Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [101]
11
Cold War
I
In 1948 the borders between East and West in Germany became front lines in the Cold War. During the ‘Berlin Crisis’ which began when the Russians cut land communications to that city in early April, and the long months of the subsequent Berlin airlift, East and West were locked into a dangerous and nerve-racking confrontation of forces. Communists in the West, however insignificant, were ‘on the other side’. As far as I was concerned, the Cold War therefore began in May 1948, when the Foreign Office informed me that it was unfortunately unable to confirm my invitation to take part for a second time in the British Control Commission’s course to ‘re-educate’ the Germans. The reasons, it was abundantly obvious, were political. A silent but comprehensive effort to eliminate known Party members from any positions connected with British public life began about that time. While it was neither as hysterical nor as thorough-going as in the USA, where by the mid-1950s communists, or even self-described Marxists, had virtually disappeared from college and university teaching, it was a bad time to be a communist in the intellectual professions. Public policy encouraged discrimination and treated us as potential or actual traitors, and we were deeply suspect to our employers and colleagues. Liberal anti-communism was not new, but in the Cold War, with ample assistance from propaganda financed by the US and British authorities, the loathing of Stalinism and the belief (not shared by the British government1) that the USSR was bent on immediate world conquest gave it a new hysterical edge.
Until then the political temperature, in Britain at least, had been much less overheated. Within the country, Labour now ruled and nobody, certainly not the defeated Conservatives, seriously challenged the far-reaching reforms of the new government. By general agreement, a return to the 1930s was unthinkable or at least unmentionable; the 1945 government enjoyed unquestioned electoral and moral legitimacy, and were, in any case, no more ‘revolutionary’ than the state-directed war effort of the past six years, which had brought the British people a victory that they felt to be profoundly theirs. Internationally, the grand alliance of Britain, the USSR and the USA had won the war, and, diplomats and intelligence services apart, frictions between the wartime allies had not yet erased the consciousness of that common struggle.2 In 1945–7 Communist Parties were represented by ministers in the governments of most belligerent and occupied countries in western Europe as well as non-communist ones in eastern Europe.
Men and women returned from the war, or turned from wartime occupations, to peacetime civilian life – to resume their old careers or plans, or to consider what to do next. Friends, who might not have seen each other for years, met again. Most of them would still be alive, for Britain had had a comparatively easy war, compared to the Russians, the Poles, the Yugoslavs and, of course, the Germans. The 1914 war, still known, and for good reason, as the ‘Great War’, killed one quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students serving in the forces, but I can think of only five or six out of the 200 or so Cambridge contemporaries I knew or knew of, who did not return from the Second. It was a time of comparing notes and for pre-war communists to ask the question: ‘Are you still in the Party?’ A considerable number of pre-war students no longer were.
I returned from the army first, for about a year, to a curious double existence in London and for several days a week as a research student in Cambridge, but from February 1947 to September 1950 as a full-time Londoner. We lived in