Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Mao Tse-tung had launched the Chinese Cultural Revolution in May of the previous year, and for the first time there was a revolutionary movement that was explicitly centred on the youth of a country Right across that vast nation young people were formed into Red Guard groups and were then encouraged to beat up their teachers, destroy factories and generally parade around like little dictators. It seemed such an obvious idea that teenagers should be allowed to wreck businesses and stop the traffic, many members of my generation wondered why nobody had thought of it before. After all, young people knew all there was to know on all subjects; our certainty and our clarity of thought meant that it was obvious that we should be put in charge of everything right away.

  In left-wing politics there were a number of code words that instantly signalled the ideology behind an organisation. If you were in the know you understood that ‘Peace’, as in ‘Peace in Vietnam’ or ‘Women’s Peace Day’, meant ‘Communist Party Front’, while ‘Solidarity’, as in ‘Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’, meant Trotskyist-controlled. Similarly, though all Communists were supposedly Marxist-Leninists, inspired as they were by the economic and philosophical ideas of Karl Marx allied to VI. Lenin’s theories on imperialism and the nature of the vanguard party, if you went on about it, going so far as to include ‘Marxist-Leninist’ in the name of your group or party, then it meant that you were in fact a Maoist.

  The leader of the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group was Ian Williams, the young man I had first encountered at the lame YCL meeting. Now a student at Liverpool University, he lived with his girlfriend Ruth who worked in an office to support them both since Ian, because of problems with his father, couldn’t obtain a student grant. The MMLG was more diverse than a lot of left-wing groups. Its oldest member was a dock worker from Birkenhead called Wally Sturrock: high-cheeked and dark haired, part-gypsy, he was in his mid-twenties and unlike the rest of us was always well dressed in smart tailored suits, narrow shoes, colourful shirts and stylish slender ties. Another member, Dave, always reminded me of Pasha Antipov as played by Tom Courtenay in David Lean’s film of Doctor Zhivago. Pasha is the disappointed romantic whose bitterness turns him into a cold-blooded and callous revolutionary known as Strelnikov. It was easy to imagine Dave travelling post-revolutionary Britain in an armoured train, shelling villages and shooting people for ideological deviationism. There was also the man with the picture of Mao on a stick, Nigel Morley Preston Jones. He had met Ian in a pub after some demonstration and, brought together by Nigel’s photo of the Chairman, they had founded their own group. Nigel was converted to Marxism-Leninism by a guy he met in Glasgow who was a member of a tiny Scottish Marxist-Leninist party. Like all little parties this group put a great deal of energy into producing their newspaper, whose headline one month read ‘Victory for Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Thought in the Gorbals’. After coming to Liverpool Nigel had found a job and a place to live at the Simon Community, a shelter for the homeless housed in a crumbling building just off Scotland Road where it was generally impossible to tell the difference between the clients and the staff.

  I found myself in an odd position within the Marxist-Leninist group because, although all these people were older than me in conventional years, I was much older than them in Communist years. I had been around revolutionary politics since I was a baby and so sometimes had the strange sensation of being able to know exactly what they were going to say minutes before they had said it.

  Other members were a young couple of social workers from Yorkshire called Barry and Ingrid and a New Zealand woman whose name was Judith Wareham. I don’t recall Judith’s particular motives for becoming a Marxist-Leninist, but for some reason the sterility and asceticism of Maoism and its Balkan offshoot, Enver Hoxha’s hard-line Communist Albania, seemed to hold a particular attraction for Kiwis. Sometimes at night I would tune the little blue and white plastic radio to Radio Albania whose English-language service, judging by the accents, seemed to be staffed entirely by New Zealanders. In reciting their long screeds of Marxist theory they would always refer to the Premier of China, the Great Helmsman, as ‘Chairman May-ow’, as if he was somebody’s pet cat. ‘Today in Beijing Chairman May-ow congratulated the Albanian State Metalworks on increasing washer production by two hundred and twelve per cent thanks to the rigorous political analysis of vice president Mehmet Shehu.’

