Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  In retrospect the reason is obvious. We were not told the truth about something that had to affect the very nature of a communist’s belief. Moreover, we could see that the leadership would have preferred us not to know the truth – they concealed it until Khrushchev’s off-the-record speech had been leaked to the non-communist press – and they manifestly wanted to bring any discussion about it to a close as soon as possible. When the crisis broke out in Poland and Hungary they went on concealing what our own journalists reported. One could understand why as Party organizers they might find this convenient, but it was neither Marxism nor genuine politics. When the familiar call to unswerving loyalty failed, their immediate instinct was to blame the unfortunate vacillations of those well-known elements of instability and weakness, petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It took the Party authorities from March to November to recognize what the Committee of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group had seen almost immediately, namely that this was ‘the most serious and critical situation the Party was in since its foundation’.5 Indeed, after the Hungarian Revolution and Soviet armed intervention later that year, not even the most blindly loyal Party members could reasonably deny it. When the leadership had re-established itself in 1957, after fending off an outburst of open opposition without precedent, the British Communist Party had lost a quarter of its members, a third of the staff of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, and probably the bulk of what remained of the generation of communist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. But, though it lost several of its leading trade unionists, it rapidly regained its national industrial influence, which reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.

  It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of that traumatic year, rising, through a succession of lesser crises, to the appalling climax of the Soviet army’s reconquest of Hungary, and then stumbling and wrestling to an exhausted defeat through months of doomed and feverish argument. Arnold Wesker’s play Chicken Soup with Barley , about a Jewish working-class family struggling with its communist faith, gives a good idea of what has been called ‘the pain of losing it and the pain of clinging to it’.6 Even after practically half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock-face. And this while all of us, except a handful of full-time Party workers, had to go on, as though nothing much had happened, with lives and jobs outside, which temporarily seemed unwanted distractions from the enormous thing that dominated our days and nights. God knows 1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of those who were then communists, everything else has faded. Of course we mobilized against Anthony Eden’s lying government in the Suez crisis together with a for once totally united Labour and Liberal left. But Suez did not keep us from sleeping. Probably the simplest way of putting it is that, for more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.

  What made things worse was that the family-sized British Communist Party was in many ways, to quote an apocryphal critique by the Comintern, ‘a party of good friends’. Unlike other Parties, it had no history of clamorous expulsions and excommunications. It lacked the particular version of the ‘bolshevik’ house-style of leadership which created ruthless, complacent bullies such as Andre śMarty in the French CP. We were likely to have met and talked to our leaders, liked most of them and at least some of us could understand the pressures upon them. None of the critics wanted to leave the Party, the Party did not want to lose us. Wherever our political future was to take us – and even those who left or were expelled from the Party overwhelmingly remained on the left – all of us lived through the crisis of 1956 as convinced communists.

  I would have been in the thick of the crisis in any case, but I was close to the centre of it, since in 1956 I was the chairman of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group – one of the few times I have been chairman of any organization – and the group emerged almost immediately as the nucleus of vocal opposition to the Party line, when it was brought to us by a King Street spokesman on 8 April 1956, shortly after the Khrushchev speech, or rather after the subsequent British Party Congress which had (vainly) tried to bypass the whole issue. We rebelled and the group made the two most dramatic challenges to the Party. In the first, one of the group’s leading members, Christopher Hill, acted as spokesman for the Minority Report of the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy, i.e. virtual leader of the opposition at the Party Congress of May 1957. In mid-July John Saville of Hull University and E. P. Thompson, then a lecturer in the extramural department of Leeds, launched an unprecedented and by Party convention entirely illegitimate bulletin of opposition within the Party, The Reasoner. (After they left the Party it was revived as The New Reasoner in 1957, with contributions from various sympathetic hands, including myself.) The Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution moved several of us to a second and even more flagrant breach of Party discipline, technically punishable by expulsion, a collective letter of protest, signed by most of the better-known historians (including the usually silent loyalist Maurice Dobb), rejected by the Daily Worker and demonstratively published in the non-Party press.7 Only Party members of that generation will appreciate how unpardonable such a breach of discipline was. A few years later this letter allowed me, on an emotional evening in an Austrian pub, to check-mate a very drunken and ill-tempered Arthur Koestler who wanted to know whether people like me had ever opposed the Russians over the Hungarian Revolution.

