Source: Revolutionary History, Volume 9, no 3, 2006.
Accounts of the crisis in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) in 1956 have typically focussed on the party’s intellectuals. Particular prominence has been accorded to the revolt against Stalinism of John Saville and Edward Thompson and their comrades in the CP Historians’ Group, a revolt which produced the Reasoner, and subsequently influenced the emergence and political direction of the New Left. [2] The Historians’ Group has received extensive, largely sympathetic attention and an almost uniformly good press. [3] Its contribution to a distinctive socialist historiography has been saluted and its members have been generally depicted as being collectively in the cockpit of opposition to the party leadership in 1956. This view has been recently and powerfully affirmed in Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography, which, moreover, posits a positive relationship between the vocation of the professional historian and the probing and questioning of Stalinism and party policy in the wake of the Khrushchev revelations. [4]
A closer look at the events of 1956-57 suggests a more variegated and more nuanced picture. The Historians’ Group did not, as might be assumed from some of the literature, consist almost exclusively of a collective which shared a common approach to historiography; nor did it consist solely or even largely of innovative academic historians. This impression is achieved by selective vision. The reality was that its members included schoolteachers, amateur historians and an assortment of party members with some interest in the subject, divided into sub-sections according to their interest in specific historical periods. [5] We should not underestimate the significance of this intense, collective experience to the formation of the minority who made a contribution to the development of historical scholarship. But we should register the fact that most of them made their most important contributions to socialist historiography after the heyday of the group. Moreover, for at least some of them, this was very much based on a break from the CP and the shackles of Stalinism. [6] The verdict that during the golden age of the group its leading members ‘were all, whether they liked it or not, apologists for Stalinism’, [7] should surprise only adherents of what the socialist historian, John Newsinger, has recently and aptly termed the ‘Moscow-lite’ school of CP history. [8]
The Historians’ Group was answerable to the CP’s Cultural Committee. Direct intervention on the part of the leadership was limited in the decade before 1956: this was not, particularly in the era of Zhdanov and Lysenko, as Edward Thompson has eloquently attested, because the party ran a liberal regime. It was because the historians, by and large, knew and respected the rules of the game. The CP leadership’s unspoken interdict on researching into recent history, particularly the history of their own party, was on the whole accepted by the group. Allegiance to Stalinism moulded their Marxism, and, if it did not entirely stifle good scholarship, it undeniably constrained their history. [9] Those sometimes portrayed as dissidents were, on the evidence, no such thing. [10] As Hobsbawm remarked, ‘in the years 1946-56 the relations between the Group and the Party had been almost entirely unclouded. [The Historians]... were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any...’ [11] As Christopher Hill later concluded:
It is important not to make a scapegoat of our leadership. We are all responsible for the state the Party has got into. Those of us who knew something about the Soviet Union have a grave responsibility for having hushed up some of the things we knew or suspected. [12]
Finally, the reaction of the CP historians to 1956 was far from uniform. Robin Page Arnot, who had most to do with the writing of party history although not active in the group, was a pillar of orthodoxy; so too was the Russian specialist Andrew Rothstein. The group’s most distinguished member, the economic historian Maurice Dobb, witnessed the events in Poznań in 1956 and voiced some criticism of the CP leadership; but he never thought for a moment of quitting the party. [13] The group’s chair and perhaps its leading activist, Hobsbawm, exhibited a calculated degree of public criticism while simultaneously expressing a fundamental loyalty to the party leadership. [14] Victor Kiernan, Hymie Fagan, Allan Merson, Max Morris, AL Morton, Lionel Munby, Joan Simon, Jack Cohen, Hugo Rathbone, George Rudé, Archibald Robertson, George Thompson and Dona Torr left no recorded criticism. After everything, they all remained members of the heavily-compromised party. The diverse responses of CP historians to 1956 and the different paths they took in reaction to it bear closer scrutiny. Matters are not concluded by the existing extensive literature on the Reasoner, the New Reasoner and the New Left, or by Hobsbawm’s valuable recollections.
Our purpose here, taking advantage of a number of documents which have recently come to hand, is to illustrate the diversity in the group, and erode stereotyping by tracing in more detail than has hitherto been possible the political progress from Stalinism to Trotskyism of one neglected Communist historian, Brian Pearce. Pearce was one of perhaps 200 activists who left the CP in the aftermath of the crisis to join the biggest Trotskyist organisation, later the Socialist Labour League and later still the Workers Revolutionary Party. Most were workers. But a few - Peter Cadogan, Tom Kemp, Alasdair McIntyre, Cliff Slaughter and Pearce - could be numbered among the CP intellectuals. [15] An examination of Pearce’s reaction to 1956 sheds light on one member of the party’s intellectual cadre who chose Trotskyism in preference to individual involvement in the New Left, as well as telling us more about the Historians’ Group in which he was a leading activist at this extraordinary time.
When Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956 illuminated the dark corners of Soviet history, lit the fuse that shattered the certainties of world Stalinism and dealt it a blow from which it never recovered, Brian Pearce was 40 years of age. He had been a member of the CP for more than half a lifetime. He was born at Weymouth, Dorset, on 8 May 1915, the only child of Leonard David Pearce, an engineering worker who belonged to the Steam Engine Makers Union and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers before he became a company secretary, and Sarah Ann Hussey, who was a housekeeper before her marriage. The family moved around southern England. They lived in Brighton, Brixton and Chelmsford before settling in Harrow, near London, where Pearce was educated at the John Lyon School. There he developed what was to be a lifelong passion for history. He became interested in socialist ideas at an early age through the influence of his uncle, Joseph Redman, a railway worker. While he was still at school he read CP literature acquired through his visits to Henderson’s ‘bomb shop’ in Charing Cross Road and the party bookshop in King Street. He also marched on demonstrations. He recollected that the economic and political crisis of 1929-31 affirmed rather than ignited his belief in revolution. [16]
The rampant leftism of the CP’s Third Period and his reading Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism left an enduring mark. But Pearce was a bookish loner and introverted scholar. It was only when he entered University College London to study history in the autumn of 1934 that he became a member of a CP still in the early days of the transition from ultra-leftism to the Popular Front. Pearce shared with Hobsbawm, whom he first encountered in student politics in 1936, an initiation into Communism that preceded the Popular Front. [17] Unlike Hobsbawm, who underwent in the mid-1930s a cathartic conversion from the ultra-leftism he had experienced in Weimar Berlin, and unlike other members of the Historians’ Group, such as Saville and Thompson, the Popular Front never entered his soul. [18]
Pearce volunteered to join the army in September 1939 and was called up in January 1940. He served on the home front until March 1944, when he was posted to India. From there he corresponded with Rajani Palme Dutt, the CP’s leading theoretician, critically contrasting the impression that Dutt’s writings gave of Indian politics with the realities Pearce now perceived at first hand. In view of later developments, it is worth recording his reflection that in these years he was ‘as viciously anti-Trotskyist as anyone’. [19] But after the war he sometimes chafed against party policy. After his demob from the army in 1946, he clashed with the CP’s education officer, Douglas Garman, over the question of the CP’s changes of line between 1939 and 1941 when the war was adjudged in turn anti-fascist, inter-imperialist and, after the German invasion of Russia, anti-fascist once more. [20]
By 1949 he was dissatisfied with the limits of the CP’s turn to the left motivated by the onset of the Cold War. Pondering what he perceived as unfavourable comparison with the leftist élan of the Third Period, he wrote a paper commemorating the elevation of Harry Pollitt, a forgotten pioneer of the now embarrassing Class Against Class line, to the CP leadership in 1929. In it he explored what was then known about the initiation of the Third Period in Britain. [21] Pearce recalled in 1976 that the Cold War turn:
... was very welcome to party members of a certain type to which I belonged... comrades who had joined the party in the ‘Third Period’ of ultra-leftism. At the same time there was marked reluctance to any ‘left turn’ on the part of important sections of the party who were quite happy with the right-wing line. It was as an attack on these people that I wrote my article on the party struggle of 1929 seeing in that a kind of precedent for the conflict of 1949. [22]
In what is still the only example I have been able to find of even mild disciplinary action involving members of the Historians’ Group before 1956, Pearce was called before the London District Secretary, John Mahon, forced to account for all copies of the document and provide the apparatus with the names of all those who had received it. [23] The incident brought home to him in practice the nature of the CP’s regime and its determination to control its history.
