On the contrary, they were for organization and routine. That is why bodies of a few thousand members – like the Vietnamese CP at the end of the Second World War – could, given the occasion, become the makers of states. The secret of the Leninist Party lay neither in dreaming about standing on barricades or even Marxist theory. It can be summed up in two phrases: ‘decisions must be verified’ and ‘Party discipline’. The appeal of the Party was that it got things done when others did not. Life in the Party was almost viscerally anti-rhetorical, which may have helped to produce that culture of endless and almost aggressively boring and, when reprinted in Party publications, sensationally unreadable ‘reports’ which foreign Parties took over from Soviet practice. Even in operatic Italy the young postwar red intellectuals made fun of the traditional style of speech at the great public meetings on which the faithful still insisted. Not that we were unmoved by powerful oratory, and we recognized its importance on public occasions and in ‘mass work’. Even so, speeches are not a major part of my communist memories, except for one in Paris in the first months of the Spanish Civil War by La Pasionaria, large, black in widow’s weeds, in the tense emotion-charged silence of a packed Vel d’hiv indoor arena. Though hardly any of the audience knew Spanish, we knew exactly what she was telling us. I can still remember the words ‘y las madres, y sus hijos’ (and the mothers, and their sons) floating slowly from the microphones above us, like dark albatrosses.
The Leninist ‘vanguard party’ was a combination of discipline, business efficiency, utter emotional identification and and a sense of total dedication. Let me illustrate. In 1941, pinned down by a fallen beam, our comrade Freddie thought she would die in the fire set off by the only enemy bomb that hit Cambridge during the Second World War. My friend Tedy Prager, who vainly tried to free her until the fire services came – he lived in what had been my old cottage in Round Church Street, almost within arm’s reach of the explosion – tells the story:
My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam, but nothing moved. Poor Freddie … It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin … Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Good-bye boys, good-bye Tedy.3
Freddie did not die, though she has spent the rest of her life with legs amputated below the knees. At the time it would not have struck any of us as surprising that the last words of a dying Party member should be for the Party, for Stalin and for the comrades. (In those days among foreign communists the thought of Stalin was as sincere, unforced, unsullied by knowledge and universal as the genuine grief most of us felt in 1953 at the death of a man whom no Soviet citizen would have wanted, or dared, to call by a pet name like ‘Uncle Joe’ in Britain or ‘Big whiskers’ [baffone] in Italy.) The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return, we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity.
The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it’, as we were expected to. For, unlike fascism, which demanded automatic abdication and service to the Leader’s will (‘Mussolini is always right’) and the unconditional duty of obeying military orders, the Party – even at the peak of Stalin’s absolutism – rested its authority, at least in theory, on the power to convince of reason and ‘scientific socialism’. After all, it was supposed to be based on a ‘Marxist analysis of the situation’, which every communist was meant to learn how to make. ‘The line’, however predetermined and unchangeable, had to be justified in terms of such an analysis, and, except where circumstances made this physically impossible, ‘discussed’ and approved at all levels of the Party. In Communist Parties outside power, where members were not too scared to pursue the ancient left-wing tradition of argument, the leadership had to go through the process of repeating its case for the official line until there was no room for doubt about what we were expected to vote for. (The technical term for this process was ‘patiently explaining’.) After the vote, ‘democratic centralism’ required that argument should give way to unanimous action.
We did what it ordered us to do. In countries such as Britain it did not order us to do anything very dramatic. Indeed, but for their conviction that what they were doing was saving the world, communists might have been bored by the routine activities of their Party, conducted in the usual ritual of the British labour movement (comrade chairman, branch minutes, treasurer’s report, resolutions, contacts, literature sales and the rest) in private homes or unwelcoming meeting rooms. But whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. After all, most Soviet and Comintern cadres in the period of Stalin’s terror, who knew what might await them, followed the order to return to Moscow. If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so. After 1933 the German Party in exile ordered Margaret Mynatt (later the inspiration behind the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels) to go to England from Paris, since they needed someone in London and, as known German communists were not admitted, a comrade with valid British documentation was needed. Without a moment’s hesitation she abandoned the love of her life (or so she later told me) and went. She never saw him (or was it a her?) again. Party dues in Auschwitz, I was told after the war by a former inmate, were paid in the inconceivably precious currency of cigarettes, and it says something about the Party’s capacity for collective resistance that they could procure them.
To have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable. Admittedly, since Party members were also apt to be emancipated in their attitude to sex, it is to be supposed that not all militants eschewed completely apolitical sex, but even for the Comintern agent in Brecht’s wonderful poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later), his casual couplings (‘der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos’) were yet another proof that the Party’s work came before everything that was personal. I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the Party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a communist in the full sense of my youth.