  The historians had been the most consistently flourishing of the Party’s ‘cultural groups’, and a notably loyal one politically. Why did we – more than the writers, more than the scientists, groggy from the impact of the absurdities of Lysenko and official Soviet ideology – find ourselves in the front line of opposition from the start? Essentially, because we had to confront the situation not only as private individuals and communist militants, but in our professional capacity. The issue of what had been done under Stalin, and why it had been concealed, was literally a question about history. So were the open but undiscussed questions about episodes in our own Party’s history which were directly linked to Moscow decisions in the Stalin era, notably the abandonment of the anti-fascist line in 1939–41. So, indeed, was our own political attitude. As someone said on the day of our first rebellion: ‘Why should we simply approve Khrushchev? We do not know, we can only endorse policy – but historians go by evidence.’8

  This accounts for our only collective intervention as a group in the affairs of the Party in 1956. We demanded a serious history of the CP. King Street, which, as I can now see in retrospect, was desperate to conciliate a troublesome bunch of intellectuals whom they nevertheless recognized as an asset, agreed to set up a commission to discuss the matter. Harry Pollitt, Chairman and unquestioned leader of the Party during our lifetime, Palme Dutt, the ideological guru, and James Klugmann, represented the leadership, I as group chairman and Brian Pearce spoke for the historians. (Brian, once a Tudor specialist, now a superb translator from French and Russian, had long been critical of the myths and silences of CP history. He was to leave the Communist Party for one of the Trotskyite groups.)

  I recall frustrating meetings. Not that the historians were faced with a single co-ordinated line. Harry had admired Stalin and, like most old-time Party leaders, neither approved nor respected Khrushchev. He was a working-class leader of major stature with more charisma than any Labour Party leader except Bevan and, as an old boiler-maker, far more sense than Bevan of what the trade unions were about. His instincts and long experience made him sceptical of researchers on Party history. As a politician he knew that coroners’ inquests on ancient quarrels, especially among comrades still living, tended to cause trouble. As an ol
d Comintern hand, he realized that a lot of things could not be told and some had better stay untold. None of us could have known then that in 1937 Pollitt had intervened in Moscow in defence of a former Comintern representative in Britain and his wife, who had just been arrested – possibly going up even to Stalin. This extraordinarily brave and honest step had landed him in serious trouble in those days of paranoiac terror. The Comintern considered replacing him as leader of the Party, and the scenario of a possible show trial was sketched out. He had been saved from the worst, with the aid of a British passport, by Dimitrov, and perhaps by the stubborn refusal under torture of the Comintern’s former organizational chief Osip Piatnitsky to make the required ‘confession’ implicating the designated victims.9 Would it have done the movement any good if someone had published this episode in the Party’s history, even if it undoubtedly reflects credit on it and especially on Pollitt himself? He made it clear that in his view the only kind of history that helped the Party was the regimental kind – a record of battles fought, heroic deeds, sacrifices for the cause, red banners waved – to fill the comrades with pride and hope.

  The Indo-Scandinavian intellectual Palme Dutt, one of those implausibly tall upper-class figures one occasionally meets among Bengalis, belonged through his mother to an eminent Swedish kindred – Olaf Palme, the socialist premier assassinated in 1986, was another member.6 Unlike Harry, Dutt was a natural intellectual as well as an instinctive hardliner. Many years earlier the night he spent in my little house in Cambridge after a meeting had left me with a lasting admiration for his acute mind and a lasting conviction that he was not interested in truth, but used his intellect exclusively to justify and explicate the line of the moment, whatever it was. I now think I was unfair to the intellectual instincts still buried somewhere deeply inside him, or perhaps to his hope of posthumous recognition as something better than a gifted sophist in the service of authority. He granted that a genuine history of the Communist Party was essentially the history of its policies, that is to say of the changes in the line. And this must of course involve critical consideration, and, where necessary, negative judgement. But had the moment for this yet come? He doubted it.