It was not, he [Mahon] said, that there was anything incorrect in what I had written: on the contrary, he had been there at the time and knew that things had happened just as I described. But the story could be misunderstood and used against the party. In fact, a copy of my little piece had gone astray and was being used by enemies in Lambeth. [24]
Pearce was first and foremost an historian. Decades after the events of 1956, he reflected:
Whatever organisation I was in, I was interested in discovering its history. I also had the problem which people trained as historians have of being worried about the accuracy of statements, needing evidence for things and worrying when there wasn’t any evidence or when the evidence was contradictory. That element was always present in me, subordinated for a long period, of course. [25]
Subordinated, certainly, for to most intents and purposes Pearce was a loyal, if sometimes awkward, adherent of Stalinism. After he graduated in 1937, he began work for a thesis on Tudor history, but the war disrupted this interest, and he was not in a position to return to it afterwards. [26] He read French and had a smattering of German, while his interest in the European left gave him a breadth of knowledge and sense of proportion denied to at least some of his comrades. After a brief spell working on the official history of the war, he got a job at the Treasury in a division concerned with training new civil servants, and he took advantage of Foreign Office classes in Russian to learn the language. It proved an important asset, one which few of his comrades possessed. His grasp of the language of the ruling faction of the political class of world Communism enabled him to study some things at first hand, and as he observed, ‘the closer you got to things the more you understood them’. [27] He attributed his initial interest in translation, the craft which would be so important to his later life, to an incident in the 1930s. Unable to make sense of a passage in Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany, he returned to the original text, and, with the help of a dictionary, deciphered Engels’ original meaning. Out of the curiosity and care which drove all his historical endeavours, a new talent was born. [28]
In 1950, as the Cold War intensified, he left the civil service in response to the party’s appeal for new cadres and began to work for the CP’s press. Hobsbawm remembered that by 1956 Pearce ‘had long been critical of the myths and silences of CP history’, [29] and a spell as copy taster on the Daily Worker in 1950-51 ensured that he experienced in close up many of the myths and silences flowing from the Soviet Union. The former party journalist Alison McLeod, who like Pearce broke with Stalinism in 1956-57, recalled that at this time:
Brian Pearce was far better than I was at fitting everything into a coherent world outlook. But that was not what made his conversation delightful. He was a historian. Like a pig hunting out the truffles, he would go for the fact that everyone else had forgotten, the statistics meant to prove one thing that proved the opposite... [30]
Through the party, Pearce found employment as a translator with its publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart. From 1952, his work in company with the resiliently evangelical Stalinist veteran Andrew Rothstein in the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR (SCR) and the British-Soviet Friendship Society (BSFS), as well as engagements teaching English at the Russian and Polish embassies focussed his attention on the Soviet Union, and produced insights into how Stalinism worked. Small incidents of distortion and complicity stayed with him, as when he was prevailed upon to replace a reference in the SCR pamphlet, A People Reborn, to the deportation of the Chechens and Ingushes by Stalin with the statement that they ‘were given an opportunity to develop elsewhere in the USSR’. [31] A BSFS tour to the USSR in 1953 stimulated further questions about the system that he had spent most of his life supporting. So did the CP’s handling of the fate of Beria, the installation of the Khrushchev leadership and Khrushchev’s rehabilitation of Tito, all accomplished without, Pearce felt, any proper, honest, political and historical accounting. But, as he later emphasised, he still knew little about Trotskyism, and still less about Trotskyists. [32]
In his brief account of Pearce in 1956, Terry Brotherstone emphasises the impact of Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian party in February in crystallising and cohering Pearce’s concerns: ‘Now a lot of things fell into place which had been awkwardly standing out and not fitting into my mind. I thought: now I begin to see how these things fit together.’ [33] Through the summer and autumn of 1956, doubts developed into certainty and opposition, and his life changed. He was stimulated into rethinking his politics by the revolt of the Polish workers in June and subsequently the Hungarian uprising and the Russian invasion in November. In collaboration with the dissident CP journalist Peter Fryer and later the Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, Pearce commenced to work out the answers to questions which had long disturbed him. He was not, like Hill, Hobsbawm, Saville, Kiernan (or Thompson in university adult education) a professional university teacher. But his conception of himself, shared by other members of the group, as Eric Hobsbawm’s memoirs intimate, was of a practising historian. Drawing on his studies of sixteenth and seventeenth century history, he had participated during the early 1950s in the discussions in the Historians’ Group which resulted in a revised version of AL Morton’s text from 1938, A People’s History of England. [34] Later Pearce took part in the group’s discussion of Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism and in its controversial investigation of the English bourgeois revolution. He also translated work by Soviet historians and wrote articles about it. [35] And the question of history remained central to his political development.
The series of letters which are published here for the first time provide an unusual, in-depth and first-hand account of one individual’s break with Stalinism. They also illustrate in some detail that the CP’s long-standing mechanisms of surveillance, inquisition and discipline were alive and well in 1956-57. The letters commence with an example of Pearce’s characteristically assiduous concern for history and specifically the history of his party. His letter to Pollitt in May 1956 was provoked by the party leader’s recent appearance on British television when he claimed with typical disingenuousness that he had characterised the Second World War as anti-fascist throughout. The record confirmed that he had publicly held it to be anti-fascist at its initiation in September 1939; inter-imperialist, although with significant concessions to the Third Reich, and to be opposed, although nothing had changed except Stalin’s instructions, from October 1939; and anti-fascist and to be uncritically prosecuted with Churchillian zeal from June 1941. [36] Pearce’s letter also insists on the relevance of the past to the present. Noting Pollitt’s rhetorical support for this, it goes on to stress that if Pollitt had forgotten his own party’s gyrations over the war, British workers, potential recruits to the CP, as well as members grown cynical at watching somersaults, had not.