  I used to wonder how they lived, these freckly redheads whose words floated to me over the short wave band — young men and women whose romantic obsession with a distant people and a violent ideology had landed them in a Balkan city that regularly ran out of soap. Did the Albanians secretly spy on them and keep them from mixing with the ordinary populace, or were they forced to take Albanian wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends of impeccable revolutionary character? Were they allowed to go home if they changed their minds about Marxism-Leninism, and did they manage to get the latest rugby scores?

  The weekly meetings of the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group were held at Ian and Ruth’s place in Huskisson Street in Liverpool 8, where they lived in a high-ceilinged first-floor flat above a Jamaican drug dealer named Beaver. In becoming a Maoist I felt I finally belonged to something that was truly mine; for that brief period it was the height of fashion to be in a revolutionary group. I was also mixing on equal terms with people who were much older than I was — at fifteen I was by far the youngest member, quite a few of them were in their twenties. I thought myself very sophisticated and worldly to be hanging out with people such as these. There was a very nice girl called Chris Walker doing postgraduate work in psychology at Liverpool University, who joined the group a little while after me. Chris would walk me to the bus stop every week after the meetings and wait with me until the bus came. I thought she must live nearby or fancied me or found what I had to say about armoured fighting vehicles so fascinating that she wanted to spend every available minute with me, while in fact she was just making sure I got safely home to my mum.

  My only real problem with being a Marxist-Leninist was that I didn’t believe a word of it, or rather I both totally believed it and totally didn’t believe it, all at the same time. The trouble with any kind of fundamentalist organisation is that it cannot be big on subtlety or nuance. The Nazis did not say, ‘Well, some people don’t like Jews, but live and let live is pretty much our attitude.’ So it was a requirement that you switched off the critical part of your brain for meetings and pretended that China acted only in the interests of international socialism, or that the oppressed peoples of the world were inevitably virtuous and decent and generally good at singing. I suppose I should have said some of this, at least to myself, but apart from a couple of exceptions my comrades seemed like nice people, were genuinely disturbed by injustice and bought me drinks, so I kept quiet.

  Unfortunately your mind will not allow you to get away with the kind of split-brain thinking I tried to stick to. Psychological tensions rise to the surface and tend to find an outlet in erratic behaviour. In this I was no different from the seemingly pious . Jew who secretly gorges on bacon sandwiches, the devout Muslim who drinks or the Evangelical preacher who dresses up as a cowgirl at weekends.

  I sometimes thought that my feelings about being a Communist were so ambivalent that I would have made an excellent double agent, a Special Branch spy, like the several hundred who were at that time infiltrating themselves into the top echelons of major trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers as well as many of the left-wing groups and parties. I thought of myself as someone who could pretend to be left-wing but in fact was working for the government, motivated by bitterness, ambition or extreme reactionary faith brought on by resentment of their parents. But then I thought I wouldn’t really have made a good spy because the government agents always presented themselves as humour-less ideologues who slithered their way to the top of the union or the party They didn’t suddenly run away from demonstrations like I did, throwing their placard in the gutter or sit at the back at meetings absent-minde
dly making strange hooting noises.

  The main activity of the group was running a bookstall every Saturday morning in Great Homer Street Market, better known as Paddy’s Market, which was maybe three-quarters of a mile from Valley Road. The neighbourhood had until recently been a network of terraced streets radiating from a mile-long road on which there had been an astounding variety of shops — butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, bakers, household equipment, clothing, confectionery, tobacco and sweet shops, a number of bicycle shops, a herbalist, a local department store called Sturlas, a Woolworth’s and a cinema. All this had been demolished a few years before, and the former shops and houses replaced with a number of bleak tower blocks and a shopping precinct of extraordinary tawdriness and such flimsy construction that it looked as if it had been made out of the paper the architects had done their optimistic drawings on.

