The Indo-Scandinavian intellectual Palme Dutt, one of those implausibly tall upper-class figures one occasionally meets among Bengalis, belonged through his mother to an eminent Swedish kindred – Olaf Palme, the socialist premier assassinated in 1986, was another member.6 Unlike Harry, Dutt was a natural intellectual as well as an instinctive hardliner. Many years earlier the night he spent in my little house in Cambridge after a meeting had left me with a lasting admiration for his acute mind and a lasting conviction that he was not interested in truth, but used his intellect exclusively to justify and explicate the line of the moment, whatever it was. I now think I was unfair to the intellectual instincts still buried somewhere deeply inside him, or perhaps to his hope of posthumous recognition as something better than a gifted sophist in the service of authority. He granted that a genuine history of the Communist Party was essentially the history of its policies, that is to say of the changes in the line. And this must of course involve critical consideration, and, where necessary, negative judgement. But had the moment for this yet come? He doubted it.
And our old hero James Klugmann? He sat on the far right-hand corner of the table and said nothing. He knew we were right. If we did not produce a history of our Party, including the problematic bits, they would not go away. The history would simply be written by anti-communist scholars – and indeed, within less than two years such a history was written.10 But he lacked what the great Bismarck once called ‘Zivilcourage ’, civilian as distinct from military courage. He knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public. (In this he was like a rather different political figure, Isaiah Berlin, about the policies of the State of Israel.) He said nothing, and agreed to take on himself the task of writing an acceptable official history of the CPGB, which he knew to be impossible. Twelve years later he published a first volume which went up to 1924. My fairly savage demonstration that he had been wasting his time did not spoil our relations. 11 Before his death he published a second volume which went up to 1927, just before he would have to face the most controversial episodes. He would never have written more. In the meanwhile he edited Marxism Today , founded as a sop to critics who stayed in the Party in 1957, not exactly encouraging open discussion but not exactly discouraging it either.
IV
When I consider what effect the Twentieth Congress had on the larger historical scene, I feel a little embarrassed to insist on the storms in our British teapot. Following strikes by Polish workers and demonstrations by Polish Catholics – a powerful combination even then – a new communist leadership took over in Poland under Vladislav Gomulka, purged in 1949 and only recently let out of prison. (Fortunately the Poles had evaded organizing the prearranged trials and executions that disfigured Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and could therefore ‘rehabilitate’ living people rather than corpses.) The Chinese, then still part of the international movement, prevailed on the Russians to avoid military action. The Hungarian Revolution which immediately followed was less lucky, almost certainly because its new leadership went beyond what the Soviets could be expected to tolerate, by leaving the eastern military alliance of the Warsaw Pact and declaring their neutrality in the Cold War. None of this, least of all Khrushchev himself, impressed the Chinese, whose relations with the USSR then began to deteriorate sharply. Within a year or two the two communist giants had split. There were now two rival communist movements, though in fact almost all existing Communist Parties remained loyal to the Soviet centre. The so-called ‘Maoism’ of the 1960s created no real parties but small and squabbling activist sects. Even the most serious ostensibly pro-Chinese group, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which seceded from the CPI, was not really Maoist. It carried with it such mass support as there was for communism in India, notably in the state of Kerala, where trucks decorated with the picture of Stalin are still to be seen on country roads, and West Bengal whose 68 million citizens the CPI(M) has now (2002) governed with solid popular support for decades.
In Britain the main effect of the great 1956 earthquake was that it made some 30,000 members of the Communist Party feel terrible, and scattered the forces of the small extreme left. Most of those who left the Party probably quietly dropped out of political activism. (So also did some who remained, like myself, convinced that, since the Party had not reformed itself, it had no long-term political future in the country.) Some joined the three main Trotskyist groups, although these grew not so much by transfers from the CP as by the general cracking of the world communist monolith and the loss of the CP’s virtual monopoly in Marxism. The militant young now had the choice of lefts. Most of the critics from the Historians’ Group, which did not effectively survive the crisis, groped for, or rather tried to build, some ‘New Left’ undefiled by the bad memories of Stalinism.
Saville and Thompson’s New Reasoner (1957–9) became the home for most of the ex-CP intellectuals. Eventually it merged with the Universities and Left Review founded by the youngest former member of the Historians’ Group, Raphael Samuel, together with another ex-communist, Gabriel Pearson, and two rather impressive unattached younger Oxford radicals, the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The average age of the editors was twenty-four. From the early 1960s this uneasily merged New Left Review was taken over by a new team of young Oxford post-CP Marxists, the core of which came from the old Anglo-Irish milieu in the Irish Republic. Its chieftain was the remarkably able Perry Anderson (aged twenty-two), who also largely financed it. Unlike the little Britons of the older ‘New Lefts’, its interests were distinctly international, more theoretical, and much less tied to the labour movement or socialist politics. Although it moved into the orbit of the Fourth International it succeeded in establishing itself as the major periodical of a new generation of Anglo-Saxon Marxists.
In practical terms these ‘New Lefts’, although intellectually productive, were negligible. They did not reform the Labour Party (about which they remained ambivalent) or the Communist Party (as happened in Sweden). They produced neither new parties of the left (as in Denmark), nor lasting new organizations of significance, nor even individual national leaders. Thompson himself eventually became nationally famous as a spokesman for nuclear disarmament, but although CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), by far the most important movement of the post-1945 British left, was founded about the same time (1958) it had nothing to do with the crisis in the CP.