The response to Pearce’s letter by the new General Secretary of the party, the colourless Scottish apparatchik, John Gollan, who had succeeded Pollitt who was now seriously ill, in May 1956, affirms the party leadership’s consistent refusal to account for its history. It also illustrates the methods it used to suppress serious scrutiny of party history and the consequent disfigurement of any attempts at party education. In 1946, those who raised awkward questions at party schools were slapped down as provocateurs. A decade later, the leadership’s stance was more measured but still stultifying: historical issues were, it conceded, important, but to address them now was a distraction from more pressing tasks. For Gollan, as for Pollitt, the past was not indispensable to the present. Moreover, rigorous examination of party history, the General Secretary hinted, could provide fuel for the party’s critics. [37]
The context of these letters was the ferment in the Historians’ Group in the aftermath of the CP’s Twenty-Fourth Congress in the spring of 1956 which had singularly failed to come to grips with the implications of Khrushchev’s revelations. There had been an important meeting of historians a month before Pearce’s letter. The minutes of the ‘Full Committee’ meeting of 8 April, which are preserved in the CP Archive in Manchester, record that a discussion was opened by James Klugmann. The former Cambridge University spy-spotter was by 1956 notorious for hack-work, memorably From Trotsky to Tito. Having known many of the historians through his leading role in the party’s student network in the 1930s, Klugmann functioned as a representative of the leadership who liaised with the group. He addressed the meeting on the lessons for historians of the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Party, ‘the congress of de-Stalinisation’. Resolutions were passed:
... expressing profound dissatisfaction with the 24th Congress of the Br party for its failure to discuss publicly the implications for the Br Party of the 20th Congress CPSU...; and with the failure of the Party leadership to make a public statement of regret for the Br Party’s past uncritical endorsement of all Soviet policies and views, the meeting calling upon it to make one as soon as possible as well as to initiate the widest possible public discussion of all the problems involved for the Party in the present situation. [This was passed to the EC.] [38]
In his essay from 1978 on the Historians’ Group, Hobsbawm provided a more precise account, and supplied verbatim quotations from a number of speakers, all of whom were critical to varying degrees of the leadership and its emissary. Hobsbawm’s narrative is based upon more detailed minutes in his possession. [39] He concludes that after this meeting: ‘... the Group itself did not express any further collective views and was indeed increasingly split.’ [40] The minutes in the CP Archive attest to broad support in subsequent meetings for examining the new thinking of Russian historians and, in a break with the past, investigating the twentieth-century history, not only of the labour movement generally, but also of the CP specifically. Particular emphasis was laid on the Third Period and the Second World War. [41] It was in this context that sustained pressure on the party leadership produced an Executive Committee decision in July 1956 ‘to proceed with the preparations for the publication of a history of the Party’, [42] and the appointment of a commission to supervise its production.
Nonetheless, differences developed. And they intensified among the historians as the months went by. They arose not only in relation to the unfolding political issues culminating in the Russian invasion of Hungary in November 1956 and the struggle over party democracy which climaxed in early 1957. They also involved different reactions to the problems confronting group members as historians in acting upon the historiographical imperatives which most of them agreed were important. At times, as in the conflict between Saville and Thompson and the CP leadership over the Reasoner, the group faced both ways. [43] At other times, individual historians took up different positions - over Hungary and over the issue of party history. [44]
In April 1956, Pearce was already one of the group’s most critical members. His impatience with the leadership intensified as he discovered how difficult it was to get his views published in the party press. The second group of letters reproduced here first appeared in the CP’s World News and the left-wing journals the New Statesman and Tribune between May 1956 and February 1957. They commence with Pearce’s uncompromising critique of the unremitting attempts by Pollitt and the leadership to lay the crisis of British Stalinism at the door of the party’s intellectuals. This resort to a crude ouvrierism and inverted snobbery quite foreign to Marxism, suggested, Pearce points out, contempt for, rather than understanding of, the British working class. Many workers, in complete contrast to the King Street stereotype, deplored tyranny and injustice in the Eastern bloc, and their abiding concern for freedom, democracy and workers’ rights acted as a barrier between them and the CP.
Pearce again refers to the party’s somersaults in 1939. He concludes that there were powerful forces in the CP of 1956 opposed to any real break with the past. As he later reflected, for Pollitt the problem was not Stalin but Khrushchev. The second letter goes on to question the seriousness of the party leadership’s self-criticism. It notes that the Stalinist police state appealed to a certain type of CP member, and recalls the role of Pollitt, Palme Dutt and Andrew Rothstein during the Third Period. The only letter Pearce had published in the party press (in World News) again calls for an honest address of the party’s past.
Succeeding letters reflect the range of issues which Pearce took up during these months both in the Historians’ Group and in the wider party: they centred on the history of Russia and international Communism since 1917. When his letters were denied publication in the CP press, Pearce employed the nom de guerre ‘Marxist’ and sent them to the New Statesman, pursuing there his arguments with the leadership and with the arch-Stalinist Andrew Rothstein. After the invasion of Hungary in November 1956 and his development towards Trotskyism, he used his own name and even assumed a dual personality. When a letter to Tribune he contributed under the name ‘I Browse’ was attacked by the Daily Worker’s Walter Holmes, ‘Brian Pearce’ rallied to support ‘I Browse’. Hitherto, as we have noted, Pearce had been orthodox in his opposition to Trotskyism. [45] Yet his longstanding openness to leftism now surfaced: these letters show him beginning to air traditional Trotskyist questions about Stalinism.
Pearce’s quarrel with the CP leadership became intimately bound up with the progress of the Party History Commission. Events hardened his suspicions: any rigorous historical examination of Stalinism in Russia and Britain, he came to believe, was the last thing on the leadership’s agenda. Hobsbawm who, together with AL Morton and Pearce, represented the group on the commission, recalled a sharp division between, on the one hand, Pollitt, who chaired the meetings and whose conception of history was, Hobsbawm affirmed, of ‘the regimental variety’ and the ageing Stalinist ideologue, Rajani Palme Dutt, more supple but ultimately unenthusiastic, and, on the other side, the historians. Intellectual functionaries like Klugmann sat silent, ineffectual, paralysed by the problems, on the fence. [46] Hobsbawm remembered that, in comparison with the other historians, ‘Pearce was much more critical of the CP’s past record’. [47] Pearce’s own memories are similar:
Pollitt made it plain he thought the whole thing had been a mistake, speaking with his brutal frankness: ‘I personally think you can’t produce a history of a Communist party until the Communist party in question comes to power.’ ... Pollitt was so cynical about this it more than worried me. None of this appeared in the minutes and I wrote and complained. [48]
Despite Pollitt’s subsequent resignation from the commission [49] and agreement that, as the group requested, specific articles scrutinising particular and difficult periods would be published rather than one orthodox version, Pearce quickly arrived at the view that little of value would see the light of day; even the commission minutes were doctored. [50] Consequently he became more outspoken in his criticisms. If he was more vocal than his comrades, before long the commission minutes were generally lamenting ‘covert opposition from the Historians’ Group’. [51]
Hungary brought the differences within the group out into the open. On the one hand, there was Hobsbawm, who had no intention whatsoever of quitting the party. Albeit ‘with a heavy heart’, he publicly supported the Russian invasion of Hungary. At the same time, he signed a collective letter published in the left-wing press questioning the party members’ past attitudes and their contribution to the Executive’s position on Hungary. [52] In the middle stood Christopher Hill. He wanted to stay in the party, democratise and reform it, but with no blank cheque. [53] At the other end of the spectrum to Hobsbawm stood Saville and Thompson, who were not prepared to compromise principle, who condemned the Russian invasion in a way Hobsbawm never did, and who decided by November 1956 that the game was up with the CP. And Pearce, the only protagonist who embraced Trotskyism.