  And our old hero James Klugmann? He sat on the far right-hand corner of the table and said nothing. He knew we were right. If we did not produce a history of our Party, including the problematic bits, they would not go away. The history would simply be written by anti-communist scholars – and indeed, within less than two years such a history was written.10 But he lacked what the great Bismarck once called ‘Zivilcourage ’, civilian as distinct from military courage. He knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public. (In this he was like a rather different political figure, Isaiah Berlin, about the policies of the State of Israel.) He said nothing, and agreed to take on himself the task of writing an acceptable official history of the CPGB, which he knew to be impossible. Twelve years later he published a first volume which went up to 1924. My fairly savage demonstration that he had been wasting his time did not spoil our relations. 11 Before his death he published a second volume which went up to 1927, just before he would have to face the most controversial episodes. He would never have written more. In the meanwhile he edited Marxism Today , founded as a sop to critics who stayed in the Party in 1957, not exactly encouraging open discussion but not exactly discouraging it either.

  IV

  When I consider what effect the Twentieth Congress had on the larger historical scene, I feel a little embarrassed to insist on the storms in our British teapot. Following strikes by Polish workers and demonstrations by Polish Catholics – a powerful combination even then – a new communist leadership took over in Poland under Vladislav Gomulka, purged in 1949 and only recently let out of prison. (Fortunately the Poles had evaded organizing the prearranged trials and executions that disfigured Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and could therefore ‘rehabilitate’ living people rather than corpses.) The Chinese, then still part of the international movement, prevailed on the Russians to avoid military action. The Hungarian Revolution which immediately followed was less lucky, almost certainly because its new leadership went beyond what the Soviets could be expected to tolerate, by leaving the eastern military alliance of the Warsaw Pact and declaring their neutrality in the Cold War. None of this, least of all Khrushchev himself, impressed the Chinese, whose relations with the USSR then began to deteriorate sharply. Within a year or two the two communist giants had split. There were now two rival communist movements, though in fact almost all existing Communist Parties remained loyal to the Soviet centre. The so-called ‘Maoism’ of the 1960s created no real parties but small and squabbling activist sects. Even the most serious ostensibly pro-Chinese group, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which seceded from the CPI, was not really Maoist. It carried with it such mass support as there was for communism in India, notably in the state of Kerala, where trucks decorated with the picture of Stalin are still to be seen on country roads, and West Bengal whose 68 million citizens the CPI(M) has now (2002) governed with solid popular support for decades.

  In Britain the main effect of the great 1956 earthquake was that it made some 30,000 members of the Communist Party feel terrible, and scattered the forces of the small extreme left. Most of those who left the Party probably quietly dropped out of political activism. (So also did some who remained, like myself, convinced that, since the Party had not reformed itself, it had no long-term political future in the country.) Some joined the three main Trotskyist groups, although these grew not so much by transfers from the CP as by the general cracking of the world communist monolith and the loss of the CP’s virtual monopoly in Marxism. The militant young now had the choice of lefts. Most of the critics from the Historians’ Group, which did not effectively survive the crisis, groped for, or rather tried to build, some ‘New Left’ undefiled by the bad memories of Stalinism.

