Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 15

Shrewd appraisals of Marxism-Leninism were provided by Sir Robert Hodgson, Britain’s resilient diplomatic representative in Moscow during 1921–7. He chronicled the Bolshevik government’s continuous conflicts with its founding principles, and the pressures which forced it to forsake the revolutionary ideals of 1917. It was a huge challenge to misdirect attention so that ‘a trusting proletariat’ could continue to cherish the illusion that they, rather than a hefty, humdrum bureaucracy, governed Russia, Hodgson reported after the May Day celebrations of 1926, when Lenin had been dead for two years. ‘Moscow, however much nonsense is exhibited on red banners, stuffed into youthful brains, or poured out through loud-speakers to the populace, has to deal with precisely the same problems as any of its neighbours – and is dealing with them in very much the same way.’²³

This focus became less helpful in assessing events after Stalin achieved undisputed supremacy in the Soviet Union in 1928–9. Wars, civil wars, threats of foreign wars and domestic class warfare were constant factors in the political careers and personal experiences of all Bolshevik leaders. Marxist-Leninist theory propounded the inevitability of wars between empires, of socialist revolution as a result of these imperialist wars, and of warlike interventions by capitalist powers against socialist states. Fears of internal adversaries and external encirclement were never assuaged. Stalin, though, intensified and invigorated this aspect of the Bolshevik mentality. He convinced the party cadres and general membership that he was a relentlessly industrious pragmatist who could manage the domestic and foreign crises that threatened the Soviet Union. He gained a well-deserved reputation for achievement. ‘He was assiduous in consolidating his power base throughout the party, state, secret police and military hierarchies,’ writes the historian of deStalinization Kevin McDermott. ‘His increasingly radical policies in the years after 1928 proved attractive to the new brand of militant unschooled proletarians who formed the base of the party at that time.’²⁴

Stalin’s supremacy was characterized by crisis-paroxysms of socialist modernization. He sought to transform a ravaged agrarian economy into a global industrial power. The upheaval of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated manufacturing capacity were akin to social and economic mobilization on a war footing. The first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans for headlong economic expansion was ill-considered, and caused huge instabilities. Bolshevik fears of counter-revolutionary plots, of foreign saboteurs and internal wreckers, of encirclement by hostile foreign powers all grew in ferocity. Opposition was equated with terrorism. Frank discussion and rational argument were precluded within the Moscow apparatus. Britain’s paramount instrument of civilized administration, the ‘circulating file’, which will be discussed later (p. 78–9), was unthinkable in communist bureaucracy.

A new ruling echelon was consolidated by Stalinism. Economic and social hierarchies were restored. The early Bolsheviks had been anti-patriarchal, had promoted the emancipation of women by improved educational and work opportunities, and had attempted to punish drunken wife-beaters. These advances halted after 1928. Stalin, whose wife shot herself in 1932 after being humiliated by him at a banquet, reconfigured masculine authority with his notions of motherhood and the criminalization of abortion in 1936. The early Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois morality ceased. Creative experimentation was stifled: stereotyped party hackwork dominated the arts; nonconformity was penalized. ‘Crucially,’ as Stephen Smith summarizes the development, ‘although the institutions of rule did not change, personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use of force, the cult of power, paranoia about encirclement and internal wreckers, and the spiralling of terror across an entire society, all served to underline the difference between Stalinism and Leninism.’ Smith sees Stalinism as a reversion to an earlier type: ‘the resurgence of … a patrimonial regime in which the tsar’s absolute and unconstrained authority derived from his ownership of the country’s resources, including the lives of his subjects’.²⁵

Bolshevik foreign policy tactics were innovative. ‘The Soviet Government’, reported Sir Esmond Ovey soon after his appointment as the first British Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1929, ‘have inverted the normal methods of diplomacy, and are past-masters in the fanning of hostility to a point which is useful for their internal political plans, without actually provoking an armed attack from outside.’ The desirable norm of Soviet diplomacy was a ‘vociferously cantankerous state of peace’, Ovey judged after some months in Moscow. Relatively minor incidents, such as the defection of Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, could excite ‘a fever of alarm’ at ‘the sinister intentions of the ring of capitalist countries who are waiting, watching, scheming and plotting to destroy them’.²⁶

