Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, June 27 2003

The other day, while I was looking through my files for something else, I turned up a clipping from the Oxford Mail in 1980. It was a news story about a demonstration by the Oxford Anarchist Group (of which I was then a member) on the occassion of the Soviet ambassador’s visit to speak at the Oxford Union, accompanied by a photograph of the dozen or so demonstrators.

Normally when I find things like this my first reaction is to sigh nostalgically. Weren’t we young — and wasn’t X a real stunner? How the hell did she end up marrying that chump who got that flash job in the City?

But this time I winced with embarrassment — and it wasn’t because of the haircuts or the clothes but because the slogans on our hand-painted placards were so asinine. One in particular stood out: “H-blocks, Gulag — Spot the difference, smash the lot!” (For younger readers, the H-blocks were the prison buildings in Long Kesh gaol just outside Belfast where IRA and other Northern Irish terrorist and paramilitary prisoners were held.)

We were protesting against a vile police-state, which was and is an entirely honourable thing to do. But we gave the impression that we were doing so because we thought that conditions in that vile police state were just as bad as here — rather than far, far worse. The British state’s policies in Northern Ireland at the time certainly deserved criticism, but to claim that the H-blocks were indistinguishable from the slave-labour system of Stalin’s Soviet Union was simply barmy. In our enthusiasm to make a point about our own society and its failings, we’d lost all sense of political perspective.

Ah well, you might think, that’s anarchists for you — and I’d agree insofar as anarchism’s blanket anti-statism does mean that many anarchists are peculiarly incapable of distinguishing among states. But anarchists are not the only leftists who are so keen to attack developed western capitalist democracy that they lose any sense of how much worse things are and have been elsewhere.

Indeed, cringe-making “spot-the-difference” comparisons of the “H-blocks, Gulag” type crop up time and again in leftist discourse. In the 1930s and again in the 1960s, the fashion was to describe anyone even vaguely right-wing as “fascist”. Since the 1980s, it has been the vogue in some leftist circles to describe the Labour Party’s internal regime as “Stalinist” — not because members are periodically rounded up, tortured into confessing crimes they have not committed and then shot, but because Trotskyists have been non-violently expelled from the party and outspoken critics of the party leadership have not been given plum jobs in government.

But “H-blocks, Gulag” thinking has been most noticeable of late in the post-September 11 anti-war movement. Time and again, in attacking the United States’s aggressive “war on terror”, Leftist writers and speakers have made preposterous claims about the supposed likeness of the Bush administration and al-Qaida, the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam’s regime in Iraq. Which is not to argue that the US is right or that it should not be criticised. It’s just that crass stupidity can undermine even the most righteous cause.

On a different matter entirely, the Guardian deserves congratulation for finding and publishing the infamous list of Soviet sympathisers that George Orwell handed over to the Information Research Department, a Foriegn Office propaganda unit, just before his death. The Guardian did rather sex up the news angle on the story, asking whether Orwell handed over the list because he fancied Celia Kirwan, a young woman friend who had just started working for the IRD — its front-page headline ran: “Blair’s babe: Did Orwell’s love for this woman turn him into a government stooge?”

But on the assumption that the list is genuine (and it appears to be), its publication should lay to rest the myth that Orwell was doing anything more sinister with it than advising the IRD that it should not hire certain people to write its anti-communist propaganda.

The 38 names on the list are all, with the exception of Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave, authors or journalists; and all those with whom I’m familiar (which is not all of them) had publicly expressed pro-Soviet opinions in print at some point.

There remains the question of whether Orwell was right to hand over a list to a secret state agency not knowing whether it might be put to a use different from that for which it was prepared. But the claim that he produced some sort of “hit list” of targets for a British McCarthyism just isn’t true.

Paul Anderson, review of Orwell: The Life by D J Taylor (Chatto and Windus, £20), Tribune, June 20 2003

There is no doubt that George Orwell is an excellent subject for a biographer. He wrote two of the most influential novels of the 20th century, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four; he was an exceptionally talented polemicist, reporter and cultural critic; and he packed an extraordinary amount into his short life. He was, moreover, a notably complex human being: the old Etonian colonial policeman Eric Blair who turned his back on his class, changed his name and became a revolutionary socialist bohemian; the prewar quasi-pacifist who transformed himself into a wartime propagandist; the civil libertarian who turned over a list of Stalinist fellow-travellers to the spooks. Partly because of this complexity, he has remained a controversial figure to this day. No writer of the 20th century has attracted more fulsome praise or more excoriating denunciation.

