Compared to the students former reports, the tone of the criticism was severe. The NKVD, or some grouping within it, had decided to destroy the SKP leadership in Moscow. The most severe denunciation against it touched on the lifestyles of some of the Finnish leaders. They had used party money in meeting prostitutes and in drinking. Among the accused were a couple of ILS teachers who should have been setting a good example. The SKP leadership tried to settle the sex scandal, but it could not deny all the malpractices. From January 1938 onwards, the SKP leadership was purged. Six of the party members caught up in this were former ILS teachers. The last Finnish ILS graduates had to witness this campaign in Moscow where they had remained after their ILS course. During this time, the prospect of their return to Finland remained. In September 1938, many of them did in fact return. 12 out of 14 Finns from the last ILS course managed to get back to Finland at some point. The ILS Finns most likely to have fallen victims to the terror were those who had assimilated into Soviet society, or had become leaders of the SKP. The total number of former ILS students killed is roughly ten per cent of the entire Finnish student population educated at the ILS (14/141). This figure is probably an underestimate, since it does not include those whose fates are unknown or those sent to the labour camps. Almost half of the total number (12 of 26) of the Finnish ILS teachers also became terror casualties. In Finland, the ILS education could to some extent sustain the illegal SKP network in the early 1930s. Most of the ILS graduates worked as district organisers for the party or its youth organisation. The Finnish state police, however, won its fight against communists in the 1930s. Paradoxically, the effort of the Finnish police saved some communist lives from the terror in Moscow. However, at the end of the decade Finnish communism was outlawed in both of its countries of origin: Finland and the USSR. On the eve of the Winter War, there were only a handful of Finnish communist leaders left in the USSR that could be appointed ministers in the infamous puppet government, Terijoen hallitus, led by Kuusinen. Four of those ministers had either studied or taught at the ILS in the 1930s. In the
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Continuation War, the Finnish ILS survivors in the USSR were usually used as war propagandists or spies at the Finnish front. After the Second World War, the communists got their share of state power in the government of Finland. In the post-war period, there were three ministers (1945-1948) and 12 members of parliament that had studied at the Soviet party schools. The SKP exploited its exceptional position poorly. Instead of promoting Soviet Finland or People's Democracy, the communists found themselves excluded from state power in 1948. If things had turned out differently, the graduates from the ILS would probably have formed the inner circle of the new democratic government, such as in the GDR. The value of Soviet education was most appreciated by the SKP itself. Power in the party was divided between a small inner circle whose credibility was measured by their years of Soviet education and their political imprisonment in Finland. Instead of a mass party, the SKP became a closed cadre party. Soviet methods of cadre control were used to check the reliability of party members. Soviet party education guaranteed, almost automatically, work as a functionary in the party or in other organisations that were controlled by the SKP. Party positions were, however, quickly lost if the SKPs cadre organs could detect a lack of commitment to the party line in a persons past. The dominance of the stalinist party leadership lasted a relatively long time in the SKP. There were no remarkable political changes in the SKP's line after 1956 unlike the situation in many other communist parties around the world. In the early 1960s, the SKP was still lead by twenty professional revolutionaries, of whom only three had not been educated in the USSR. Kuusinen himself, then a member of the highest Soviet party leadership, had been urging the SKP to make ideological reforms. The old orthodox leadership lost some of its power in 1966 and this gave impetus to the SKPs actual party split in the late 1960s. A Short Course of Stalinism refers, first, to the effects of ILS education. The longer the stay in Moscow, the better the methods and mentalities of stalinism were internalised. Since the majority of the Finnish ILS students took the shortest course, their stalinist education remained incomplete. The longest ILS course that included a career both as a student and as a teacher proved to be fatal during the terror years. In between these extremes emerged a group of comrades that witnessed repression and terror on both sides of the Finnish-Russian border. Finnish stalinism maturated during the long years in two types of total institution that were strangely complementary. The leading Finnish stalinists of the post-Second World War period were thus marked by two formative experiences: a Soviet party education and a period of political imprisonment inside Finland. Secondly, A Short Course of Stalinism refers to the ideological dead end that was highlighted by the famous compass of international communism: History of the CPSU (B): Short Course (1938). Although the students at the ILS did not read the book before their schools dissolution they were witnessing stalinist process towards an ideological homogenisation throughout the 1930s. The Short Course remained the supreme ideological guide for communist parties until 1956. It was still valid in 1954 when the SKP renewed its cooperation with Moscow in respect to party education. Finally, what was the significance of the Short Course of Stalinism at the ILS for the Finns? For the students, leaving Finland for party education in the USSR was the decisive move in a career as a professional revolutionary. Despite major risks, the ILS education ensured upward social mobility for those who remained faithful to the SKP throughout all the trials. In the 1930s, the SKP leadership in Moscow respected ILS education because the systematic schooling increased its influence on communism in Finland until the terror years. For the great majority of Finns at the time, the Soviet party education simply symbolized treason. Despite short-term success after the Second World War, the history of the ILS Finns is, first and foremost, a history of losers. Joni Krekola

