I had been elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society in my last undergraduate term in 1939, together with another Kingsman, the later Walter Wallich of the BBC, son of the director of the Deutsche Bank and descendant of its founder who, after the Kristallnacht of 1938, having sent wife and children abroad in good time, took a train from Berlin to Cologne and jumped off the bridge into the Rhine. It was an invitation that hardly any Cambridge undergraduate was likely to refuse, since even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition. Who would not wish to be associated with the names of earlier Apostles, which were more or less the great names of nineteenth-century Cambridge: the poet Tennyson, the marvellous physicist Clerk Maxwell, the greatest of Cambridge historians, Frederick Maitland, Bertrand Russell and the glories of Edwardian Cambridge – Keynes, Wittgenstein and Moore, Whitehead and, in literature, E. M. Forster and Rupert Brooke. Only the greatest of nineteenth-century Cambridge names was missing, Charles Darwin of Christ’s. Actually, the bulk of the Victorian and Edwardian Apostles, who have been exhaustively and perceptively analysed by an American professor,13 were by no means in that class, and, since greatness of intellectual (or other) achievement often requires running the risk of boring friends whose interests do not coincide completely with your own – and no Apostle would have wanted to bore the other brethren – many of them suffered in later life from their inability to live up to the exemplars of their great tradition.
It may be worth observing that communism had nothing to do with my election, although the famous photo of six Apostles that appears in every book on the Cambridge spies contains four communists. It is no surprise that the Party was heavily represented in the society of the Spanish Civil War years. However, neither John Cornford and James Klugmann nor any of the heads of the Party in my time were Apostles, nor (with one exception) was any Marxist don of the 1930s. The criterion for being elected to the society was, and presumably still is, not subject or belief, or even intellectual distinction, but ‘being apostolic’, whatever that meant – and it was, and no doubt continues to be, endlessly discussed among the brethren. For that matter, neither were the Cambridge spies recruited primarily through the Apostles (except via Anthony Blunt): of the Cambridge Five three had nothing whatever to do with the society (Philby, Maclean and Cairncross).
The war had suspended the ‘real world’ in Cambridge, although a number of senior Angels continued in at least intermittent residence as dons. If I am not mistaken, only two pre-war active brethren returned to Cambridge as research students, myself and the late Matthew Hodgart, a black-haired, moon-faced, hard-drinking literary Scot, perhaps the most brilliant of my undergraduate friends, by then no longer a communist. We were, or rather, since he was not present, I was charged by the assembled Angels at the society’s first postwar annual dinner in 1946 (at Kettners in Soho) to revive it. We did this by recruiting among pre-war friends who had returned to Cambridge, and the students sent to me for supervision by King’s. When I became a Fellow, I recruited a college friend, the Canadian economist Harry Johnson. Since I also supervised economics students in economic history, the postwar Apostles thus found themselves continuing the tradition of Maynard Keynes. However, increasingly, the arts, i.e. history and English, tended to fill the society of the 1950s – together with the unclassified multiple brilliance of Jonathan Miller, who read natural sciences. Before the 1939 war many of them would have gone into the civil service, but now the non-economists among them flocked into two expanding occupations: ‘the media’ and university teaching, sometimes in succession. Women began to be elected only in the 1960s.
After the war the most famous surviving Apostle, the novelist E. M. Forster, moved into King’s College, and, loyal as ever to the society, offered his rooms for its Sunday evening meetings, sitting quietly in the corner – he probably never said much even in his youth – listening to the young brethren speaking literally (in the society’s argot) ‘on the hearth-rug’, since fireplaces fed from coal-scuttles were still the main Cambridge line of defence against the raw eastern climate. Never a habitual scribbler, by this time Morgan had virtually stopped writing, although he took enormous trouble to avoid the slightest hint of cliche ś or platitude in such few texts as he still composed. He had no family, except that of his old policeman lover. I do not think he was ever as much at ease in the postwar world as he would have liked to be, but he was consoled by the unchanging nature of the youth surrounding him. In the early 1960s I once tried to introduce him to the later twentieth century by taking him to see the American soliloquist – one could hardly call him a ‘comedian’ any longer – Lenny Bruce, who was briefly performing at the Establishment, a shortlived Soho club, on his way to rapid self-destruction. Morgan was, as always, courteous and endlessly considerate, but this was not his wavelength.
