Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

public standing by trying, if not quite managing, to defend the Soviets? Were they simply to shut their eyes, say nothing, and go on with their work as before? The peculiarities of Stalinist science were not quite so damaging elsewhere. Communist psychologists, for instance, found Moscow’s insistence on Pavlov (‘conditioned reflexes’) less constricting, partly because of the experimental, positivist, behaviourist and strongly anti-psychoanalytical slant of British psychology departments. But these were the special problems of intellectuals, and for various reasons they did not seriously affect British communist historians who kept away from Russian and Communist Party history. Obviously, none of us believed the version of Soviet Party history contained in the, pedagogically brilliant, text of Stalin’s History of the CPSU (b): Short Course. But there were more general problems, even if we leave aside the horrors of the Soviet camps, the extent of which communists did not then recognize.

What were British, and even more Cambridge, communists, who had been deeply involved in wartime relations with the Yugoslav Partisans, to think of the 1948 split between Stalin and Tito? We were close to Yugoslav communism. Young Brits by the hundred flocked into the country to build the so-called ‘Youth Railway’, including notably Edward Thompson, not yet a historian, whose brother Frank had his wartime base among the Macedonian Partisans, until he went on to fight and die with the Bulgarian ones. 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 interests of foreign intelligence services? We could understand that James Klugmann was forced to disavow Tito, but we did not believe him and, since he had until recently told us the opposite – and so had the newly formed Cominform, whose headquarters were initially in Belgrade – we knew he did not believe it either. In short, we stayed loyal to Moscow because the cause of world socialism could dispense with the support of a small, if heroic and admired, country, but not with that of Stalin’s superpower.

Unlike what happened in the 1930s, I cannot recall any serious efforts to compel Party members to justify the succession of show trials which disfigured the last years of Stalin, but this may merely mean that intellectuals like myself had given up the effort to be convinced. Few of us knew anything about Bulgaria, so the first of the trials, against Traicho Kostov (executed in 1949), left me unhappy but not unduly sceptical. The trial of Laszlo Rajk in Hungary in the autumn of 1949 was another matter. Among the ‘agents of the British Secret Service’ alleged to have undermined communism, the indictment named (and suitable confessions doubtless confirmed) someone I knew personally: the journalist Basil Davidson. I simply did not believe this. A big, tough man with a sharp mind, already grizzling wiry hair, an eye for women and a very attractive wife, Basil had had what they called a ‘good’ but unorthodox war. He had fought with the Yugoslav Partisans in the flat, fertile Vojvodina adjoining Hungary – terrible guerrilla territory – then with the Italian Partisans in the Ligurian mountains, and written a good book, Partisan Picture, about both. (It gave him the necessary training for his later footslogging with African liberation fighters in the hinterlands of Portuguese Guinea and Angola.) We became, and still remain, friends. The Hungarian accusation was not incredible in itself. In fact, though I did not then know it, Davidson had in his time, like other British journalists on the continent, been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service and sent to Hungary. It would not have surprised me if he had known Rajk then. What made me sceptical, apart from my personal judgement of the man, was the fact that his career as a journalist had taken a sharp turn for the worse with the Cold War. After leaving the (London) Times he was, in effect, edged out of the New Statesman and Nation, then at its height as the organ of the respectable left, as a fellow-traveller. Nobody wanted him. He was about to construct for himself a new freelance career as a highly respected pioneer historian of Africa, and an expert on the anti-imperialist liberation movements south of the Sahara. The accusation simply made no sense.

The last and biggest set of East European show trials, in Czechoslovakia, sounded even less convincing; quite apart from the markedly anti-Semitic tinge which they shared with the notorious 1952 ‘doctors’ plot’ against Stalin in the USSR itself. My student generation knew many of the young Czech emigrants to Britain. We knew at least one of the executed ‘traitors’ well: Otto Sling, married to the ever-reliable Marion Wilbraham from the pre-war Youth Peace Movement, had returned to his country to become Party chief of Brno, Czechoslovakia’s second city. By this time even the – expected – official Party defence of the Czech trial seemed to show a certain lack of conviction.

Patently people like myself did not remain in the Communist Party because we had many illusions about the USSR, although undoubtedly we had some. For instance, we clearly underestimated the horrors of what had gone on in the USSR under Stalin, until it was denounced by Khrushchev in 1956. Since a good deal of information was available about the Soviet camps, which could not easily be ignored, it is no excuse to point out that even western critics did not document the full extent of the system until 1956. ¹⁶ Moreover, after 1956 many of us did leave the Party. Why, then, did we remain?

Perhaps the best way to recapture the mood of the peak years of the Cold War – essentially the period from Hiroshima to Panmunjom – is by an episode from the life of Bertrand Russell, which the great philosopher did not like to have recalled in his later days as an anti-nuclear activist. Shortly after the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, Russell concluded that the American monopoly of nuclear arms would be only temporary. While it was, the USA should exploit it, if need be by a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Moscow. This would prevent the USSR launching on the course of imminent world conquest to which he believed it to be committed, and would it was hoped destroy a regime which he regarded as utterly appalling. In short, as far as the people of the USSR were concerned, he believed in the then familiar western Cold War slogan ‘Better dead than red’. In practice other peoples were the only ones to whom this literally senseless slogan was applied. If it had any sense it meant, not that Cubans or Vietnamese or, if it should so happen, Italians should commit suicide rather than live under a communist government, but that they should be killed by the arms of the Free World to prevent this awful contingency. (No sane person seriously expected mass suicide in either Britain or the USA.)

Fortunately, though the possibility of American pre-emptive nuclear strikes worried Whitehall,¹⁷ nobody listened to Russell, who in any case changed his mind when both superpowers had the capacity to destroy one another, thus turning world war into global suicide. Yet before then people, including even some serious politicians, undoubtedly talked in terms of something like an apocalyptic global class war. The issues were enormous. Whichever side one stood on, there was no limit to the price to be paid. The war, especially since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had got the world used to human sacrifices by the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Those who opposed nuclear arms were accused of depriving the West of a necessary, an indispensable arm. We too – I say this with retrospective regret – recognized no limit to the price we were prepared to ask others to pay. It is no mitigation to say that we were prepared to pay it ourselves.

On the one hand, communists saw the USA and its allies threatening the total destruction of a still besieged and vulnerable USSR, in order to bring to a halt the global advance of the forces of revolution since the defeat of Hitler and Hirohito. They still saw the USSR as its indispensable guarantee. On the other hand, for the USA and its allies the USSR was both the threat to the world and a system totally to be rejected. Everything would be so much simpler if it were not a superpower. Everything would be even simpler if it were not there. To us it was obvious that the USSR was not in a position to conquer the world for communism. Some of us were even disappointed because it appeared not to want to. It was – at least western communist intellectuals thought, even if they did not say so – a system with severe defects, but with titanic achievements and still with the unlimited potential of socialism. (Though it now seems incredible, in the 1950s, and not only to its sympathizers, the Soviet Union did not yet look like a foundering economic hulk but like an economy which might well outproduce the West.) To most of the world, it did not seem to be the worst of all possible regimes, but an ally in the fight for emancipation from western imperialism, old and new, and a model for non-European economic and social development. The future of both communists and the regimes and movements of the decolonized and decolonizing world depended on its existence. As far as communists were concerned, supporting and defending the Soviet Union was still the essential international priority.

So we swallowed our doubts and mental reservations and defended it. Or rather, because it was easier, we