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Reviews

New works in the study of stalinism

Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (eds), Stalins Terror. High politics and mass repression in the Soviet Union, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pb edition, 2004, xviii & pp256, ISBN 1-4039-3903-9. Brigitte Studer, Berthold Unfried and Irne Hermann (eds), Parler de soi sous Staline. La construction identitaire dans le communisme des annes trente, (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de lhomme), 2002, ppviii & 210, ISBN 2-73510947-X. Brigitte Studer and Heiko Haumann (eds), Stalinistische Subjekte. Invdividuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern 1929-1953, (Zrich: Chronos), 2006, pp555. ISBN 3-0340-0736-1.

ne characteristic of the historical literature on stalinism has been its compartmentalisation; not only on those familiar political and intellectual lines which can be traced across national boundaries, but in more complex ways in which subject matter, academic discipline, language, historiographical formation and ideological persuasion have all played a part. When the revisionist debate broke out among writers on Stalins Russia in the mid1980s, an argument of some revisionists was they were claiming for historical scholarship a field hitherto dominated by political scientists. More specifically, the claim advanced was that of social history, either replacing or extending the institutional focus of a more narrowly conceived political history. Though sometimes they cut across them, these disciplinary distinctions could be mapped onto distinct historiographical traditions and wide variations in the political saliency of communist history. Further muddying the canvass were differences of subject matter, for beyond the far from negligible differences that existed between different western communist parties there lay the larger distinction between stalinism as an organised political tendency and stalinism as a system of government and/or terror. Though the interconnections between these stalinisms were everywhere recognised, and often accorded a determining significance, conceptually distinct literatures developed almost without reference to each other. Of the contributors to the initial revisionist debate, only Geoff Eley, a relative outsider to the subject, appears to have engaged simultaneously with the similar historiographical challenges being posed in respect of oppositional communist parties.1 Significant contributions to the debate did not come from historians of these parties. The level of cross-fertilisation, even among historians of different national parties, was at best uneven, as was the practice of comparative or collaborative scholarship. Even accounts stressing transnational lines of determination, sometimes perhaps especially these, could nevertheless be documented and constructed almost entirely within a national framework. It is telling that the one major attempt in English to write a history of international communism was produced as part of a project on Soviet Russia the work, of course, of E H Carr. In recent years things have been changing fast. Whether to clarify distinctions or underline commonalities, communisms transnational character, or its incomprehensibility without a transnational frame of reference, has given rise to an increasing number of exchanges and collaborations. So, too, despite the persistence of certain older refrains, has an avowed pluridisciplinarity and the attenuation of partisan anathemas. Introducing the first of the collections under review, Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott characterise describe earlier debates on stalinism as cantankerous, and ultimately sterile and note that the goalposts have now been moved along. Indeed, there is a further related paradox: that a greater sensitivity to national or subnational variations in the movements character and political dynamic has itself helped stimulate transnational and comparative scholarship, as the inadequacy of reading off assumed general characteristics from any single national case, even perhaps the Russian, becomes widely accepted. The goalposts havent just moved; the very exercise of simply kicking from one end (e.g.
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centre) to another (e.g. periphery) has come to appear simplistic and arcane, like an echo of the battles of ideas with which communism and its early historiographies were so identified. The collections under review indicate both the advantages of this increasing openness of boundaries and some of the practical and methodological challenges which it poses. All present research of high quality, all are impeccably edited and they can be recommended unreservedly. Stalins Terror is in many respects the most traditional of the three though not in any pejorative sense. Edited by two leading English-language authorities on the subject, its primary focus is on the Soviet experience of the terror. Its contributors include both western specialists like David Shearer and Russian historians including Aleksandr Vatlin, who (with Natalia Musienko) provides a microlevel study of the workings of the terror, and Oleg Khlevniuk, who writes on relations between the Soviet party and NKVD. Of special interest to Comintern historians are Fridrickh I. Firsovs discussion of the Cominterns role in the terror, substantially deriving from the now-published diary of Dimitrov, and an English adaptation of some of the themes in Berthold Unfrieds chapters on self-criticism in Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (see review in CHNN 17) and Parler de soi sous Staline (see below). While the editors broadly uphold an intentionalist perspective on the terror, they also note the contribution of work on socio-cultural and ideological themes including gender, popular culture and the construction of social and national identities. Implicitly, the validity seems to be recognised of a range of methodological perspectives which need not be regarded as mutually exclusive or reducible to a single dominant narrative of stalinism. On the specific debate over the terror, cogently summarised in the same introduction, the editors further suggest that continuing differences of opinion are unlikely to be settled on the basis of archival revelations or the achievement of any simple consensus. That may be compared with Stephen Kotkins recent observation that perspective and not archives remain determinative and that common archival sources as in any other field of history persist in giving rise to very different narratives and interpretations.2 The other two collections may be linked with the Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux collection, and several themes and contributors feature in more than one of the collections. Deriving from a Paris seminar held in 1999, Parler de soi sous Staline begins with an overview by Brigitte Studer in which she notes the paradox by which the totalitarian system of stalinism, described by Nicholas Werth as a civilisation du rapport, gave rise to a proliferation of narratives of self-representation. Some of these narratives have become accessible since the opening of the archives; others, as Studer notes, were already accessible but largely neglected. The papers which follow comprise four contributions each in French and English, and though they adopt a variety of methodological perspectives they are all more or less kicking towards the same goalposts. Some contributors take up the Foucauldian themes outlined in Studers introduction and further elaborated by Urs Martin. Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, in their discussion of the PCFs institutional autobiographies of the 1930s, and specifically the problematic ones, hence describe the stalinist subject as a Foucauldian subject, and by extension perhaps an Althusserian one too. Other points of reference include Webers Sociology of Religion (Klaus-Georg Riegel), while Sheila Fitzpatrick revisits one of the autobiographies reproduced in her co-edited collection In the Shadow of Revolution. Other contributions include Oleg Kharkhordins on the origins of individualisation in the USSR; Berthold Unfrieds aforementioned discussion of self-criticism in the Comintern; and an essay of Jochen Kellbecks, Working, struggling, becoming, which originally appeared in the Russian Review in 2001. Stalinist Subjects is the largest and the most ambitious of the three collections. For a start it is trilingual, with roughly equal numbers of contributions in German (9), English (8) and French (6), a wide-ranging introduction by the editors in both German and English and English summaries of all chapters. Studer and Haumann describe as one of its objects that of bringing together the fields of Russian history and communist history, hence some three-quarters of the contributions deal primarily with some aspect of Soviet history while the remainder draw on the French, Swiss and Belgian cases and the distinct political milieu that was the Comintern itself. Contributors range from prominent revisionists like Gabor Rittersporn to Nicolas Werth, who wrote on state violence and terror in the anything-but-revisionist Livre noir du communisme. As well as the work of Haumann himself, the collection also features a number of younger Swiss historians previously unknown to me. An introduction by Haumann and Studer provides both historiographical and
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theoretical bearings, locating the collection in the context of the cultural turn and characterising stalinism as a collective social project in which the mobilisation of identity was central. In subjecting newly accessible sources to a variety of cultural-historical readings, the aim, tentatively expressed, is to help establish new explanatory schemes for stalinism and the agents, typology and function of the stalinist state apparatus (p39). If the collections confirm the increasingly transnational character of the literature on stalinism, this should not therefore be mistaken for a sort of general historiographical melting-pot in which disparate traditions and perspectives are indiscriminately thrown together. Not only are distinct intellectual traditions and political conjunctures reflected in what remain anything but uniform historiographies. Beyond that, even the forms of interaction between them are not diffuse and interchangeable but represent quite specific lines of development. Already there was discernible within the Sicle des communismes project the coming together of two particularly influential traditions in recent communist historiography. One was a mainly Francophone literature on communist identities, in which influences like Foucault and also Bourdieu combine with strong intellectual traditions of prosopography and political sociology. The other was a mainly Anglophone literature on Soviet communism, the famous revisionism and its offshoots, which provided the majority of contributions in the Russian section of Le sicle des communismes. Stalinist Subjects takes this further, just as Stalins Terror features a Russian and German scholarship to some extent rooted in the experience of totalitarianism and the need to bear witness to its tragedies as well as make sense of them. Other connections remain to be made. One, as the introduction to Stalinist Subjects points out, is the extension of Russian history into Eastern European history. Another might be the extension of the communist history component into southern Europe, the Nordic countries, Asia or Latin America. For any such projects, these volumes will provide a major stimulus and point of reference. One approach is what might crudely be described as an Anglo-American approach to communist history, not in the sense of any particularly well-developed transatlantic networks, but through common roots in a Thompsonian tradition of labour and social history. Sometimes, particularly in the States, this literature too has been described as revisionist, and hence implicitly conflated with the Soviet revisionists like Fitzpatrick and Rittersporn. Certainly, the view that non-Russian communist historiography has largely involved a traditional history of organisations and parties (Stalinist Subjects, p40) would be shared neither by revisionists nor their detractors on either side of the Atlantic. Even so, the implications of these revisionisms may vary widely, just because stalinism itself was far from uniform and a characteristic of revisionism has been the recognition of difference. Donald Filtzers contribution to Stalinist Subjects is in this respect instructive. Invoking Hillel Ticktins example in support of a class-based analysis of stalinism, Filtzer is concerned that some of his co-contributors imply a consensual basis for stalinism, a position which Filtzer rejects categorically. We know that many who embraced the official ideology of the system wound up in conflict with the system precisely because of their internalization of that ideology, he warns. We know that people could internalize some aspects of ideology but reject others, both in articulation and in practice. Within the historiography of western communist parties it is precisely this recognition of conflict within the framework of party loyalty that has been taken as a hallmark of revisionism. Stalinism, as Filtzer puts it, displayed a high level of contradiction: Charged with the actual implementation and execution of regime policy on the ground, [party managers and functionaries] learned that they could achieve this only by reaching various degrees of compromise and accommodation with individual workers and collective farmers. They understood that they could carry out their orders and instructions only by violating key aspects of those same orders and instructions. They thus subverted the formal policies of the regime in order to ensure the systems institutional coherence, and with this its long-term survival. Whether or not specifically grounded in class analysis, this emphasis on agency, potential conflict and sheer dysfunctionality has been a crucial element in the historicisation of stalinism, particularly in the case of communist parties lacking effective powers of compulsion over their members or other actors needing to be accommodated. It is a subject crying out for comparative analysis, though this field of scholarship too is only just getting off the ground.
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This in turn raises a more fundamental issue. In establishing a bridge between Russian and communist history, the editors of Stalinist Subjects observe (p40) that both deal more or less with one and the same subject, Stalinism, and both have equally profited from the archival revolution. This seems a large assumption. Indeed, Im not sure that even the latter point is strictly true. Without in any way underestimating the importance of the Comintern archives, through oral sources, defectors papers and the records of wider networks and movements histories could arguably be written of western communist parties Theodore Drapers, for example to which only the fortuitous accessibility of the Smolensk archives offered any real Soviet equivalent. Moreover, such materials continue to become accessible. In Britain, for example, there has begun another archival revolution involving the records of the British secret state, including abundant and intrusive personal files on communists (among others) that might also be worked into a Foucauldian analysis. Unpoliced interviews, freely deposited archives, wider political networks, competing systems of surveillance all are symptomatic of a more basic issue concerning the sameness of stalinism. In clarifying the terms individual and system which hold the collection together, Studer and Haumann define the latter as follows: the specific interlocking configuration, under Stalin, of the organs of power, the state, the party and the secret police, with their cognitive schemata and organisational rules, their administrative apparatus and personnel (p44). Such a definition is clearly not meant to extend to communist parties in which there was no such configuration with state or secret police, and where adhesion to communism need not exclude other commitments, sometimes