Party animals, p.25
Party Animals, page 25
Platts-Mills’s conviction availed his friend nothing. A week later, after the usual recitation of their complicated crimes, eleven of the defendants were sentenced to be hanged. Sling was one of them. In his final words from the dock on 3 December he wished ‘every success to the Communist Party, the Czechoslovak people, and the President of the Republic’. But, he said, ‘I have never been a spy.’
Artur London, one of the accused men who was not executed, later wrote about their treatment by the secret police. A Jew who had fought in Spain and the Czech resistance, whose mother and sister had been murdered in Auschwitz, London had been arrested after the Rajk trial and broken through psychological and physical torture and the use of threats to him and his family. In his book The Confession (turned into a movie by Costa-Gavras), he recalled being confronted by the infamous secret police officer, Major Smola. ‘We’ll get rid of you and your filthy race,’ Smola apparently told him.’You’re all the same. Not everything Hitler did was right, but he destroyed the Jews and he was right about that. Too many of you escaped the gas chamber. We’ll finish what he started.’
The bodies of Slánský, Sling and the others had barely been rendered to ashes when the next (and, as it happened, last) great story of conspiracy, treachery, arrests and confessions struck the Communist world. This apotheosis of Stalinism was announced on the front page of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, on Tuesday 13 January 1953 under the headline ‘Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians’. The story began:
Today the TASS news agency reported the arrest of a group of saboteur-doctors. This terrorist group, uncovered some time ago by organs of state security, had as their goal shortening the lives of leaders of the Soviet Union by means of medical sabotage.
The ‘saboteur-doctors’ had already done away with two senior comrades, Andrei Zhdanov (‘the Soviet Sam Aaronovitch’ earlier in this chapter) and Alexander Shcherbakov, former head of the Writers’ Union, as well as a number of military men. These deaths had been accomplished by deliberately administering the wrong drugs and incorrect regimen to them while they were ill in hospital. Thus the crimes had been concealed by the appearance of death from natural causes. The idea had been to ‘remove Soviet and military cadres from the power structure’ and so weaken the defence of the nation. ‘Whom,’ demanded Pravda, ‘did these monsters serve?’ Then, as was customary, the writer answered himself:
The majority of the participants of the terrorist group – Vovsi, B. Kogan, Feldman, Grinshtein, Etinger and others – were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence – the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organisation called ‘Joint’. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organisation, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of kindness, is now completely revealed.
Had the plot not been uncovered, said Pravda, then other and even more senior leaders might have been murdered, up to and including Stalin himself.
The ‘bourgeois press’ in Britain and elsewhere had little doubt that this plot was a figment and the consequence either of paranoia or of some internal power struggle in the Soviet Union. Jewish writers and organisations round the world understood immediately that it was a variation on a deadly and ancient theme. The conspirators were Jews supposedly working for an underground Jewish cause. Unsurprisingly there were fears that this campaign would end in a state pogrom against the considerable number of Jews in the Soviet Union.
The British Communist Party was – officially – not worried. Pat Sloan, a long-time senior member, author of several books about the Soviet Union (including the 1937 classic Soviet Democracy) and now Secretary of the British Soviet Friendship Society, gave the line in March’s edition of Labour Monthly:
Ultimately with the passage of time it becomes generally accepted that the Soviet Government did, in fact, nip a conspiracy in the bud. The recent announcement of the doctors’ plot discovered in Moscow has so far run true to form… So let the Press shriek ‘fantastic’ and ‘frame-up’ and ‘anti-Semitism’. We’ve had it all before. But the facts will show, as they have shown before, that drastic steps must sometimes be taken by a Socialist state against capitalist conspirators and their tools.
‘The facts will show’. Sloan was writing even before any trial could take place to test the evidence (not, of course, that any trial would have done so), but he knew – and he wanted everyone else to know – that the Jewish doctors would turn out to have been as guilty as Slansky, Sling and Rajk.