D J Taylor is one of Britain’s best highbrow book-reviewers, an accomplished biographer (his Thackeray, published in 1999, deservedly won plaudits) and a novelist of distinction. He has also been an Orwell obsessive since his teens, and he shares many of Orwell’s literary enthusiasms (Swift, Dickens, Gissing).

Who could be better placed to write a life of Orwell? Well, if it hadn’t been done before, hardly anyone – and if it hadn’t been done before, Orwell: The Life would be hailed universally as the nearest thing to definitive you can get. Taylor has immersed himself in Orwell’s writing and has trawled the archives. He has interviewed dozens of people who knew Orwell. He knows the secondary literature backwards. Orwell: The Life is an impressive piece of scholarship, well written and fair. It is generally sympathetic to Orwell but acknowledges his faults and even sets out the case against him.

The problem is that it has been done before. There were dozens of takes on Orwell’s life between his death and the late 1970s, some good and some dire, but none of them done with the benefit of access to Orwell’s own papers. In 1972, however, Orwell’s widow Sonia gave Bernard Crick unrestricted access to the papers, and in 1980 Crick’s magisterial George Orwell: A Life was published.

Now, there’s a case for arguing that Crick’s biography doesn’t successfully capture Orwell’s inner life (though you could equally well say that Crick resisted the temptation of engaging in the sort of amateur psychological speculation that has marred subsequent biographies). There have also been some important Orwell-related documents that have emerged since Crick first published – notably a version of his notorious list of fellow-travellers, but also material from the Soviet archives (turned up by Gordon Bowker for his new biography) that shows just how close Orwell came to being liquidated by the Stalinists in Spain. Several very good short books have been written contesting various aspects of Crick’s take on Orwell, the best of them John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics.

But on most of the big things, Crick has not been found wanting – and, good as Taylor’s Orwell is, too much of it retells a familiar tale. There is some interesting new material on Orwell’s early life, but otherwise the freshest bits of Taylor’s book are the short essays on various aspects of Orwell – his voice, his attitudes to the Jews, his paranoia – that he scatters through the main narrative. So much hard work and craft have gone into this book that it almost seems churlish to suggest that Taylor should have dropped the traditional biography and produced a collection of essays. But it is what I think.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column June 13 2003

I’M not sure exactly why, but I felt deflated this week after Gordon Brown’s announcement that we shan’t be joining the euro for a while.

It was hardly that I was expecting anything else. True, I’d felt a little twinge of hope when Will Hutton reported in the Observer a few weeks back that Tony Blair was so fed up with the Chancellor’s obstructionism on the euro that he’d decided to shunt him off into the Foreign Office. And even as late as Monday morning, I found myself imagining Gordon stunning the world by declaring that there was a persuasive case for British euro membership now.

But these were idle thoughts. All the evidence suggested Hutton’s story was just too good to be true – and that there was a close-to-zero chance of Brown springing a surprise and giving the euro the green light. I had only modest hopes of New Labour in government even in 1997. After six years of disappointment, I reckon I’ve learnt that wishful thinking gets you nowhere.

So why did Brown’s performance on Monday get me down? The more I mull it over, the more I realise that it’s because I simply can’t stand the thought of another two years – or three years, or five, or whatever – of British politics being dominated by the grind of inconclusive arguments about the euro.

It’s not that I don’t have my own view about it. I think Britain should join as soon as possible and put its weight behind proposals to tone down the anti-inflationary zeal of the growth and stability pact and to give the eurozone the capacity to run a redistributive fiscal policy. Britain’s best hope, I believe, is to become part of a social democratic federal Europe. And we won’t do that outside the euro.

The point is that I’ve thought this for years – and just about every other protagonist in the argument, whatever their views, is in the same boat. For all the pervasive grumbling from the sceptics that Britain has not had a proper national debate about our relationship with Europe since the 1975 referendum, the truth is that our relationship with Europe has been minutely dissected as no other political issue has been in recent times. All the positions are so well rehearsed that the argument has become stale and utterly tedious. It should be decision time.

