As time went on, and especially during the years of the battles against fascism, the effectively organized revolutionary left had become virtually identified with the Communist Parties. They had absorbed or eliminated other brands of social revolutionaries. While the Communist Universal Church gave rise to one set after another of schismatics and heretics, none of the rebel groups it shed, expelled or killed had ever suceeded in establishing itself more than locally as a rival, until Tito did so in 1948 – but then, unlike any of the others, he was already head of a revolutionary state. As 1956 began, the joint strength of the three rival Trotskyite groups in Britain has been estimated as fewer than 100 persons. 1 In practice since 1933 the CPs had virtually cornered Marxist theory, largely through the Soviets’ zeal for the distribution of the works of the ‘classics’. It had become increasingly clear that, for Marxists, ‘the Party’ – wherever they lived, and with all their possible reservations – was the only game in town. The great French classicist J. P. Vernant, a communist before the war, broke with the Party by joining the Gaullist Resistance from the start against the then Party line, and had a most distinguished war as ‘Colonel Berthier’, and compagnon de la Libération, but he rejoined the Party after the war, because he remained a revolutionary. Where else could he go? The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, but in his heart a frustrated political leader, said to me, when I first met him at the peak of the communist crisis of 1956–7: ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.’ Unlike me, he never reconciled himself to the fact that he was politically significant only by having become a writer. After all, was not the business of communists changing the world and not merely interpreting it?
III
Why did Khrushchev’s uncompromising denunciation of Stalin destroy the foundations of the global solidarity of communists with Moscow? After all, it continued a process of managed destalinization that had been advancing steadily for more than two years, even though other Communist Parties resented the familiar Soviet habit of suddenly, and without previous information, confronting them with the need to justify some unexpected reversal of policy. (In 1955 Khrushchev’s reconciliation with Tito particularly exasperated comrades who, seven years earlier, had been forced, almost certainly against their will, to hail his excommunication from the True Church.) Indeed, until the leaking of the Khrushchev speech to a wider public, including that of the Communist Parties, the Twentieth Congress looked simply like another, admittedly rather larger, step away from the Stalin era.
I think we must distinguish here between its impact on the leadership of Communist Parties, especially those who already governed states, and on the communist rank-and-file. Naturally, both had accepted the mandatory obligations of a ‘democratic centralism’, which had quietly dropped what measure of democracy it might originally have contained.2 And all of them, except perhaps the Chinese CP which nevertheless acknowledged the primacy of Stalin, accepted Moscow as the commander of the disciplined army of world communism in the global Cold War. Both shared the extraordinary, genuine and unforced admiration for Stalin as the leader and embodiment of the Cause, and the well-attested sense of grief and personal loss which communists unquestionably felt at his death in 1953. While this was natural enough for the rank-and-file, for whom he was a remote image of poor people’s triumph and liberation – ‘the fellow with the big moustache’ who might still come one day to get rid of the rich once and for all – it was undoubtedly shared by hard-bitten leaders like Palmiro Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at close quarters, and even by his real or prospective victims. Molotov remained loyal to him for thirty-three years after his death, though in his last paranoiac years Stalin had forced him to divorce his wife, had her arrested, interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing Molotov himself for a show trial. Anna Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania, wept when she heard of Stalin’s death, even though she had not liked him, had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to be thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, agent of Truman and Zionism. (‘Don’t cry,’ said her interrogator. ‘If Stalin were still alive you’d be dead.’3) No wonder that the impassioned attack on his record, and on the ‘cult of personality’, by Khrushchev sent shockwaves through the international communist movement.
On the other hand, much as their leaders admired Stalin and accepted the ‘guiding role’ of the Soviet Party, Communist Parties, in or outside power, were neither ‘monolithic’, in the Stalinist phrase, nor simple executive agents of CPSU policy. And since at least 1947 they had been told to do things by Moscow, often politically prejudicial, which they, or at least substantial sections of their leadership, would never have done themselves. While Stalin lived and the Moscow leadership and power remained ‘monolithic’, that was the end of it. Destalinization reopened closed options, especially since the men in the Kremlin patently lacked the old authority, and still faced strong opposition from the old Stalinists. Because Moscow was (briefly) no longer under monolithic rule. In short, the cracks in the structure of the region under Soviet control could now open. Within a few months of the Twentieth Congress they did so, visibly, in Poland and Hungary. And this in turn aggravated the crises within the non-governmental Communist Parties.
What disturbed the mass of their members was that the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds came, not from ‘the bourgeois press’, whose stories, if read at all, could be rejected a priori as slanders and lies, but from Moscow itself. It was impossible not to take notice of it, but also impossible to know what loyal believers should make of it. Even those who ‘had strong suspicions … [about the facts revealed] amounting to moral certainty for years before Khrushchev spoke’4 were shocked at the sheer extent, hitherto not fully realized, of Stalin’s mass murders of communists. (The Khrushchev Report said nothing about the others.) And no thinking communist could escape asking himself or herself some serious questions.
Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that at the start of 1956 no leadership of any non-state Communist Party seriously thought that destalinization implied a fundamental revision of the role, objectives and history of such Parties. Nor did they expect major troubles from their membership, since the people who remained Party members were those who had resisted the propaganda of the cold warriors for ten years. Yet, probably because of their very confidence, this time they failed to carry a substantial number of their members with them.
In retrospect the reason is obvious. We were not told the truth about something that had to affect the very nature of a communist’s belief. Moreover, we could see that the leadership would have preferred us not to know the truth – they concealed it until Khrushchev’s off-the-record speech had been leaked to the non-communist press – and they manifestly wanted to bring any discussion about it to a close as soon as possible. When the crisis broke out in Poland and Hungary they went on concealing what our own journalists reported. One could understand why as Party organizers they might find this convenient, but it was neither Marxism nor genuine politics. When the familiar call to unswerving loyalty failed, their immediate instinct was to blame the unfortunate vacillations of those well-known elements of instability and weakness, petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It took the Party authorities from March to November to recognize what the Committee of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group had seen almost immediately, namely that this was ‘the most serious and critical situation the Party was in since its foundation’.5 Indeed, after the Hungarian Revolution and Soviet armed intervention later that year, not even the most blindly loyal Party members could reasonably deny it. When the leadership had re-established itself in 1957, after fending off an outburst of open opposition without precedent, the British Communist Party had lost a quarter of its members, a third of the staff of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, and probably the bulk of what remained of the generation of communist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. But, though it lost several of its leading trade unionists, it rapidly regained its national industrial influence, which reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.