of a formative and durable character. Stalinism as a political project no doubt was more or less the same despite these distinctions. In respect of relations between system and individual, on the other hand, it is hard to imagine a distinction of more existential significance quite literally so, for example, if one compares the fate of Old Bolsheviks in Britain and the USSR. Hence, of course, only natural that the volumes sections on societal mobilisation and experiencing violence should relate exclusively to experiences in Russia, albeit including a sobering account of American victims of the purges that further underlined how densely interconnected these histories were. But as Serge Wolikow points out in his contribution, the interconnections did not preclude significant variations in both form and chronology (p276). These variations have important implications for the construction of stalinist subjects. Studer and Haumann in their introduction refuse the simplicities of the old totalitarian model and insist that the internalisation of stalinist norms was always negotiated. Precisely because this was the case, wide variations in the terms of such negotiation demand the closest attention. Within the context of Stalins Russia, for example, Studer points out in Stalinist Subjects that foreigners attracted particular suspicion because they possessed a resource Soviet citizens did not: their life and experience were partly beyond the control of the party institution (p210). Berthold Unfrieds essays in the other two collections are especially insightful in respect of the difficulties that western communists had in internalising or even comprehending Soviet norms that violated already internalised western notions of individuality and the private sphere (Stalins Terror, p175). Beyond these Russian contexts, and for the many stalinists who never experienced them at first hand, these personal resources included not only past lives but future ones too, and hence the ultimate revocability even of what might turn out to be a lifetimes commitment. It would be surprising if stalinist norms themselves were not subtly redefined in the process of negotiation. If I have a reservation about Stalinist Subjects it is that these distinctions too might have been better documented and theorised and the specific parameters of the subject set out more fully. Though all of the accounts are finely nuanced, the predominant concern is with the working of stalinist norms outwards. The other possible notions of the self to which Unfried refers and which might involve rival collective identities, such as that of the trade unionist, as well as western ideas of individuality are not really considered except as obstacles for bolsheviks to overcome, or at least try to. Perhaps the archival revolution itself is ready for its NEP. In a fascinating contribution showing the preoccupation of Belgian communists with party education even during
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the countrys wartime occupation, Jos Gotovitch is one of the few contributors to make extensive use of non-Russian archival collections. Nevertheless, Gotovitch also notes that how the reading even of previously accessible sources has been transformed by the Moscow archives. While the collections under review eloquently prove the point, one may also wonder whether the very richness of the Comintern archives, especially in respect of biographical materials, may obscure the fact that this is fundamentally an institutional repository in which the organisational logic, political priorities and material resources of the institution are reflected in its character, arrangement and language (in both senses of the word) as well as its disposition over time. Given the parameters of the project, it is interesting, for example, how few of the contributors draw on oral testimony for the exploration of subjectivities and the construction of identities. Apart from Juliane Fursts account of the Soviet dance craze and some methodological reflections of Heiko Haumanns, the main example is Eva Maeders contribution on the Siberian communist and former Old Believer, Ivan Petrov. Maeders account is of particular interest both in showing how Petrov in 1996 simply passed over the two-year forced labour sentence he received in 1937 and in comparing his oral testimony with the party autobiographies he had written in the early 1930s. Struck by the surprising consistency of these accounts on many points, Maeder speculates on how far this might demonstrate the internalisation of the partys norms for the construction of such narratives. Here one may observe how the metaphor of internalisation, even in the process of embracing subjectivity, almost intrinsically suggests the primacy of some external agency or discourse penetrating inwards. If, for the sake of argument, one were to use the oral testimony as the yardstick, such consistencies might suggest the durability of a certain sense of self that had not simply been reshaped according to institutional norms. That again will depend on context. Clearly it has less force in the context of Soviet Russia, where remembering itself was an activity fraught with danger.3 The same, of course, could not be said of less powerful and pervasive external agencies like many of the western communist parties.4 The comparison and relativisation of these particular narratives of self therefore raises issues of considerable critical interest. Here I can give only one illustration. Studers own contribution in Stalinist Subjects is devoted to the stalinist practice of techniques of the self culminating in the purge as what one French communist described as the highest form of self-criticism and in the practice of torture as the ultimate logic of unmasking and biographical transparency. It is a brilliant essay in the use of Foucauldian concepts, utterly convincing on its own terms, but leaves the reader unsure as to their scope and application. Studer states that her sources allow the identification of three such techniques of the self within the communist party: the autobiography; the practice of criticism and self-criticism; and the self-report or self-evaluation. These, it might be noted, were not only performative acts but particularly stylised and ritualised ones. They were generated by the institution, then meticulously recorded, filed and preserved by the apparatus, thanks to whom historians of western communist parties spend a good deal longer in Moscow than most of the subjects they are looking at. Just as any diplomatic historian buried in a foreign office archive, the researcher too needs to be careful not to internalise their logic. Even when deployed with such enormous sophistication, the use of sources generated by the single system of stalinism, and the reconstruction of subjectivities in sole relation to that system, may obscure the fact that subjectivities in complex societies are typically even in the case of communists constructed in relation to a variety of external agencies or contexts, whether concurrently or over the course of a lifetime. But again, the immediate issue is actually a wider one of our usages of stalinism itself as a concept. Though a number of contributors touch briefly on these issues, they are most clearly flagged up in Serge Wolikows triple distinction, not only between the individual and system and the national and international, but between stalinism and stalinisation, with its sense of process. Wolikows reading of stalinism suggests a clear distinction between the Soviet symbiosis of party/state/society and the national communist parties that were clearly subordinated to this Soviet centre but not merely its epiphenomena. What then are the limits, the subdivisions or the modifiers of this concept of stalinism? The notion of a century of communisms, with which Wolikow along with several of the other contributors has been associated, is one explicitly opposed to homogenising narratives or the conception of communism as an international conspiracy. Where, then, does stalinism fit into this picture? Was stalinism one of these communisms? Or are the two concepts
36