The reason it isn’t has precious little to do with the mounds of documentation produced by the Treasury on Brown’s “five tests”. There are of course real arguments to be had about the technical economics of joining the euro, in particular over the exchange rate at which we join; and it should go without saying that it would be mad to join if the British and eurozone economies were completely out-of-kilter.

But the Treasury documents show no such thing. Their most serious claim is that there would be a danger of inflation if Britain adopted eurozone interest rates, which is true – but we’re not talking serious inflation, and in any case fiscal measures, otherwise known as increased taxes, could effectively counter the danger (as the Treasury report acknowledges).

No, the real reason that Brown put off the decision yet again is purely political. To put it bluntly, the Government is scared shitless that it will lose the promised referendum on euro entry. Which is not to say that the Government shouldn’t be worried. If Britain voted no in a euro referendum, as all the polls suggest it would, Labour’s credibility would be shattered, and the only beneficiaries – and I mean the only beneficiaries – would be the Tories.

Labour’s mistake was offering a referendum in the first place, way back in 1996 when it was in opposition. At the time, it was greeted by nearly every commentator as a clever political gambit that not only neutralised Labour’s own divisions on the euro but also had genuine cross-party popular appeal. But even then it should have been obvious that a referendum campaign would have to be fought against the rabidly anti-European Right-wing press as well as the Tories – and winning would not be easy.

Had Blair and Brown gone for a euro referendum immediately after the 1997 general election, they might just have prevailed – but instead they lost their bottle and effectively ruled out the referendum for the duration of Labour’s first term. Since that defining moment, the referendum has become an increasingly daunting prospect. Monday showed that it has now rendered the Government incapable of acting decisively just as decisive action has become urgent.

Some on the Tribune Left will no doubt find some satisfaction in New Labour being hoist with one of its own petards, but I can’t join them. In 1997, Blair was handed the best chance anyone has ever had of making Britain a full member of the European club. That he has blown it is his greatest political failure.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, May 2 2003

The fuss seems to have died down a little over the discovery in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph journalist of documents that appear to show that George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, received large sums of money from Saddam Hussein. And it’s not surprising that the story has gone quiet. Mr Galloway is promising to sue for libel, and that has made not only the Telegraph but every other newspaper very wary. Recent changes in Britain’s libel law might make it possible for newspapers to mount a succesful defence that falls short of proving that the documents are genuine and that Mr Galloway took the cash, but this is by no means guaranteed. Once the writs start flying, any sensible editor takes cover.

In time, perhaps, we will get to know the truth about this murky business. Mr Galloway says he did not receive funding from Iraq, and it is indeed possible that he is an unwitting victim of some vile scam. Some of the more lurid scenarios that have been advanced by his supporters are, however, rather implausible.

In particular, the idea that the Telegraph forged the documents or published them in the knowledge that they are forgeries almost beggars belief. The Telegraph is certainly politically hostile to Mr Galloway and everything he stands for. But its reporters and editors are not crazy. They know that their reputations would be destroyed if they were discovered to have been complicit in faking evidence of this kind. They simply wouldn’t risk it.

It is slightly more believable that the documents were forged and planted for the Telegraph to discover by some spook or other. As several Galloway supporters have remarked, including the editor of Tribune, there is a history of this sort of thing.

The most notorious example, of course, was the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Purportedly a missive from the head of the Communist International demanding that British communists prepare to subvert Britain’s armed forces, it was published by the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 1924 general election as a means of discrediting Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government, which had negotiated trade treaties with Soviet Russia. In fact, it was almost certainly forged, probably by White Russian emigres with the connivance of British intelligence agents hostile to Labour.

There are also more recent cases of intelligence service dirty tricks to undermine Labour, most notoriously in the 1970s, when various spooks spent an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to smear Harold Wilson as a Soviet stooge. And who can forget the Sunday Times’s preposterous claims in the early 1990s that Michael Foot was the KGB’s “Agent Boot”?

But is Mr Galloway the victim of this sort of sting? Maybe, but I doubt it. He just isn’t an important enough player to warrant the effort that would be involved in setting it up.

If he didn’t receive the money from Iraq, the most plausible scenario is that the payments were authorised somewhere in the upper echelons of Saddam’s regime — and then siphoned off by someone feathering his or her own nest.