The British Communist Party itself had a significant Jewish membership, partly as a result of its record in the fight against fascism. And the leadership must have realised that the increasingly strident tone of the Soviet antagonism to ‘Zionism’ would discomfit many such members and supporters. What was needed to bring everyone into line was another pamphlet like Klugmann’s or Kartun’s and so they cast around for someone with good Jewish credentials to write it. Their first choice was a Scottish Jewish mathematician and author of the wartime pamphlet Soviet Jews at War, Professor Hyman Levy. Levy refused.
The main job of explanation fell to Andrew Rothstein, whose house on Hillway was a few yards away from Sam and Lavender. In the same March 1953 edition of Labour Monthly as Pat Sloan’s defence of Soviet paranoia, Rothstein linked the ideological with the conspiratorial. The working-class movement, he wrote, had never been welcomed by ‘petty Jewish capitalists’, who had wanted a way of diverting the Jewish proletariat from Marxism. It had found just the vehicle it needed in Zionism. When it seemed advantageous Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis, but as Hitler faced defeat they had thrown in their lot with ‘the highest bidder’ – America. As a result ‘Jewish millionaires in the USA took over in practice the leadership of the world Zionist organization’.
So Zionism was inimical to socialism. Hence when a plot involving Zionists was uncovered, neither it nor the shrieks of those determined to deny it was at all surprising. Wrote Rothstein:
The Zionist leaders of this and other countries have rushed into the press to attack the Soviet Union for arresting a few degenerate middle-class professional men whom thwarted class hatred of socialism (thwarted Zionism for some) has led into terrorist attacks on behalf of Wall Street.
There was, concluded Rothstein, ‘but one road to safety… the victory of working-class internationalism over bourgeois nationalism and Zionist racialism’.
Unfortunately for Rothstein hardly had the March edition appeared than a great event happened, which sundered time between ‘before’ and ‘after’. On 5 March 1953, at his dacha in Kuntsevo near Moscow, Stalin died. By the end of the month the doctors had been exonerated (alas, two had already died in prison, probably as a result of torture), the charges dismissed and the entire business subsequently blamed on Stalin’s Georgian security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, and his deputy, Mikhail Ryumin, both of whom were tried and shot.
How Andrew Rothstein, Pat Sloan and other Party members reconciled what they had just written about the plot with its rapid and complete evaporation is a matter of conjecture. I can find nothing from any of them explaining how such a thing could have happened. But in any case the rather sudden death of the giant of world Communism was probably their main preoccupation at the time.
It will occupy me in a few pages’ time. But for now it is impossible not to ask questions, like the one Eric Hobsbawm asked years later in his memoirs, Interesting Times:
How could one possibly believe the official Soviet line that Tito had to be excommunicated because he had long prepared to betray the interests of proletarian internationalism in the interest of foreign intelligence services? We could understand that James Klugmann was forced to disavow Tito, but we did not believe him… We knew he did not believe it either.
Who was this ‘we’? It appeared again in a review by the Party historian Victor Kiernan of Alison Macleod’s memoir of the 1950s, The Death of Uncle Joe.
We had all admired the Yugoslav resistance to Hitler, and Tito’s sudden excommunication seemed inexplicable. James Klugmann, who had served in Yugoslavia during the war, and came back talking enthusiastically of everything there, was – very tactlessly – commissioned by the Party to write a book explaining the volte-face. He could only make the shuffling best of a bad job. Someone told me of having seen him at headquarters, about to face the leadership over some question, looking distressingly nervous. I and a friend, who had spent some time in Prague on scientific work, went to see him privately – we had known him well at Cambridge – and tried to make him see that some of the tales told at the trials, as at the earlier ones in Russia, were quite incredible. They meant that men who had risked their lives for years as revolutionaries had been wearing traitors’ masks all the time, ready to be thrown off at a given signal. We could make no impression whatever.