interchangeable, at least in the period of Stalins ascendancy, so that communisms plural need to be plotted over time, not as a modifier of stalinism itself? If the latter is the case, do we then need to think of stalinisms as a plural concept to register these differences of environment if not of intent? Does it refer to a system, more or less closed according to ones interpretation, or is it a set of attributes or qualities that can be found in complex relations with other traditions or discourses, including its possible modification by them? If that no doubt allows the broadest possible usage, then the further danger may need to be recognised of attenuating its moral and political distinctiveness as a closed political system culminating in terror, along with those aspects of communist politics, nationally or internationally, most closely bound up with its functioning or legitimation. No doubt it is the easy identification of stalinism with a centralised command system and the ascendancy of its begetter that has lent itself to colloquial uses that scarcely go beyond that of a descriptive qualifier. Fitzpatrick for example has described it as a convenient term for the new political, economic, and social structures that emerged in the Soviet Union after the great break associated with collectivization and the First Five Year Plan; or as a shorthand for the complex of institutions, structures, and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the Stalin era.5 If, on the other hand, stalinism is to be used in a more comparative and analytical way that is relevant to both stalinist and non-stalinist societies, then one must presumably envisage at least as painstaking a discussion of its defining characteristics as has taken place in respect of fascist systems and fascist movements. In making such observations, I am aware once again of the old conundrum of how far differences in perspective between the historians of different communist parties arise from different historiographical approaches and how far they reflect significant variations in the location and political culture of the parties themselves. In any event, almost the only British communist to figure in any of these volumes is the Lenin School student William Cowe, a former Scottish railwaymen, whom Unfried in Stalins Terror cites as an example of some students resistance to Stalinist rules of conspiracy. Unfried rightly links this with the relative legal security enjoyed by communists in Britain. What is also clear from the unpublished autobiography which Cowe wrote many years later is the depth of his socialisation into a labour movement culture as well as Stalinism. His Lenin School rapporteurs saw this, and attributed his dangerous errors to strong remnants of petty-bourgeois individualism and traditions of the labour aristocracy. As Cowe himself put it in his autobiography, he was had on the mat: for taking the role of a shop steward in a capitalist factory, a trade union representative wanting a negotiated settlement of demands without realising that I was in a Socialist country where the rights of workers or students are the very first safeguards of Socialist management. I was told that I was void of self-criticism and showed I was a victim of social democratic tendencies. It set me thinking. At least it was a natural state to be in coming from and growing up in bourgeois democratic Britain. Unfried points out that Cowe, despite his dangerous counter-revolutionary opinions, was returned to the CPGBs central committee with Harry Pollitts in 1938. What was now emerging, he noted complacently in his autobiography, was that it was not so much the fault of the student, as some fault in the running of the School. Cowe, nevertheless, was also a loyal stalinist and remained one all his life, working for the party and grateful for the education he had received in Moscow. Dangerous opinions were a good deal less dangerous in Britain for all concerned. There is possibly a large scope here for more comparative work if we are to clarify what it is we are talking about when we refer to stalinism. Nevertheless, this is not intended as a criticism of three outstanding collections. Taken together, Parler de soi sous Staline and Stalinist Subjects in particular represent major collaborative efforts which take the international literature on stalinism into genuinely new areas and raise searching questions about existing approaches. Where so much work on the subject consists of variations on familiar themes, they are likely to provide something of a scholarly landmark. Kevin Morgan
37