Hobsbawm, despite his limited and contradictory act of public criticism which gave him credibility with consistent opponents of the CP leadership, and his maintenance of personal relations with dissidents, was prepared to accept the writ of the party apparatus. He stomached the constraints that it imposed, in the hope things might change. Pearce did not. Hobsbawm, unlike Pearce, had maintained a lasting attachment to Popular Front politics and that profound antipathy to leftism and Trotskyism which the Popular Front dictated. [54] Pearce, as we have seen, was attracted to the leftism of the Third Period. He came to appreciate the explanations that Trotskyism provided for the chameleon nature of Stalinism and its ‘right-wing’ components. He remained an advocate of Communism, but of an anti-Stalinist variety. He perceived the Trotskyists as authentic left anti-Stalinists. In contrast, Hobsbawm was not prepared to break with Stalinism root and branch: he preferred to liberalise it and hoped to turn it decisively towards ‘the right’, towards the Popular Front and reformism.
Pearce, on the other hand, perceived the need for an organised political alternative to the CP in the form of a new revolutionary party. He had known Peter Fryer since his days on the Daily Worker in 1950-51, and had kept in touch with him. On the basis of his experience as a Daily Worker reporter in Hungary, Fryer had broken with CP politics and was now collaborating with the Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy which was working inside the Labour Party. [55] In January 1957, Pearce, who was beginning to realise that in his past condemnations of Trotskyism ‘I didn’t know what I was talking about’, [56] came into direct contact with Healy’s group when he received a visit from the veteran Trotskyist Joe Pawsey, a left oppositionist from the 1930s. Subsequently he arranged to meet Fryer and Healy on the steps of the British Museum. The Trotskyists he encountered impressed him with their commitment and energy. He quickly entered into joint work with the Healy group around the Newsletter, which Fryer first published in May, and the newly-relaunched journal Labour Review. [57]
This constituted the background to the memo from ‘AR’ (Andrew Rothstein) [58] to the party leadership in February 1957 and the subsequent initiation of disciplinary proceedings against Pearce. Pearce was involved in the opposition in the SCR to the CP’s control of the organisation. This developed in 1956-57, particularly over the use of the SCR magazine, the Anglo-Soviet Journal, as a vehicle for Russian propaganda. As the correspondence reproduced here illustrates, the disciplinary proceedings against Pearce initially centred on his letters to the press - though, as he notes, there was no objection to others such as Rothstein or Hobsbawm writing to the New Statesman - and his clashes with Rothstein in the SCR. The bargain with Fryer and Healy was that Pearce would stay in the party until he was thrown out. He would attempt to influence others and as far as the leadership was concerned make a nuisance of himself. [59]
Pearce attracted further opprobrium when he took part in the organisation of the Conference of Socialist Forums at Wortley Hall, Sheffield, in April 1957. In the report in the Newsletter he was referred to only as ‘another speaker’ who opened the discussion entitled ‘Lessons of the Stalin Era’ by urging wide-ranging study of the history of the USSR and the Third International. However, the detailed report in the movement’s journal, Forum, recorded that Pearce was the speaker and that he described how Stalinism had distorted the development of both the Soviet Union and British Communism and ‘discredited Marxism’. Referring to Trotsky, he noted the rise in the USSR of ‘a bureaucratic caste freed from real democratic control acquiring material privileges and developing an ideology of “substitutionism” whereby its interests and its will were substituted for those of the working class as a whole’. [60] The USSR was not socialist, and the Stalinist doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ had held back socialist progress in other countries - he cited China, Germany and Spain. [61] Socialism nowhere else in the world was the corollary of socialism in one country:
In the urgently necessary Marxist re-evaluation of the Stalin era particular consideration should be given to the writings of Trotsky such as The New Course, The Real Situation in Russia and The Revolution Betrayed. These have been too long ignored or even abused without being read by Communists (such as myself) who have lately learned to approach them with more respect and readiness to learn... It is urgent for socialists and especially Communists and ex-Communists to study anew the history of the Soviet Union, the international Communist movement and the British Communist Party, so as to understand what has happened and chart the way forward. This is needed not only for the sake of the British working class but for that of the workers of the whole world, not least those of the Soviet Union whose struggle to get rid of all forms of Stalinism should be supported in every possible way. A ‘de-Stalinised’ USSR would be a powerful beacon of socialist progress. [62]
He concluded:
If we have a feeling of solidarity with the Soviet people we cannot show them better than by very honestly and frankly coming out over such things as the events in Hungary. The spirit of the October Revolution is inseparable from a policy of evaluating in an independent Marxist way what is happening there and speaking our minds quite independently. [63]
It was clear that Pearce had emancipated himself both as a political activist and as an historian from the constraints of Stalinism. His contribution to the conference demonstrated his conversion to Trotskyism and his rejection of both the CP and the amorphous, networking approach of the New Left. Working with the Trotskyists, he continued his critical work in the Socialist Forum movement, a home for some who wanted to transform the CP, in the SCR and, as Rothstein’s memo notes, in the Historians’ Group, for which unfortunately there are no minutes for 1957 in the CP Archive. [64] Pearce’s letters from early 1957 reprinted here exhibit his new independence. They culminate with the communication from Betty Matthews, the CP’s London District organiser, which warned him as to his future conduct, and Pearce’s reply firmly rejecting the reprimand. [65] His response to Edward Thompson, which was published in the Newsletter at the end of May, is of particular interest to historians. In an earlier contribution to that journal, Thompson, who was ready to reject Leninism and revolutionary politics, had associated the intense political polemic and verbal infighting of the Communist tradition with a past which must be transcended, and demonstrated his enduring hostility to Trotskyism. Pearce’s brief retort foreshadowed a parting of the ways between Saville and Thompson and those who would form the core of the ‘old’ New Left, and the Newsletter group which would become the Socialist Labour League. [66]
Half a century later, Pearce remembered:
I felt that I was a Marxist. I felt that I was a Leninist and I had become convinced that the Trotskyists were right in claiming that they were the true lineal descendants as it were, that far from their being the deviants, you know, it was Moscow... [that] had taken the wrong road. What was needed was to move towards the creation of a new Communist Party... Gerry’s organisation would be the beginning. [67]
With his new interests he continued to attempt to raise issues in the CP press (see the letter on Ceylon, printed in the Newsletter in June 1957). But he was less attentive in attending the historians’ meetings. However, from July 1957, the correspondence concerning Pearce and his conflict with the CP touches on a small but significant incident in the Historians’ Group. This episode, redolent of Stalinist censorship, has been overlooked for 50 years. It is absent from all published accounts of the CP historians.