By 1951–2 Hobsbawm, who said he hadn’t believed the 1949 stories about Tito, found the accusations against Slansky and Sling, who were eventually rehabilitated in the 1960s, ‘even less convincing’. Apparently now the Party’s reflexive belief in the Soviet Union was waning. ‘Party defence of the Czech trial seemed to show,’ thought Hobsbawm, ‘a certain lack of conviction.’
Unlike what happened in the 1930s I cannot recall any serious attempt to compel Party members to justify the succession of show trials that disfigured the last years of Stalin, but this means that intellectuals like myself had given up the effort to be convinced.
Such may have been the mood amongst the Party historians (though they clearly kept it to themselves) but that such scepticism was not shared by Party members was demonstrated to me by a letter sent by Lavender to Sam on 27 January 1953, at the height of the furore over the Doctors’ Plot. ‘Dearest One’, she wrote:
Have just come back from the Pollitt meeting. It was not as well attended as it should have been, but 10 new recruits were made (alas not Gill among them) and £48 collected. The theme was ‘socialism in our time’ and Harry took the opportunity of dealing very clearly and firmly with the Czech and Moscow plots.
This was also the experience of the young Daily Worker journalist, Alison Mcleod. She remembered that in 1949 her colleagues Derek Kartun (‘clever, interesting, cultivated’) and Peter Fryer had ‘both sincerely believed the confessions of the accused to be genuine’. Two years later when Pravda announced the Doctors’ Plot a colleague in the newsroom spoke for himself and others when he said of the supposed conspirators and their masters, ‘Gosh, they never give up, do they?’
And Sam, all this time working as Cultural Secretary? In Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook there is another episode involving Comrade Bill, but this one does not appear in non-fiction form in her memoirs. The heroine, Anna – being of Hobsbawmian mind but possessing a more activist disposition – is shocked by the East European show trials and in particular by the accusation against an old friend. So she and a writer friend approach Bill, who says he will make enquiries. Then…
We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? ‘Well in matters of this case where there might be doubt…’ Bill hesitated, began on a long and manifestly insincere rationalisation, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent, ‘including me’.
If Bill is indeed Sam then he knows what Lavender obviously doesn’t – that the accusations are almost certainly untrue. In other words, he is – for whatever reasons – a complete cynic.
But perhaps not so cynical because, according to my aunt Gill, on hearing the news of Stalin’s death that spring in 1953, Sam cried. I never once saw my father cry in the forty-four years I knew him – except twice, maybe, with laughter.
In the National Archive is a file on the Communist singer Ewan MacColl. Intercepted letters in the file show that at the beginning of the decade MacColl was in correspondence with Sam about, among other matters, his new song, ‘The Ballad of Stalin’. The last verse ran:
Joe Stalin was a mighty man and he made a mighty plan;
He harnessed nature to the plough to work for the good of man;
He’s hammered out the future, the forgeman he has been
And he’s made the workers’ state the best the world has ever seen.
It later came be to an item of faith that what was known as ‘the cult of personality’ was a Soviet disease, inculcated by Stalin and his hangers on, and which, though influential, had never quite infected parties like the British Communist Party. They were not directly responsible for the idolatry, the pictures of an almost godlike Marshal in white uniform standing in a golden field of Soviet corn.
But MacColl’s ballad suggests otherwise. Here Stalin is the quintessential Big Hewer of industrial mythology – half worker, half god. Elsewhere British Party members and leaders also assigned to him a unique intellectual and prophetic capacity.
The March 1953 edition of Labour Monthly – the same that held Sloan’s justification of show trials and arrests and Rothstein’s complementary attack on Zionism – also marked the 70th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. The editor was concerned to reconcile Marxism as a science with what had obviously been recent attacks by political opponents on the idolatrous nature of Stalinism. Written as little as two or three weeks before the General Secretary passed on, it is a masterpiece of aggressive apologism and of making an elephant look like an apostrophe. It has to be admired for its casuistry:
Marxism is a science alike in the field of theory and action; and precisely because it is a science, and all the more because it represents the highest level of science, it requires mastery; and mastery implies a master. For this reason Marxism finds its expression in the living person, and its highest expression in the ‘greatest head’, the ‘central figure’, the genius whose perfect understanding and whose theoretical and practical leadership most effectively carries forward to the fulfilment of Marxism.