This would fit not only with what we know about the enthusiasm of the Iraqi Ba’ath leadership for self-enrichment but also with its record of paying its supporters and propagandists abroad.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, its chosen vehicle in Britain was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the paranoid Trotskyist sect led by the late and unlamented Gerry Healy, which, in return for money to subsidise its daily newspaper News Line and the weekly Labour Herald, informed on Iraqi exiles in London and printed encomiums to Saddam — “a man of firm action in home affairs, insisting on the highest standards of dedication and integrity of Government officials”, as News Line had it in 1980.

Some time after the WRP imploded in the mid-1980s, the Iraqis appear to have decided that the Labour left and the peace movement was a better pond to fish in than the revolutionary Left. I remember as a journalist on Tribune in the late 1980s and early 1990s being offered by an intermediary free trips to Iraq at the regime’s expense, which I turned down. Plenty of others did not.

This is not to impugn their motives: often the only way to visit a totalitarian regime and meet its people is on an official trip. Nor is it to claim that every benefiary of Saddam’s hospitality turned into a propagandist for his vicious rule. But that was what he wanted — and from some people at least, all of whom should have known better, that was what he got.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, May-June 2003

If there is one thing that is clear about Britain’s Europe policy today, it is that it is in a right mess.

Most spectacularly, the Blair government’s policy on Iraq – first loudly backing the Bush administration as it prepared for a military strike, then attempting and failing to secure United Nations backing for an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, then playing a major supporting role in the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam – did serious damage to Britain’s relationship with the two most important countries of the European Union, France and Germany, both of which opposed the war.

How lasting that damage will be is another matter, however. The French and German governments were opposed to military action against Iraq for different reasons – the French out of Gaullist hostility to American unilateralism, the Germans out of social democratic respect for international law and a tendency towards pacifism – and neither has any long-term interest in stoking up antipathy to Britain.

Unless George Bush decides to extend the treatment given to Iraq to, say, Syria or North Korea, and unless Tony Blair backs him again, Britain’s relationship with the big hitters in the EU will return to normal. Already, it’s back to business as usual in the Convention on the Future of Europe, where Britain and France are pushing hard (and together) for an intergovernmentalist settlement, against the federalism of Germany and the smaller EU countries.

The unlesses of the UK-US relationship are important, but at present the signs are that the US military will be tied up in Iraq for some time to come (as Martin Woollacott argued in an excellent piece in the Guardian – click here) and that the British government is not keen on more military adventures for a while.

Jack Straw’s denials that any other invasions are planned are of course worth taking with a pinch of salt. But the recent revelations that he and Blair would have resigned if the backbench Labour revolt on Iraq in the Commons in March had been only a little bigger suggests that they might have learned a little in the past few weeks about the extent of opposition to their uncritically pro-American policy. I have a sneaking suspicion that their doubts about joining a madcap neo-con crusade will from now on prove decisive.

But we shall see. The end of the war in Iraq – which was a remarkable military success, whatever its political ramifications – turns the spotlight on other aspects of Britain’s European policy, in particular the euro.

And here the picture is anything but optimistic. Disagreements at the highest level on the euro, most notably between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, appear to have come close to paralysing the government – and as yet there is little sign of any resolution.

In early April, nearly all the broadsheet newspapers carried reports, inspired by briefings from sources close to Brown, that the chancellor would soon declare that his famous five tests for British entry into the single European currency had not been met, thereby effectively (though not explicitly) ruling out a referendum on the euro for the rest of this parliament (see for example the Guardian report here).

At the end of April, however, a seemingly authoritative piece by Will Hutton in the Observer (click here) claimed that Blair had decided to shift Brown from the Treasury to the Foreign Office in order to clear the way for a euro referendum next year.

That would be a massive gamble for Blair. Brown is a big figure in the government, the architect of its overall strategy and for many years the favourite to succeed Blair as Labour leader (and prime minister) if Blair decided to go. It is not implausible to suggest that Brown could send the government into terminal crisis if he decided to resist Blair over-ruling or moving him.

Then again, it is difficult to see how Blair can regain credibility in Europe unless he overcomes Brown’s opposition to joining the euro – and, given the apparent strength of Brown’s opposition, it is hard to see how Brown could remain as chancellor after being forced to eat humble pie.

So Hutton’s interpretation has a certain credibility to it. Nevertheless, there is a simple way out for Brown that has been given scant consideration by the commentators – which is that some time in the next month or so he announces that the five tests have been passed.