Notes

Correspondence

Der Thlmann Skandal [I]

n his review of Hermann Weber and Bernhard H. Bayerlein (eds), Der Thlmann Skandal, the collection of documents concerning the removal from his post of KPD chairman Ernst Thlmann due to his covering up of corruption in the Hamburg organisation and his subsequent reinstatement by Stalin, Norman LaPorte writes that one of the editors, Bayerlein, makes the convincing case that Stalin believed Thlmann had been turned by the Nazis, hence his lack of interest in negotiating his release. A quote from the Dimitrov Diaries is used, in which Stalin put this view to Dimitrov and claimed that his letters are witness to the influence of fascist ideology. Having read the part of the Thlmann-Stalin correspondence published in the May and June 1996 issues of Utopie Kreativ, the Berlin journal close to the PDS, I find Bayerleins arguments wholly unconvincing. The letters justify everything the KPD, CI and Soviet Union had done and were doing at the time. There is no sign of doubt in the policy followed, never mind any fascist ideology. Stalin had no interest in doing a deal with the nazis during the Pact in order to get Thlmann to Moscow. He had prevented a well-planned scheme to free him already in 1935. Thlmanns presence would have hindered his liquidation of Comintern workers and communist refugees. Furthermore, Thlmann was seen as an anti-fascist hero, and with Dimitrov there, and untouchable, another would be double trouble. Stalin had Ulbricht, Pieck and many other loyal stalinists to do his bidding at the head of the KPD when it became necessary. Thlmann was surplus to requirements. LaPorte believes that the editors could also have stressed that almost no German communist leader ever wanted to lead the Comintern. In the months following the March Action (1921) about the half the KPD membership, including many leading trade unionists, Reichstag deputies, and co-chairman of the party Ernst Dumig. Less than two months after the KPDs Essen Congress in March 1927, where he argued from a right position, Arthur Rosenberg resigned from the party. He argued that the Comintern was unreformable, as it could not cut across the interests of the USSR. Both his speech at Essen and his resignation letter are appended to Mario Kesslers biography of Rosenberg (Kln: Bhlau Verlag, 2003). Why should any communist want to leave, as long as one believes one is part of the world revolutionary party, or, if it is degenerating, it is still capable of reform? An explanation for Clara Zetkin remaining in the KPD, in spite of her hostility to the third period and her general negative evaluation of the Comintern is also lacking, the reviewer points out. Tania nldags Die Tragdie einer Kmpferin fr die Arbeiterbewegung? Clara Zetkin 1928-1931 in IWK (Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung), No. 3, September 1997, an essay presenting Zetkins letter to the CPSU politbureau of 8 December 1928, her speech at the ECCI presidium of 19 December 1928, plus half a dozen other letters, tackles precisely that question. Due to till health Zetkin lived mainly in the Soviet Union. She had a heart condition, was almost blind, and suffered from other ailments. She was often in sanatoria or health resorts. From 1921 Zetkin was looked after by a nurse who was also a GPU/OGPU agents. Her post was under control too. After visiting Germany in 1927, she wrote letters to Bukharin (11 Sept 1927) and Pyatnitzky (26 Sept 1927) describing the lamentable state of the KPD under the leadership of Thlmann, whom
38

