I spent the summer living in a grim but well-placed Paris hotel in the rue Cujas on the editorial profits of Granta, working on James’s great Congress. A photograph from the Congress is before me: a mixture of whites (mostly from Cambridge) with Indians, Indonesians, the odd Middle and Far Easterner and a solitary African. I recognize that well-meaning girl from Amsterdam – she was later killed in the Dutch Resistance. There, among the crowd of forgotten youthful faces, is the handsome Javanese Satjadjit Soegono, who became a major trade union leader in Indonesia after the war until he was killed in the 1948 communist insurrection in Madiun. There, next to James, is Pieter Keunemann, the future General Secretary of the CP of Sri Lanka and P. N. Haksar, the future chief-of-staff of Mrs Gandhi. There are the Spanish refugees – little Miggy Robles, who worked so hard at the duplicator with Pablo Azcarate of the Spanish Communist Party. There is the small, intense, Bengali face of Arun Bose. It was a successful Congress except for one thing: the Second World War began less than two weeks later.
I needed a rest and hitchhiked for a few days to Concarneau in Brittany. I returned on 1 September. A well-dressed but somewhat preoccupied Frenchwoman in a sports car gave me a lift somewhere past Angers. Had I heard? Hitler had marched into Poland. We drove to Paris, stopping to discover the latest from the radio somewhere, with random conversation about the coming war. As this was France, it is inconceivable that we did not stop for lunch, but on such a day that does not stay in the memory. Some Parisians were already going the other way in loaded cars. We wished one another good luck as she dropped me off. I made for the Westminster Bank on the Place Vendôme and queued with the rest of the Brits. A bad-tempered man with a notably retreating chin was ahead of me, whose passport made him out to be the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. There was not much to pack before going to St Lazare to get tickets, if I could, for the night train to London. It was full of tall, long-legged blondes: the English dancers from the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris were returning to their homes in Morecambe or Nottingham. If I remember it right, I came out of Victoria Station on the last morning of peace having underslept, but into a sunny London. I no longer had a home there, but I think I spent the last night of peace in the flat of, or shared by, Lorna Hay, a Scottish graduate from Newnham about to look for a career in London journalism. She had just been told by Mohan Kumaramangalam, returning to India, that his future as a professional revolutionary made it impossible to take her with him.
That is how the 1930s ended for me.
9
Being Communist
I
I became a communist in 1932, though I did not actually join the Party until I went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1936. I remained in it for some fifty years. The question why I stayed so long obviously belongs in an autobiography, but it is not of general historical interest. On the other hand, the question why communism attracted so many of the best men and women of my generation, and what being communists meant to us, has to be a central theme in the history of the twentieth century. For nothing is more characteristic of that century than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the twentieth century: political passion’. And the quintessential expression of this was communism.
Communism is now dead. The USSR and most of the states and societies built on its model, children of the October Revolution of 1917 which inspired us, have collapsed so completely, leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin, that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start. Yet the achievements of those inspired by this conviction, and the associated belief that ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot conquer’, were indeed quite extraordinary. Within little more than thirty years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, one third of the human race and all governments between the Elbe and the China Seas lived under the rule of Communist Parties. The Soviet Union itself, defeating the most formidable war machine of the twentieth century, which had pulverized Tsarist Russia, emerged from the Second World War as one of the world’s two superpowers. There had been no comparable triumph of an ideology since the (slower and less global) conquests of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries of our era.
This was achieved by small, often by relatively or absolutely tiny, self-selected ‘vanguard parties’ for, unlike the working-class parties which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, also mostly inspired and encouraged by the ideas of Karl Marx, communism was not designed as a mass movement, and became one only by historical accident, as it were. In this respect it contrasted with, and indeed rejected, the classic approach of Marxist social democracy, which expected everyone who recognized themselves as a ‘worker’ to identify with parties whose essence, often expressed in their very name – Labour Party – was that they were parties of workers. To support the party of labour seemed to them not so much an individual political choice as the discovery of a person’s social existence, which necessarily had certain public implications. Conversely, their least political activities were imbued with the sense of what defined a person’s social existence, so that the clubs which met in the back rooms of pubs in ‘Red Vienna’ – I recall seeing such notices there as late as the 1970s – practised their hobbies not as stamp collectors but as Worker Philatelists, or as Worker Pigeon Fanciers. Such parties were sometimes also to be found in the communist movement, as notably in postwar Italy. There the Party, rooted in family and local community, combined the tradition of the old socialist movement with the organizational efficiency of Leninism and the moral authority of a secular Catholic Church. (As Palmiro Togliatti put it in 1945: ‘in every household a picture of Marx next to the one of Jesus Christ’). It was the kind of Party in which a young woman from Modena could quite naturally ask her Party Federazione to make enquiries to the Padova Federazione, to discover whether the young carabiniere from that city who courted her was ‘serious’ (Alas, he turned out to be already married in Padova.)1 Here public and private, becoming a better person and building a better world, were considered indivisible.
The Communist Parties of the Comintern era were of an entirely different kind, even when they claimed, sometimes correctly, to be rooted in the working class and to express its interests and aspirations. They were Lenin’s ‘professional revolutionaries’, that is to say necessarily a relatively or absolutely small selected group. To join such an organization was essentially an individual decision, and was recognized as life-changing both by those who invited a ‘contact’ to join the Party and by the man or woman who joined it. It was a double decision, for remaining in the Party (at least outside countries of communist rule) implied the continuous choice not to leave it, which was possible easily and at any time. For most of those who joined, membership of the Party was a temporary episode in their political life. Nevertheless, unlike the 1968 generation, few interwar communists went into the revolution as into a political Club Med (which, by the way, was founded as a holiday mini-utopia by a young Communist Party exresister after the Second World War).