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By Root 1606 0

after the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, Russell concluded that the American monopoly of nuclear arms would be only temporary. While it was, the USA should exploit it, if need be by a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Moscow. This would prevent the USSR launching on the course of imminent world conquest to which he believed it to be committed, and would it was hoped destroy a regime which he regarded as utterly appalling. In short, as far as the people of the USSR were concerned, he believed in the then familiar western Cold War slogan ‘Better dead than red’. In practice other peoples were the only ones to whom this literally senseless slogan was applied. If it had any sense it meant, not that Cubans or Vietnamese or, if it should so happen, Italians should commit suicide rather than live under a communist government, but that they should be killed by the arms of the Free World to prevent this awful contingency. (No sane person seriously expected mass suicide in either Britain or the USA.)

Fortunately, though the possibility of American pre-emptive nuclear strikes worried Whitehall,17 nobody listened to Russell, who in any case changed his mind when both superpowers had the capacity to destroy one another, thus turning world war into global suicide. Yet before then people, including even some serious politicians, undoubtedly talked in terms of something like an apocalyptic global class war. The issues were enormous. Whichever side one stood on, there was no limit to the price to be paid. The war, especially since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had got the world used to human sacrifices by the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Those who opposed nuclear arms were accused of depriving the West of a necessary, an indispensable arm. We too – I say this with retrospective regret – recognized no limit to the price we were prepared to ask others to pay. It is no mitigation to say that we were prepared to pay it ourselves.

On the one hand, communists saw the USA and its allies threatening the total destruction of a still besieged and vulnerable USSR, in order to bring to a halt the global advance of the forces of revolution since the defeat of Hitler and Hirohito. They still saw the USSR as its indispensable guarantee. On the other hand, for the USA and its allies the USSR was both the threat to the world and a system totally to be rejected. Everything would be so much simpler if it were not a superpower. Everything would be even simpler if it were not there. To us it was obvious that the USSR was not in a position to conquer the world for communism. Some of us were even disappointed because it appeared not to want to. It was – at least western communist intellectuals thought, even if they did not say so – a system with severe defects, but with titanic achievements and still with the unlimited potential of socialism. (Though it now seems incredible, in the 1950s, and not only to its sympathizers, the Soviet Union did not yet look like a foundering economic hulk but like an economy which might well outproduce the West.) To most of the world, it did not seem to be the worst of all possible regimes, but an ally in the fight for emancipation from western imperialism, old and new, and a model for non-European economic and social development. The future of both communists and the regimes and movements of the decolonized and decolonizing world depended on its existence. As far as communists were concerned, supporting and defending the Soviet Union was still the essential international priority.

So we swallowed our doubts and mental reservations and defended it. Or rather, because it was easier, we attacked the capitalist camp for preferring a West Germany run by old Nazis, and soon actually to be rearmed against the USSR, to an East Germany run by old prisoners of Nazi concentration camps; for preferring the old imperialism to the movements of anti-imperial liberation, and a USA which made Franco’s Spain its military base against those who had supported the Republic.

Even so, it was not easy. Being a communist in the West