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By Root 1759 0

was no problem. The trouble was the experience of communism in the East. But I was soon to see this myself. There were the first signs of some slight thawing on the fringes of the frozen ice-cap of Stalin’s USSR. In 1952, even before the terrible old man died, the historian E. A. Kosminsky was allowed a brief visit to Britain with his wife for the first time since, long ago in the 1920s, he had worked in London on those problems of English manorial history in the Middle Ages that had made him famous in the world of historical scholarship. I took him to the British Museum, for he wanted to use the great round Reading Room again. Could he have a short-term ticket? A lady librarian asked whether he had ever used the library before. He had. ‘Ah,’ she said, looking his name up in the files. ‘No, of course there will be no problem. Do you still live in Torrington Square?’ It was a moment of great emotion for him. A few months later, after Stalin’s death but before post-Stalinism, he arranged for the Soviet Academy of Sciences to invite a group of British Marxist historians to the USSR. It was my first, but not quite my only, experience of the country of the October Revolution. I did not much want to go there again. That visit helped to prepare me for the crucial turning-point in the lives of all communist intellectuals, and in the world communist movement, which is the main subject of the next chapter: the crisis of 1956.

12

Stalin and After

I

I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who has actually seen Stalin; admittedly no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3in) by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, having so far (2002) resisted eleven post-Soviet years of attempts to remove him, Stalin was displayed only in the brief period between his death in 1953 and 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated ‘destalinization’ not many months later, was already occupying the post of General Secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow.

‘We’ were four members of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the academic Christmas vacation of 1954–5, as part of the still painfully slow process of extricating Soviet intellectual life from its isolation: Christopher Hill, already well known as a historian of the English Revolution, the Byzantinist Robert Browning, myself and the freelance scholar Leslie (A. L.) Morton, whose Marxist People’s History of England enjoyed the official imprimatur of the Soviet authorities. Probably only Robert Browning, a Scotsman of amazingly wide-ranging erudition and linguistic competence, who gave a paper on the recent decipherment of the Cretan Linear B inscriptions, realized quite how cut off Soviet scholars had been from literature in the English language. (Contacts with France had never been quite so decayed.) Since none of the visitors specialized in Russian history, where the real strength of our hosts naturally lay, on balance they probably benefited more from our conversations than we did.

What did we expect to find in the USSR? We were not totally dependent on the official guide/translators provided for us by the academy, for two of us knew Russian – Christopher Hill, who had spent a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had friends there, and the apparently almost accentless Robert Browning. Nevertheless, the USSR two years after Stalin’s death, and indeed for several years thereafter, was not a place given to informal communication with foreigners even in Russian. Not that an official ‘delegation’ invited by the academy, a body with considerable status