Intelligence-gathering and subversion managed by SIS representatives, under cover of passport control officers, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, made Moscow feel beset by fears of foreign capitalist intervention. This feeling was shared by members of the CPGB, which was founded in 1920. Norman Ewer, a loyal upholder of Bolshevist ideology who ran a spy network for Moscow in London during the 1920s, felt sure that capitalist governments must be plotting to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state by either invasion or secret subversion. As he wrote in 1927 in Labour Monthly, a magazine edited by a CPGB founder, Rajani (‘Raymond’) Palme Dutt: ‘I would lay heavy money that to-day the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry are very busy with their plans for a Russian war. For a variety of Russian wars, I expect. There would be one plan for a war in defence of “gallant little Esthonia”: another for a war to safeguard India from the Afghans … another for Manchurian possibilities; all these plans quite possibly interlocking and correlating, as did the pre-1914 plans for the aiding of France and for the conquest of Mesopotamia.’ Ewer saw the Tory government as pushing ‘a continuous movement in one direction and to one end. That end is war. War will come as certainly as harvest follows sowing.’²⁷

After his defection from the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1929, Gregori Bessedovsky published his revelatory ‘Souvenirs’ in Le Matin. Summary translations, which were supplied to the British counter-espionage agency MI5 by the SIS station in Paris, show the ferocity of communist extremism. Ivanov, one of the Cheka chiefs, had confided to Bessedovsky ‘that passing sentences of death was not so difficult as one might think. It was all a matter of getting used to it. At first, of course, it made one feel a bit queer, but afterwards one no longer thought of the man – the living person – in front of one, and the only thing one saw was a “dossier” of documents and papers.’ Ivanov admitted that he never attended executions, although he was nominally in charge of them, because ‘he feared the madhouse’. Ivanov’s executioner-in-chief Gourov, who had killed 3,000 people and intended to reach the figure of 5,000, ‘could no longer “work” unless he made himself drunk’. Ivanov continued: ‘every Saturday night it is Hell’, with the condemned in the cellars shrieking like beasts in a slaughter-house. Ivanov’s assistant, who attended most executions, proposed gagging the prisoners’ mouths to stop their cries; but, so Ivanov told Bessedovsky, ‘I forbade him doing so. It would look too much like ordinary murders.’²⁸

Maurice Dobb, an economist and pioneer Cambridge communist who was a key influence in assembling his university’s spy network, minimized these enormities in a lecture at Pembroke College. He admitted the famine, executions and reprisals against hostages – undoubtedly ‘the Red Terror has been at times exceedingly brutal’ – but most stories, including those of ‘torture’ or ‘the massacre of everyone with a white collar’, were fables spread by tsarist exiles. His optimism was not ignoble, although time would discredit it. The Bolshevik programme was committed to the abolition of standing armies and to establishing the workers and peasantry as the new ruling class. Dynastic absolutism and bigoted theocracy had already been replaced by a federation of soviet socialist republics. Ownership of the means of production had been transferred from exploitative capitalism to the socialist state. Reactionary hereditary landowners had been usurped by peasant uprisings. In consequence of these revolutionary changes, Dobb averred, ‘the extremes of riches & poverty exist no longer’. Although there were food shortages, rations were equitably shared. In Moscow ‘there are no slums; their former inhabitants having been accommodated in the flats & palaces of the former bourgeoisie … children are especially well cared for’. Dobb idealized Lenin as ‘a stern realist. Siberia & exile no doubt have tended to embitter him to a considerable degree. His political writings, which display acumen, erudition & logical reasoning, are invariably marred by virulent vilification of his opponents.’ Lenin resembled a Jesuit priest, continued Dobb, ‘with all the Jesuit’s sincerity & idealism, and at the same time the Jesuit’s callousness, casuistry, & bigotry’. He was ‘a man with a mission, subordinating all else to a single goal … a great leader, a great thinker and a great administrator’; but withal ‘a modest man, who regards himself as the mere instrument of the inexorable forces of social progress’.²⁹

By contrast the diplomat Owen O’Malley, who journeyed through Russia in 1925 and 1941, described it as ‘a spiritual gas-chamber, a sinister, unnatural and unholy place’. People trudged through the streets of Leningrad with averted eyes: they had to efface themselves to stay safe; greeting a neighbour might prove fatal; children spied on parents. A red-bearded Cheka agent dressed in an engine driver’s peaked cap, black drill blouse and blue serge riding-breeches was charged with watching and eavesdropping on him in 1925. O’Malley believed that after he threw this tail, the ‘poor fellow’ was put to death. Even as a temporary visitor to the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ he grew nerve-racked by ‘the horrible feeling of being alone and in the power of these revolting barbarians’. After a few months as Consul General in Moscow in 1930, Reader Bullard felt repelled by what he saw: ‘the unscrupulous deception, the unrelenting despotism, and above all the cruelty’.³⁰