  Saville and Thompson’s New Reasoner (1957–9) became the home for most of the ex-CP intellectuals. Eventually it merged with the Universities and Left Review founded by the youngest former member of the Historians’ Group, Raphael Samuel, together with another ex-communist, Gabriel Pearson, and two rather impressive unattached younger Oxford radicals, the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The average age of the editors was twenty-four. From the early 1960s this uneasily merged New Left Review was taken over by a new team of young Oxford post-CP Marxists, the core of which came from the old Anglo-Irish milieu in the Irish Republic. Its chieftain was the remarkably able Perry Anderson (aged twenty-two), who also largely financed it. Unlike the little Britons of the older ‘New Lefts’, its interests were distinctly international, more theoretical, and much less tied to the labour movement or socialist politics. Although it moved into the orbit of the Fourth International it succeeded in establishing itself as the major periodical of a new generation of Anglo-Saxon Marxists.

  In practical terms these ‘New Lefts’, although intellectually productive, were negligible. They did not reform the Labour Party (about which they remained ambivalent) or the Communist Party (as happened in Sweden). They produced neither new parties of the left (as in Denmark), nor lasting new organizations of significance, nor even individual national leaders. Thompson himself eventually became nationally famous as a spokesman for nuclear disarmament, but although CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), by far the most important movement of the post-1945 British left, was founded about the same time (1958) it had nothing to do with the crisis in the CP.

  In some ways the brief episode of the Partisan Coffee House symbolizes the combination of ideology, impracticality and sentimental hope of those early post-1956 ‘New Lefts’. Like so much else it was the brainchild of Raphael Samuel who, with Edward Thompson, another and greater natural Romantic, emerged as the most original influence among the ex-CP intellectuals. Anyone who knew Raphael during an impassioned life cut short by cancer has exactly the same memories of him: a thin, enthusiastic
face with mild, quick-witted eyes under a waterfall of eventually thinning dark hair, rushing from place to place alone, carrying with him wherever he went a vast collection of notes and files from which he struggled to retrieve the right piece of paper. All the work he ever published was part of an infinite all-embracing work-in-progress. He found it impossible to choose between the many marvels of the (overwhelmingly British) past, which is why he never got far with the doctoral thesis I was supposed to supervise – I think it was on Irish labour in Victorian London – or any other project. Not unnaturally for so ingrained an activist, he found his place in Ruskin College, where he taught trade unionists within earshot of the mostly uncaring dons of Oxford University. His history had neither structure nor limits. It was an unending and astonishingly learned perambulation round the wonderful landscapes, of memory and the lives of common people, with an occasional intellectual pounce suggested by some particularly fascinating sight glimpsed on the way.

  This eager vagabond figure, the absolute negation of administrative and executive efficiency, carried inside him an explosive charge of energy, an endless capacity to generate ideas and initiatives, and above all a quite astonishing capacity to talk others into realizing them. The Universities and Left Review was one of them, the ‘History Workshop’ movement, origin of the History Workshop Journal (the most influential meeting-point of the post-Marxist historians of the left), was another. The Partisan Coffee House was a third. With two generations of Jewish revolutionary Marxists from Eastern Europe behind him, he dreamed of replacing the Stalinist authoritarianism of the Party with a free-wheeling creative mobilization of political minds, and what better centre for doing so than a cafe? Not one of those neo-baroque quick-consumption coffee bars which were then filling the side streets of the West End with the newly popular Gaggia Espresso machines, but a real Soho café, in which people could discuss theoretical issues, play chess, consume strudel and hold political meetings in a back room, as on the continent in the days before innocence was lost. The profits of the café śwould pay for the Review itself, whose offices would be above it. The Partisan would express both the new spirit of politics and the new spirit of the arts. It would be designed by the cutting-edge young architects of the moment, who were obviously going to be in sympathy with the project. I cannot remember whether jazz sessions were part of the dream. More likely folk sessions. To ensure its bona fides (and perhaps win the support of the older generation) some suitable left-wing personalities would preside over it. I let myself be talked into one of these directorships, against my better judgement. An eminent tweed-suited ex-CP architect with a house in Keats Grove was another. I cannot remember any of the others. Raph took not the slightest notice of any of us.