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By Root 1602 0

History Society (to the council of which I was elected in 1952). Above all, from 1946 to 1956 we – a group of comrades and friends – conducted a continuous Marxist seminar for ourselves in the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, by means of endless duplicated discussion papers and regular meetings, mainly in the upper room of the Garibaldi Restaurant in Saffron Hill and occasionally in the then shabby premises of Marx House on Clerkenwell Green. Those who know only the buzzing, gentrified Clerkenwell of 2000 cannot imagine the empty, cold, grey dankness of those streets at weekends fifty years ago, when the Dickensian fog, which disappeared after 1953, was still likely to fall like a vast yellow-grey blindfold on London. Perhaps this was where we really became historians. Others have spoken of ‘the astonishing impact of [this] generation of Marxist historians’ without whom ‘the worldwide influence of British historical scholarship, especially since the 1960s, is inconceivable’. 15 Among other things it gave birth to a successful and eventually influential historical journal in 1952, but Past & Present was born not in Clerkenwell, but in the more agreeable ambience of University College, Gower Street.

The Historians’ Group broke up in the year of communist crisis, 1956. Until then we, and certainly I, had remained loyal, disciplined and politically aligned Communist Party members, helped no doubt by the wild rhetoric of crusading anti-communism of the ‘Free World’. But it was far from easy.

The Soviet Union, God knows, made it harder and harder. Intellectuals were, of course, under particular pressure, since from 1947 on the beliefs to which they were committed were reduced to a catechism of orthodoxies, some only faintly related to Marxism, and several – especially in the natural sciences – absurd. After the official triumph of ‘Lysenkoism’ in the USSR this was a major problem in the Cambridge graduate branch, several, perhaps most, of whose older members were natural scientists. Were they, like the great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, quietly to withdraw from the Party, unable to accept untruth? Were they, like J. D. Bernal, to ruin their public standing by trying, if not quite managing, to defend the Soviets? Were they simply to shut their eyes, say nothing, and go on with their work as before? The peculiarities of Stalinist science were not quite so damaging elsewhere. Communist psychologists, for instance, found Moscow’s insistence on Pavlov (‘conditioned reflexes’) less constricting, partly because of the experimental, positivist, behaviourist and strongly anti-psychoanalytical slant of British psychology departments. But these were the special problems of intellectuals, and for various reasons they did not seriously affect British communist historians who kept away from Russian and Communist Party history. Obviously, none of us believed the version of Soviet Party history contained in the, pedagogically brilliant, text of Stalin’s History of the CPSU (b): Short Course. But there were more general problems, even if we leave aside the horrors of the Soviet camps, the extent of which communists did not then recognize.

What were British, and even more Cambridge, communists, who had been deeply involved in wartime relations with the Yugoslav Partisans, to think of the 1948 split between Stalin and Tito? We were close to Yugoslav communism. Young Brits by the hundred flocked into the country to build the so-called ‘Youth Railway’, including notably Edward Thompson, not yet a historian, whose brother Frank had his wartime base among the Macedonian Partisans, until he went on to fight and die with the Bulgarian ones. How could one possibly believe the official Soviet line that Tito had to be excommunicated because he had long prepared to betray the interests of proletarian internationalism in the interests of foreign intelligence services? We could understand that James Klugmann was forced to disavow Tito, but we did not believe him and, since he had until recently told us the opposite – and so had the newly formed