Our starting point is the letter from Betty Grant to the new General Secretary of the CP, John Gollan, reproduced here which refers to a pamphlet by ‘Joseph Redman’. This pamphlet had been drafted by Pearce the previous year after the Historians’ Group had established a working party to put together material on relations between the CP and the Labour Party during the interwar years. Pearce offered his work to Grant, who was the secretary of the Committee of the Historians’ Group and also editor of the party’s ‘Our History’ series of duplicated pamphlets. She showed little interest in publishing it, and he later withdrew his offer. The essay was taken up by John Saville, who shared Pearce’s historical concerns, particularly his intense interest in the Third Period. It was published in April 1957, under the ‘Joseph Redman’ pseudonym, entitled The Communist Party and the Labour Left, 1925-29 as Reasoner Pamphlet, no 1. [68]
As Grant’s letter makes clear, she was in a position to inform Gollan that Pearce was ‘Redman’, that he had links with the Reasoner, and, further, that using this alias he had also contributed an article to the current issue of the Healy group’s journal, Labour Review. [69] Healy’s perhaps ill-considered use of Pearce’s name to gain an entrée to Grant strengthened the CP leaders’ conviction that Pearce was at least an accomplice of the Trotskyists, and added to the growing charge-sheet against him.
But Grant’s letter to Gollan also mentions what is clearly a different but equally controversial document: ‘our own recent pamphlet’. She states intriguingly that ‘when our pamphlet was banned I believed this fact would be publicised by newspapers... in a way damaging to the party. That was my reason for publishing.’ Apparently there was another pamphlet, and it had been banned by the party. But, in what was presumably an act of insubordination, Grant had gone ahead and published it anyway. Grant’s letter also refers to ‘a leak’ about the ban on this pamphlet. She connects the leak with Pearce, and claims that he had found out about the suppression of the pamphlet through the Historians’ Group, despite attempts by Grant and Hobsbawm to keep things quiet. Moreover, Grant considered that the leak and the circumstantial evidence pointing to Pearce as the culprit was sufficient to justify Hobsbawm, as chair of the group, writing to Pearce to request his resignation from the committee of the group. There was, she concluded, a need to distinguish between loyal critics and those like Pearce who took matters outside the party.
The following letters from ‘J’ (probably John Gollan) to Grant and from Gollan to ‘Betty’ (either the London district organiser Betty Matthews or the party’s authority on Trotskyism and other deviations, Betty Reid) demonstrate that Pearce’s behaviour in letting the cat out of the bag was now referred to the party Executive. As a consequence, he was summoned to a meeting in August with Grant and the CP’s national organiser, the dour Scot, Bill Lauchlan. Gollan for his part attempted to cover the party’s flank, in danger from researchers to the left such as Pearce and also social-democratic historians such as Henry Pelling on the right, by urging loyal historians to produce articles on ‘disputed periods’ for party journals.
The notes of the meeting on 26 August between Grant, Lauchlan and Pearce confirm the tensions between Hobsbawm and Pearce. They reflect what Grant and Pearce both denote as the ‘malaise’ in the Historians’ Group. These notes suggest that the leak was to Peter Fryer’s Newsletter - the paper had carried a brief account of the banning of the pamphlet [70] - although at the meeting Pearce repeatedly refused to implicate himself. Precisely what happened is not clear from the documents and letters we have included here. However, by drawing on other sources it is possible to piece together a more detailed picture of what happened. Small-scale but eloquent, the Betty Grant story demonstrates yet again the CP leadership’s determination to control and if necessary suppress the history of the party.
The affair began in late 1956. In accordance with the Historians’ Group decision, Grant had prepared a pamphlet, Labour-Communist Relations, 1920-39, which she intended to publish in the ‘Our History’ series. The pamphlet presented with minimal commentary a collection of extracts from historical documents which demonstrated the continual changes in CP policy towards Labour. [71] Inasmuch as they spoke for themselves, the extracts, which began with pronouncements from Lenin in 1920, might have been thought to illustrate changes in policy which were inconsistent, unjustified oscillations, popularly termed ‘zig-zags’ in the labour movement. They might arguably provide ammunition for those critical of the CP’s political dependence on changes in Soviet policies rather than developments in the class struggle in Britain. In an interesting insight into the modus operandi of party historians, Grant had, on her own account, sought and secured agreement for a pamphlet on this subject from the Political Committee sub-committee which dealt with such matters. Moreover, in January 1957, she had discussed the pamphlet with Pollitt in his capacity as chair of the Party History Committee. Nevertheless, when she sent Pollitt a draft of the pamphlet in March, he referred it to the Political Committee. In short order the committee informed Grant that the pamphlet must not be published. This was confirmed by both Pollitt and James Klugmann, the link between the leadership and the Historians’ Group. [72]
The reasons that the Political Committee proffered for refusing publication were predictable. The material, it observed, consisted of isolated quotations deprived of what the leadership saw as their necessary context and historical background. The extracts therefore lacked adequate explanation and sufficient assessment of the changing political conditions in which party policy was decided and developed. Grant’s compendium might therefore give a completely misleading impression of the party’s attitude to the Labour Party. Conscientious students of British Communism and those streetwise to Stalinism might, as suggested earlier, opine that what was missing from the text was not so much estimation of the historical context in Britain, very much secondary in justifying Stalinist policy, as apologetics for an unstable and manipulative politics that derived from the changing requirements of the rulers of the Russian state, rather than the changing predicament of the British working class. Nonetheless, in a further intimation of the subordinate role of the Historians’ Group in the CP, the Political Committee directed that Grant’s pamphlet should be handed over to the Party History Commission which might decide to use the material in its own publications. The leadership concluded: ‘... we are against the publication of the document and must instruct you not to publish it.’ [73]
Grant provides a good example of those dedicated, non-professional historians whose presence in the CP Historians’ Group has been neglected by its historians. Pearce remembers her as a very efficient secretary who had a chip on her shoulder about academics whom she treated with the inverted snobbery sometimes prevalent in CP circles. [74] We have no minutes for the Historians’ Group for 1957. On the evidence that we do possess, Grant, unhappy with the way things were going but ultimately a leadership loyalist, was the only member with the exception of Pearce to protest against what she termed ‘a fantastic and intolerable form of censorship on the work of historians’. [75] She also argued to the party leadership that their censorship of her work would attract bad publicity and play into the hands of critical elements who, as the Redman pamphlet demonstrated, were publishing research into CP history.