If a man was the ‘greatest head’ and the ‘central figure’, then it was not just the science of which he was master, but all its practitioners. It was no step at all to make Stalin a figure not of Pope-like authority, but something greater than that. From his pen came new scriptures, new commandments. Thou shalt not like Tito, thou shalt loathe Israel. Thou wilt strike agreements with social democrats. Honour thy Father above all things.
Sam quoted Stalin in each of his books until 1955, somehow shoehorning the Georgian into the text. E. P. Thompson cited Stalin in his biography of William Morris (the reference was removed after 1956). Stalin was the authority for everything. The ultimate superdad, in direct line of succession from Lenin. With Stalin around there would always be an answer. There would never be doubt.
And then he was gone and replaced in Russia by a triumvirate of gnomes. Malenkov. Bulganin. Khrushchev. The April edition of Labour Monthly was sombre but tearfully determined:
Through all the storms of a thunderous dawn, of the dissolution of an old era and the birth of a new, he steered the ship of human hopes and aspirations with unflinching tenacity, courage, judgment and confidence. Now the road lies plain ahead.
Except it didn’t. That’s why the trials stopped, the doctors were freed and why – between early and late 1953 – Peter Mauger’s speech about those dreadful comics moved from a concentration on crude anti-Americanism to a more ecumenical idea about promoting a world at peace. (‘There is not one reference to American imperialism,’ the perceptive academic Martin Barker noted while reading a speech made by Mauger in the second half of 1953. ‘The tenor has altered from a crude political anti-Americanism to a humanistic stance of war versus peace.’) Stalin’s death changed everything because they had all been Stalinists.
The Cold War went down a notch or two from appalling to dreadful, workers were shot in East Berlin, my parents married and I was born. Sam stopped being Cultural Secretary, Khrushchev visited Yugoslavia and made up with Tito, some prisoners of Stalinism emerged from Eastern European gaols to tell their stories (and to be accused of exaggeration), the battle against colonialism intensified and the class struggle carried on in Britain, albeit in a not completely uncivilised way.
If Eric Hobsbawm and Victor Kiernan or, for that matter, Sam Aaronovitch and Harry Pollitt and John Gollan had believed that Sling and Rajk and the others were guiltless, then at least that period was over and the edifice – the past leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, the heroic Soviet Union and the international proletarian movement – still stood. When the Soviet Party Congress met in February 1956 there were early reports of complaints about a lack of collective leadership in the past and a suggestion that there had been a problem with a ‘cult of the individual’. The release a year earlier of some of those imprisoned in the Slansky trial suggested second thoughts. Significant, perhaps, but the structure of Communist history and Communist belief was intact. Pictures of Stalin still hung on the walls of King Street.
But then it began to filter out in accounts in various countries, picked up by the British press, that there had been an unprecedented secret session at the Congress, and that this session had heard extraordinary revelations concerning the Stalin period. At the Daily Worker there was a continuing hum among journalists about the provenance of emerging stories of pardons and rehabilitations.
And then, in the spring and early summer of 1956, it was announced as news that the rumours of a closed session were correct and that at this session Khrushchev (now in a univirate with himself) had destroyed the reputation of Stalin. In May Harry Pollitt stood down as General Secretary of the Party and John Gollan took over.
On 10 June, without any warning being given to Party comrades, the Observer published the previously unseen full text of the speech which, boiled down, implied that almost everything that the capitalist press had said about repression and tyranny in Russia over twenty years was true and (an unsaid corollary) everything that the Communist Party and its members had said in response was not. The trials the Party had defended were all shams, the confessions were all false, the condemnations of old comrades as having been fascist hyenas and worse were all unjust, the executions all – in effect – judicial murders.