Such a scenario is also just about feasible. Although Brown has been quite happy for his political allies to tell journalists that his line on the euro is “not yet”, he has not committed himself publicly to this position. He still has the option of endorsing British membership now. The anti-euro lobby would feel horribly let down – but the political impact would be extraordinary.

Once again, we shall see. But if there is a euro referendum soon, under any circumstances, it will be a tough battle for the government to win.

The pro-euro camp has spent the past few years waiting for the go-ahead from Blair, and is not in good shape: if the referendum isn’t announced soon, Britain in Europe, the umbrella group that will be the basis of any “yes” campaign, will collapse.

To make matters worse, there has been a serious decline in support for the euro among trade unions, which will be one of the crucial elements in any “yes” campaign. Anti-European leftists have won key positions in several major unions in the past couple of years, and John Monks, the most articulate of the pro-euro trade union leaders, is leaving the TUC. Labour movement support for Britain joining the single currency will be in rather shorter supply than five years ago.

Yet joining the euro remains the best bet for a social democratic future for Britain. It is true, as Gordon Brown argues, that the EU’s system of economic management needs to be reformed, particularly when it comes down to the idiotic growth and stability pact, which effectively rules out counter-cyclical state spending. But here we are pushing at an open door: the rest of Europe, social democratic, Christian democratic and neo-liberal alike, realises that the regime of enforced austerity imposed by the Bundesbank and subsequently endorsed by the governments of Europe as the price of monetary union was a big mistake. Faced with low growth and rising unemployment, the governments of Europe recognise that John Maynard Keynes had some bright ideas after all.

If Blair does not go for a euro referendum this parliament, he will have missed the best opportunity any British government has ever had to define Britain’s place as a European social capitalist country. The next few weeks will be absolutely critical.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, March 21 2003

Robin Cook’s resignation from the government was hardly unexpected – but it was dramatic all the same. He is the only Labour figure of top rank to have quit on grounds of principle since Tony Blair became prime minister nearly six years ago: indeed, you have to go back to 1951, when Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman left Clement Attlee’s government, for a Labour resignation with anything like the impact.

Although Cook’s resignation statement to the House of Commons on Monday evening was eclipsed as news by George Bush’s blunt 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, it was quite the most sensational parliamentary event in this government’s lifetime. In calm, measured tones, Cook eloquently demolished the case for an immediate assault on Iraq. The contrast with Jack Straw’s bumbling performance at the despatch box minutes earlier could not have been more stark.

As things now stand, Cook is finished as a government politician – that much is clear. But it would be foolish to write him off. At very least, as a backbench MP he could provide the left in the Parliamentary Labour Party with the intellectual sophistication and political clout that has been so obviously missing in recent years. Then there’s the possibility of a comeback in Scottish politics. He could even be the best hope the beleagured Scottish Labour Party has of staving off major losses in the forthcoming elections to the Scottish Parliament.

But what’s really intriguing is Cook’s position if the war against Iraq were to go so horribly wrong that Blair lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

This scenario has been chewed over in recent months by just about every Labour Party member I know at every level – and most of them reckon that if Blair were forced out in such circumstances, Gordon Brown would be a shoo-in as his replacement.

Until this week, I thought the same, not least because all the other names being touted as possible successors to Blair would not be credible challengers to the Chancellor. Straw? Too compromised by his role in the Iraq policy. David Blunkett? Unpopular with those Labour Party and trade union members least likely to be prejudiced about his being blind. Charles Clarke, Peter Hain and Alan Milburn haven’t held high office for long enough. And John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Cook are all – how to put it politely – big figures whose career trajectories are not on an upward curve.

But Cook’s resignation has made me think again – at least about him.

Like many others on what used to be called the soft left, I was disappointed when Cook decided not to challenge for the Labour leadership after John Smith died in 1994, and I still think he would have made an infinitely better Prime Minister than Blair. Unlike Blair, he is an egalitarian, an environmentalist and a committed constitutional reformer. From 1997 to 2001, he was a very good Foreign Secretary – particularly in repairing British relations with the rest of the European Union and in pressing for intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone – and as Leader of the House of Commons he made a valiant attempt (scuppered by Blair) to introduce a democratic second chamber. Like everyone else I know, however, I thought his time at the top was coming to an end. Now I’m not so sure. If – and it’s a big if – Blair is forced out by a military disaster, it’s not just wishful thinking to suggest that Cook would be in a very strong position to replace him.