Fundamentally, she asserted: ‘I emphatically reject, totally and utterly, any claim that the PC is endowed with some special wisdom and knowledge which places it in a unique position to issue historical judgements.’ [76] This went to the root of the matter; it did so in an honest, direct, principled fashion which was eschewed by too many of her professional comrades. Demonstrating the courage of her convictions, Grant went further: on 30 March 1957 she published the pamphlet in defiance of the party ban. When she reported this to the Historians’ Group, it determined that no action was called for on its part. [77]
It is unclear what, if any, disciplinary action was taken against Grant. However, the leadership and at least some of the Historians’ Group believed that something must be done about Pearce. He had in fact discovered the details of the affair at the Historians’ Group Committee held on 7 July, and he immediately informed Fryer. In the letter of 23 July, ‘J’ suggested that Pearce should be removed from the Party History Committee. Moreover, on Grant’s account Hobsbawm was not prepared to sit down with him on the committee of the Historians’ Group. Here, in the midst of demands for de-Stalinisation, was the party leadership utilising Stalinist methods to cover up the history of Stalinism in Britain.
The incident deepened Pearce’s disillusion. Yet, taking the materials available to us, Hobsbawm, who saw himself as part of the opposition, was less concerned at the party leaders’ prohibition of Grant’s pamphlet than he was with Pearce giving publicity to that censorship. In his letter to Grant of 27 August, Pearce maintained his silence over the Newsletter report. But he formally resigned from the committee of the group. The reasons he cited included Grant and Hobsbawm’s cover-up of the ban on the pamphlet, their hostility towards him and his desire to remove any barriers to discussion of ‘urgent and fundamental questions’ concerning ‘the attitudes of the Party Centre towards Party history’.
Grant, as her letters of 28 August 1957 confirm, wanted to move on and repair the breaches in the Historians’ Group. The Political Committee, in contrast, were determined to take action against Pearce and pursue the issue of the Newsletter report and his links with Fryer. This can be seen from Lauchlan’s letters of 29 August and 3 September. The letters of 11 September and 14 September 1957 deal with the national organiser’s belated resort to a form of due process. In an attempt to isolate and pressurise Pearce, the question was put to all members of the Historians’ Group present at the meeting where the censorship of Grant’s pamphlet had been discussed: had they leaked the details to the Newsletter? Far from caving in, Pearce returned to the attack (letter, 14 September). Lauchlan’s memo which follows specifically notes that, with Pearce no longer a member of the committee: ‘The question remains of his membership of the group itself.’ He suggests that Bill Wainwright, long prominent in the apparatus, should attend the next meeting of the group’s committee in November to pursue the issue and ‘to hear what they have to say in the way of further proposals for action’. [78]
A further front was opened when Pearce was summoned to appear before the London District Committee to justify his continued involvement in the Socialist Forums and ‘the prominent part’ he had taken in a recent London conference. This was a reference to a report in the Newsletter in which Pearce was quoted as moving amendments to the draft statement of aims and arguing that the purpose of the forums was to provide a meeting place ‘where people could go to discuss with others from all parties and of all trends’. [79] Such activity, the London District Secretary, John Mahon, states in his letter, ‘is not compatible with Party membership’.
Further contributions to the Newsletter criticising the CP and Russia clarified the situation for the CP leadership. [80] Pearce now declared publicly that the CP ‘has irreparably ceased to be a Marxist Party capable of leading Britain to socialism’, and that he would not be re-registering his party membership for 1958 (see report in the Newsletter, 16 November 1958, reprinted here). Gollan moved formally and ritualistically to expel him. The succeeding documents reprinted here which were circulated to members of the CP Executive list the charges against him. They include, in another example of the nature of the party regime, reference to the circulation of Pearce’s piece on the Third Period in 1949. [81]
Pearce was finally expelled as per Mahon’s communication of 12 December 1957. The charges against him were subsumed under ‘conduct detrimental to the interests of the Communist Party’. As he pointed out in his reply posted on Christmas Eve, he had technically lapsed from membership in October. He concluded his 23 years’ association with the party with the hope that ‘the numerous honest men and women still in your ranks will at last understand and shake off the incubus of Stalinism, in time to play their part in the real battle for socialism in Britain’.
In recalling this time, Pearce warmly acknowledges the part which Healy played in his transformation:
Gerry was very helpful, you know. Gerry lent me various books and I discussed various questions with him. I formed a very good opinion of Gerry, but as the years went by, of course, I realised that Gerry was a, shall we say, many-sided man, but my first acquaintance with him was of a remarkably intelligent man... very sympathetic and understanding of one’s problems and getting to grips with things, and I felt quite satisfied at having joined his group. [82]
This would not last. But that is another story. [83]
1. Thanks to Ian Birchall, Alan Campbell, Ted Crawford, Paul Flewers, John Plant and, of course, Brian Pearce.
2. See, for example, John Saville, ‘The XXth Congress of the British Communist Party’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), Socialist Register 1976, Merlin Press, 1976; John Saville, ‘Edward Thompson, the Communist Party and 1956’, in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (eds), Socialist Register 1994, Merlin Press, 1995; John Saville, Memoirs from the Left, Merlin Press, 2003; Lin Chun, The British New Left, Edinburgh University Press, 1993; Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995; Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group, Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On, Verso, 1989; Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left, Merlin Press, 2004.
3. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of AL Morton, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978; Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Polity Press, 1984; Bill Schwartz, ‘The People in History: The Communist Party Historians’ Group 1946-56’, in Richard Johnson et al (eds), Making Histories: Studies in Writing and Politics, Hutchinson, 1982; David Parker, ‘The Communist Party and Its Historians 1946-89’, Socialist History, no 12, 1997; Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, Allen Lane, 2002. And more critically Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Group: British Marxist Historians’, in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp 70-93.
4. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, pp 206-09.
5. As the membership lists and minutes attest. See, for example, CP Archive, Manchester (CPA), CP/CENT/CULT/05/11, CP/CENT/CULT/05/12, CP/CENT/CULT/07/06. The same point is made in Bryan Palmer, ‘Reasoning Rebellion: EP Thompson, British Marxist Historians and the Making of Dissident Political Mobilization’, Labour/Le Travail, no 50, Fall 2002, p 2; Pamela J Walter, ‘Interview with Dorothy Thompson’, Radical History Review, no 77, Spring 2000, pp 5-6.
6. This is particularly evident in the case of Edward Thompson, who played at best a peripheral role in the group. But more prominent members, such as Hobsbawm, Hill and Rodney Hilton, produced their major work after the group’s heyday. So did Royden Harrison, who never seems even to have been a member: see John McIlroy and John Halstead, ‘A Very Different Historian: Royden Harrison, Radical Academics and Suppressed Alternatives’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, no 15, Spring 2003, pp 113-43.