she saw as lacking theoretical education, as having character-weaknesses, and suffering from the self-delusion that he was the German Lenin. Someone showed Thlmann the letter. Henceforth Zetkin was boycotted by the KPD. For example, her Reminiscences of Lenin appeared in French in 1926, followed by an English edition, though she did not get to check the translations. A German edition appeared only in 1929, without her checking the text. She had difficulties getting articles published and items that did appear were censored. Zetkin shared the views of the KPD (Opposition), the expelled current around BrandlerThalheimer. She had contact with some of its members, as shown by the four letters to Fanny Jezierska, and the fact that some of her internal protests appeared in the journal Gegen der Strom. Zetkin did not come our publicly for the KPO and avoided steps that would have led to her expulsion. Anyway, the KPO aim was to reform the KPD/CI from the outside. nldag points out the economic dependency of Zetkin, her son Maxim and his wife Emilia Milevidova upon the CI (or Soviet Union) and KPD, but sets out other causes for her staying in the party. nldag refers to Zetkins authoritarian characteristics. She notes her attitude towards key events in her political life. Zetkin was a product of Wilhelmine society and the rise and fall of the SPD. She welcomed the centralised control and discipline imposed by the Comintern on its sections. In this she was the opposite of Luxemburg, who had always opposed Lenins party-concept and foresaw bolshevik domination of the new international. While Luxemburg was wary of Lenin, Zetkin idolised him. Luxemburg criticised key parts of bolshevik policy openly already in 1918, whereas Zetkin kept quiet. If she was troubled by developments in the Soviet Union later, she kept it to herself. In that regard, nldag suggests that her caution could owe itself to concern about how open criticism could affect her son and his wife, both members of the CPSU. Both are described as ambitious. Could they have influenced Zetkin, she asks. They corrected her manuscripts. The first draft of a speech by Zetkin upon receiving the Order of Lenin heaped praise on him but didnt mention Stalin. The final one contained the obligatory references to the genius-like leader of the Soviet state. Tania nldag subsequently wrote a biography of Zetkin but I have not read it. The reviewer is right to stress the need for a critical biography of Thlmann. A John-Prescott like figure: overpromoted, a buffoon, popular among the communist workers, a myth was built around him, particularly in the GDR (for example, his supposed role in the Hamburg uprising). In his memoirs, Karl Retzlaw relates how he showed Skoblevsky, the military adviser sent by the bolsheviks, the preparations in Hamburg. Thlmann was then a pub-tribune (Kneipen Volksredner). Retzlaw gave him no details of the plan as alcohol played too large part in his life.6 Mike Jones Notes
6

Spartakus. Augstieg und Nidergang. Erinnerungen eines Parteiarbeiters, Franfurt/Main:, revised edition, 1976, p241.

Correspondence

Der Thlmann Skandal [II]

n his letter to CHNN, Mike Jones takes issue with Bayerleins interpretation of Stalins stance towards Thlmann. Having read the correspondence between Stalin and Thlmann, he finds it implausible that Stalin thought that Thlmann had been influenced by fascist ideology and, as someone turned by the enemy, should be left to his fate in the nazis prison camps. It is difficult to cover every point made by an author in a review (even longer reviews as published here). For this reason, I should take responsibility for the cursory treatment of Bayerleins research finding. In his appraisal of recent research, which takes into account the new insights offered by the Dimitrov Diaries and encoded ECCI telegrams, Bayerlein offers greater analytical precision that was
39

apparent in the review. As this is not available to English-language readers, it is worth giving the topic some further coverage. Bayerlein addresses the vexed question of why Stalin did not lift a finger to have Thlmann released from Hitlers dungeons. It had, after all, proved possible in other cases (for example, with the Hungarian Rakosi and the Romanian Anna Pauker and prisoner swaps had taken place after the Nazi-Soviet Pact). The files cannot serve as a window into Stalins soul. We will never know precisely what motivated Stalins decision abandon Thlmann to his sad fate (Bayerlein) in nazi Germany. But clues in this psychological puzzle are offer by Stalins statements to leading communists. On 19 March 1940, Molotov showed Stalin a letter from Thlmann dated 3 March, which pleaded for the active engagement of his Russian friends for his release. Stalin merely wrote on it into the archive. Bayerlein concurs with the conclusion of the Russian historian D S Davydovi that this was little short of a death sentence. Immediately prior to the nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalins response to the reinvigorated Comintern campaign for Thlmanns release was little short of malicious. The Soviet dictator was concerned that it would impact adversely on Moscows policy of friendly relations with Hitler-Germany. Bayerlein emphasises the casualness with which Stalin made these statement, which had a life-or-death significance for Thlmann, using them to illustrate the indifference of the Soviet dictator. In the absence of any smoking gun evidence that actually claims to tell us what motivated Stalin to act towards Thlmann in this manner, interpretation is everything and CHNN welcomes debate on this, and any other, matter raised here. The two other issues Mike Jones letter raises are also of importance. Firstly, he agrees the absence of a critical, post-Cold War biography of Thlmann is a serious omission in the literature. After gaining funding generously provided by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, I have begun to research the political life of Ernst Thlmann in a project the will culminate in the publication of a biography. Secondly, he draws our attention to the complexity of what could be termed the psychology of communist leaders. Little has been written on either the motivation of those, like Clara Zetkin, who stayed in the Comintern and its national sections despite their growing reservations about its direction; or those, like Arthur Rosenberg, who chose to leave and fight for socialist outside the Comintern. It is a subject that I will return to in the next issue of CHNN. Norman La Porte