Which is not to say that I am hoping for a military disaster to force Blair out. As I write, 48 hours have not passed since Bush’s speech. But Saddam has rejected Bush’s demand that he and his sons go into exile. It almost certain that by the time you read this we will be at war.

This is not what should have happened: other means of dealing with Saddam should have been given more time. Blair’s strategy of hanging on to Bush’s coat tails and hoping to restrain him has proved a humiliating failure, alienating domestic public opinion and wrecking Britain’s relations with France and Germany, the two most important members of the European Union. War will inevitably result in the deaths of Iraqi civilians and conscript soldiers – and there is a danger that the death toll will be massive. In the worst case, the attack on Iraq could turn into a conflict involving the use of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons that engulfs the whole Middle East. Bush and Blair have taken an extraordinary risk this week. They should not have done so.

Nevertheless, I see no credible option for democratic socialists once the military action begins other than hoping that it works – and that it works quickly, consigning Saddam and his vile regime to the proverbial dustbin of history with minimal casualties on either side. Sorry, folks, but I think I’ll be giving the next anti-war demo a miss.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, March 7 2003

Fifty years ago this week – at 9.50am Moscow time on March 5 1953, to be precise – Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, breathed his last.

His death was a squalid affair, entirely befitting his regime. The Soviet dictator, probably by this point clinically paranoid, had suffered a brain haemorrhage on March 2 – but medical help was delayed by Lavrenti Beria, his scheming secret police chief, who hoped to succeed him. For more than two days, Stalin lay in bed motionless, surrounded by his family and the leading figures of the Soviet Politburo, many of them drunk and all of them terrified for their futures. No one admitted that his condition could be terminal. On one occasion Beria famously demanded of the as-good-as-dead Stalin in a loud voice: “Comrade Stalin, all the members of the Politburo are here! Say something to us!”

It would be comforting to relate that Stalin’s death was greeted by a universal sense of relief, but it was not. The man who turned the already-extant Bolshevik police-state into a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship, killing millions in the forced collectivisation of agriculture and committing hundreds of thousands more to slave labour, was mourned in the Soviet Union as the heroic war leader who saved the world from Nazi Germany. (Never mind that the the business was done by the poor bloody infantry.) Abroad, he was given a send-off that was at least respectful and at worst obsequious – particularly on the left.

No one was more gushing than Rajani Palme Dutt, the chief ideologist of the Communist Party of Great Britain, writing in Labour Monthly: “The genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity, lives on forever in the imperishable monument of his creation – the soaring triumph of socialist and communist construction; the invincible array of states and peoples who have thrown off the bonds of the exploiters and are marching forward in the light of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.”

In similar vein, the CPGB’s leader, Harry Pollitt – whose apologists say was sceptical about Stalinism – paid tribute to Stalin as someone whose “miracles of communist construction are of a character that even Marx would never have dared to believe possible”.

Tribune, to its credit, was more sceptical. In a piece headlined “Now let’s bury the Stalin myth”, Michael Foot wrote: “The Nazi-Soviet pact and the frightened sycophancy towards Hitler which Stalin displayed in the two subsequent years still stand out as probably the most grievous and colossal blunder of the century . . . He sent to their deaths almost all the leaders of the revolution. He distorted the socialist aim in a manner which would have horrified both Lenin and Marx. He then falsified the history of the revolution itself.”

The deflation of Stalin’s reputation was not long in coming. The Berlin workers’ uprising of June 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and Nikita Khruschev’s “secret speech” the same year to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he (selectively) denounced Stalin’s crimes, all saw to that. And within 15 years of his death there was a substantial scholarly literature available – at least in the affluent Western democracies – that gave chapter and verse on collectivisation, the Great Terror and just about every other aspect of his years of despotic misrule.

But the Stalin myth was never entirely buried. The Soviet tyrant remains an official hero in communist China to this day – and his memory is still revered by Russian nationalists and many leftists in the Third World. Tribune readers might take with a pinch of salt recent reports that Saddam Hussein has a library of books on Stalin and sees him as his role model: but the similarities between the two go further than their moustaches.

