Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [119]
It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of that traumatic year, rising, through a succession of lesser crises, to the appalling climax of the Soviet army’s reconquest of Hungary, and then stumbling and wrestling to an exhausted defeat through months of doomed and feverish argument. Arnold Wesker’s play Chicken Soup with Barley , about a Jewish working-class family struggling with its communist faith, gives a good idea of what has been called ‘the pain of losing it and the pain of clinging to it’.6 Even after practically half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock-face. And this while all of us, except a handful of full-time Party workers, had to go on, as though nothing much had happened, with lives and jobs outside, which temporarily seemed unwanted distractions from the enormous thing that dominated our days and nights. God knows 1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of those who were then communists, everything else has faded. Of course we mobilized against Anthony Eden’s lying government in the Suez crisis together with a for once totally united Labour and Liberal left. But Suez did not keep us from sleeping. Probably the simplest way of putting it is that, for more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.
What made things worse was that the family-sized British Communist Party was in many ways, to quote an apocryphal critique by the Comintern, ‘a party of good friends’. Unlike other Parties, it had no history of clamorous expulsions and excommunications. It lacked the particular version of the ‘bolshevik’ house-style of leadership which created ruthless, complacent bullies such as Andre śMarty in the French CP. We were likely to have met and talked to our leaders, liked most of them and at least some of us could understand the pressures upon them. None of the critics wanted to leave the Party, the Party did not want to lose us. Wherever our political future was to take us – and even those who left or were expelled from the Party overwhelmingly remained on the left – all of us lived through the crisis of 1956 as convinced communists.
I would have been in the thick of the crisis in any case, but I was close to the centre of it, since in 1956 I was the chairman of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group – one of the few times I have been chairman of any organization – and the group emerged almost immediately as the nucleus of vocal opposition to the Party line, when it was brought to us by a King Street spokesman on 8 April 1956, shortly after the Khrushchev speech, or rather after the subsequent British Party Congress which had (vainly) tried to bypass the whole issue. We rebelled and the group made the two most dramatic challenges to the Party. In the first, one of the group’s leading members, Christopher Hill, acted as spokesman for the Minority Report of the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy, i.e. virtual leader of the opposition at the Party Congress of May 1957. In mid-July John Saville of Hull University and E. P. Thompson, then a lecturer in the extramural department of Leeds, launched an unprecedented and by Party convention entirely illegitimate bulletin of opposition within the Party, The Reasoner. (After they left the Party it was revived as The New Reasoner in 1957, with contributions from various sympathetic hands, including myself.) The Soviet intervention in