Obituary

Dr Neil Rafeek, 17 November 1960 - 8 April 2006

eil Rafeek was one of Scotlands foremost oral historians, a vocation that he loved passionately and played a significant role in promoting. He was born in London, the middle of Taureq and Susan Rafeeks three sons. His father was a town planner and regularly moved with his work. After a few years in Bristol the family moved to Edinburgh, where Neil attended primary school, then six years later moving to Sunderland. His experience at secondary school prevented Neil from successfully completing his early education and, leaving with just one O-level, he entered the building trade to train as a bricklayer.

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As a mature student he enrolled at Strathclyde University, attracted by its non-elitist history and the socialist traditions of the city of Glasgow. After completing his first degree he went on to do a PhD on Women and the Communist Party in Scotland which he completed in 1998. It was the first oral history based PhD to be awarded in the Department of History at Strathclyde University. Neil developed into a brilliant oral historian, among the best and most respected oral history interviewers in Scotland. Typically Neil didnt just limit his involvement to his own work, but actively helped to build, manage and run the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde University. It is no accident that Neil excelled in oral history as he quickly established a rapport with his respondents. This was an extension of his personality. His interest in peoples stories and lives was genuine and deep and they opened up to him because they were treated with respect and the utmost courtesy. Neil was very aware that he was being given access to peoples most precious, and sometimes traumatic, memories. This enabled him to delve deeper than most, one of his themes being that in everyone there is always another story. This was not, however, a means of gaining material to be exploited. Neil always insisted on transcribing his interviews and returning them to the interviewees for approval before they were used in publications. He brought his own style to teaching, which at oral history day schools was particularly inspirational. Whilst taking an essentially democratic approach to his work, which respected the individuals who shared their testimony with him, Neil also ensured that rigorous standards applied to his methodology and research. He did much to cement oral history as an academic discipline in Scotland. He had a growing reputation for his expertise on the history of the Socialist Sunday Schools and had a list of publications to his credit, most recently contributing to the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women. His other work included co-authoring the University Experience a History of Strathclyde University, extensive work on occupational medicine and dust related diseases, the Salt of the Earth Working Lives Project and a new project on combat experience in World War Two. He had several articles to his credit, including a co-authored article in the Journal of Oral History on the anti-Iraq War demonstration in Glasgow in February 2003. Neil was also out last year, mini-disc in hand, recording history as it happened, at the Make Poverty History demonstration in the Meadows in Edinburgh. From a young age Neil suffered ill health and was often at odds with the medics, seeking alternative ways to manage and improve his condition. Despite, or perhaps even because of, his health Neil distilled the essence of life and lived it to the full. It has been said that he didnt have interests, but rather passions. Oral history was only one of these. He also loved good food, theatre, film and popular music, particularly The Beatles. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the development of different bands and musical genres and was perhaps the only person who could be equally happy listening to Matt Munro, The Dubliners or Deep Purple. Neil was a committed socialist, first getting involved in combating racism and fascism in the AntiNazi League in the 1970s. He was active in the Labour Party and the trades union movement, holding positions such as constituency secretary, election agent and treasurer of his UCCAT branch. Remaining committed to his ideals he eventually left the New Labour party. Neil had a long association with international solidarity causes and was the founding treasurer of the Scottish Cuba Defence Campaign. His enthusiasm and commitment will be sorely missed by his family, friends and colleagues. Arthur McIvor, University of Strathclyde This obituary first appeared in the Glasgow Herald.

41

Eley, International communism in the deyday of Stalin, New Left Review, 157, 1986, pp. 90-100; Eley, History with the politics left out again?, Russian Review, 45, 4, 1986, pp385-94.
2

Stephen Kotkin, The state is it us? Memoirs, archives and Kremlinologists, Russian Review, 61 (January 2002), pp35-51.

See Introduction in Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson and Anna Rotkirch, Living through the Soviet System, New York & London: Transaction Books, pp1-22.
4

See the interview and autobiography of the British communist Peter Cadogan in this issue of CHNN. In Cadogans case the consistencies in the two narratives are in some ways even more surprising given that he had spent less than five years in the communist party when he wrote his autobiography and forty-five outside of it when he recorded his interview.
5

Fitzpatrick, New perspectives on Stalinism, Russian Review, 45, 1986, p357; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p3.