And even in Britain it’s remarkable how Stalinism persists – albeit in a small way. The Communist Party of Britain is a pale shadow of the CPGB even of the early 1950s, but it is still able – just – to sustain a daily newspaper, the Morning Star, that retains the respect of a large swathe of the left in spite of its unthinking Stalinism. As the Independent on Sunday reminded us last weekend, Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers and Socialist Labour Party remains an unabashed admirer of Stalin, as does Andrew Murray, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition (whom I remember in the 1980s working for the official Soviet news agency Novosti, buying full page ads in left newspapers to publish dull speeches by Konstantin Chernenko).

Which is not to claim that contemporary Stalinism poses a massive threat to civilisation as we know it: far from it. The Stalinists of 2003 are, at least in Britain, a sick joke. I just can’t work out why so many on the left tolerate them. Can anyone enlighten me?

Respond to Tribune

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 February 2003

There is no doubt that Tribune has plenty to crow about in its record on various wars, but — contrary to the leader in last week’s issue — that doesn’t really include the 1930s and the start of the second world war.

True, the paper backed the right side in the Spanish civil war, arguing for military aid for the Republic and condemning the British Government’s asinine policy of non-intervention, with its willful blindness towards the massive armed support being given to Franco’s insurgent Nationalists by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Tribune was also consistently critical of the Government’s policy of appeasement of Mussolini and Hitler, correctly warning that it only encouraged them in their expansionist ambitions.

But on the key question of what Britain should do instead of appeasing the dictators, Tribune — like nearly everyone else on the left in Britain — was badly caught out by the turn of events.

The paper had been set up by Stafford Cripps and others at the beginning of 1937 as the organ of the “Unity Campaign” to create a “United Front” of Labour and other left parties, most importantly the Communist Party, against fascism and appeasement. The CP had representatives on Tribune’s editorial board and played a crucial part in determining the paper’s editorial position.

The CP’s influence made sure that — despite protests from the Independent Labour Party and others — Tribune had nothing of substance to say either about the cynical way the Soviet Union sabotaged the Republican cause in Spain or about Stalin’s terror in the Soviet Union itself. The CP also played a role in ensuring that the paper opposed British rearmament against the threat posed by Nazi Germany (though in this almost the whole of the left was in agreement) and placed all its hopes in the creation of an anti-fascist international alliance of Britain, France and the other democracies of Europe with the Soviet Union. And when, in August 1939, the treacherous Stalin concluded an alliance with Hitler, Tribune was taken aback.

When Hitler subsequently invaded Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany, the paper was left completely at sea. Should it embrace the British war effort as anti-fascist?

Or should it take the mendacious Moscow line and oppose the war as an inter-imperialist one?

For more than six months, to its shame, it opted for the latter course, following pretty much the defeatist position adopted at Moscow’s insistence by the Communist Party (despite the opposition of Harry Pollitt and other CP leaders). It was only after Aneurin Bevan and various other democratic socialists staged a boardroom coup in spring 1940 and ousted the Stalinists — including the editor, H J Hartshorn, who was replaced by Raymond Postgate — that Tribune abandoned its cringe before the Soviet Union’s betrayal of the left.

Now, you might be thinking, this is all very well, but it has nothing to do with what’s happening in the present. In 2003, who cares who was right in 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940?

Well, I do, and I think everybody else ought to, not just because I think history matters in itself but because there are important lessons to be learned today from the mistakes of the left in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not agreeing here with those of the pro-war party who have spent the past year or more ranting on about how Saddam Hussein is the new Hitler and how those opposed to war are the modern equivalents of the appeasers. That line of invective was eloquently disposed of by Michael Foot in last week’s issue.

No, I’m talking about the way in which the outbreak of war profoundly changes political realities. Right up to the Hitler-Stalin pact, the idea that the world could be saved from war by an anti-fascist alliance between the democracies and the Soviet Union made a great deal of sense. Stalin was not the ideal ally — but the threat from Nazi Germany was such that desperate measures were necessary.

The pact, and the ensuing war, changed all that irrevocably. They were not what the left had wanted — any more than the Left today wants war against Saddam. But once the war had started, the left was forced into choosing between adapting to the new circumstances or railing impotently from the sidelines. We’re going to have to do the same if, as seems increasingly likely, the US launches the assault on Saddam we were marching against last Saturday.