  The weekend open-air market was held behind this precinct and, though all trace of the old area had been expunged, the former shoppers still came. In the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I read, if there was an indeterminate brown-skinned character he would inevitably be referred to as a ‘Lascar’. Paddy’s Market was full of Lascars, seamen from boats moored in the river who had been coming to the market for over a century to buy second-hand woollen clothes that they would unravel and take back home with them, presumably to make into new garments.

  ‘Five shilly, Johnny,’ the old women who ran the stalls would say to them as they haggled over some moth-eaten jumper. ‘Five shilly, Johnny.’

  ‘Two shilly?’

  ‘Four shilly, Johnny.’

  ‘Three shilly.’

  And once they had finished buying old overcoats and worn out socks the Lascars could come to our stall and purchase copies of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy or Stalin’s History of the CPSU.

  The stall itself had been made from an oak door that somebody had salvaged from a building site and was incredibly heavy — it took four of us to carry it the half-mile from the Simon Community hostel where it was stored. We didn’t know anybody who had a car. However, once we had put it up, Liverpool being the sort of place it was the stall did a reasonable amount of trade — better than some of the others that only seemed to sell twisted wire, broken fish tanks and rusted-up fuel pumps. There would always be some little old bloke in a flat cap coming up to us and saying, ‘Ere, son, do you have Friedrich Engels’ The Holy Family, the critique of the Young Hegelians he wrote with Marx in Paris in November 1844?’

  ‘No, but we do have Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.’

  ‘Naww, I’ve already got that.’

  ‘Make a lovely Christmas present for a family member.’

  ‘Eh, I suppose you’re right there. Give us two copies then, son.’

  Molly was not the most domestic of mothers. When attempting to clean the house she deployed a great deal of violence but to very little effect, moving the dirt around rather than actually picking it up. She used to store the vacuum cleaner at the top of the flight of stairs that led down to the cellar, and when she had finished using it, knocking the furniture about and frightening the dog she would just open the cellar door and throw the vacuum cleaner in so that it inevitably tumbled down the wooden stairs. Quite soon, due to this rough treatment the cleaner would stop working. Then it would be abandoned where it had fallen in the dark cellar and Molly would buy another, which she would throw down the cellar stairs like its predecessor. In time that cleaner would join its fallen comrades until after a few years there was a large pile of broken vacuum cleaners in our cellar with the one working cleaner lying on top.

  Molly’s biggest cleaning or recycling problem, though, was connected not with the accumulated dirt or rotting kitchen waste but with the Soviet Weekly. This was a Russian state-subsidised tabloid paper published in full colour which was crammed full of propaganda about the Communist workers’ paradise. Lies about industrial production and the grain harvest would be accompanied by photos of smiling agricultural workers and industrial labourers, there were editorials and articles ranting against the West, and there was always a big spread on the latest African dictator being feted by Moscow. At some point in the distant past Molly and Joe had agreed to take six of these things each week and so they arrived every seven days, month after month, year after year, thumping on to the mat each Wednesday, a tightly rolled log of six Soviet Weeklys, like a slow ticking clock marking out the decades. From time to time the head office in Moscow would send us a bill, stating we owed them first fifty pounds, then a hundred pounds, then five hundred pounds, but they never attempted to collect the money and they never stopped sending the Soviet Weeklys.

  It would have been all right if Molly hadn’t felt that, though we had stopped reading them or even unwrapping them years ago, she couldn’t bear to throw them out — she felt in some incoherent way that to do so would be a betrayal of the international struggle for freedom and justice. So instead of putting them in the bin she began to store them all over the house. Next to the front door was a coat rack mounted on the wall, and Molly would often pick up the roll of Soviet Weeklys as they came though the door and stuff them in the pocket of the nearest coat. If you left your coat hanging there for a few weeks you would find when you returned to it that every single pocket was stuffed with rolled up newspapers. People who came to visit would frequently go away with their coat or jacket feeling oddly heavy and bulky.