7. Sam Ashman, ‘The Communist Party Historians’ Group’, in John Rees (ed), Essays on Historical Materialism, Bookmarks, 1998, p 148, where the group’s neglect of the history of British Communism and Russian history after 1917 is also emphasised. For examples of Stalinist history written by someone usually viewed as an anti-Stalinist historian, see Christopher Hill, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, English University Press, 1947, and Christopher Hill, ‘Stalin and the Science of History’, Modern Quarterly, no 8, 1952-53. To make this point is not to deny the important insights into the seventeenth century which Hill achieved while a Stalinist in work such as The English Revolution, 1640, Lawrence and Wishart, 1940 and new edition 1955.
8. John Newsinger, ‘An Inferior Brew’, International Socialism, no 108, Autumn 2005, p 201.
9. Edward Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Lawrence and Wishart, 1955, in itself a not inconsiderable achievement, may be compared with his later work and the revised 1978 version.
10. A good example is the unrelentingly politically orthodox Dona Torr, often portrayed as the inspiration of the group, but recalled as ‘a fierce Stalinist’: see Anthony Howe, ‘Torr, Dona’, in Keith Gildart and David Howell, eds, Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 12, Palgrave, 2005, pp 275-82; and Neil Davidson, ‘Good Tradition’, Socialist Review, September 2004, p 42.
11. Hobsbawm, ‘Historians’ Group’, p 26.
12. Daily Worker, 23 April 1957.
13. John Saville, ‘Dobb, Maurice Herbert’, in Joyce Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 9, Macmillan, 1993, pp 63-72.
14. Norah Carlin and Ian Birchall, ‘Kinnock’s Favourite Marxist: Eric Hobsbawm and the Working Class’, International Socialism, no 21, Autumn 1983, pp 88-116; John McIlroy, ‘Founding Fathers’, Labour History Review, Volume 70, no 2, August 2005, pp 231-38.
15. Although McIntyre was a CP fellow-traveller. For some of this group, see Terry Brotherstone, ‘1956: Tom Kemp and Others’, in Terry Brotherstone and Geoffrey Pilling (eds), History, Economic History and the Future of Marxism, Porcupine Press, 1996.
16. These comments are based on letters from Pearce to the author, 14 June, 14 and 20 July 2004, and an interview the author and John Plant conducted with Pearce, 24 February 2006.
17. Pearce recalled that Hobsbawm contributed a pen picture of the young Pearce, ‘Portrait of A Cadre’, to a wall newspaper produced at a Communist summer school in 1939, where Pearce also appeared in a comic play, much to Harry Pollitt’s disapproval, playing the part of ‘Mex Bronstein’: Pearce interview.
18. Pearce interview. On the relationship of the Popular Front to the evolution of Stalinism and the continuing attachment of some former CP intellectuals to it, see Paul Blackledge, ‘Learning From Defeat: Reform, Revolution and the Problem of Organisation in the First New Left’, Contemporary Politics, Volume 10, no 1, March 2004.
19. Pearce interview.
20. Pearce interview; Pearce to Pollitt, nd (May 1956). See the letters which follow this introduction.
21. Pearce to John Mahon, 12 October 1949, copy in author’s possession. The piece was published more than a quarter of a century later: see ‘From the Archives: Two Articles by Brian Pearce’, International, Volume 3, no 3, Spring 1977, pp 49-56.
22. Pearce, ‘Introduction’ to ‘From the Archives’, p 49.
23. Pearce to Mahon, 12 October 1949.
24. See note 22. ‘Lambeth’, Pearce recalled, was short-hand for Trotskyists.
25. Interview with Brian Pearce, Workers Press, 29 November 1986. Pearce was the only member of the Historians’ Group who pursued an interest in Communist history (albeit briefly) after 1956.
26. The only published product of this research was B Pearce, ‘Elizabethan Food Policy and the Armed Forces’, Economic History Review, Volume 12, no 142, 1942.
27. Pearce interview.
28. Pearce to author, 24 March 2006.
29. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p 207.
30. Alison McLeod, The Death of Uncle Joe, Merlin Press, 1997, pp 23-24.
31. Brotherstone, ‘Tom Kemp’, pp 315-16. The SCR consisted of Communist fellow-travellers and those interested in developing cultural relations with Russia. But the society and its magazine, the Anglo-Soviet Journal, were ultimately controlled by the CP and acted largely as a fan club for the USSR.
32. Brotherstone, ‘Tom Kemp’, p 316; McLeod, Uncle Joe, p 43; Pearce interview.
33. Brotherstone, ‘Tom Kemp’, pp 315-16.
34. Pearce interview. These discussions in the early 1950s eventually produced AL Morton and George Tate, The British Labour Movement, Lawrence and Wishart, 1956.
35. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1946. This work was an important stimulus to the work of many in the group. See the collection The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Symposium, Science and Society, 1954, and Rodney Hilton (ed), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, New Left Books, 1976.
36. The letters which we print here are only a selection from Pearce’s correspondence in 1956-57. Throughout the period he wrote regularly to the leadership and the London District raising issues such as the lack of openness of the party press, the refusal to circulate Executive minutes and the composition of party bodies. For Pollitt’s appearance on television, see Daily Worker, 2 May 1956. For the CP’s changes of line in the first phases of the war, see Francis King and George Matthews, About Turn: The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings, 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, and Monty Johnstone, ‘The CPGB, the Comintern and the War, 1939-41: Filling in the Blank Spots’, Science and Society, Volume 61, no 1, Spring 1997, pp 27-45.
37. For more extended comment on the party’s dishonest attitude to its history, see John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘Histories of the British Communist Party: A User’s Guide’, Labour History Review, Volume 68, no 1, April 2003, pp 33-59.
38. CPA, CP/CENT/CULT/05/13, Minutes of the Historians’ Group, 8 April 1956.
39. Hobsbawm, ‘Historians’ Group’, pp 41-42 and notes 16 and 18, p 47.
40. Hobsbawm, ‘Historians’ Group’, pp 41-42 and notes 16 and 18, p 40.
41. CPA, CP/CENT/CULT/05/13, Minutes, 27 May 1956.
42. CPA, CP/IND/KLUG/02/06, Editing Commission for History of the Communist Party, nd (1956).
43. CPA, CP/CENT/CULT/05/13, Minutes, 21 October 1956.
44. Pearce interview.
45. Pearce interview.
46. Hobsbawm, ‘Historians’ Group’, p 30. The minutes of the Commission in the CP Archive are largely unrevealing.
47. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p 207.
48. Pearce, interview in Workers Press, 29 November 1986.
49. CPA, CP/IND/KLUG/02/06, Pollitt to Political Sub-Committee, 9 November 1956.
50. Pearce was right in thinking little of value would be published. The commission first appointed Robin Page Arnot, who had a long record of producing hagiography about the CP’s past, to write the party history. He was succeeded by Klugmann, whose selection, Pearce observed, ‘was no accident’. Klugmann’s two volumes, taking the story up to 1926 and avoiding all the difficult problems, appeared 12 years later; see James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Volume 1: Formation and Early Years, 1919-1924; Volume 2: The General Strike, 1925-1926, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969. For Hobsbawm’s view, see McIlroy and Campbell, ‘Histories’, p 38.