It has been said by a perceptive observer of the society’s first century that ‘the Apostles devoted themselves to two things above all else, and did so with a pure intensity which to an unkind eye might look absurd, but to a kind eye absolutely admirable. These were friendship on the one hand, and intellectual honesty, on the other.’ 14 Both were still very central to the Apostles of my time, though the dons who participated in these sessions, being older, probably injected a dose of diplomacy into the ‘intellectual honesty’ they brought to their personal relations. Still, both crossed the barriers of age and temperament, and I, as well as my family, owe to the undergraduate Apostles of the early fifties (and to the young men and women I met with and through them) a number of lasting friendships.
III
I cannot say that the first half of the 1950s was a happy time for me in my personal life. I filled it with work, with writing, thinking and teaching, with a lot of travel during university vacations, and, dutifully, with Party work. Fortunately, moving out of London had put me out of the range of London local branch work – organization, canvassing, selling the Daily Worker (renamed Morning Star after 1956) – for which I had no natural taste or suitable temperament. From then on, in effect, I operated entirely in academic or intellectual groups.
Intellectually, though, those were good years. The mind of most people is at its sharpest and most adventurous in their twenties, but I returned from the army passionately determined to catch up on the ideas of the lost war years, and just young enough to do so. There is nothing for the self-education of academics like the need to prepare lectures, and, since the four or five of us in Birkbeck’s history department had to cover all history since antiquity, I had to have a very wide range as a lecturer, even without the additional demands made on me as a supervisor in Cambridge. Academic careers might be blocked, but the historical world was not. What happened in the wider world of historians in those years is the subject of another chapter. For the present purposes it is enough to note that I began to publish in the professional journals from 1949, to play a part in international congresses and in the Economic History Society (to the council of which I was elected in 1952). Above all, from 1946 to 1956 we – a group of comrades and friends – conducted a continuous Marxist seminar for ourselves in the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, by means of endless duplicated discussion papers and regular meetings, mainly in the upper room of the Garibaldi Restaurant in Saffron Hill and occasionally in the then shabby premises of Marx House on Clerkenwell Green. Those who know only the buzzing, gentrified Clerkenwell of 2000 cannot imagine the empty, cold, grey dankness of those streets at weekends fifty years ago, when the Dickensian fog, which disappeared after 1953, was still likely to fall like a vast yellow-grey blindfold on London. Perhaps this was where we really became historians. Others have spoken of ‘the astonishing impact of [this] generation of Marxist historians’ without whom ‘the worldwide influence of British historical scholarship, especially since the 1960s, is inconceivable’. 15 Among other things it gave birth to a successful and eventually influential historical journal in 1952, but Past & Present was born not in Clerkenwell, but in the more agreeable ambience of University Co
llege, Gower Street.
The Historians’ Group broke up in the year of communist crisis, 1956. Until then we, and certainly I, had remained loyal, disciplined and politically aligned Communist Party members, helped no doubt by the wild rhetoric of crusading anti-communism of the ‘Free World’. But it was far from easy.
The Soviet Union, God knows, made it harder and harder. Intellectuals were, of course, under particular pressure, since from 1947 on the beliefs to which they were committed were reduced to a catechism of orthodoxies, some only faintly related to Marxism, and several – especially in the natural sciences – absurd. After the official triumph of ‘Lysenkoism’ in the USSR this was a major problem in the Cambridge graduate branch, several, perhaps most, of whose older members were natural scientists. Were they, like the great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, quietly to withdraw from the Party, unable to accept untruth? Were they, like J. D. Bernal, to ruin their 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 wit
h 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.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 24
