Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

rich, today I am ashamed of it. I abominated the black market dealers, the dollar speculators, the men of rapacity and greed. No problem! I’d stay loyal for ever to the poor. So, crazy chick that I was, I joined the Communist Party to be with the poor. ⁶

In practice, national or other collective or historical identities were far more important than we then supposed. Indeed, communism probably made its greatest impact outside Europe, where it had no effective rival in the fight against national or imperial oppression. Ho Chi Minh, the liberator of Vietnam, chose as his nom-de- guerre in the Comintern ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Chin Peng, who led the communist insurgency and jungle guerrillas in Malaya, though less successfully, began as a youthful patriot who first turned to communism when he abandoned hope in the ability of the Kuomintang Party to liberate China. He told me so himself, an elderly Chinese gentleman of intellectual interests looking most unlike a former jungle guerrilla leader, in the improbable environment of the Athenaeum’s Coffee Room. Nevertheless, even for those who began with limited aims, even for those who abandoned the wider hope when it disappointed the narrower one, like the many communist Jews who left the Party under the impact of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, communism represented the ideal of transcending egoism and of service to all humanity without exception.

But there was a third element in the revolutionary convictions of Party communists. What awaited them on the road to the millennium was tragedy. In the Second World War communists were vastly over-represented in most resistance movements, not simply because they were efficient and brave, but because they had always been ready for the worst: for spying, clandestinity, interrogation and armed action. Lenin’s vanguard Party was born in persecution, the Russian Revolution in war, the Soviet Union in civil war and famine. Until the revolution communists could expect no rewards from their societies. What professional revolutionaries could expect was jail, exile and, quite often, death. Unlike the anarchists, the IRA or movements of Islamic suicide bombers, the Comintern did not make much of a cult of individual martyrs, though the French CP after liberation appreciated the attraction of the (true) fact that during the Resistance it had been ‘le parti des fusilles’ (the party of those executed by firing squad). Communists were undoubtedly the quintessential enemy for almost every government, including even the relatively few which allowed their Parties legal existence, and we were constantly reminded of the treatment they could expect in jails and concentration camps. And yet we saw ourselves less as sufferers or potential casualties than as combatants in an omnipresent war. As Brecht wrote in his great 1930s elegy on the Comintern professionals, An die Nochgeborenen:

I ate my meals between battles I lay down to sleep among the murderers.

Hardness is the soldier’s quality, and it ran even through our very political jargon (‘uncompromising’, ‘unbending’, ‘steel-hard’, ‘monolithic’). Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the bolshevik. It was the necessary response to the times. As Brecht wrote:

You, who will emerge from the flood In which we have perished Remember also When you speak of our weaknesses The black times You have escaped

But the point of Brecht’s poem, which speaks to communists of my generation as no other does, is that hardness was forced upon the revolutionaries.

We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves.

Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.⁷ Nobody could anticipate the scale of human suffering in the Second World War until it happened. However, it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or wilful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side. In any case, we were not liberals. Liberalism was what had failed. In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves. Since we were not in power, or likely to be, what we expected was to be prisoners rather than jailers.

There were Communist Parties and functionaries, such as Andre s Marty, who appears in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who took pride in their necessary ‘steel-hard’ bolshevism, not least the Soviet Communist Party, where it combined with the absolutist tradition of unlimited power and the brutality of everyday Russian existence to produce the hecatombs of the Stalin era. The British CP was not among them, but Party pathology appeared in more masochistic and peaceful forms. To take a case in point: the late Andrew Rothstein (1898–1994). Andrew was a rather boring, round-faced petit-bourgeois figure, who defended whatever needed defending in the Soviet Union, the son of a more dramatic Russian old bolshevik, Theodore Rothstein, who had once been a Soviet diplomat and had written a pioneering book of Marxist labour history. We shared a cold bedroom once at a conference of the Association of University Teachers, and I still recall him carefully unpacking his toilet set and slippers. Possibly I was mandated to protest against the failure of the University of London’s School of Slavonic Studies, where he taught Soviet Institutions, to renew his time-limited contract as a lecturer. A founder member of the British CP, and obviously with good Russian connections, he had been a leading figure in the Party in the 1920s, but in 1929–30 his opposition to the Comintern’s ultra-left course, not to mention his vitriolic temper and lack of proletarian bona fides, led to his fall. He was exiled (minus his wife and children) to Moscow, his Party membership transferred to the CPSU. Luckily for his survival he was soon allowed back into Britain and the British CP on condition that for the rest of his career he occupied only local functions in the Party. Yet he remained a totally loyal, totally committed communist. Indeed, I had the impression that for him, as for others like him, the test of his devotion to the cause was the readiness to defend the indefensible. It was not the Christian ‘ credo quia absurdum’ (I believe it is because it is absurd), but rather the constant challenge: ‘Test me some more: as a bolshevik I have no breaking-point.’ When the British CP finally went out of existence in 1991, he became, at the age of ninety-three, the first member of the tiny hard-line Communist Party of Britain which succeeded it.

I doubt whether any communist of my generation would have been inspired to join the Party, or stayed in the Party, by the career of Rothstein. And yet we had our heroes and models – Georgi Dimitrov, in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 who stood up alone in the Nazi court, defying Hermann Goring and defending the good name of communism and, incidentally, of the small but proud Bulgarian nation to which he belonged. If I did not leave the Party in 1956, it was not least because the movement bred such men and women. I am thinking primarily of one such figure, barely known in his lifetime, un-remembered except by comrades and friends today. I still recall him, small, sharp-eyed, quizzical, as we walked on a Sunday morning through the sun-dappled and carefully marked footpaths of the Wienerwald hills, among occasional couples of hiking acquaintances, white-haired men and women, who had organized illegal Party and socialist meetings in the remoter parts of those woods before they survived the concentration camps. The open air had always been the characteristic environment of Austrian revolutionaries. There is probably no man for whom I have a greater admiration.

In mid-August 1944 he had written his last words in cell 155 of block 2 and cell 90 of block 1 of Fresnes prison in Paris:

Franz Feuerlich, communist Franz Feuerlich, Austrian will be executed 15 August 1944 On the eve of liberation?⁸

But Ephraim Feuerlicht (1913–79), whom we all knew by his Party name Franz Marek, was lucky. The liberation of Paris saved him. He had been a leading figure in the French Communist Party’s MOI (Main d’Oeuvre Immigree)