51. Pearce interview; CPA, CP/IND/KLUG/02/06, Party History Commission, 1 August 1957.
52. Hobsbawm has portrayed himself as a member of the opposition in 1956-57. He has included the collective letter of protest he signed alongside the publication of the Reasoner and the fight for the minority report of the Committee on Inner-Party Democracy as the three major landmarks of opposition in 1956-57. However, the letter written on 18 November 1956, published in the New Statesman on 1 December, and signed by 15 party intellectuals, did not explicitly condemn the invasion of Hungary. It simply noted: ‘The uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact and failure by British Communists to think out political problems for themselves.’ The letter did, however, state: ‘Not all the signatories agree with everything in this letter...’ [emphasis added] Hobsbawm characterises this letter as an ‘even more flagrant breach of Party discipline’ than the publication of the Reasoner (Interesting Times, pp 206-07). Hobsbawm’s signature on this collective statement was further compromised by his own letter published in the Daily Worker on 9 November 1956 which began: ‘While approving with a heavy heart of what is now happening in Hungary we should also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.’ It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Eric backed both horses - each way: see Peter Fryer, ‘Once Again on Hobsbawm’s “Protest"’, Workers Press, 10 March 1990, and note 14 above.
53. Kate Hudson, The Double Blow: 1956 and the Communist Party of Great Britain, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1992, pp 200-01.
54. Hobsbawm shared these attitudes with those who left the party such as Hill, Saville and Thompson. But, as the future would demonstrate, his allegiance to the Stalinist policies of the mid-1930s was more intense. See also Blackledge, ‘Learning From Defeat’, note 18 above.
55. See Peter Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, Dennis Dobson, 1956; Brotherstone, ‘Tom Kemp’, pp 306-11. Healy’s patient, even tolerant, side was briefly in the ascendant in 1956-57: see John McIlroy, ‘Healy, Thomas Gerard’, in Gildart and Howell (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 12, pp 136-46.
56. Pearce interview.
57. Information from Brian Pearce, 2 February 2006.
58. Andrew Rothstein (1898-1994), the son of the Soviet functionary Theodore, was an antagonist of the dissidents, and particularly Pearce, in 1956-57. Despite suffering at the hands of Stalinism himself when he was disgraced and detained in the Soviet Union during the Third Period, he remained a loyal disciple of Stalin throughout his long life, and at this time edited the SCR’s Anglo-Soviet Journal.
59. Pearce interview. Another reason, Pearce emphasised, was that his livelihood, teaching and translating, depended on his party membership and he needed time to sort things out.
60. Newsletter, 10 May 1957; Forum, July/September 1957, pp 11-12. David Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956-1968, Penguin, 1976, p 81, provides only a terse summary of Pearce’s comments.
61. Forum, July/September 1957, p 12.
62. Forum, July/September 1957, p 12.
63. Newsletter, 10 May 1957. The Socialist Forums were comprised of dissident Stalinists, Trotskyists and unaligned socialists who gathered to discuss the crisis on the left and the way out of it. Some 25 CP members attended the Wortley Hall conference, and at one stage it was suggested that Pearce should edit the journal Forum.
64. Of those mentioned in Rothstein’s memo, Judith Todd and Elsie Trimbey worked for the SCR, and TH Bradley, a scientist at Reading University, was a leader of the opposition to Stalinist control who contributed to the Newsletter. Walter Holmes was a party veteran, Daily Worker columnist and husband of Dona Torr. Frank Jackson was the party librarian and was also involved in the Historians’ Group.
65. Tom Durkin, referred to in Mahon’s letter to Pearce of 10 May, was an Irishman, a long-standing CP activist on the building sites and a leading member of the District Committee. He came to prominence in the late 1970s during the Grunwick strike.
66. The developing antagonism can be followed in Peter Fryer, ‘Lenin as Philosopher’, Labour Review, September-October 1957; Editorial, ‘An Unreasonable Reasoner’, Labour Review, March-April 1958; and Anonymous, ‘Rejected by the New Reasoner’, Labour Review, May-July 1958.
67. Pearce interview.
68. The pamphlet had an introduction by John Saville. Pearce’s text was reprinted in Michael Woodhouse and Brian Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain, New Park, 1975. See also John Saville, ‘On Party History: An Open Letter to Comrade R Page Arnot’, The Reasoner, November 1956, pp 23-27. The pamphlet was not Trotskyist - otherwise Pearce believed the Reasoner group would not have published it - but was written before he had fully assimilated the Trotskyist arguments: Pearce interview.
69. Pearce’s article ‘British Communist History’ (also reprinted in Woodhouse and Pearce, Essays) appeared in Labour Review in July 1957. His piece under the pseudonym L Hussey, ‘Mr Rothstein and the Soviet Union’, New Reasoner, 11, Summer 1957, pp 65-70, seems to have escaped the CP’s attention.
70. The Newsletter, 13 July 1957, carried a brief statement on the affair.
71. Labour-Communist Relations, 1920-39, ‘Our History’ Pamphlet, no 5, Spring 1957.
72. CPA, CP/CENT/DISC/10.
73. CPA, CP/CENT/DISC/10, George Matthews to Grant, 28 March 1957.
74. Pearce to author, 2 February 2004. The only mention of Grant in existing literature is in Pamela Walters’ interview with Dorothy Thompson and a reference to that interview in Palmer, ‘Reasoning Rebellion'; see note 5 above.
75. Grant to Gollan, 1 April 1957.
76. Grant to Matthews, 27 March 1957.
77. Grant to Gollan, 1 April 1957.
78. William Wainwright (1908-2000) was a longstanding party loyalist and the author of such anti-Trotskyist diatribes as WH Wainwright, Clear Out Hitler’s Agents, CPGB, 1942, and Secretary of the BSFS.
79. Newsletter, 26 October 1957.
80. For the piece on the Sputnik and the Dudintsev affair Pearce used the pseudonym ‘Leonard Hussey’ - his father’s first name and his mother’s maiden name. See also his L Hussey, ‘Mr Rothstein and the Soviet Union’, New Reasoner, Summer 1957.
81. It is unclear whether the reference in this memo to Pearce’s document being used by the opposition in the pre-Congress discussion refers to 1949 or 1957, although the reference is in all probability to the Easter 1957 Special Congress.
82. Pearce interview.
83. Pearce contributed to the work of the Socialist Labour League until 1961. Much of his work in that period is included in Woodhouse and Pearce, Essays, see notes 68, 69. During 1964-66, he was secretary of the Society for the Study of Labour History, and thereafter developed a reputation on the left and beyond as a gifted and prolific translator. He continued his interest in the history of Soviet Russia, and from 1980 he was active in the Study Group on the Russian Revolution which produces the journal Revolutionary Russia.