  Finally, after years of this, Molly wound herself up to cancel our subscription. But on the very week she was planning to do it Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia, smashing Dubcek’s Prague Spring, and she felt that the Russian government would take it as a criticism of their actions if she stopped taking their publication now. So they continued to arrive through our letterbox for years to come, bouncing on to the lino in the hall until the very day when the Soviet system itself collapsed.

  The only daily newspaper we had ever taken at 5 Valley Road was the Daily Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain. While other households read papers which indulged in salacious tales of vicars and their misdeeds or bloodthirsty accounts of murders or showbusiness gossip or investigative journalism or humorous parliamentary sketches, everything we read had to be contorted to fit in with a document called The British Road to Socialism, which was the programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain and of the Young Communist League.

  Organisationally, the Communist Party was a theocratic organisation very much like the Catholic Church. As with the Church of Rome the mass of worshippers were actively discouraged from studying the sacred texts, in our case the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, themselves. Instead the interpretations of the holy books were handed down to the party members from on high, after the line had been decided, first in Moscow and then in London by the party’s theologians. For many years the leading ‘theorist’ had been an Anglo-Indian called Rajani Palme Dutt, whose many dull books resided in our front room. But for the ordinary member or sympathiser the main way in which the party line was received was via the Daily Worker, which did not make for the most thrilling read over the breakfast table.

  Because it was supposed to be a daily paper rather than a theoretical journal the Daily Worker was required to have some of the features of a more mass-market publication. Most famous of all was their racing tipster, ‘Cayton’. In 1959 he had spectacularly tipped the winner of the Grand National, Russian Hero, at 66—1 and over the years he generally came out well ahead of all the other tipsters on more capitalistic newspapers. My parents held this up in some vague way as being a triumph of Marxist-Leninist thought, without going into the specifics too deeply The Daily Worker also had its own comic strip entitled ‘The Adventures of Pif’. This cartoon featured a patched, ideologically correct dog called Pif and a black and white cat called Hercules. ‘Pif’ was actually reprinted from the French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité, and though his words were trans
lated into English the characters that he met, policemen, shopkeepers and so on, were unmistakably French in their dress. I don’t know if ‘Pif’ was funny in his native language, but he sure as hell wasn’t funny in English and frequently didn’t even make any kind of sense. As I became fascinated by existentialism I sometimes wondered whether leading French Communist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre hadn’t taken a turn at doing ‘Pif’, so arcane did his adventures seem.

  In 1966 the Daily Worker was relaunched as the Morning Star in a supposedly more accessible tabloid format, but the problems with content continued. ‘Pif’ was still there, as was ‘Cayton’. One improvement that did occur, though it didn’t appeal much to the old Stalinists, was that, because there were a number of talented young people writing for the paper who were tuned in to the emerging progressive music scene, the Morning Star’s coverage of gigs and albums by groups such as the Incredible String Band, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis and Soft Machine was often much better than that of the dedicated music papers. This could sometimes lead to some incongruous juxtapositions, for instance the review of a gig by Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the St Martin’s Lane Arts Lab, describing their ‘freaky light show’, might appear next to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s latest pronouncement on the best grain harvest in the Urals ever.

  Another feature that carried over from the Daily Worker was the ‘Fighting Fund’. Both papers were always continually in financial difficulties. The Morning Star, like its predecessor, carried little commercial advertising apart from Au Montmartre and that boarding house where we used to stay in Belgium. Car makers and manufacturers of expensive watches were not interested in the Communist market, and the cover price did not even meet print and distribution costs. So every day the paper ran its Star Fund appeal. The prominence of the Star Fund appeal waxed and waned depending on how much trouble the paper was in. It told the readers how much money they needed not to go under that month and how short they were from achieving their goal. This always lent a slightly hysterical tone to the front page, as if it was some dumped girlfriend who was constantly threatening suicide.